economics: good news

So then explain why the number of food stamp recipients grew so much if the economy is "growing".

That's one of the major issues that got us into the mess we are in. Because people spent more than they had. For example on houses. It's wrong.

And that's probably why he got a 2nd term. A rather sad reason. More people on the dole, more left-leaning voters.

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

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Majority?.

Exactly how? No, wait, never mind.

Apparently Emmanuel Goldstein, the Tea Party, and the Grinch been even busier in Europe, with dismal growth, housing melt-downs of their own, and whose "austerity", it turns out, has been 90% tax increases, Barack-style.

an-austerity-myth/

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Cheers, 
James Arthur

Why do you reply to Slowman and give him a forum? Can't find anyone else at your "intelligence" level to talk to ?>:-} ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson, CTO                            |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      | 
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| Phoenix, Arizona  85048    Skype: Contacts Only  |             | 
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  | 
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I love to cook with wine.     Sometimes I even put it in the food.

kicks in. You can't keep printing money in such volumes without severe consequences coming home to roost sooner or later.

Savings? Debt?

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com 

Precision electronic instrumentation 
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators 
Custom laser drivers and controllers 
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links 
VME thermocouple, LVDT, synchro   acquisition and simulation

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Oh that's easy. The Tea Party flew in from outer space and did that.

g.

Actually, there was virtually no employment recovery at all until

*after* the 2010 election. Despite Barack's 2 prior years of giant instant-fix unstimulus spending, which, theoretically should've worked almost instantly, nothing happened.

Despite population growth, despite the "recovery" in which real household income is still falling, we barely have as many people working today as when BHO took office.

The modest rise we've had had its inflection point about mid-2011, after the new House got to work. You could say almost all the jobs BHO claims came from the Tea Party. Tea Party = jobs.

--
Cheers, 
James Arthur

-tidi...

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nflation kicks in. You can't keep printing money in such volumes without se vere consequences coming home to roost sooner or later.

ary policy and inflation is like trying to tug a brick with a rubber band, and we ain't in no normal times...

James Arthur doesn't have any trouble making predictions - the fact that they are roughly equivalent to "if you keep on sailing that way you'll fal off the end of the earth" rather suggests that he shouldn't bother.

Sure. The economy finally starts growing at about 3% per year, and the administration can stop the stimulus spending.

James Arthur's flat earth economics leads him to see the situation differently.

Clinton didn't have to cope with the after-effects of the sub-prime mortgage crisis.

Getting the economy back on track will. Having the Tea Party treat the Keynesian deficit-financed stimulus spending as their own private pork- barrel doesn't help.

Actually, what James Arthur is prescribing is a rerun of the Great Depression, with the economy shrinking at 6% per year, but his economic insight is no more advanced than Hoover's was.

Actually, it's the revenge of the fringe bankers who made a mint out of engineering the sub-prime mortgage crisis, and seem to have hung onto pretty much every cent that they made.

This does presuppose that there a a significant number of people around who share James Arthur's demented ideas about economics. Sadly, they don't identify themselves openly by wearing tin-foil hats.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

kicks in. You can't keep printing money in such volumes without severe consequences coming home to roost sooner or later.

As sound as the dollar, they are.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

--
"it's the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward" 
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com 
Embedded software/hardware/analog  Info for designers:  http://www.speff.com

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Sadly, the Tea Party got elected to congress along with a bunch of other far-right-thinking nitwits. They did manage to block all attempts to terminate Dubbya's tax cuts for the rich, which did help the top 5% of the income distribution to grab pretty much all of the economic growth from 2010 to 2011, which may have something to do with why the people on food stamps needed more rather than less over the same period.

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ong.

Not true, at least on the basis of publicly accessible statistics. James Arthur's roll-your-own statistics will probably tell a different story

Unemployment is a lagging indicator, so most theories would predict a lag. Your theories are strange and antiquated and always seem to prove that the Democrats haven't done the right thing.

Which means that he has done a whole lot better than Hoover did, when faced with a comparable situation.

James Arthur would say that. The one reliable aspect of his "predictions" is "Republicans good, Democrats bad".

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

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See table 2 on page 8. The economic growth is all ending up in the pockets of the top 5% of the income distribution. Everybody else is seeing the incomes shrinking slightly or staying put.

The top 5% of the income disribution don't make much use of food stamps.

g.

The fringe banks encouraged people to borrow to buy houses at - what turned out to be - inflated prices. That was wrong, but the banks involved sold on the worthless mortgages and didn't suffer anything like the financial penalty they'd earned.

That's probably wrong. That group was going to vote for him anyway. The voters that made the difference were the ones that listened to what Romney had been saying before he got the nomination, and what he said after he'd got the nomination, and decided that they couldn't trust a word he said. One might hope that enough of the voters had noticed that the Republican Party was busy concentrating government largesse on top 5% of the income distribution - not their supporters but just the large scale electoral contributors - but if they'd been that well informed there'd have been fewer Republican congressmen elected.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

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The Tea Party faction doesn't form a majority in congress, but they can and o intimidate their less rabid Republican colleagues - arguing with the Tea Party can damage your changes of getting the Republican nomination at the next election.

Table 2, page 8, You should recognise it - you alerted me to its existence by selectively quoting from it to make a claim that the table, as whole, entirely vitiated.

0

Actually, the sub-prime mortgage crisis damaged quite a few European banks, and European economies. Dismal growth is one of the consequences of evaporating a lot of over-valued assets.

Right-wing nitwit opinion. If taken seriously, he'd give us a rerun of the Great Depression, which did a great deal of real damage, as opposed to the imagined damage being done by deficit-funded stimulus spending.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

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Jim has funny ideas about intelligence. He's smart enough to qualify for Mensa - the organisation for people who do well on intelligence tests but nowhere else - but only marginally smart enough not to join.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

Correct. And why are the blue collar incomes shrinking? Because many blue collar jobs are driven out of the country. My former employer is a classic example, build the new plant in Costa Rica. To many of us it's obvious why this happens.

Meaning the economy isn't really growing for average people.

The current administration is putting one nail after the other into it. Now it's a new medical device tax skimmed off the top, meaning from gross revenue, meaning even non-profitable companies must pay. That tax is outright stupid. The first waves of layoffs have already happened. Predictably.

The people lied on their mortgage applications.

Right. And his administration has made that group larger. Much larger. Ergo ...

[...]

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

[...]

Exactamente! Except most people fail to understand that :-(

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

kicks in. You can't keep printing money in such volumes without severe consequences coming home to roost sooner or later.

When you borrow a trillion dollars per year or so, the consequences are predictable. Unless you're an economist or an elected official, of course.

--

John Larkin                  Highland Technology Inc 
www.highlandtechnology.com   jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com    

Precision electronic instrumentation 
Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators 
Custom timing and laser controllers 
Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links 
VME  analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer 
Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators

Basically, yes. The money only exists as a stock and not as a flow, which is as good as saying it doesn't exist at all.

Basically, this is a feint - the fed can claim it released all this money but it really didn't. But it helps shore up the liquidity of banks in a climate of uncertainty, which is not nothing.

The whole goshdarn system makes Alice in Wonderland look like a physics text.

Yep. Sumner et al claim to know what to do about that, too. I'd love it if they were right - but it all sounds so simple...

Ooh, they had a thing on financial panics on CSPAN3 yesterday that was fantastic:

There is nothing new about *any* of this.

I am gonna get this guy's book ASAP.

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Les Cargill

It does not explain any of the near-deflation lasting for five years. Those shocks were worked through in a year or two. Now they're just being perverse and terrified of inflation.

The crisis has been one of poor liquidity from 2007 onward. Bad debt does not cause illiquidity* unless you want it to . Quite the contrary; illliquidity causes bad debt....

*I mean system-wide illiquidity.

If we had let the firms that held the stupid things fail, then we would be *WAY* past this.

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Les Cargill

Maybe. Who knows how far the cascading collapses would have gone.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

--
"it's the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward" 
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com 
Embedded software/hardware/analog  Info for designers:  http://www.speff.com

if

That doesn't make sense. Even if true, how would a measly $35 billion have made *any* difference compared to ~2T in stimulus?

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o .

You're citing spin. The BLS employment stats give the accurate raw number of people who actually have jobs.

You can plot the actual civilian employment here (series LNS12000000):

I suggest plotting 30yrs or so too, so you can see what the trend should've been (due to population increase).

The whole premise was that the unstimulus would immediately launch millions of shovel-ready jobs. As you can easily see from the BLS data, that never happened.

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Cheers, 
James Arthur

I'm with Les. It appeared self-limiting to me. (I might be wrong, of course.) If nothing else, the offenders could've been deflated gracefully, not built up into bigger monsters. All the "too-big-to- fail" are now too big to bail.

But the bigger problem is that virtually none of the gas has been let out of the system. The foreclosures haven't stopped. Neither have the lending practices, which are currently revived (and crushing) FHA.

Added to that, horrendous spending. Fiscally, Bernanke's switched the shells around faster and faster, but the fundamental problems remain.

Ultimately it'll just come out of all of our savings, and a bunch of kids' futures.

--
Cheers, 
James Arthur