JACKSON HOLE, Wyo. — The American economy could experience painfully slow growth and stubbornly high unemployment for a decade or longer as a result of the 2007 collapse of the housing market and the economic turmoil that followed, according to an authority on the history of financial crises.
Sales of previously owned homes in the United States plunged 27 percent in July, reaching the lowest level since at least 1999.
U.S. pay TV subscriptions have declined for the first time in history this quarter, according to new data from SNL Kagan. The business intelligence company reports that cable companies lost 711,000 subscribers, which represents the biggest quarterly loss in cable TV’s history. Six out of eight cable TV operators also reported their worst subscriber losses ever last quarter.
New Numbers Reveal: Cord Cutting Is Real (via tedr) (via mikehudack) (via sectionfive) (via soupsoup)
Can companies do well by doing good? Yes—sometimes.
But the idea that companies have a responsibility to act in the public interest and will profit from doing so is fundamentally flawed.
Kevin Carson’s take on Capital flight:
American political debate has recently centered on manufacturers that relocate overseas and “abandon” American workers — and the alleged need for government to stop them from doing it. But maybe we need to figure out a way to abandon the corporate employers, instead.
So basically, shop locally and produce locally.
The magnitude of the problems facing the US mortgage market came into stark relief on Monday as Freddie Mac, the home loan group, said it needed an additional $1.8bn from the taxpayer.
Deep in the consensus-reality shared by post-war economists is the belief that the US economy transformed itself over the past thirty years, and now operates with much less sensitivity to energy costs. Indeed, in the cheap oil era and as the US developed its FIRE economy (finance, insurance, real estate), the energy inputs needed to create GDP certainly declined. But this also served to lull economists into yet another false rulemaking as they converted temporary conditions into permanent ones. For, beginning in the year 2000, the US economy–which had admittedly made great advances in power sector efficiency–became quite sensitive again to energy as the price of oil discovered America’s Achilles heel: our leverage to gasoline.
Imagine a world of healthy happy children, strong families, caring communities, and a vibrant natural environment in which everyone has a meaningful and fulfilling means of livelihood and young people grow up confident in the prospects for their future. An impossible dream? It is within our means.
While he was president, Bill Clinton kept a note taped to his mirror to remind him every morning “It’s the economy, stupid!” Perhaps we should all do the same. It would remind us that the institutions that define the economy effectively determine whether a living wage job will be available to everyone who needs one, whether families can put food on the table without running up credit card and mortgage debt, whether a quality education and health care will be available at an affordable price, and much more.
Economic instability, a grossly unjust distribution of wealth, environmental devastation, and endless wars in distant lands are all symptoms of a failed economic system. Of course, not everyone agrees that it is failing. It works fine from the perspective of Wall Street bankers. They are, however, a tiny minority. It is a devastating failure from the perspective of those who struggle with the realities of an economy that pays substandard wages, keeps jobs scarce, puts education and health care beyond reach, and forces us into perpetual debt slavery to generate hundred million dollar bonuses for Wall Street bankers.
The only legitimate purpose of an economy is to produce the goods and services people need for a full and healthy life. If existing economic institutions fail to fulfill this purpose, it is the democratic right of the people to change them. I’m not talking socialism here. I’m talking real markets and real democracy — the economic alternative both to a capitalist system that subjects people to rule by unaccountable financiers and to a socialist system that subjects them to rule by unaccountable bureaucrats.
It is entirely possible to design economic institutions that value life more than money and distribute power democratically to ordinary people who have a natural concern for the health and vitality of their children, families, community and nature. Although the political barriers are substantial, the basic concepts are simple common sense. You evaluate economic performance by life indicators rather than financial indicators, root the power to create and allocate money in locally accountable financial institutions, and favor public policies that support equitable compensation, community-based cooperative forms of ownership, cost internalization, fair elections, and bio-regional self-reliance.
Declaring our independence from Wall Street to create democratic, market based economies accountable to the people they are intended to serve is a challenge comparable to that faced by the early North American colonists who declared their independence from a powerful king in 1776. The leadership in that early independence movement came from below, not from King George. Likewise the leadership in our contemporary independence movement will come from ordinary people mobilizing from below, not from Wall Street or Wall Street owned politicians.
Christina Romer, chairwoman of Pres. Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, has decided to resign, according to a source familiar with her plans.
Romer, an economics professor at the University of California (Berkeley) before taking the key admin post, did not respond to repeated calls to her office.
“She has been frustrated,” a source with insight into the WH economics team said. “She doesn’t feel that she has a direct line to the president. She would be giving different advice than Larry Summers [director of the National Economic Council], who does have a direct line to the president.”
“She is ostensibly the chief economic adviser, but she doesn’t seem to be playing that role,” the source said. The WH has been pounded for its faulty forecast that unemployment would not top 8% after its economic stimulus proposal passed.
Instead, the jobless rate is 9.5%, after exceeding 10% last year. It was “a horribly inaccurate forecast,” said Bert Ely, a banking consultant. “You have to wonder why Summers isn’t the one that should be taking the fall. But Larry is a pretty good bureaucratic infighter.”
Listening to Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, and Rahm Emanuel is going to result in Obama being a one-term president. — Ryking (via ryking)
Americans are broke and depressed—and also swilling $3 lattes and waiting in line for iPhones. Welcome to the schizophrenic economy.
So much for learning anything about thrift and frivolity. Emphasis mine.
ECB officials have taken a strong stance against government stimulus to support the economic recovery, arguing that austerity is the better means to boost confidence, investment and spending. That has put them at odds with many economists in the U.S. who have warned against pulling the plug on stimulus too soon.
“Because you know what? They were right. South Louisiana is bought and owned by the oil industry…. The state is now the oil industry’s willing whore, doing anything it can to please Chevron or ExxonMobil because that’s where the jobs are.
You drive down, for instance, Highway 90 from Lafayette to New Iberia, and you pass the pipe fitters, the heavy tool operators, the boat repair shops, the undersea explorer offices, the truck rental places, business after business after business, every single one of them, every single person in them, every single restaurant nearby, every single motel and hotel that puts up business travelers, all of them serving the oil corporations. And all of those jobs and all of those sales and service payments make up a huge part of the tax base of the state.
So, yeah, even with just 33 rigs down, that’s thousands of jobs that are directly affected. And BP ain’t gonna pay it all. And it’s kind of a joke to get all upset about the ruined marshes when the canals and paths that have been carved out of the Louisiana landscape have shredded the wetlands for decades, with little attention beyond activists who wave their hands uselessly.
We’re fucked. That’s the conclusion the Rude Pundit reached. We are so very fucked by oil. Because the cost of weaning this nation off it is astronomical. Last month, when Bill Maher said, “Fuck your jobs” in favor of the environment, it was a fine rhetorical flourish, but so, so very naive, in a way he usually is not. But not because he dreams big. Liberals are dreamers. It’s what we do.
We are fucked because every job lost is a family we all gotta help. It would cost trillions of dollars to extricate ourselves from the claws of Big Oil. And we are simply no longer a nation that thinks in such ways any more. That’s why the Rude Pundit walked out of the rally angry, sad, and despairing. Unless we are willing to sacrifice as a whole, unless we are willing to shift our entire economy to saving the earth and the air, you may as well let ‘em drill.”
One of the most pivotal moments in world and United States history came in 1953 when the CIA and British intelligence forces staged a coup in Iran, overthrowing the democratically elected Mohammed Mossadegh, a national Iranian hero who was named Time’s Man of the Year in 1952. That coup led directly to the Iranian revolution of 1979, which launched an era of Middle East anti-Americanism whose repercussions have since been felt in deadly ways.
Mossadegh earned the adoration of his people and the scorn of Britain for nationalizing the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which controlled Iran’s oil reserves, shared little of the revenue and kept its workers in slave-like conditions. Anglo-Iranian became British Petroleum.
BP’s role in Iran’s descent into tyranny is no trivial historical coincidence. To this day, it is not difficult to find an Iranian living in America who refuses to buy gas from BP.
There was one primary purpose of the coup that overthrew Mossadegh and installed the Shah: To reclaim BP’s domination of Iranian oil.
Mossadegh’s government had attempted to negotiate a resolution, but BP’s executives flatly refused any compromise. BP’s stubbornness led to the most extreme policy move — full nationalization. Their failure to negotiate led Dean Acheson to coin what has become an oft-repeated analysis applied to varieties of bad actors: “Never had so few lost so much so stupidly and so fast.”
Crazynutjob has read through the latest HAMP performance report (pdf warning) and has some thoughts. He takes issue with the following statement:
…For the first time in a while, I’m actually professionally qualified to comment on something, which is exciting. It also means that this post…
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