Friday, July 02, 2010
I Don't Think It Makes Political Sense
At some point the disconnect between happy talk and reality makes you seem a wee bit out of touch.
THIRTY ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS PER YEAR
Lovely article in the New York Times about how companies would love to hire people, but they're all too stupid. Perhaps the problem is you want highly skilled workers but you want to pay them crap, or you aren't willing to pay to train them.
Here in this suburb of Cleveland, supervisors at Ben Venue Laboratories, a contract drug maker for pharmaceutical companies, have reviewed 3,600 job applications this year and found only 47 people to hire at $13 to $15 an hour, or about $31,000 a year.
Jobs
-125K, unemployment at 9.5%...
...+83K private-sector jobs.
...unemployment drop due to shrinking labor force/participation rate. I'm so old I can remember when Larry Summers told me the increase in unemployment was good news because it reflected an increasing labor force due to people getting excited about the newly awesome economy.
...+83K private-sector jobs.
...unemployment drop due to shrinking labor force/participation rate. I'm so old I can remember when Larry Summers told me the increase in unemployment was good news because it reflected an increasing labor force due to people getting excited about the newly awesome economy.
Thursday, July 01, 2010
Making Me Cranky
Dems might pull off what even George Bush couldn't do.
The triumph of the catfood commission.
BREAKING: WHILE FUNDING THE WAR, LET'S LAY WASTE TO THE NEW DEAL WHILE WE'RE AT IT - In the House summary of the rule that governs tonight's war-funding vote is this gem: "Commits the House to vote on any Senate-passed recommendations of the bipartisan Fiscal Commission and that net savings from any Commission recommendations will go to deficit reduction."
The triumph of the catfood commission.
Looking For Bad News
As I've written before, I have no desire to destroy the Village to save it, and I have no desire for a single more person to be without a job. But the number that comes out tomorrow is just an estimate, and all estimates are imperfect. I'm not confident that anything will spur elites to do more, but the best chance we have is bad news, or a bad estimate of the actual news. The reality should be bad enough, but for some reason it isn't.
The Bond Vigilantes Are Coming! The Bond Vigilantes Are Coming!
At 2.9%, it's irresponsible not to borrow.
Helicopter Drop
Bernanke could have sent money from the Fed's magic money machine in all kinds of ways. They could have paid down mortgages. They could have put money in my bank account. They could have given it to state governments. What they did was prop up a failed banking system, and the worst failures of the failed banking system, under the premise that capital misallocating financial intermediaries were necessary for a stable economy.
It's one way to do things.
It's one way to do things.
Ground Level Retail
I don't know this spot (or at least can't remember at the moment), but hopefully they do go ahead with adding ground level retail. A lot of central cities are plagued with many large civic buildings which lack it, creating major urban dead zones especially at night.
They Could Have Shored Up My Balance Sheet Too
But Fed charity is only for the banksters.
In very simple terms, what the Fed did was say, "What? You say you lost all your money gambling? Well, let us replace it for you. Go have some more fun at the craps table!"
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and then-New York Fed President Timothy Geithner told senators on April 3, 2008, that the tens of billions of dollars in “assets” the government agreed to purchase in the rescue of Bear Stearns Cos. were “investment-grade.” They didn’t share everything the Fed knew about the money.
...
“Either the Fed did not understand the distressed state of some of the assets that it was purchasing from banks and is only now discovering their true value, or it understood that it was buying weak assets and attempted to obscure that fact,” Senator Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat and member of the Senate Banking Committee, said in an e-mail when informed about the credit quality of holdings in the Maiden Lane LLC portfolio. The committee held the April 3 hearing.
In very simple terms, what the Fed did was say, "What? You say you lost all your money gambling? Well, let us replace it for you. Go have some more fun at the craps table!"
Nobody Could Have Predicted
Greenspan sticking with it.
I was calling it a game of Jenga back in 12/07. Just saying.
In the far ranging interview, Greenspan said that raising the capital gains tax in the US would be ill advised. He also added that the financial crisis could not have been foreseen.
“It is just not feasible to forecast a financial crisis,” he said. “A financial crisis by definition is a sharp abrupt, unexpected decline in asset prices.”
I was calling it a game of Jenga back in 12/07. Just saying.
Protecting The Powerful
I think there's a bit of truth in the idea that reporters shouldn't run with every single quote just because it might be damaging, though it's not because I think powerful people need to be protected. It's more that there are things which will obviously make news even though they aren't really news worthy. An obvious example would be, say, candidate Obama saying (horrors!) the word fuck and being overheard by a reporter. Yes it would make news because Politico would win the morning noon and night with it, but it would be idiotic as a piece of news. So, yes, reporters should use some judgment about when comments are genuinely newsworthy, but not because those they cover need to be protected.
Thursday Is New Jobless Day
Still high. Surprise!
Initial claims for state unemployment benefits increased 13,000 to a seasonally adjusted 472,000 in the week ended June 26, the Labor Department said.
Analysts polled by Reuters had expected claims to slip to 452,000 from the previously reported 457,000, which was revised slightly up to 459,000 in Thursday's report.
Exceptionally Mediocre
There was a significant amount of money allocated both directly to industry (well, via grants) and to research institutions in the stimulus last year, but looking at the pace of deployment in other countries should embarrass quite a few people in DC. It's even more shameful when you compare our insolation with that of Germany, Italy, or Japan.
I mean, as long as we're looking* for things to throw money at, there are plenty of places in PV to throw it. Maybe we could even begin to approach the total installed capacity of countries significantly smaller and less solar resource rich than us?
*I know, I know. Nobody in a position to do anything about it is actually looking.
I mean, as long as we're looking* for things to throw money at, there are plenty of places in PV to throw it. Maybe we could even begin to approach the total installed capacity of countries significantly smaller and less solar resource rich than us?
*I know, I know. Nobody in a position to do anything about it is actually looking.
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