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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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2009: Recession vs. Recovery (Update 2)
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May Leading Economic Indicators (1)
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VAT or Value Added Tax is Getting a Look in D.C.
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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
- 191423 reads
2009: Recession vs. Recovery (Update 2)
- 67422 reads
May Leading Economic Indicators (1)
- 50877 reads
VAT or Value Added Tax is Getting a Look in D.C.
- 347041 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.
- 346712 reads
U3 and U6 Unemployment during the Great Depression
- 321945 reads
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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what the view out of the Hamilton Project is, but in general their solution to these things is more education. It's the only place that I can figure that Obama would have got this idea that the tax cuts actually created an economic stimulus.
If he really wanted to get voters, he would be presenting a much stronger trade reform policy agenda and he never has.
I don't believe there is any polling out there which says giving tax giveaways to the super rich is popular and that includes your GOP/conservative voters. Maybe I'm wrong,
but I don't think I've ever seen any poll claiming the Bush tax cuts were popular, even among most Republicans.
In terms of pandering, I'm fairly certain the thing that would win voters is trade reform. They want to see all NAFTA based trade agreements plain renegotiated to keep jobs in the United States, they especially want to see the China trade agreement renegotiated.
I mean go to Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Indiana, West Virginia...any of these states decimated, whose economy was heavily manufacturing based....and that's the key word of the day, trade. Crosses party lines.
Of course it would be nice to not have pander and to have a trade strategy that adopt a VAT, that would have a dynamic change process based on the trade deficit, that would give special consideration to manufacturing and services which are critical to the US national interest or the United States has a strong economic interest to develop here...
Within each one of those trade deals are hundreds and hundreds of clauses and conditions and each one needs to be analyzed and if it's plain not working for the United States....say unfair tariffs on automobiles such as an example...it plain needs to be renegotiated.
The arbitrage of market weaknesses by these multinational corporations is on steroids and that's where the real holes need plugging.
This one is sure news to me. We need to start digging.
ok, Economists View has a post from 2007 on the Hamilton Projects view of tax cuts.
(The video link is broken)
I don't see where the Hamilton Project is saying the Bush tax cuts worked here.
I was very surprised to see support of a VAT tax by them.
If the polls are valid, and they stay this close for the next 60 days, then expect more of this. Obama will attempt to sound as centrist or center-right as he can to woo in Republican voters. He knows he won't alienate his base that much, or at least risk losing a portion that could sway the election. Hell, don't be surprised if he comes out and says he will keep the Inheritence Tax in it's current status!
Go figure on Ford and the US. Well, something has to give here, either we get diesel going as an "alternative fuel" for cars or we're stuck with what we got for now. For Ford, man, how about building those cars here too? Good piece, this was going to be in Manufacturing Monday, but I think you've done a better job than me. Question for everyone, do you think we'll get the burdon off of diesel next year?
the Hamilton Project on Bush's tax cuts. This sounds like it's straight out of their playbook.
The truly ironic thing here is that we've gotten to the point where tax policies like this aimed at redistributing income to the wealth (who presumably have more than their fair share of entrepreneurs who will supply goods that will create their own demand) reduce total social output, which is the argument that they use for keeping wages low (that redistributing income will lead to economic losses for the economy overall.)
The main thing about Blinder is that he has this clunkers for cash idea that shows the right way. The simple recognition that lower income workers are unable to make capital investments that lower long term recurring costs makes a hug difference. The biggest problem is access to capital.
I should write on this. I want to, but I'm really busy with school.
I suppose that it is time that I just write the damned diary that's in my head.
But procrastination is the east path.
I linked to you over at European Tribune.
I don't know if you've read any of the stuff that Jerome has written on the "Anglo disease" but I highly recommend it. Most economic literature says that government spending and access to credit markets "crowds out" other uses of that money that could have higher returns. Jerome applies the same idea to financial capital. (i.e. hedge funds, and the other creatures at work on Wall Street) Saying that it crowds out investment in other areas of the economy that may create higher social returns.
Well, I don't know about those other sites, especially those political agenda ones...
But I would assuredly appreciate a Blinder primer on his recommendations.
He's a large main stream economist and I'm familiar with his offshore outsourcing work and would love to read a Blinder primer is he is making policy recommendations or huge overview analysis reports.
So have at it, I know we would assuredly appreciate an overview, boiled down into layman.
On this statement, I really was shocked and am seriously wondering who is he listening to for the only organization I am aware of who claim the Bush tax cuts helped the economy are groups like the Heritage foundation and their analysis has major assumption, statistical holes.
I mean who credible really says this? Mankiw? He isn't credible to me.
at hear Sen. Obama is and remains a neo-liberal.
What pisses me off the most about this, is that it buys into the line that the government can do no good.
Obama can't be taking Blinder and the other decent economists very seriously.
I seriously considered taking a shot on this, and posting a diary up over at big orange on this.
Blinder has an excellent stimulus plan that offers continuing returns, and focus on stimulating demand. These tax cuts for the wealthy are, as you say, supply side economics. The problem with the US economy has been demand destruction as the prices of basic consumer goods has raced up like a Triple Crown winner on speed, not a lack of supply.
There's too much finance capital out in search of returns as it is now. I mean the tech stock bubble and the real estate bubble come from the same problem: footloose cash in search of a short term return.
Jerome a Paris over at ET has it down with his idea of the Anglo-Disease, you've got these jackasses on Wall Street offering hyped returns that crowd out investment in other parts of the economy like manufacturing. There's not relationship between the market capitalization of the firm and the market value of the firms assets and long term prospects.
GM and Ford currently have market capitalizations that make them look more like startups instead of staples of the US economy. It's like back in the late 1970s when Winnebago had a larger capitalization than Ford. It was totally out of whack. And it's precisely this disconnect between the market capitalization of firms (their value in terms of being sold like any other commodity) and their productive power (their investment value as an asset that can be expected to produce additional wealth) that is the problem.
We are a nation obsessed with market capitalization at the cost of productive power, and this has lead us to starve, sell off, and bash those parts of the economy that have actual productive power, i.e. the ability to actually produce items of value. Friederich List must be turning in his grave seeing what's happened to the American system of Political Economy.
I want this car. More importantly one could probably easily turn it into a French Fry car(biodiesel) to boot.
As I understand it, without modification one can run cooking oil on a diesel but the modifications and filters are not very expensive.
How about making the engines in the United States?
They "just don't think". Nice marketing research from Ford huh?
Over on NoSlaves.com blog are links to organizations. WashTech is AFL-CIO affiliated and the Programmer's Guild is more of a group, not union affiliated but they have been fairly effective, at least in terms of getting information out there.
I've seen many with strong patent portfolios, supposedly the golden researchers also unceremoniously fired.
Just thought I would remark that oil, unlike other assets, doesn't trade technically. It's not a stock, or a currency, or even an above ground commodity like gold, that can be easily warehoused. Oil trades on consumption demand from real world users who take delivery every month, and burn it. If supplies are tight, as they are--or if global oil production is flat for several years, as it had been since 1995--then the price has all the more reason to go higher. Trendlines, moving averages, those are helpful in other things like stock indexes, stocks, etc. But not oil.
About 45 years ago, an older engineer (likely about 40) told me he thought that we should be organized. I told him that he was out of his mind. This was of course before outsourcing, downsizing and the practice of discriminating against older engineers. After all, I was a software engineer and we were in major demand.
Today I am under employed and frequently unemployed. At age 57 my employer, a company that was known of protecting any employee with more than 10 years service told this 15 years employee with 10 patients who had successfully developed numerious products goodby. BTW I had a long career filled with commendations, run successful businesses and had been the subject of newspaper and magazine articles.
How could I protest by myself?
One of the most effective propaganda (corporate lobbyist public relations tactics) run on white collar workers is this idea that by their own brain power magically they will be protected against the same problems blue collar workers are.
They have perpetuated a myth by by one's own accomplishments one would not be subject to what happens to others.
Go to school! The reason blue collar workers are in trouble is they are just too stupid to advance their skills!
When one is educated, one is separate from blue collar labor. Above the fray and somehow special.
One would think those workers upon which high I.Q. is a requirement would figure this game out!
A union would provide a damper to the insane tactics of wild CEO's, MBA's, and CFO's whose interests are not in the general welfare and future of the company. There would be less mergers, acquisitions, downsizings, outsourcing, offshoring, layoffs, and bankruptcies.
Since the 70's, IT managers have been groomed from sales positions. They are outsourcing contract managers with no knowledge of IT.
This site does a watch list on failing banks. Only a blog can make it fun to watch financial institutions collapse.
Great comment title. In the dot con era and seemingly they got completely away with it, power point slides might not have even existed for a buddy of a pal to give another one of his friends millions in Venture Capital.
There is assuredly a good ole boys network, or the executive class where I think it's safe to say they are not getting these executive jobs based on meritocracy.
My caution comment is just we don't want to turn into the financial and economic version of "babies of whose babies of who had what baby and not her baby" type of things we cannot substantiate yet.
Not that it isn't possible.
China, Japan and others reduced holdings in GSEs earlier this month, but seemingly still have large holdings. Does this leave them with worthless stock or does it help them?
From Bloomberg:
WaPo is reporting that preferred shares will be protected while common stock will be diluted.
hmmm....now who usually owns preferred stock?
First of all, we don't know how much of this failure can be attributed to incompetence, and how much to fraud yet. That sort of information won't come out for many months.
Fraud in large quantities always happens during bubbles. The real estate bubble will not be an exception.
Now did Andrew engage in fraud? Probably not. Did Neil Bush engage in fraud? Yes. Did Neil Bush knowingly engage in fraud? It's hard to say. Neil Bush doesn't strike me as being all that smart.
Let's say you were a crook. Or better yet, part of a gang of crooks. The best partner you could have would be the brother or son of a powerful politician.
Not only would having him as a partner allow you easy access to rich people, but when you finally got caught you know they wouldn't throw the book at you because it would come back on the brother or son.
It also helps if the brother or son isn't very bright, for obvious reasons.
bank yesterday.
Every time I move and go in to my new local Chase branch, they always try to get me to sit down with a personal banker. Who then tries to talk me into some kind of investment situation with Chase. I always explain that I'm not interested.
Yesterday, they try to talk me into a CD, and I tell them that their rates aren't good enough for me. So I tell this personal banker that if I was really interested in a CD, I'd go to WaMu because they've got much better rates.
So she says something that surprised me. She says to me that if they're offering that kind of deal you ought to be worried about how solid the bank is, and how an article would be coming out soon saying how Chase was. I wonder if we aren't on the brink of a large number of bank failures,
I think it's important to be deadly accurate on these sorts of things so quoting the
article with more details:
So before we go making unfounded accusations or even worse, the infamous unsubstantiated rumor mill machine of the blogs, the article also says:
It could be more simply our classic super rich executive class who hire incompetent CEOs because they are their friends pay them absurd amounts of money to run corporations and companies into the ground or mediocrity, get fired, get a golden parachute and then moveon to another CEO or executive position to do the same thing all over again.
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