(This was originally posted on DailyKos, where it was suggested that I post this here. It has been slightly edited.)
Unless you've been living under a rock you know that we are in an economic death spiral and that things will get worse before they get better. All things will pass, however, and unless things crater for good, we will eventually pull out and begin economic recovery, in one year or three or ten, and we will be ... well, where will we be? What are our economic goals? What do we want from an economy?
I want to bring to your attention a list of Projected Jobs by Congressional District. Then, Kaiser has a web page of total unemployment rates, the total residents per state, the poverty rate of each state and even the breakdown of citizenship status by state.
Center for American Progress interactive map on which states would get how much of the Stimulus money per Gross State Product (GSP).
Does this distribution make sense? Let's take the case of Michigan. According to the Projected Stimulus jobs per Congressional District, the break down is as follows:
Although retail sales data reported last week surprised by not being as awful as expected, nevertheless the plunge in consumer spending since "Black September" has been dramatic.
Just how dramatic? Let's compare the cliff-diving plunge in retail sales at the end of 2008 with past retrenchments.
Below is a graph of real retail sales (i.e., adjusted for inflation) since the original, now-discontinued series was started in 1947 (in red) with the more modern version since its inception in 1990 (in blue):
Following Enron's [and Worldcom's] demise Congress enacted Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) to ensure the transparency of management practices for public companies. Enron's financial engineers had created off-book derivatives that worked just like an off-shore toilet: they would dump all their "phantom" debt there, but unfortunate for Enron's executives, the flusher didn't work. The debt was actually real. Enron was able to hide its debt so long as its energy revenues were growing. Once that stopped the house fell down.
Years ago when Tenant, Columbia and others were building out their networks, they purchased thousands of local community hospitals. They were viewed as undervalued assets. These large health conglomerates issued bonds to finance their acquisitions, and the first thing they'd do upon purchasing a small community hospital would be to sell the land it was on to one of their REITs. The community hospital then would begin paying rent to the REIT, and that in turn ultimately financed the acquisition. Community hospitals were effectively refinanced and mortgaged, instead of being free and clear of debt burden. No longer did the community hospital operate as an entity standing on fully paid for land. Historically, before the massive reconsolidation by Wall Street, Community Hospitals paid no rent. Why is this important?
You know those banks that you just bailed out with your money? Well, they are repaying the favor by charging Loan Sharking Rates, if you miss one payment on a credit card or even carry a high balance.
Millions of cardholders have recently received letters from the likes of Citibank, Bank of America Corp., Wells Fargo & Co. and American Express Co. notifying them that their interest rates are going up, in some cases to 30% if a single payment is missed.
JPMorgan Chase & Co., the nation's largest issuer of plastic, has begun charging hundreds of thousands of cardholders a $10 monthly fee for having carried large balances for more than a couple years.
Gee Thanks Citigroup! Glad we're all in this together. Isn't there a call to completely nationalize all of the banks, fire executives who got us into this mess and restructure them completely?
Now that the teachings of business school have proved to create groups of blind mice, some of the better ones are rethinking their programs.
For some academics, the financial crisis is the ultimate "teachable moment" for anyone destined to work in financial markets, big business and start-ups, and is forcing the schools to rethink the way they teach the art of making money.
Preparing future executives for any eventuality at the top of corporations is becoming the new vogue, replacing an emphasis on simply making money using short-sighted business plans and discredited risk models.
Our younger faculty are willing to entertain ideas that would have been offensive 20 years ago," such as psychological biases in markets, he said.
Japans exports in one quarter dropped 13.9%. Their quarterly GDP was 3.3% contraction and exports accounted for 3% of that drop.
Japan’s economy shrank at an annual 12.7 percent pace last quarter, the most since the 1974 oil shock, as recessions in the U.S. and Europe triggered a record drop in exports.
The prospect of mighty General Motors Corp. tumbling into bankruptcy protection edged closer on the weekend, increasing the danger of a cascading collapse of a major chunk of the North American auto industry.
Talks between the United Auto Workers union and GM on concessions broke off and then resumed again as The Wall Street Journal reported that the auto maker will offer a restructuring plan to the U.S. government that includes Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection as one of its options.
The Wall Street Journal is also reporting:
The Obama administration will not appoint a "Car Czar." An inter-agency process, led by Geithner and Summers, will instead tackle issues relating to auto companies.
During the Clinton years much was said about "bridging the digital divide." On Charlie Rose recently Leo Apotheker, CEO of German software giant SAP referred to enterprise-wide computer networks as a "nervous system." In listening I drifted back to the time just before the event of 9-11. What if government computers (at C.I.A., F.B.I., etc.) had all been able to "talk" and share/analyze/intelligate aggretized data? What if there had been an interchangeability and exchangeability? Aren't these largely the kind of "hi-tech" public works projects we need in today's economy?
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