The effects of the Oil Shock that took prices to $100+/barrel in 2007-2008 are gone now, aren't they?
Before the Black September market/401k meltdown, aside from housing and finance, the chief drag on Main Street was the shock of Oil prices rising relentlessly from $55 dollars/barrel in January 2007 to $147/barrel in July 2008. This was the 4th such Oil Shock, the previous shocks all causing recessions in 1973-74, 1980, and 1990. Last summer people weren't talking about how their retirement accounts had been cut in half, or how unemployment was skyrocketing, they were talking about how it took $50 or $100 to fill up their cars or SUVs. Suddenly mass transit and carpooling were popular again.
There are various media reports that GM will shut downall of it's U.S. plants for the summer, or 9 weeks.
General Motors Corp. is planning to temporarily close most of its U.S. factories for up to nine weeks this summer because of slumping sales and growing inventories of unsold vehicles, three people briefed on the plan said Wednesday.
Analysts say the company could be seeing sales decline because of talk about a potential bankruptcy.
The exact dates of the closures are not known, but the people said they will occur around the normal two-week shutdown in July when changes are made from one model year to the next. None of the people wanted to be identified because workers have not yet been told of the shutdowns.
It is also reported GM will miss it's $1 billion dollar loan payment.
Japan is trying to lower the labor supply by offering to pay foreign workers to go home.
Japan’s offer, extended to hundreds of thousands of blue-collar Latin American immigrants, is part of a new drive to encourage them to leave this recession-racked country. So far, at least 100 workers and their families have agreed to leave, Japanese officials said.
The program is limited to the country’s Latin American guest workers, whose Japanese parents and grandparents emigrated to Brazil and neighboring countries a century ago to work on coffee plantations.
In 1990, Japan — facing a growing industrial labor shortage — started issuing thousands of special work visas to descendants of these emigrants. An estimated 366,000 Brazilians and Peruvians now live in Japan.
On a Dreary Morning in May of 1920 Seven Men Carrying Winchesters and pistols boarded the Norfolk and Western's No. 29 at Bluefield, West Virginia, bound for the little mining town of Matewan on the Kentucky border.
- Robert Shogan
It was the only time in American history that government airplanes intentionally bombed its own citizens. It was the largest armed insurrection fought on American soil since the Civil War.
And it has been almost totally forgotten outside of the lore of the United Mine Workers of America.
Someone better check the canary in this coal mine. I think it's dead.
Misdemeanors such as assaults, thefts and burglaries will no longer be prosecuted in Contra Costa County because of budget cuts, the county's top prosecutor said Tuesday.
District Attorney Robert Kochly also said that beginning May 4, his office will no longer prosecute felony drug cases involving smaller amounts of narcotics. That means anyone caught with less than a gram of methamphetamine or cocaine, less than 0.5 grams of heroin and fewer than five pills of ecstasy, OxyContin or Vicodin won't be charged.
People who are suspected of misdemeanor drug crimes, break minor traffic laws, shoplift, trespass or commit misdemeanor vandalism will also be in the clear. Those crimes won't be prosecuted, either.
Portfolio.com has published an in depth profile of U.S. Treasury Secretary Geithner. The article goes into Geithner's background as a Rubin Clone and a Hamilton Project member.
It's become a matter of policy bordering on irrationality for professional traders and investors to be hostile to gold. Yet when times get unpredictable and scary, people still turn to gold. This trend change deserves to be acknowledged.
Inflows into gold ETFs continued to grow throughout the quarter, with investors buying a record 469 tonnes of gold, dwarfing the previous quarterly record of 145 tonnes, set in the third quarter of last year. This took the total amount of gold in ETFs to 1,658 tonnes, worth US$48.6 billion, the World Gold Council said.
Ya know, the real culprits of trouble rarely commit suicide, they are usually too full of themselves, but regardless, this is yet another casualty of the ongoing economic mailaise:
David Kellermann, the acting chief financial officer of money-losing mortgage giant Freddie Mac was found dead at his home Wednesday morning in what police said was an apparent suicide.
It appears the SEC was investigating the accounting practices of Freddie.
There was certainly no shortage of skepticism and criticism of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) when it was first introduced. But the news dump from just today is downright scandalous.
Let's start with the headline numbers.
Ethisphere, a research think tank that examines whether companies can benefit from using ethical practices, created a TARP Index in December to track losses taxpayers are taking under the TARP program. Since TARP's inception on Oct. 7, 2008, the government has lost $104.2 billion (as of Apr. 10).
According to Elizabeth Warren, who heads the Congressional Oversight Panel responsible for keeping tabs on TARP, for every $100 put into the program, the taxpayer is getting $66 back.
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