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US oil supplies at a 36½ year low, SPR at a 39 year low; oil+products supplies at an 18½ year low
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Presto! Unemployed people vanish before your very eyes
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State budget crisis about to become a "catastrophe"
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The QE2 Binge - Inflation on the Horizon
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US oil supplies at a 36½ year low, SPR at a 39 year low; oil+products supplies at an 18½ year low
- 190169 reads
Presto! Unemployed people vanish before your very eyes
- 23453 reads
State budget crisis about to become a "catastrophe"
- 169433 reads
The QE2 Binge - Inflation on the Horizon
- 82325 reads
The Golden Rule
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Will the NY Attorney General Bring Doomsday Charges Against Wall Street? If So, How Long Will He Survive?
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New York Post Claims Census Falsifies Unemployment Figures
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How Many Jobs Are Needed to Keep Up with Population Growth?
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VAT or Value Added Tax is Getting a Look in D.C.
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U3 and U6 Unemployment during the Great Depression
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The war on the middle class
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House discusses 401k/IRA confiscation
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Tax Cuts for the Rich Do Not Generate Jobs
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I must say that CBS Marketwatch gets it right much more on statisics, Krugman's fine but there are so many, better financial/economics papers and Journalists out there (and they don't do some ridiculous spyware trap nightmare thing on their links, articles).
I had no problem as a visitor to this website in accessing those links, but I removed all NYT links per your request (and readers can just Google the titles I used.)
Any site which isn't a clean link, please do not put it there.
The current trend in how CEOs are paid, particularly with stock options, creates a range of economic problems.
Several studies show that equity-heavy pay, because it makes executives very wealthy very quickly, distorts CEOs’ incentives, inducing them to take on too much risk. Instead of bearing this risk themselves, they shift it onto the rest of society, as we saw during the financial crisis. This model also encourages executives to behave fraudulently.
In order to issue stock options to top executives while avoiding the dilution of their stock, corporations often divert funds to stock buybacks rather than spending on research and development, capital investment, increased wages, or new hiring.
To top it all off, these pay packages cost taxpayers billions of dollars due to the performance pay tax loophole instituted by President Clinton.
A high degree of economic inequality precipitates financial instability because it leads to, for example, a decline in consumer demand, which has tremendous spillover effects in terms of investment, job creation, and tax revenue, not to mention social instability.
The growth of executive pay is a core driver of America’s rising economic inequality.
http://www.nextnewdeal.net/beyond-fairness-skyrocketing-ceo-pay-bad-our-...
"The case for “skill-biased technological change” as the main driver of wage stagnation has largely fallen apart. Most notably, high levels of education have offered no guarantee of rising incomes — for example, wages of recent college graduates, adjusted for inflation, have been flat for 15 years."
NYT
Thanks...great comment. I liked this too:
"Bipartisan means something so stinky bad for the common man that both parties need to support it so neither side loses too many votes."
It's seems that a conservative blogger has been converted into a "far left wing loon" after watching Robert Reich's "Inequality for All". (One of Reich's basic premises is that income inequality causes decreased economic growth.)
An entertaining read. One of the readers commented with some links to some wonkish papers on the subject.
http://www.env-econ.net/2015/07/does-income-inequality-cause-decreased-e...
While I agree with the author that a day of reckoning is coming, I take some solace from a rhyme my granddad taught me. It goes like this, if I remember it properly.
My granddad, in his house of logs, said "things is goin to the dogs!"
His granddad in his woolen togs, said "Things is goin to the dogs!"
His granddad in the Flemish bogs, said "Things is goin to the dogs!"
And all I have to say to that, is "The dogs have had a good long wait."
But it looks like they just might get it yet.
The meter isn't perfect, but the idea is simple.
Do not say, "Why were the old days better than these?" For it is not wise to ask such questions.
Ecclesiastes 7:10
Perhaps this will be the moment when people figure out that Jeb is tone deaf clueless out of touch.
Like what happened when his dad visited a supermarket to show he had the "common touch" and showed surprise at the bar-code scanners, which had been standard for several years. Clearly out of touch with the realities of ordinary people. That was the beginning of the end for Bush I round 2.
Though it depends greatly how much the media gives it play. Like the current occupant of the white house suggesting people should put more air in their tires to defray the high cost of gasoline. It perfectly illustrates the man and his intellect, but it didn't get enough play to fix itself in the national consciousness.
Working longer hours will actually lower workforce participation, as more hours by the same people means more people unemployed. That is apparently to rarified an intellectual concept for Bush III, however.
Right now, I hope the democrats nominate Sanders. I dislike his class warfare rhetoric, but he appears to have some integrity.
It seems a mischaracterization of the democrats to say they actually side with the great unwashed masses, however. It was a democrat who lowered capital gains taxes from 40% to 28%. It was a Democrat who signed NAFTA into law, with just enough democrats voting for it to get it to pass. Same with PNTR with China. (Bipartisan means something so stinky bad for the common man that both parties need to support it so neither side loses too many votes). If the democrats are the friend of the working man, they certainly don't need any more enemies.
These are not aberrations. Being married to the democrat party is like being married to Tiger Woods. It isn't an isolated indiscretion, or even a short lived fling. It is a regular thing. You are being cheated on most every day.
Seems to me while the constituencies of the democrat and republican parties are quite different, the parties are practically interchangeable. At least it is so on economic issues. Both parties have refused to secure the borders against illegal migration. Both parties have favored unrestricted trade with our adversaries. Both pander to their constituencies with their rhetoric, but both act about the same.
Same end result just volume of trade is much less than Q1.
Paul Krugman at the New York Times ("Jeb and the Nation of Takers") says Jeb Bush makes Mitt Romney look like a model of empathy for the less fortunate, and notes:
"Longer hours would mean more GDP ... but not necessarily better lives, especially if the increase in GDP doesn’t trickle down. When Jeb Bush talks about more hours, he’s probably thinking largely about getting the bums on welfare out there working."
So besides having Robert Reich as his Secretary of Labor, maybe President Sanders can make Paul Krugman his Chief Economist and Economic Adviser.
Who would want vote for Jeb. His brother is the oil thief of Baghdad.
My understanding is they were hoodwinked by the banks with lend-lease etc. debt scams and put their country into hock before the financial crisis. Now they get financial terms which wipe out their pensions, their income, wages, health care, etc. and they are paying off debt....for life and it is a never ending cycle for the EU terms do not allow them to rebuild their economy.
it's just math, and i have a google calculator link to show how results were arrived at in each case...the caveat, of course, is the complicated inflation adjustments that i took a shortcut estimate on...but the nominal 2.0% increase in April and another 0.8% in May construction spending after a weak first quarter fairly obviously indicate growth at a double digit rate..
We're holding ya to 'em when the report comes out July 30th. ;)
The site looks great!
Guess what? The predictions of financial collapse were vastly overrated. There's no reason to be surprised, but nevertheless...
Merkel and Holland Respect Greek Referendum but Demand Concrete Proposals
http://greece.greekreporter.com/2015/07/06/merkel-and-hollande-respect-g...
How about this proposal: AMF to the IMF, EU, NATO etc. It's like ForclosureGate. If the presentation and internal workings of the loan are a fraud, then the loan is null and void.
Being a never ending debt slave as the choice isn't one.
Glad to see your writing!
you cannot mix these two surveys, it's statistical caca to do that. This is on a month to month basis, to compare two different surveys, databases, one has to compare raw data, not seasonally adjusted, for years to see if there is any correlation and to answer why there is not for the same data.
SSA and Census on wages widely differ and there is little attempt to quantify the differences.
This wasn’t because of people on Social Security disability, because we actually had a net decrease since last month:
April 2015 -- 8,939,419
May 2015 --- 8,939,029
-390 (less)
SOURCE:
http://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/dibStat.html
And it wasn't because of retiring Baby Boomers either:
Apr 2015 --- 39,432,426
May 2015 -- 39,505,145
+72,719
SOURCE:
http://www.ssa.gov/oact/ProgData/icp.html
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-07-02/air-force-one-serv...
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