By Jack Sparrow, who writes at Mercenary Trader The employment picture constitutes yet another headwind and a significant one to the already-faltering U.S. recovery. It will undermine future spending, company earnings and profitability. Indeed, the poorer the employment picture, the greater the likelihood that households will become more cautious and that the corporate sector will […]
Read more...The Wall Street Journal seems truly mystified that with headline unemployment at 9.5% and U6 at 16.5%, some employers are nevetheless having trouble filling jobs. But this shouldn’t seem all that strange when you consider that workers are not an undifferentiated mass, but have particular skills and experience, and live in particular places, and they […]
Read more...The press has been duly supportive of the successful effort by Bill Gates and Warren Buffet to get other mega-rich individuals to give away at least half their wealth to charity. But is this the unalloyed boon that it is presented as being? William Langley, in the Telegraph, points out that the new model of […]
Read more...Some readers already found the CSPAN segment via comments in Links yesterday, so I hope you bear with me posting it for the benefit of other readers. Although I’ve done a fair bit of call in on radio, this was my first time on TV. I think readers will find the mix of questions interesting.
Read more...Even though St. Louis Fed President Jim Bullard created a bit of frisson last week by discussing deflation, and Treasury yields are awfully reminiscent of Japan, investors and consumers have been so conditioned to be on the watch for inflation (particularly increases in food and fuel prices), that the suck of deflation on much bigger […]
Read more...Robert Frank at the Wall Street Journal contends that the rich don’t need the rest of us all that much (hat tip reader Don B): Late last year, the U.S. economy experienced a surprising decoupling. As stocks boomed, the wealthy bounced back. And while the Main Street economy was wracked by high unemployment and the […]
Read more...It should come as no surprise that a financial services industry powerful enough to water down meaningful reform in the US and internationally (Basel III rules were weakened to allow, for instance, that mortgage servicing rights be included in regulatory capital calculations) would probably have its way in blocking the nomination of Elizabeth Warren as […]
Read more...This post first appeared on June 23, 2007 A neat little analysis by Ross Eisenbrey at the Economic Policy Institute may be difficult for union foes to explain away. It shows the proportion of workers covered by collective bargaining agreements in major European countries and the US and then shows productivity growth country by country […]
Read more...Cross-posted from http://www.presimetrics.com/blog/ By Mike Kimel of Presimetrics This post is going to be a bit different, at least for me. Generally I like to write things that are more data oriented, and that involve some pictures and figures. But this is a little story that happened to my wife and me, only a few […]
Read more...By Paul Jay, the CEO and Senior Editor of The Real News Network; originally posted at New Deal 2.0 Police brutality at the G-20 protests in Toronto targeted freedom of speech and assembly, putting the world’s poor and working people on notice. The Toronto G-20 summit sent a message to poor and working people in […]
Read more...A well placed Washington contact wrote: I was in a discussion with the staff at one of the Federal agencies involved in housing to ask them about the new policies on strategic defaults. It became clear almost immediately that regulators obviously have no idea how to identify strategic defaulters except by asking big banks. They […]
Read more...Satyajit Das is too shrewd to call the European Financial Stability Facility, informally described as a €440 billion sovereign bailout fund, a mere sleight of hand. But it’s hard not to draw that conclusion after reading his Financial Times comment today. Central banks and governments have developed an alarming fondness for the very sort of […]
Read more...For those who did not catch wind of it, the Peterson Foundation, which has long had Social Security and Medicare in its crosshairs, held a bizarre set of 19 faux town hall meetings over the previous weekend to scare participants into compliance and then collect the resulting distorted survey data, presumably to use in a […]
Read more...On Friday, I put up a short post alerting readers to a PR campaign apparently just getting off the runway to impress the average American of his moral obligation to honor his debts. The rise of strategic defaults (and perhaps even more important, the increasingly positive coverage it is getting in the media and the […]
Read more...By Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns Everybody in the west knows the fabled effectiveness of weight-loss dietary programs designed around intense cardiovascular regimes which burn huge amounts of calories. The people who work hard, doing as much cardio as possible lose weight. Those that pump iron may get muscular, but they aren’t working as hard […]
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