Economic News

[j_b]

In the environment, pretty much everything goes through cycles of boom and bust. Chaotic fluctuations are characteristic of population biology, for instance.

 

Why do people get surprised and cast blame when the same thing happens in the economy?

 

Because we had put systems in place to prevent catastrophic failures of the economy and the pirates dismantled them on purpose to rob us blind.

[j_b]

What ever happened to "let the market take care of itself"?

 

It is taking care of itself. Are You Ready For The Great Reset?

 

I know what you mean but per usual the taxpayer is paying for the great reset so the market isn't really taking care of itself.

 

As a matter of fact, they probably will have to nationalize banks soon.

[fear_and_greed]

In the environment, pretty much everything goes through cycles of boom and bust. Chaotic fluctuations are characteristic of population biology, for instance.

 

Why do people get surprised and cast blame when the same thing happens in the economy?

 

Because we had put systems in place to prevent catastrophic failures of the economy and the pirates dismantled them on purpose to rob us blind.

You will find this article quite interesting then. If the readers jaw doesn't drop in astonishment, they're retarded.

http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/may2006/nf20060523_2210.htm?campaign_id=rss_daily

Take note of the date.

 

Edited October 6, 2008 by fear_and_greed

[prole]

What ever happened to "let the market take care of itself"?

 

It is taking care of itself. Are You Ready For The Great Reset?

 

I know what you mean but per usual the taxpayer is paying for the great reset so the market isn't really taking care of itself.

 

As a matter of fact, they probably will have to nationalize banks soon.

 

No, I was being facetious. The "free market" is not capable of taking care of itself when it is "operating smoothly", when it requires massive public infrastructure, institutions and rules to govern its behavior, internal and external coercive apparatuses to guarantee and open markets. Nor is it capable of taking care of itself when the speculative bubbles, monopolization, waste, and environmental degradation its logic results in threatens to unravel the social order as a whole.

[Crux]

 

In case you haven't noticed neo-liberalism was applied almost everywhere, which explains why so many economies have tanked.

 

like this economy is doing soooo great! open your eyes duchebag.

 

Huh? are you a cretin or is it the booze that prevents you from understanding what I said?

 

Well, there might be in play here the problem with neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism having precisely the same meaning -- with neo-liberal being the term by which Friedman would describe himself and his economic theory, and neo-conservative (aka neo-con) the term that his followers (who became Bush policy makers) came up with for describing themselves, plausibly to better win over enough votes from the "conservative" side of the electorate, as needed to divert by guile and force the wealth of the many into the pockets of the few.

 

I prefer the term neo-liberal, for its historically grounded accuracy. But I used to say neo-con myself, as that's what I picked up from popular jargon -- as a descriptor for delusional, sociopathic economists like Friedman and the corporate raiders now taking our country and its wealth by conquest of one institution after the other. First it was the presidency, then the financial institutions, and now Congress. One wonders if the people will take it back. For that matter, it appears that much of the world now wonders if The People will take back Their Country, or whether the prevailing cancer of capitalism unchecked by democracy will continue.

[prole]

Rather than juxtapose "neoconservatism" and "neoliberalism", my understanding of neoconservatism has more do do with an outwardly focused activist foreign policy philosophy that would attempt to remake the rest of the world (by force when necessary)in the image of a freemarket capitalist if not always liberal democratic ideal. Clintonite internationalism of course had the same ideal in mind (they were followers of the Washington Consensus at which neoliberalism is at the heart), but attempted to go about getting there in a different manner (multilateral institutions and military humanism).

[j_b]

Sure, my use of neo-liberal may have been confusing but my posts do not leave much doubt about what I think of this economy. This has been a 30-year trainwreck in the making and although it is finally making the headlines, many americans have felt the crisis for a while already. The housing bubble finally brought down this house of card, but we still have to deal with the "limits to growth" issues first raised by the oil shocks of the 70's, except that the situation is much worse now.

[G-spotter]

1873

 

When commentators invoke 1929, I am dubious. According to most historians and economists, that depression had more to do with overlarge factory inventories, a stock-market crash, and Germany's inability to pay back war debts, which then led to continuing strain on British gold reserves. None of those factors is really an issue now. Contemporary industries have very sensitive controls for trimming production as consumption declines; our current stock-market dip followed bank problems that emerged more than a year ago; and there are no serious international problems with gold reserves, simply because banks no longer peg their lending to them . . .

 

The problems had emerged around 1870, starting in Europe. In the Austro-Hungarian Empire, formed in 1867, in the states unified by Prussia into the German empire, and in France, the emperors supported a flowering of new lending institutions that issued mortgages for municipal and residential construction, especially in the capitals of Vienna, Berlin, and Paris. Mortgages were easier to obtain than before, and a building boom commenced. Land values seemed to climb and climb; borrowers ravenously assumed more and more credit, using unbuilt or half-built houses as collateral. The most marvelous spots for sightseers in the three cities today are the magisterial buildings erected in the so-called founder period.

 

But the economic fundamentals were shaky. Wheat exporters from Russia and Central Europe faced a new international competitor who drastically undersold them. The 19th-century version of containers manufactured in China and bound for Wal-Mart consisted of produce from farmers in the American Midwest. They used grain elevators, conveyer belts, and massive steam ships to export trainloads of wheat to abroad. Britain, the biggest importer of wheat, shifted to the cheap stuff quite suddenly around 1871. By 1872 kerosene and manufactured food were rocketing out of America's heartland, undermining rapeseed, flour, and beef prices. The crash came in Central Europe in May 1873, as it became clear that the region's assumptions about continual economic growth were too optimistic. Europeans faced what they came to call the American Commercial Invasion. A new industrial superpower had arrived, one whose low costs threatened European trade and a European way of life . . .

[j_b]

The traditional explanation [for the great depression] is a combination of high consumer debt, ill-regulated markets that permitted malfeasance by banks and investors, cutbacks in foreign trade, and growing wealth inequality, all interacting to create a downward economic spiral of reduced spending and production.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression_in_the_United_States

 

 

Apart from the cutback in foreign trade (which could still come), the underlying reasons for 1929 seem quite similar to today's.

[glassgowkiss]

real cause of the shit this time

so while your 401K is disappearing faster then march snow, this fuckface took 300mil in bonuses!

 

 

[glassgowkiss]

my prediction is Dow will end up at 8500 points- where it should have been in the first place.

[j_b]

Conservatives try to pin the blame for the subprime mess on Fannie and Freddie but, as you probably guessed, it isn't true.

 

Private sector loans, not Fannie or Freddie, triggered crisis

 

By David Goldstein and Kevin G. Hall | McClatchy Newspapers

 

WASHINGTON — As the economy worsens and Election Day approaches, a conservative campaign that blames the global financial crisis on a government push to make housing more affordable to lower-class Americans has taken off on talk radio and e-mail.

 

Commentators say that's what triggered the stock market meltdown and the freeze on credit. They've specifically targeted the mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which the federal government seized on Sept. 6, contending that lending to poor and minority Americans caused Fannie's and Freddie's financial problems.

 

Federal housing data reveal that the charges aren't true, and that the private sector, not the government or government-backed companies, was behind the soaring subprime lending at the core of the crisis.

 

Subprime lending offered high-cost loans to the weakest borrowers during the housing boom that lasted from 2001 to 2007. Subprime lending was at its height from 2004 to 2006.

 

Federal Reserve Board data show that:

 

More than 84 percent of the subprime mortgages in 2006 were issued by private lending institutions.

 

 

Private firms made nearly 83 percent of the subprime loans to low- and moderate-income borrowers that year.

 

 

Only one of the top 25 subprime lenders in 2006 was directly subject to the housing law that's being lambasted by conservative critics.

 

Follow the link for the rest of the article: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/251/story/53802.html

[j_b]

SO, when was the last time the "free" markets showed such enthusiasm for the widespread nationalization of banks?

[prole]

Where are the libertarians?

[j_b]

Waiting for orwellian media fog to spin this fiasco into "too many regulations were the problem, the market wasn't free enough"

[RuMR]

real cause of the shit this time

so while your 401K is disappearing faster then march snow, this fuckface took 300mil in bonuses!

 

yeah, but he felt horrible about it bob!

 

Motherfucker should be in prison...

[Fairweather]

real cause of the shit this time

so while your 401K is disappearing faster then march snow, this fuckface took 300mil in bonuses!

 

yeah, but he felt horrible about it bob!

 

Motherfucker should be in prison...

 

...along with Barney Frank, Christopher Dodd, and George Soros. Fucking moron.

Edited October 13, 2008 by Fairweather

[j_b]

The God That Failed: The 30-Year Lie of the Market Cult

Written by Chris Floyd

 

Beginning with Margaret Thatcher's election in 1979, government after government -- and party after party -- fell to the onslaught of an extremist faith: the narrow, blinkered fundamentalism of the "Chicago School." Epitomized by its patron saint, Milton Friedman, the rigid doctrine held that an unregulated market would always "correct" itself, because its workings are based on entirely rational and quantifiable principles. This was of course an absurdly reductive and savagely ignorant view of history, money and human nature; but because it flattered the rich and powerful, offering an "intellectual" justification for rapacious greed and ever-widening economic and social inequality, it was adopted as holy writ by the elite and promulgated as public policy.

 

This radical cult -- a kind of Bolshevism from above -- took its strongest hold in the United States and Britain, and was then imposed on many weaker nations through the IMF-led "Washington Consensus" (more aptly named by Naomi Klein as the "Shock Doctrine"), with devastating and deadly results. (As in Yeltsin's Russia, for example, where life expectancy dropped precipitously and millions of people died premature deaths from poverty, illness, and despair.)

 

According to the cult, not only were markets to be freed from the constraints placed on them after the world-shattering effects of the Great Depression, but all public spending was to be slashed ruthlessly to the bone. (Although exceptions were always made for the Pentagon war machine.) After all, every dollar spent by a public entity on public services and amenities was a dollar taken away from the private wheeler-dealers who could more usefully employ it in increasing the wealth of the elite -- who would then allow some of their vast profits to "trickle down" to the lower orders.

 

This was the cult that captured the governments of the United States and Britain (among others), as well as the Republican and Democratic parties, and the Conservative and Labour parties as well. And for almost thirty years, its ruthless doctrines have been put into practice. Regulation and oversight of financial markets were systematically stripped away or rendered toothless. Essential public services were sold off, for chump change, to corporate interests. Public spending on anything other than making war, threatening war and profiting from war was pared back or eliminated. Such public spending that did remain was forever under threat and derided, like the remnants of some pagan faith surviving in isolated backwaters.

 

Year after year, the ordinary citizens were told by their governments: we have no money to spend on your needs, on your communities, on your infrastructure, on your health, on your children, on your environment, on your quality of life. We can't do those kinds of things any more.

 

Of course, when talking amongst themselves, or with the believers in the think tanks, boardrooms -- and editorial offices -- the cultists would speak more plainly: we don't do those things anymore because we shouldn't do them, we don't want to do them, they are wrong, they are evil, they are outside the faith. But for the hoi polloi, the line was usually something like this: Budgets are tight, we must balance them (for a "balanced budget" is a core doctrine of the cult), we just can't afford all these luxuries, sorry about that.

 

But now, as the emptiness and falsity of the Chicago cargo cult stands nakedly revealed, even to some of its most faithful and fanatical adherents, we can see that this 30-year mantra by our governments has been a deliberate and outright lie. The money was there -- billions and billions and billions of dollars of it, trillions of dollars of it. We can see it before our very eyes today -- being whisked away from our public treasuries and showered upon the banks and the brokerages.

 

 

Follow the link for the rest of the article: http://www.chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/3/1627-the-god-that-failed-the-30-year-lie-of-the-market-cult.html

[j_b]

In the meantime, the pillage goes on uninterrupted.

 

Top Wall Street bankers to receive $70bn pay deals

Pay and bonus deals equivalent to 10% of US government bail-out package

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/oct/17/executivesalaries-banking

[prole]

In the meantime, the pillage goes on uninterrupted.

 

Top Wall Street bankers to receive $70bn pay deals

Pay and bonus deals equivalent to 10% of US government bail-out package

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/oct/17/executivesalaries-banking

 

This is also known as "spreading the wealth around".

[j_b]

Wealth gap creating a social time bomb

 

Growing inequality in US cities could lead to widespread social unrest and increased mortality, says a new United Nations report on the urban environment.

 

In a survey of 120 major cities, New York was found to be the ninth most unequal in the world and Atlanta, New Orleans, Washington, and Miami had similar inequality levels to those of Nairobi, Kenya Abidjan and Ivory Coast. Many were above an internationally recognised acceptable "alert" line used to warn governments.

 

...

 

"In western New York state nearly 40% of the black, Hispanic and mixed-race households earned less than $15,000 compared with 15% of white households. The life expectancy of African-Americans in the US is about the same as that of people living in China and some states of India, despite the fact that the US is far richer than the other two countries,"

 

...

 

"It is clear that social tension comes from inequality. The trickle down theory [that wealth starts with the rich] has not delivered. Inequality is not good for anybody,"

 

For the rest: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/oct/23/population-egalitarian-cities-urban-growth

[prole]

 

Oh, don't worry. I'm sure if the coming economic collapse results in any social flare-ups, the "real Americans" will be happy to use their guns against these "terrorists" in defense of our rights.

[j_b]

Most of the gun-totting yahoos won't be spared by economic hardship so they might view things differently once their certainties are no more.

[Mal_Con]

Not to worry, the GOP will blame their job loss on minorities and illegals.

[rob]

Not to worry, the GOP will blame their job loss on minorities and illegals.

 

and liberals