Rolling US Economy Into The Shitbin Thread

China is brilliant about how much money they're spending towards public transportation/monorails. If I remember correctly USA is spending 1/10th that amount.

― Muttley vs. Mumbly (CaptainLorax), Friday, July 15, 2011 11:01 PM (33 minutes ago) Bookmark

I assume you meant high speed rail?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monorail

james fallows is all about china daily - http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2010/03/redesign-fever-welcome-china-daily/36864/ - this kills me

http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/jamesfallows/assets_c/2010/03/IMG_5603-thumb-550x348-22418.jpg

EXCLUSIVE http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/jamesfallows/CHinaDaily1.png

english.peopledaily.com.cn somehow real funny to me

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/18/business/fast-traders-under-attack-defend-work.html?hp=&pagewanted=all

“High-frequency traders turned what was a very down day for many investors into a very profitable one for themselves,” said Mary Schapiro, the S.E.C. chairwoman, in a speech on the anniversary of the flash crash in May. “Their activity that day should cause us to thoroughly examine their current role.”

bunch of big swinging dicks pissed off at others for having bigger, swingier dicks

Poor Goldman Sachs, only making $1.3 billion more in profit than last year:

Goldman Sachs Disappoints With Earnings of $1.05 Billion
...
The second-quarter profit of $1.85 a share fell short of analysts’ expectations of $2.27 a share, according to Thomson Reuters. Still, it was an improvement for the period a year earlier, when Goldman posted a profit of $453 million, or 78 cents a share.

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/07/19/goldman-sachs-reports-profit-of-1-05-billion/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Basic lack of money remains Americans' foremost financial concern. Even in the current job climate, 17% of Americans say the most important financial problem their family faces today is a lack of money compared with 9% who say it is unemployment or the loss of a job. The cost of healthcare takes second place as 12% say it is the most important financial problem for their family.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/148625/Lack-Money-Tops-List-Americans-Financial-Worries.aspx

Here is the formula for disaster. Cut wages. Cut them some more. Issue lots of credit cards to the people whose wages yo have cut. Issue some more credit cards and push home equity loans. Cut wages again. Repeat as necesssary to create a financial catastrophe. Pretend that the people who struggle with this are poor managers of their money and irresponsible.

Will default cause a stock crash? Should I try to talk my parents into selling their stocks before next week?

it would impact the bond market first, where investors would be far less likely to buy U.S. debt instruments. but the resulting increase in interest rates (i assume based on the fact that U.S. debt instruments become a riskier investment, requiring higher rates to entice investors) will have a ripple effect on lots of other things that are tied to the treasury's interest rates. that ripple effect would likely cripple the market, dry-up all credit, spike unemployment, and so forth. that is, of course, if the crises gets that far.

that gallup poll is kinda useless

poor people's biggest concern is 'being poor' second biggest concern is 'all the shit they can't afford'.

<3

Instability in the market is often good for the long term investor, bad for the short term investor, especially those looking to cash out soon for retirement. But I think no one really knows how the worst case scenario would play out, even if it came to that. In this sense the Y2K analogy is pretty apt, except, of course, that maybe one reason little bad came of the Y2K doomsday scenarios is that people took it seriously and planned/recoded accordingly. This particular game of debt limit/budget chicken, however, seems to be predicated on a lack of fear of worse case scenario outcome. It's basically calling the bluff of fate, which seems ... unsound.

this is great.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQqDS9wGsxQ

https://twitter.com/#!/search/%23gfc2

http://img237.imageshack.us/img237/5648/dollarohnopq6.png

can we get rid of money now or what

beer and wine based economy now!

my pizza economy has proved to be a disaster and needs to be retooled with more onions

well we first noticed that the olive oil pizzas w/ feta cheese started falling in value among traders. in a desperate attempt to reverse the trend, pepperoni pizzas and bratwurst pizzas were brought in to shore up the market, but they started rapidly losing value too. troubles overseas in the hamburger/jalapeno pizza markets became a cause of concern. pretty soon, a wheelbarrow full of Jeno's couldn't get you a gallon of gas.

http://news.yahoo.com/p-reconsidering-u-downgrade-cnbc-001207261.html

ruh roh

see ya'll in canada

So is this why both ATMs were out when I just went to deposit my check?

on the bright side, the image the new york times is using for this is particularly beautiful

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/08/06/business/06ratings_337_span/06ratings_337-articleLarge.jpg

Treasury Department officials said that the S.&P. announcement was delayed after Treasury found a serious mathematical error in a draft of the downgrade announcement, which was provided to the government earlier Friday afternoon. The officials said that the ratings agency inadvertently added $2 trillion to its projection of the federal debt, significantly overstating the problem confronting the government.

Treasury said that S.&P. conceded the problem after about an hour of discussion.

The company did not return a call for comment.

it's been hard not to reach the conclusion that the ratings agencies are a bunch of clowns

'it was just a little 2 somewhere in our spreadsheet! happens all the time!'

where's that quote from Tracer

I don't have a problem with this. The US has a lot of debt and little long term plan of paying it off.

on the other hand, remember that the subprime mortgage CDOs had AAA ratings.

i've read a few articles that say people are overreacting to this news. thoughts?

Yes, it isn't that big of a deal really

well, they had all but announced they were going to do it unless the debt deal was more extreme than what even TP republicans were pushing for.

also there's "The other rating agencies, Moody’s and Fitch, have said they have no immediate plan to downgrade the country’s credit rating, giving the government more time to make progress on debt reduction. The split verdict limits the impact of the S.& P. downgrade as many consequences would be set off only by a reduction by two agencies."

The US has finances that fall in line with AA (not AAA) economies. While S&P was deterred, Fitch's sovereign debt guy was on Bloomberg radio Thursday morning and was pretty equivocal regarding their assessment.

Not that ratings agencies should be given much credence (given the structured swill they were bribed to grade AAA in the mid-oughts). Its seems like a great time to short Treasuries, but that's been true for much of the decade - there are no shorts left to cover so the plunge (in real terms) will be swift. My guess, the dollar moves, the rates are little perturbed.

Its an extended play Kondratieff Winter (of our debt repudiation). In past K. winters paper promises were rejected. But history only rhymes.

Though, as the leper with the most fingers, the dollar may not move vs other fiats. Watch your grocery bill.

http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/templates/worldfood/images/home_graph_1.jpg

already have my liberal friends talking as if Monday is going to be the end of the world. *eyeroll*

LIke it's possible to acknowledge something sucks without going all end of days with it.

should we be worried that you suddenly sound like an oracle rather than an economist reader, sanpaku??

is "fiat" a dog whistle word for something i'm not going to like?

ErinBurnettCNN Erin Burnett
S&P downgrade: a needed wake-up call. Now, let's replace partisanship with patriotism and get our confidence back. We're a city on a hill!

This John Chambers is a big ol' nerd.

Part of me loves that this happened after the big fecal crisis was "resolved."

if anyone can explain, in simple language, kenneth rogoff's theory that a sustained burst of moderate inflation would help cure our economic troubles, i'd appreciate it.

Growing the economy means growing net exports, and the overvalued U.S. dollar has priced U.S. labor out of most export (or import competitive) industries for several decades, though benefiting the financial sector.

Thomas Friedman's flat world implies flat wages for equivalent work. Getting there via a slow currency devaluation is probably the least painful way for the U.S. to get there. Unless you're a saver or on fixed income or like to drive or buy other imported things.

Thomas Friedman's flat world implies flat wages for equivalent work.

let's spend 20 seconds on this idea before ling out l

"Am I even here now? What week is it? I'm Tom Friedman. I was talking to a taxi driver in Dubai yesterday. He taught me more about the global economy in five minutes than any of you could ever learn in your entire lives. Here what he said: A penny saved isn't a penny earned. It's a penny learned. That's why we need to create 'thin cities' made of polycarbon sheeting and guarded by solar-powered 'green nukes'. If we don't do it, that taxi driver will. And that can never be allowed to happen."

― Tracer Hand, Wednesday, March 31, 2010 3:51 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

michael lewis's portrayal or S&P and other ratings agency in the big short makes them out to be a bunch of clueless ignoramus chumps

oh well

Reich: "We’d all be better off had S&P done the job it was supposed to do, [during the housing bubble]. We’ve paid a hefty price for its nonfeasance."

dude u have the wrong feasance there.

it's a good thing that protecting rich asshole "job creators" from paying more taxes is more important than our national credit rating

The political brinksmanship of recent months highlights what we see as America’s governance and policymaking becoming less stable, less effective, and less predictable than what we previously believed. The statutory debt ceiling and the threat of default have become political bargaining chips in the debate over fiscal policy.

It appears that for now, new revenues have dropped down on the menu of policy options.

The act contains no measures to raise taxes or otherwise enhance revenues, though the committee could recommend them.

Compared with previous projections, our revised base case scenario now assumes that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, due to expire by the end of 2012, remain in place. We have changed our assumption on this because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the act.

http://blogs.wsj.com/marketbeat/2011/08/05/sp-downgrades-u-s-debt-rating-press-release/

Fuck the S&P, Krugman sez:

On the other hand, it’s hard to think of anyone less qualified to pass judgment on America than the rating agencies. The people who rated subprime-backed securities are now declaring that they are the judges of fiscal policy? Really?

Just to make it perfect, it turns out that S&P got the math wrong by $2 trillion, and after much discussion conceded the point — then went ahead with the downgrade.

More than that, everything I’ve heard about S&P’s demands suggests that it’s talking nonsense about the US fiscal situation. The agency has suggested that the downgrade depended on the size of agreed deficit reduction over the next decade, with $4 trillion apparently the magic number. Yet US solvency depends hardly at all on what happens in the near or even medium term: an extra trillion in debt adds only a fraction of a percent of GDP to future interest costs, so a couple of trillion more or less barely signifies in the long term. What matters is the longer-term prospect, which in turn mainly depends on health care costs.