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US Has Been In Recession Since December 2007
The National Bureau of Economic Research said Monday that the US has been in a recession since December 2007. The NBER is a private, nonprofit research organization of academic economists who determine business cycles. The stock market took a dip on the news that reached double-digit percentages for some tech stocks.
Recession pshaw!
The NumBER's a flaw.
A portfolio of duds
Requires the suds:
Burma Shave
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
It's about time they came up with that revelation. What matters now is that we get out of it by shopping our asses off this Christmas!
FR!
A long-standing rule of thumb for "recession" is that it is defined as contraction in the GDP for at least two consecutive quarters (six months).
More info.
By that long-accepted definition of recession, the US is not even yet in a recession. The US GDP decreased for the first time in recent history only in the third (most recent) quarter, by 0.3%. In the second quarter -- earlier this year -- real GDP increased 2.8%.
But how long has the media been ceaselessly hammering it into our heads that we're in a recession, tolling the bells of doom and gloom? How many times have we heard the phrase, "In these tough economic times" inserted into nearly everything we see or hear? How long has the drumbeat of the "recession" been played, when we had nothing but positive growth reports, even in the midst of the sub-prime crisis?
Worse still, many people actually believe that whatever recession we'll end up having is exclusively the fault of only the current President, and can't look back to anything before the year 2000 for any blame whatsoever. The egregious irresponsibility of the sub-prime lending has a long and sordid history.
It is this kind of partisan willful ignorance on the part of many that has enabled the political agenda among some to drive the notion that the US is in a severe recession caused by the ineptness and reckless irresponsibility of the Bush administration, when the US had nothing but growth in the GDP until only a month ago. If you asked most people how long they thought the economy had been shrinking for negative, they'd probably say things like, "A year? Two years?"
Wrong.
Last quarter. And we just found out about it.
So we've heard talk, day after day, night after night, an incessant drilling into our heads that we're in a deep and severe recession -- one that may even now rival the Great Depression! -- creating panic and fear, causing people to pull investments and hold onto their wallets, change purchasing plans, in turn creating bleak forecasts for manufacturers and other business, which causes job loss, and then -- voilà!:
Is it any surprise we're going to have a recession on our hands?
Capitalistic systems only work when the participants have faith in the system -- when that faith collapses, for whatever reason, you get a recession. And that's a normal and accepted part of the cycle.
We would not known that that US was in a recession unless they had told us. Do they work for the psychic network?
Are they going to tell us that we can't buy a Delorean or that gas prices are over $1.00/gallon.
Is this a think tank telling us this?
Fight Spammers!
Now that the election is over and the Republicans have lost, they can finally say "recession".
step aside intel 45 nanometer chipset, cloaking materials, telepathic controllers, and internet technology....its time for an economic recession story from the National Bureau of Economic Research.
you nerds can thank us later after you're done spending your way to patriotastic victory over the stock plunge and housing crisis.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Sure they are more accurate but they are mixing up precise esoteric terms with the 'generally understood' terms.
People understand what the general term means in terms of their daily lives and for them "recession" is bad. What started in 2007 it wasn't "bad" for the ordinary Joe - in fact a recovery might have occurred and we'd never have known about it. Now that it's the 2 quarters of negative growth thing, it's a real recession.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
The economy must be surely in a recession if it takes a team of economic experts a FULL YEAR to figure this out!
Now go and tell this to John McCain...
If you don't succeed at first, try again. If you still don't succeed, try harder. If nothing works, try reality shows.
but when these economists start retroactively applying the recession to previous time periods, thats just cruel and unusual punishment
why do we tolerate these economists? why don't we just lock them in a dungeon somewhere? what did we ever do to them to make them hurt our economy so bad?
maybe if some of us form a posse and tar and feather some economists these jerks will relent and make the economy good again
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
...of negative growth.
Only one, the most recent, where the GDP shrank by 0.3%.
The prior quarter GDP growth was 2.8%.
We've only had one quarter of negative growth, and we only found out about that less than a month ago.
See? All the constant doom and gloom talk works, doesn't it? Even someone who knows the accepted definition of a recession such as yourself thought we were in one.
It's sort of like a junkie being asked diagnostic questions like "Where does it hurt?" by a doctor who is prescribing him opiates.
Seastead this.
"What started in 2007 it wasn't "bad" for the ordinary Joe - in fact a recovery might have occurred and we'd never have known about it."
Depends were Joe was on the socioeconomic scale. For a lot of Joes the economy hasn't been right since 9/11.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Since the only growing industries seem to have been weapons and war, it's only natural that when you take the influence of government debt out of the picture, the economy has been shrinking for a long time.
There are some people who think you can replace economic growth in the private sector with economic growth in the public sector and it's the same thing. That may be true in Soviet Russia, but in the free world, pork financed with debt is an inflationary measure that doesn't increase the actual size of the economy.
What's worse, this 3.4% growth in the economy financed by debt is going to cause a cascade plunge. Right now we're like a family using debt to pay off debt (the growth in the national debt is equal to the money spent maintaining the current debt). What always happens in cases like these is the debt supply runs out, and the family goes bankrupt. If you think we're seeing hard times today, just wait. Paying back this 10 trillion is going to send the US back to the stone age by comparison.
It's been a long time.
The system as it existed worked on faith. Not facts. Faith that an industry that produces nothing and adds no value can be the most significant industry nonetheless and make EVERYTHING else secondary. It is not the first time.
During the internet bubble, real businesses that produced real goods that real people bought with real money were considered to be worthless. The future was in... well pets.com and what not. Pipe dreams, ad based revenue. It became hard for ordinary businesses to even find investment because they didn't promise the sky.
Of course, you can't say that the financial industry is much the same, that all these speculators add nothing, are fluff. But that is what happened, we had the financial industry fluffing itself up by selling itself its own products over and over again. This whole mortage reselling would be similar to Ford and Chrysler (apologies if they are the same) buying each others cars over and over and counting that as total production. The financial industry obtained a far larger share of the total market then it really is supposed to have. It worked because everyone believed it, believed that Wall Street really is important. It isn't.
Then it collapsed, people did indeed loose fate. Somewhere someone burst the bubble. What we got now is not so much a reccesion, as a re-appreasal. We now got to decide what exactly the role of the financial industry is supposed to be. Is it a service industry to the rest of the industry (exactly like say a cleaning company is a service industry) or is everyone else in the service of the financial industry.
Do we want banks to be just banks, lend our money to others for a profit that they partly keep and partly give to us or speculators, driving up prices, investing only in their own profit margins rather then investing long term in other industries.
A few economists, even as high up as the world bank are daring to question the system right now. That perhaps we should see the bank again as it once was, a service to society rather then the controller of the entire economy. No longer should the financial industry have a 40% share of the economy but rather something closer to 4%, back to REAL industry that actually produces value being the motor again, not shoveling money around.
Frankly I been watching the developments with great intrest. Right now I think a LOT of goverments are showing their true colors, bailing out banks that were never trustworthy, never played by the rules to help out the rich who put their money in their high risk accounts at the cost of the working mans taxes.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
So they dropped triple-digit percentages? Did any of them drop more than 100%? I thought the whole point of shares was that you couldn't lose more than what your investment was?
So, I'm assuming that the outfit that decided that present conditions constitute "recession" rather than something else is working from publicly available information, not some super-secret oracle. In that case, why would the markets react to their giving a label to a set of phenomena that were already present(and thus presumably reacted to)?
FFS you "rational actors", you'd better get your act together or I'm going to have to start paying attention to behavioral economists!
- "We don't believe we're going to have a recession though." [Vice President Dick Cheney, 1/30/08]
- "I think the experts will tell you we're not in a recession." [President Bush, 2/10/08]
- "The answer is, I don't think we are in a recession right now." [Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Edward Lazear, 2/11/08]
- "First of all, we're not in a recession." [President Bush, 4/22/08]
- "The data are pretty clear that we are not in a recession." [Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Edward Lazear, 5/7/08]
- "I don't think we are" in a recession. [Director of the National Economic Council Keith Hennesy, 6/3/08]
- "I think we have avoided a recession." [White House Budget Director Jim Nussle, 7/31/08]
- "I don't think anybody could tell you right now if we're in a recession or not" [Dana Perino, 10/7/08]
I refuse to participate in any recession.
As long as I work and earn, I will save and spend just as I always did. My family's economy won't be dictated to by some namby-pamby report by a bunch of gloom and doom busybodies.
Seriously.
If you practice fiscal responsibility (something the U.S. government seems unwilling to do, hence the current mess), work hard and consistently, keep your skills updated and always marketable, you'll stay out of trouble... or at least be nimble enough to make whatever moves are necessary to get out of trouble very quickly.
Some folks want to wail and gnash their teeth at the falling sky. Hey, whatever floats their boat.
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
If I only knew about it yesterday so that I could trade on it. Thanks slashdot.
And to all of the poindexter's at the NBER, "Duuuuuhh!" The real news here is that the brains at NBER finally figured out how to click the "1Y" button on either Google's or Yahoo's DOW chart.
Politicus
We're in a recession? No way!
Hey I heard we landed on the moon, discovered fire and invented a round wheel too.
Wonder when we'll harness the power of electricity??
If that consumption is financed by mortgage debt and the housing boom - which is not included in GDP calculations, I have to wonder about these numbers that economists throw around. Sure we technically haven't been in recession because the numbers are skewed that way. What if we did include new housing? We'd be showing a huge decrease in output. Why aren't we including housing in the GDP number? Many of these measurements are created based on consensus and for political reasons. They are not based on any physical laws.
If healthcare was included in the inflation calculations, we would have double digit inflation. But that wouldn't be good for the Government and corp America because all the benefits that they pay (Social Security, Veterans benefits, etc... ) would have to increase dramatically.
How does it go again? Figures don't lie but liars can figure?
Slashdot: late with the news since September of 1997
Lately the term "Great Recession" has emerged in the press to describe the current predicament. It's weighty enough to distinguish this very serious situation from a garden variety recession, but doesn't verge into hysteria.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to hop a train to Kalamazoo.
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=%22Great%20Recession%22
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
Not to stir the conspiracy pot, but I find it odd that we've been in a recession for a year, but we only hear about it a month after an election. One could postulate that the administration worked very hard to keep this announcement quiet in order to not look worse.
Up until a few months ago, the republicans have been saying the economy is strong and NOT in a recession. OK, so now they lose, and we find out the truth.
It could be innocent timing, but given the record of this administration I suspect it was known for some time.
They do stuff like classify making hamburgers as *manufacturing* now. If you went back and relooked at the economy with the older metrics, it has been a recession for well over a year. Plus, no one outside the Fed has the real numbers on inflation, they stopped publishing the full M3. That was a serious red flag indicating "lookout, shenanigans ahead!" for anyone paying attention. A couple of websites try to guess at the real numbers and according to their analysis it is a lot higher than what the official stats say. And then all you have to do is pay attention to your own budget and look at prices, taking into consideration such things as package weight shrinkage at the grocery store. You may be paying near the same price for product x over the past year but a LOT of stuff is now sold smaller weight for the same appearing package. For instance (just one of many) I noticed my large standard bags of catfood remained at the regular price, but dropped two lbs in weight. And look at the huge fuel price runup tis summer, that was a lot of extra cash that disappeared mostly down the speculator/investment bank rabbit hole, some analyssts think just goldman sachs was responsible for at least one dollar of those higher gas at the pump prices. then all the commodities jumps as the mortgage loons switched to that, they have bankrupted huge segments of the ag industry over that, just yesterday the largest poultry operation went chapter 11, they got stuck with being forced to pay the speculator driven huge price increases for corn (and no it wasn't all for ethanol demand, it was speculator driven). Now look at how they keep cooking the books on the real unemployment figures, they just stopped counting people who have gone a long time without work! Just not included!
If anything, the true damage to the economy is still being lowballed, the sheer outright thievery that has gone on at the upper levels of the "bailout zone" is off the scale.
From an interview with James K. Galbraith:
But there are at least 15,000 professional economists in this country, and youâ(TM)re saying only two or three of them foresaw the mortgage crisis?
Ten or 12 would be closer than two or three.
What does that say about the field of economics, which claims to be a science?
Itâ(TM)s an enormous blot on the reputation of the profession. There are thousands of economists. Most of them teach. And most of them teach a theoretical framework that has been shown to be fundamentally useless.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/02/magazine/02wwln-Q4-t.html?_r=1
Why are these people still employed and why does anyone listen?
This is all a lie! You can't trust statistics or facts. Where there is money, there is wealth.... at least so I am told. Just look at the government's own numbers for the number of dollars in the economy (http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/BASE Federal Reserve) - they have created $650billion more dollars in the last three months effectively increasing the total number of dollars in the economy by only 61%. Wealth has nothing to do with the goods in the economy, only the number of pieces of paper exchanged as currency.
I say the only way to create more stuff is to let the government print more money. Just think how much better everyone will be.... you know.... when everyone is a millionaire.
Bottom line - we boned.
One thing I never understood about this bailout of the housing market is where did all this money go? Sure, lots of people way overpaid for their homes, but shouldn't that money still be in the economy in the hands of the people who sold the homes? Surely not all of them blew their entire profit from the transaction by moving into new houses that they couldn't afford...
People who live beyond their means ultimately succumb to their avarice. I fail to see what all the economic doom and gloom is about. These are great days for the ant but those silly grasshoppers sure make a melodramatic ruckus when the wealth runs dry.
Having lived far below my means, refused debt slavery's yoke, saved and invested well foreseeing the bubbles demise and dodging its implosion, I now plan to spend my wealth on all those necessities denied me being so unrealistically over priced. Now homes and land, cars and other things are becoming cheap and I can buy them with cash owing no debt to anyone.
Thank you Mr. Bush, great days indeed!
I agree! The way inflation is calculated is a farce. Ever since the 70's (and maybe even before) items were taken out of the inflation figures. We do not have a constant measure of the actual inflation rate. How can we compare the rate of inflation now with what it was in previous years if we use different ways of making the measurement?
When all of the sudden everyone becomes an economics expert, talks trash and screams Armageddon...it's nice to have someone fair and impartial like NBER. It wasn't easy for them to call a recession since Q1 and Q2 GDP growth was positive, yet unemployment was negative. These were conflicting statistics and until the aggregate numbers were recently revised, meant there was NO recession. But that's why they're economists and not frat-boy b-school analysts.
We're still seeing the effects of the blasted internet bubble when stocks went sky-high on nothing but pipe dreams. Well it aint going to be a recession until the market drops below 1995 levels, where it finally broke the 4000 mark on Feb 23, 1995 according to http://www.djindexes.com/mdsidx/index.cfm?event=showavgstats
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
As many "experts" have explained, right about the time we finally admit to the recession it usually is the start of the recovery.
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
Peter Schiff was right, this is hilarious:
FOX News Two years ago (and sooner) discussing how a recession just isn't going to happen as well as giving Washington Mutual as the Stock Pick of 2008. :)
Love it, hate it, it's hilarious. Cameo by Ben Stein.
Not me who found it, just passing it on, got it from Pharyngula. Linking direct to youtube video, Pharyngula is easy to find. Don't wanna slashdot their servers.
The news media has accurately predicted 23 of the last 2 recessions.
No shit. The only people who wouldn't come out and say it are being evicted on January 20, 2009. The Clampetts are moving back to Texas.
For the last few years, I have taken the stance that Christmas could do with a good Humbuggering, and have taken to actually saying, literally, "Humbug" whenever people start with the "Merry..." , "Happy,..." etcs and general ostentatious jolliness on December 1st!
For many years prior, my lack of delirious excitement and palpable enthusiasm, as well as overt cynicism about the commercialization and general over-selling of the holiday, had me labeled "miserable", "hopeless", "a grump" and in recent years "the grinch". The way I see it, "Humbug" is just giving the crowd what they want, and it has the added advantage that people no longer expect, nay, demand my mandatory jolliness throughout the "season".
I actually enjoy Christmas, but the way I see it, the holidays are from the 23rd to the 31st of December. None of this all winter madness. The bastards are not getting once once ounce of holiday cheer out of me outside of those dates, and inside of them, I'm spending most of the time asleep.
So in conclusion; Christmas!? HUMBUG!!!
May the Maths Be with you!
More even more generally than laying blame on the CDS fiasco, one could explain the financial industry's woes on too much leverage and no actual risk management controls. One could also generalize the leverage problem out to the American consumer too..
Leverage: $100 in the bank is used as collateral for borrowing $1000 (10x leverage) It works great if you get a return on the $1000. But when the credit stops and the person that put the $100 in the firm wants their money back, it's a steep fall. That's why many financial firms evaporated overnight.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
The stock market dropped dramatically on the "news". Except the news is just the aggregation of other news. There wasn't any new facts in hand.
The whole idea of the Efficient Market Theory is that the market integrates all the facts and arrives at a rationally optimal price. It should not be possible to affect prices without introducing new facts.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Again for emphasis, "Ummmm, duh!"
Save Pangaea!! Stop Continental Drift!!
I don't think you know anyone with children. I have two small ones, and have a group of friends with small children. Lots of single income families. Sure they are married with 2 kids in a 2 bedroom condo, and they are driving used cars, but they get by on one income. The reality is, child care is expensive, and unless both earners have professional careers or a successful business, it's hard to net out ahead of child care costs. A 20k-25k second income, after the tax bite, and paying for childcare for 2-3 children, quickly goes negative.
Middle class subsistence? You've got to be kidding. A small 50s era starter home or small apartment, one or two used cars, and careful grocery shopping, you absolutely can do it... That's what middle class subsistence WAS, now if you think middle class subsistence is 2 cars 4 years old, a 4 bedroom house of 3000 square feet and a yard, 400 channels of Cable/Satellite, high speed Internet, multiple computers, meat EVERY NIGHT, then yeah, you can't do it on one income.
I like that latter life, and my wife and I both have masters degrees, and both work. But I don't pretend that it's subsistence, and trying to have the lifestyle that I remember as a child (when I was 8 or 9) and doing it with toddlers means more leverage to have things earlier in life. Plenty of families get by on a single income... but they live modest lives in inexpensive areas.
> Do we want banks to be just banks...
It would be insane for them not to be doing something with all that capital--mortgages are reasonable, but I could see some conservative investments, as well. Conservative. Derivative contracts on 500-million-dollar units of sub-prime (or even prime) mortgages are not conservative.
(The exception might be very limited and technically limited derivative contracts with absolute downward value limits built into them. You could basically use these for insurance.)
Subprime lending has very little to do with the current recession. The default rate is only slightly higher than average. The real problems have to do with derivatives, naked shorting and other financial shenanigans that Washington has refused to regulate. When we repackage debt, and insurance on said debt, and resell both dozens of times over, even a slight increase in defaults will knock over the whole house of cards. When we allow people to sell stocks they don't even own, and haven't even borrowed as in regular shorting, nothing but chaos can ensue.
In short, it is not the poor, who were simply patsies, who caused this mess. It was, as always, the greedy rich. Blaming the poor and those who try to help them get a fair shake is simply despicable.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/
Um, strawman. "God, Rest ye merry Gentleman" is not Dogma.
"Hmm. I am to metaphor cheese as metaphor cheese is to transitive verb crackers!"
After the pent-up inflation hits, we will wish we only had 10 trillion to pay off. The needed Keynesian stimulus will cost an additional $1 trillion per year, the Chinese and Arabs will want higher interest rates, and we'll effectively use inflation to devalue the huge pile of paper dollars held by foreign interests.
The strong dollar policy is supported by anyone whose current wealth is denominated in dollars (that includes a lot of influential people), but the bulk of U S citizens relies upon their labor in the next 2 weeks to avoid starving and rioting. That will force fiscal and monetary policy to give us roaring inflation in a few years.
I don't think you really grasp the true cause of a recession; it's not what you nor most economists seem to think... or at least are willing to admit publicly. Here's the dirty little Darwinian secret about the origin of recessions:
Recessions are caused by a reduction in the ability of the ruling economic class - the wealthy - to concentrate wealth at a rate that satisfies their greed.
When this happens they turn around and share the lack of wealth, by "trickling down" their displeasure in the form of job layoffs, etc., taking advantage of the dependencies they created in the process of becoming wealthy to make the rest of the general population suffer.
The sad thing is that a recession actually signals that the general citizenry has actually begun to learn how to limit the tactics of the rich; it's a win for the average consumer... or at least it would be if said average consumer didn't have a job that depended upon the wealthy, putting them in a position of dependence. (Think we don't still have a "barony" of the sort that American forefathers were supposedly trying to escape? Think again.)
The wealthy then retaliate against this victory by using that trickle-down effect that Reagan thought was so great to make the general population feel their pain, too.
A recession is in no way a loss of productivity or general faith in productivity and the "economy"; people don't actually stop being productive. That's bullshit fed to us by the wealthy, via mis-educated "economists" who don't actually have a clue (because they were very deliberately mis-educated to serve the interests of the wealthy).
The effect of a recession is to teach the general population a lesson, put a (temporary) end to their little economic victory and return control back to the grabby grubby greedy little hands of the wealthy. In effect a recession is the wealthy saying, "If we can't have our cake and eat it too, then by God none of the rest of you will, either!"
What do you think that "economic stimulus package" was all about? What is the real purpose of the "bailout"? That stimulus package was really intended to benefit the wealthy, not you nor I (I actually refused it), by encouraging people to once again spend-spend-spend and put profit back in the hands of the wealthy.
Since a recession is actually about loss of control by the wealthy, why the fuck would we want to give it back to them? Why don't we suck it up and finish the job we unknowingly started: kicking the money-changers out of the temple? Don't END the recession... DEEPEN it.
How cares? What is the "economy" anyway? We have just as many resources this year as we did last year. That means plenty of everything we need to get by.
If the "economy" being down means that people are being more careful abut how they spend their time and money, that is a good thing. If it means we are all working to reduce our debt, that's a good thing too.
Sometimes I think people are so concerned with money that they forget what it represents.
Now they tell me!
I keep hearing the doom and gloom about the recession, and yet when I go to the mall, movie theatre, restaurants, arenas and more, the parking lots are packed. So if people are hurting, it isn't slowing them down. I realize there are alot of people losing their jobs and homes, but I don't think it's as dire as the media makes it seem. Nor do I think that people who bought more house than they can afford should be bailed out with MY tax money.
and the U.S. ranks 36th in freedom of the press this year. An improvement actually.
A coincidence nobody wanted to talk about this before the the election? Sure, Sunshine.
>There are precedents. Even though President
>Bush and his administration never said that Iraq
>sponsored or was linked to 9/11, you could not
>stand the fact that Americans had that
>misapprehension - so you pounded us with the fact
>that there was no such link. (Along the way, you
>created the false impression that Bush had lied
>to them and said that there was a connection.)
Oh, that's rich! Here's a quote from a Boston globe Article dated June 16, 2004:
>Bush has previously said there was ''no
>evidence" linking Hussein to the Sept. 11, 2001
>attacks, but he and other members of his
>administration have continued to say they
>believe there were ties between Hussein and Al
>Qaeda. In a speech to the conservative Madison
>Institute in Orlando on Monday, Cheney called
>Hussein ''a patron of terrorism" and said ''he
>had long established ties with Al Qaeda."
Please stop reading Orson Scott Card. He's completely full of shit.
Actually, Christmas is quite ancient. Christmas as a mere shopping day, however, is quite recent.
Please don't confuse the two, because they have nothing in common. I guess that people have forgotten what it is ever since they squished the two words together and dropped the 's' at the end.
The top 10 or 20% of the populous will be doing great.
Is is the 10 0r 20% at the bottom who will struggle.
Even if your industry completely disappears you are more likely to have made some saving or to have assets and stuff to sell.
For the poorest people recession started the moment they were made redundant and they found out that 20 years driving a truck or handling an utlraspecialized machine in a manufacturing plant just puts them on the street with tens of thousands of folks exactly like them (and these are the lucky ones, pray for those whose only skill is burger flipping).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
The U.S. economy has been in a recession since December 2007
In other news, the ocean has been declared wet and Antarctica is said to be cold.
Why not go after the oil industry (and Bush by proxy)? I'm pretty sure their economists are just as good (or in this case, bad) as any others.
Realestate bubble about to burst? Check.
Businesses laying off people in the tens of thousands? Check.
Irresponsible failed oil baron wannabe in charge who writes blank checks for his buddies? Check.
I know, lets raise diesel and gas prices to around $5! That'll work!
One of my favorite conspiracy theories (my own, your own may vary) is that the reason they've been building all those megastructures in Dubai, is because like Michael Jackson and Halliburton, all the other ethical criminals are going to cash out and move there.
I'm sorry to say they're probably proving me right. And I'm tired of being right most of the time.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Hmmm - Since December eh??? Suspiciously around the same time the Federal Reserve started reducing the amount of money in circulation. Just look at the price of anything of value in comparison to the US Dollar (real estate, gold, oil) and then follow what the Federal Reserve has done. They've reduced interest rates spurring people and businesses to borrow money, but reduced the amount of money in circulation so that there isn't as much money around - so it is impossible for the money to ever get paid back. This is an engineered recession, not a real one - unless people do what the central banks want you to do - sell what you have of value to pay for your debts, or better yet borrow more to pay for your debts, and then they'll increase the money supply. Anybody left holding anything of value will get richer, those that sold everything just to live, get poorer.
Yes, you are a sucker. But because you believe that welfare and the bailout are the main reason the government is taking your money.
Military spending eclipses any other program by 2 to 1. So, first, you should be complaining about the defense shield program, which won't work, the Iraq war, which didn't work, and all of the other investments in destruction that enrich corporations and their owners, and do nothing for the people that pay those taxes. To put it in perspective, you'd have to have a 500 billion dollar bailout every single year added together with health care, welfare, and other social services in order to match military spending. If we paid the average per capita that other nations do, we'd spend around 180 billion instead of 1000 billion.
If you didn't want higher taxes, I hope you didn't support the war. Taxes will go back to normal levels, because someone has to pay for the three billion dollars that are flushed down the toilet in Iraq every week, on top of all of the other idiotic military spending programs that are never criticized. Even talking about military spending is anti-American, but criticizing taxes that improve the lives of the taxed is considered patriotic. How's that for some cognitive dissonance.
So, in conclusion, I'll repeat something I heard quite a bit in 2003. If you don't want your taxes spent on programs that you don't want, just remember, this is America: love it or leave it.
Giving money to ultra rich people does not stimulate the economy, it creates bubbles in sectors where rich guys try to dump the billions of dollars they don't know what to do with. "Hey, I got $2 billion back from the feds, maybe I should chuck it in a real estate hedge fund" "hey, a bunch of rich idiots want new real estate funds" "hey, why did all these financial thingies we created for no reason tank?" If the tax cuts had gone to people earning $500K and less there would have been a stimulus. People buy more upscale food, bigger houses, another car, more beer, it works out. When taxes on people earning billions drop by a significant percentage that leaves a small number of people with a lot of money to ship to the Caymans. No spending (the first billion or two sort of takes care of the lifestyle) so no stimulus. The economy tracks pretty well with taxes on the ultra rich. Taxes go up, the economy does better, taxes go down, recession. The government actually does a pretty good job with the money it takes in.
You got me into this! You were the ideologue! I'm only a poor assassin! - Twenty evocations, Bruce Sterling
In Soviet United States banks rob you!
I was thinking of the earlier, and misdirected tax cuts, not the more recent (and much smaller) stimulus. Oops.
You got me into this! You were the ideologue! I'm only a poor assassin! - Twenty evocations, Bruce Sterling
...equals socialized risk and private profits which is frighteningly close to Mussolini's idea of a the quite literally fascist economic structure of corporatism.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
Huh? The April hand-out? As far as I've heard, it had almost no effect at all.
True.
(it was too small and too untargeted to have any significant effect on the economy-- it essentially was a very small tax cut, primarily at the lower income levels.
But that's not the reason it failed. It failed because it was a handout, not a tax cut. Handouts never work. Tax cuts can.
To be a tax cut it has to affect the tax rate on decisions made and actions taken AFTER it is instituted. Retroactive "tax cuts" apply to behavior that is already in the past and can't affect the decisions that drive it. They could have gotten some stimulus by reducing the tax rates on economic activity conducted in 2008 and later. But that's not what they chose to do.
Government "stimulus" - handouts or purchases of goods or services - don't work because the money they "inject" is "extracted" elsewhere. (See the broken window falacy.) This may be directly, by taxation (picking the pockets of the productive to get the money to hand out) or by "printing" new money (which gets value extracted from the rest of the existing money, stealing from the people's savings, salaries, and every other holding denominated in dollars.) Not only that, the process of transferring the "stimulus" money is lossy. So such plans retard more than they stimulate.
Such "economic stimulus" is like trying to lengthen a blanket by cutting a strip off one end and sewing it onto the other. Not only does the blanket not get bigger, it actually shrinks a bit.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Giving risky loans to people less likely to be able to repay them is what caused the crisis.
http://debatebothsides.com/showthread.php?t=73500
http://www.ptmortgage.com/blog/2008/10/01/pointing-fingers-was-it-cra-and-minority-lending-that-caused-the-mortgage-mess/
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=did_liberals_cause_the_subprime_crisis
Long and the short of it: CRA/CAP loans actually had better underwriting standards, and the evidence suggests that rather than being the bulk of the weight of failing loans, CRA/CAP loans have lower default rates than comparable commercial lending. The GSAs (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) and Congress (including Democrats) are not without responsibility, but the policy Card's talking doesn't really have much to do with the heart of the problem.
A better explanation of some of the underlying mechanics is given in an award-winning episode of This American Life called The Giant Pool of Money. There's a lot of blame to go around -- from the borrowers up through the securitizers who sold global investors the Mortgage Backed Securities, but it seems pretty obvious that without the MBSs and in particular some of the faulty representations of the risks involved in MBSs, you couldn't have had the disconnect between the loans and sensible lending standards (*not* mandated by the CRA), which is ultimately where things really started going off the tracks.
Tweet, tweet.
Time for a new war to save the US-economy.
In case of no enemy, just make something up.
Always worked so far.
People are stupid, so the only way to protect them is to eliminate capitalism and embrace communism. If you are a capitailist pig, you will die in the next revolution.
In reaqlity, spun is nothing more than a stupid fucktard who should go slit his fucking wrists.
GO AHEAD FUCKING FLAME AWAY FUCKTARDED COMMIE!!!
Wow, where do I get one of those?
The longest I've ever seen offered is a 40 year.