Here is a challenge for this weekend. What economic indicators are still (or again) trending unequivocally down, or if it's bad news, unequivocally increasing?
I went through CR's July summary, and added a few others and came up with the following list:
Calculated Risk has a sortable table of troubled banks on their website. This is not official, but from public sources. It's massive and appears to be a unique list to CR, so I just give the link for you to check it out.
So now we can place bets on which banks will be seized on our reoccuring series, Bank Failure Friday, which announced this week's bank failures almost like Pizza night.
"We must break the Money Trust or the Money Trust will break us."
- Louis D. Brandeis, 1913
When the economy appeared to be melting down last September, Wall Street bank representatives began showing up in Congress like mobsters walking into a mom-and-pop business looking for protection money.
"Nice economy ya got here.(crash!) It would be a shame if something were to happen to it."
Mobsters and Robber Barons have a lot in common.
Neither has any respect for the law or morals, only for power. Neither can ever be satisfied with any amount of wealth. They will always need to steal more and more and more until they've completely bankrupted their victims.
We are now at the mercy of modern Robber Barons, and if history is any judge, it is either them or us.
I'm not sure if we have much of an East of the Mississippi contingent here else than me, but I thought that people might be interested in this. Protests are being planned for the Pittsburgh G-20 Meeting. I liked this poster the best.
Capitalism in crisis...... well, it's about fucking time......
Fifteen states and the District of Columbia reported jobless rates of at least 10.0% in July
We have some eye catching headlines out of today's BLS regional and state unemployment survey. Firstly Michigan has an unemployment rate of 15%. California is now 11.9%, a record and Georgia is at 10.3%, also a record. Looking for new claims data?
If we remove political considerations, such as how we can get to a certain solution in the face of powerful corporate interests, what would be the best solution to healthcare? First, a few baseline assumptions:
We want to have everyone covered.
We want to maximize health.
We want to minimize costs.
We want the cost burden to be progressive (i.e. rich people pay more.).
Let's look at a hypothetical proposal from economist Brad DeLong, the Australian system, our VA system here in the US, and some thoughts of my own.
We've noted many times on The Economic Populist how the continual focus of the United States citizenry as simply a bunch of consumers is just plain wrong. We hear cries 70% of the economy is based on consumerism, how this creates demand and so on....
But here's the real situation. The consumer is plain tapped out.
Naked Capitalism through Guest Posts by Leo Kolivakis, publisher of Pension Pulse, has done an excellent job of chronicling the problems with pension funds. I certainly encourage people to read his posts.
The headline is from a Bloomberg "exclusive" story. This is the lead in paragraph:
U.S. pension funds contributed to the record $1.2 trillion that private-equity firms raised this decade. Three of the biggest investors, state pensions in California, Oregon and Washington, plunked down at least $53.8 billion. So far, they only have dwindling paper profits and a lot less cash to show the millions of policemen, teachers and other civil servants in their retirement plans.
The ranks of poor and uninsured Americans are likely increasing – with more than 38.8 million believed to be in poverty.
The current U.S. population is estimated to be 307 million.
Rebecca Blank, the Commerce Department's undersecretary of economic affairs, spoke to The Associated Press in advance of next month's closely watched release of 2008 census data. Noting the figures are not yet final, Blank said the numbers likely will show a "statistically significant" increase in the poverty rate, to at least 12.7 percent. That would represent a jump of more than 1.5 million poor people compared with the previous year.
Citigroup Inc.’s $301 billion of federal asset guarantees, extended by the U.S. last year to help save the bank from collapse, will be audited to calculate losses and determine whether taxpayers got a fair deal.
Neil Barofsky, inspector general of the U.S. Treasury Department’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, agreed in an Aug. 3 letter to audit the program after a request by U.S. Representative Alan Grayson. Barofsky will examine why the guarantees were given, how they were structured and whether the bank’s risk controls are adequate to prevent government losses.
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