Rolling US Economy Into The Shitbin Thread

dean baker on reinhart and rogoff has been good as well

i have sort of turned to him permanently in favor of the daily howler, not sure why, he's not as funny or as vibrantly outraged. there is maybe a weird little pill of bitterness somewhere in the howler's work whose origin remains obscure but whose absence makes beat the press a slightly clearer read

Always seems like a lot of his bitterness is rooted in the way that his friend Al Gore got treated during the presidential campaign.

This could probably fit on multiple threads, but Felix Salmon is in fine form today on how labor has been taking it in the nads from capital for the past 40 years, and he throws in a masterful skewering of Tom Friedman's latest:

Friedman is a billionaire (by marriage) who — like all billionaires these days — is convinced that he achieved his current prominent position by merit alone, rather than through luck and through the diligent application of cultural and financial capital. His paean to self-motivation recalls nothing so much as Margaret Thatcher's "there is no such thing as society" quote: "parenting, teaching or leadership that 'inspires' individuals to act on their own will be the most valued of all," he writes, bizarrely choosing to wrap his scare quotes around the word "inspires" rather than around the word "leadership", where they belong.

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2013/05/01/the-systemic-plight-of-labor/

the employment-to-population ratio, which fell off a cliff during the Great Recession and which will probably never recover.

actually, the whole thing is quite depressing

A Story for May Day: The Fed, Apple, and Trickle-Down Economics
http://robertreich.org/post/49368810890

in favor of over

so what's going on, unto the brink of the shitbin once more my friends?

Ask Bernanke (though Krugman disagrees)

WSJ: Joblessness expected to dip below 7% next year.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323300004578559263197557362.html?mod=ITP_pageone_0

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/harold-meyerson-start-the-border-fence-in-norfolk-va/2013/06/25/09e63d18-dd1c-11e2-9218-bc2ac7cd44e2_story.html?hpid=z3

Northern US policy ideas versus Southern ones

http://www.propublica.org/article/the-expendables-how-the-temps-who-power-corporate-giants-are-getting-crushe

http://www.moneynews.com/MKTNews/billionaires-dump-economist-stock/2012/08/29/id/450265

Ha, don't know what link trail led me there. Didn't realize it was newsmax. Newsmax otm?

That temps article is so sad

lol billionaires warn of impending financial collapse

no, newsmax definitely not otm. the dow is not going to 1500.

if warren buffet thinks we're about to get a 90% stock market correction then why would he reduce his consumer products allocation by only 21%? and what did he do with that money (clue: he bought stocks. warren buffet does not think this.)

Here's some more great moneynews reporting

http://www.moneynews.com/Wolinsky/Buffett-obama-wolinsky-Credibility/2011/09/22/id/411898

lol

I think moneynews is literally the site that always has those "from around the web" links with the worried billionaire who I think looks like saul bellow

so detroit just filed for bankruptcy. who will break the record next?

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/19/us/detroit-files-for-bankruptcy.html?hp&_r=0

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/22/business/in-climbing-income-ladder-location-matters.html?_r=0

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/business/a-shuffle-of-aluminum-but-to-banks-pure-gold.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0

MOUNT CLEMENS, Mich. — Hundreds of millions of times a day, thirsty Americans open a can of soda, beer or juice. And every time they do it, they pay a fraction of a penny more because of a shrewd maneuver by Goldman Sachs and other financial players that ultimately costs consumers billions of dollars.

The story of how this works begins in 27 industrial warehouses in the Detroit area where a Goldman subsidiary stores customers’ aluminum. Each day, a fleet of trucks shuffles 1,500-pound bars of the metal among the warehouses. Two or three times a day, sometimes more, the drivers make the same circuits. They load in one warehouse. They unload in another. And then they do it again.

This industrial dance has been choreographed by Goldman to exploit pricing regulations set up by an overseas commodities exchange, an investigation by The New York Times has found. The back-and-forth lengthens the storage time. And that adds many millions a year to the coffers of Goldman, which owns the warehouses and charges rent to store the metal. It also increases prices paid by manufacturers and consumers across the country.

Tyler Clay, a forklift driver who worked at the Goldman warehouses until early this year, called the process “a merry-go-round of metal.”

Only a tenth of a cent or so of an aluminum can’s purchase price can be traced back to the strategy. But multiply that amount by the 90 billion aluminum cans consumed in the United States each year — and add the tons of aluminum used in things like cars, electronics and house siding — and the efforts by Goldman and other financial players has cost American consumers more than $5 billion over the last three years, say former industry executives, analysts and consultants.

The inflated aluminum pricing is just one way that Wall Street is flexing its financial muscle and capitalizing on loosened federal regulations to sway a variety of commodities markets, according to financial records, regulatory documents and interviews with people involved in the activities.

maybe this is 'rolling us economy out of the shitbin' news, but still, these fuckin dudes

yeah I know, posted that in the finance industry thread, one of those things where you go "how the fuck is this not illegal"

it's their gas, i guess

I loved the, uh, optimism of this headline in my local paper yesterday:

Free to Be Bold
The economy pushes a growing number of Americans to find work through freelancing or entrepreneurship

Galt's Gulch, here we come!

http://www.endicottalliance.org/jobcutsreports.php

"Free to be bold"

Reminds me of the time my friend's dad took a litter of puppies far up a forest road, threw them out of the car and told them, "Now you are free to be bold!"

Then the puppies instantly turned into feral wolves and ate him, they end.

freelancing is BOLD alright, having no health insurance usu is

don't worry people prosperity's about to trickle down any day now

impeach!

http://behindthewall.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/10/14/20957509-china-state-media-blasts-us-shutdown-calls-for-a-de-americanized-world?lite

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/11/yep-being-a-young-american-adult-is-a-financial-nightmare/281214/

http://cdn.theatlantic.com/newsroom/img/posts/Young_adults_reuters.jpg

lol young adults can't even afford shirts these days

No money left over for health insurance after you get all those tattoos.

heh, i feel guilty for criticizing people struggling w/ money, but he probably doesn't need have to have the fancy undies either

or that microwave. heat it up over a campfire like the oldtimers do. or those paper towels - put things outside and evaporate them! or those sugar/flour jars back there - just spread the granules out in the backyard, you'll never need a jar again!

i don't think they actually live there, those are probably just the props for the demonstration unit in the building they can't get rental approval for

fancy undies

were a birthday gift from his grandmother

http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/chinascentral-bank-announces-job-creation-program-for-the-united-states

onion thread surely?

bad news is QE is going to be turned off. good news is zero % interest rates for the rest of our lives!

http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-federal-reserve-ben-bernanke-taper-stimulus-forecast-economy-20131218,0,2330244.story#axzz2nreq63hR

eternal bubbles for all!

http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/52f3e70e6bb3f750586ea831-800-/cotd-120.jpg

"Disability Queens" just doesn't have the snap, crackle and pop we have all come to expect from the GOP phrasemakers.

number of people in america

record high!

Do these charts not suggest that The Job Creators have been failing miserably at creating jobs with all that cash the fed has been pouring into their pockets?

i can't read the Y-axis on the right-hand chart, but it appears to be saying that the rate of growth in the total number of people collecting welfare has slowed considerably since 2009. which seems good, right? given that there were 16 million more americans in 2013 than there were in 2010, i would expect the total number to increase by some number, regardless of the country's economic fortunes.

as for the graph on the left, i don't know what it's correlated with, but it doesn't appear to have anything to do with politics.

the one in the middle is more interesting. i would bet that some of the movement has to do with how difficult congress makes it for poor people to receive food stamps. sometimes congress feels miserly and vindictive, sometimes it doesn't. but i don't know. the number falls gradually during the reagan years, shoots up during the bush years, falls fairly dramatically during the clinton years and then rises pretty consistently ever since 2000 when the first mini-recession hit.

not sure what you're trying to say by posting this graph, dandy don? business insider is a weird publication. i can never figure out where they're coming from.

that's it, cut the capital gains tax again