Two years ago -- actually two years and 3 days ago, on November 28, 2006, I wrote a note called Recession now looks likely, in which, citing a decline in manufacturing that had been running strong through the duration of the post-9/11 recovery:
a recession is likely to occur within 12 months, and may in fact have already started.
Here Come the Stats. The Institute of Supply ManagementPMI is now at 36.2. That is the lowest number since 1980, when it was 24.2.
PMI is a manufacturing index with nine components: New Orders, Production, Employment, Supplier Deliveries, Inventories, Prices, New Export Orders, Imports, and Backlogs.
Bernanke and Paulson talk about the financial collapse
John Cassidy has a lengthy article in The New Yorker today which includes some excellent insights into U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke and his miserable handling of the financial collapse, including, so far as I know, the first public discussion of an August 2007 meeting in Jackson Hole, Wyoming in which the Fed’s initial approach was discussed and decided by Bernanke and a small group of top advisers.
First, Cassidy provides some interesting details on how Bernanke became Fed chairman,
“I always thought that Ben would stay in academia,” Mark Gertler, an economist at New York University who has known Bernanke well since 1979, told me. “But two things happened.”
How is it that activists are so often completely ineffective? Even when they espouse a cause acceptable to the majority of the American people? And why do they not take a harder look at just how effective/ineffective they are, so as to evolve toward more effective means of activism? To what extent are activist groups coopted?
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