Rolling US Economy Into The Shitbin Thread

that took fucking long enough

the last decade in terms of real wages was actually worse than the Great Depression

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2011/06/03/235709/depression-wages/

The increase in total private-sector wages, adjusted for inflation, from the start of 2001 has fallen far short of any 10-year period since World War II, according to Commerce Department data. In fact, if the data are to be believed, economy wide wage gains have even lagged those in the decade of the Great Depression (adjusted for deflation). Over the past decade, real private-sector wage growth has scraped bottom at 4%, just below the 5% increase from 1929 to 1939, government data show.

i think we should cut taxes and deregulate stuff

so frustrating

If we all just sit and wish hard enough, maybe the rich will start letting us have a bit more of the profits of our labors.

but nobody in america wants to redistribute $$$$$$, except for like half of americans

Americans break into two roughly evenly matched camps on the question of whether the government should enact heavy taxes on the rich to redistribute wealth in the U.S. Forty-seven percent believe the government should redistribute wealth in this way, while 49% disagree, similar to views Gallup found four years ago.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/147881/Americans-Divided-Taxing-Rich-Redistribute-Wealth.aspx

florida couple forecloses on bank of america

http://www.news-press.com/article/20110603/BUSINESS/110603016/Bank-America-pays-debt-instead-losing-furniture

That story made me happy, until I thought about all the shit that couple had to put up with and how little the bank really compensated them for it.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2000558/Record-61-6TRILLION-financial-promises-paid-US-borrow-125bn-month.html

We knew the U.S. economy's financial health and future was looking bad - but amazing figures show how rapidly it deteriorated even further last year.
The federal government has a record $61.6trillion of financial promises not paid for after $5.3trillion of new financial obligations were added in 2010.

This gap between spending commitments and revenue in the year gone by equals more than one-third of the nation's output, reported USA Today.

Medicare added $1.8trillion in new liabilities and Social Security took on $1.4trillion in obligations, which is partly down to longer life expectancies.

really could do without the daily mail on this thread

Of course, but it was a toss up between that and USA Today.

how about the boise register? chinidaho ho!

http://www.idahostatesman.com/2010/12/31/1472023/chinese-company-eyes-boise.html

FYI, approximately half of the jobs created in May came from McDonalds

Up to 30,000 of the 54,000 jobs created in May were the result of a hiring spree by the hamburger chain, analysts at Morgan Stanley told Market Watch on Friday.

Richard Fisher, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, dropped by our offices this week and relayed a remarkable fact: Some 37% of all net new American jobs since the recovery began were created in Texas.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304259304576375480710070472.html

since this is the wsj, curious how many of those new lone star positions are mcjobs (not that there's anything wrong with those). i'd want to see info on average wages and benefits before i take them seriously

nobody in america wants to redistribute $$$$$$, except for like half of americans

We've BEEN redistributing it... upward!

it's called "rightfully earned" Morbs

um...

Multi-billion-dollar government subsidies to, for example, oil companies are "rightfully earned"?

but they create jobs so we should be grateful for them and give them whatever they need out to give us jobs because they create them for us and we're goddamn lucky for the privilege

certainly the Bush-Obama Tax Cuts have rewarded the right class.

they work hard, despite their comfortable upbringings. the rest of us should be grateful for their job-producing ingenuity, and go to church

When self-parody surpasses all attempts at satire it becomes impossible to know what ground is left beneath our feet.

All that is solid melts into pixels.

the rest of us should be grateful for their job-producing ingenuity, and go to church the mall

oh man

http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20110614/bs_yblog_thelookout/workers-share-of-national-income-plummets-to-record-low

"Why are workers taking home such a reduced share of the pie?"

i blame the unions and jimmy carter. and welfare

Communists

a rising tide will lift all boats

i blame obamacare

i blame everyone except for the workers who are taking a enlarged share of the pie

yes. they are engorged upon ill-gotten pie, extorted from the ultra-productive upper management class.

you know things have gotten weird when "Frum Forum" commenters are more reasonable than anybody at Talking Points Memo

this was interesting imo http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n10/donald-mackenzie/how-to-make-money-in-microseconds

I should have started a bank back when the getting was good.

professor, what's another name for pirate's treasure?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTzMqm2TwgE

this is a pretty amazing article about how goldman lost 98% of a $1.5 billion sovereign wealth fund practically overnight. oh yeah, and which country's sovereign wealth fund was it? step forward, libya.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/goldman-tries-fails-to-sell-soul-with-libya-deal-20110602

Having managed to get their bankers out of Libya with their heads still attached to their shoulders, Goldman decided to make up for losing $1.5 billion of Qaddafi’s money by offering the international pariah a $3.7 billion equity stake that would have made him one of the largest single owners of the bank.

In con-man parlance, this is called the reload. You beat someone in a Ponzi scheme for his life’s savings, and when he shows up at your door with an axe, you get him to mortgage his house to buy a stake in the Brooklyn Bridge. After blowing $1.5 billion of Libya’s money almost instantaneously, Goldman’s solution to the problem was to immediately get Qaddafi reaching back into his pocket for a cash sum over twice the size of the original losses. It’s really hard not to admire the sheer balls of the whole deal.

I've talked to a lot of people who got on the wrong end of a bad Goldman deal, and I never heard any hint of Goldman coming back with flowers and chocolates after the date rape. What makes the Libyans deserve such special attention? One wonders if you get better service from an American investment bank if the threat of beheading is behind your business deals.

krugman and wells on jeff madrick's new book, age of greed

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jul/14/busts-keep-getting-bigger-why/?pagination=false

The great financial crisis of 2008–2009, whose consequences still blight our economy, is sometimes portrayed as a “black swan” or a “100-year flood”—that is, as an extraordinary event that nobody could have predicted. But it was, in fact, just the most recent installment in a recurrent pattern of financial overreach, taxpayer bailout, and subsequent Wall Street ingratitude. And all indications are that the pattern is set to continue.

yeah, they're gonna kill us all with more floods if we let them. And we will, til we have fascism.

new bay bridge pre-fabbed at bargain rates.

Pan Zhongwang, a 55-year-old steel polisher, is a typical Zhenhua worker. He arrives at 7 a.m. and leaves at 11 p.m., often working seven days a week. He lives in a company dorm and earns about $12 a day.

“It used to be $9 a day, now it’s $12,” he said Wednesday morning, while polishing one of the decks for the new Bay Bridge. “Everything is getting more expensive. They should raise our pay.”

welcome to america

yeah pretty much fascism is the only way to explain shit like this

"It has now become orthodoxy on the right—despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary—that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, not Angelo Mozilo and Countrywide Credit, are to blame for the subprime mess."

California decided not to apply for federal funding for the project because the “Buy America” provisos would probably have required purchasing more expensive steel and fabrication from United States manufacturers.

and if there were no buy america provisos, they likely would have got the $ from the feds and STILL bought that shit from china, right?

xpost

If most Americans are no longer needed by the American rich, then perhaps the United States should consider a policy adopted by the aristocracies and oligarchies of many countries with surplus populations in the past: the promotion of emigration. The rich might consent to a one-time tax to bribe middle-class and working-class Americans into departing the U.S. for other lands, and bribing foreign countries to accept them, in order to be alleviated from a high tax burden in the long run.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2010/07/27/american_people_obsolete

I watched the old HBO film Barbarians at the Gate last night for the first time. Pretty good--James Garner has to speak in forced witticisms the whole way, but otherwise I liked it. I'm wondering if it's the forgotten beginning of the recent spate of economic-meltdown films (going back a few years to the Enron doc).

I've thought of that film more than a few times over the years -- very stagy by Gelbart's intent but not without merit. Fred Thompson's prominent role is cause for a roffle or two.

As the head of Amex--he gets fired during the end credits. Ran for president, didn't fare any better.

You kind of have to blame Obama for doing nothing in regards to bank regulations

hmm where have i seen this before

There are implications for the environment, too. The technology used to get gas flowing out of the ground — called hydraulic fracturing, or hydrofracking — can require over a million gallons of water per well, and some of that water must be disposed of because it becomes contaminated by the process. If shale gas wells fade faster than expected, energy companies will have to drill more wells or hydrofrack them more often, resulting in more toxic waste.

In fact, as this very newspaper covered in depth just a few months ago but is for some reason reluctant to make explicit now, a bunch of toxic chemicals are making their way into drinking water supplies, and state regulators are doing jackshit

Are shale gas and hydrofracking synonymous or is hydrofracking a specific kind of shale gas extraction?