Rolling US Economy Into The Shitbin Thread

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

these are the chronically unemployed who have fallen out of the work force and now are on disability and welfare for the rest of their lives?

Btw if you multiply that max food stamps number by 200 it about equals the number of yearly fossil fuel subsidies!

It would really be cool if gas companies defended their own pipelines in the middle east but yeah i guess we got to foot the bill for them, that's billions and billions every year for people not to work, just imagine the private armies we are denying and the jobs we are killing by nationally taking on this burden.

the bush/cheney housing crash will cost the US over $24 trillion

http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/congressional-budget-office-increases-estimate-of-the-cost-of-housing-bubble-collapse

LOL @ GOP

$80,000 per american. but let's cut food stamps, cuz the GOP says

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.

Business Insider is a link bait publication, but some of their stuff is worth reading. Assuming you can get over the hysterical headlines that they usually post.

I posted the jpg because I found it interesting--each of those graphs shows growth in programs that easily outpace the rate of population growth.

FWIW, those charts I posted comes from here, which is a very interesting read if you have some time to kill.
http://www.gluskinsheff.com/Assets/Documents/Musings%20and%20Special%20Reports/Breakfast_with_Dave_2014_02_05_Free(Website).pdf

and actually, if you just skim through that PDF for the graphs, it's got some interesting tidbits

each of those graphs shows growth in programs that easily outpace the rate of population growth.

if that's true, then it's hard to come to any conclusion other than that the fruits of our ever-increasing prosperity since the 1970s have not been shared equally. if each year a bigger proportion of americans have to rely on government assistance, it just proves that productivity gains are being gobbled up by a lucky few. it's not as though the means-testing for food stamp and welfare benefits have gotten more generous in that time.

a rising tide lifts all yachts

Not sure if prosperity can be shared "equally" but certainly the widely recognized problem of chronic unemployment is something that economists have studied a lot recently. It's a pretty complicated problem with a lot of variables.

But if more people are on government assistance, and that pace is escalating, I don't see how that can be a good thing.

I don't think anyone sees it as a "good thing." The divide seems to be more among people who see it as symptom vs cause

But if more people are on government assistance, and that pace is escalating, I don't see how that can be a good thing.

Certainly a good thing for Wal Mart and other big corporations who encourage that kind of thing in order to keep wages down.

I don't see how that can be a good thing.

It could not "be a good thing", if what you want to compare it to is a situation where jobs are freely available to those who can accomplish them, thereby allowing every able person to earn a living wage and contribute to social wealth by creating a prosperous household.

But the situation described in those graphs can be a very good thing, if you compare it to a situation where there is no possibility of the disabled or unemployed getting jobs or earning an income, because employers will not or cannot employ them, causing them to fall into dire poverty with no income whatsoever. That would be amazingly shitty.

everyone is on government assistance in some way shape or form. oil subsidies, 0.75% interest the government charges to lend to big banks, etc.

not bill o'reilly.

Aimless OTM.

The American economy added 113,000 jobs in January, a disappointing showing that is likely to spur fears that the labor market is poised for yet another slowdown.

But after an extraordinarily weak showing for hiring in December, some experts are concerned that weakness is carrying into 2014 and signaling a broader loss of momentum in the economy.

Still, in the fall there had been enough pickup in hiring to persuade the Federal Reserve in December to gradually begin scaling back its stimulus efforts. With the January report substantially weaker than expected, that call is looking increasingly premature.

You know what creates jobs? Consumer demand for goods. You know how to boost consumer demand? Make sure people have money to buy things. You know how to do that for people who are out of work? Give them money.

But no, let's definitely cut the top tax rates again. In fact, let's get from five brackets down to two - people who make more than $500,000 a year will pay nothing, everyone else will pay 45%. That should fix it.