As a follow up to yesterday’s glowing review of the Occupy Wall Street crowd comes an alternative view from somebody almost a thousand miles south of Zuccotti Park.
From the Rick McKee archive at the Augusta Chronicle.
REMINDER: All investment, economics, and finance related material now appears at the new IaconoResearch.com. For the time being at least, this has become a personal blog covering a variety of mostly unrelated topics.
On October 21, 2011,
in Economy, Our Culture,
by Tim
The latest reading for the Reuters/University of Michigan consumer sentiment index showed that the American mood slipped back toward the August debt-ceiling debate low after a rebound in September proved to be short-lived. The overall index fell from 59.4 last month to 57.5 in the first of two readings for October as a weak labor market continues to weigh on consumers, the rebounding stock market doing little to boost confidence.
The expectations component fell from 49.4 to 47.0, the lowest level since May 1980, and the current conditions index also fell, down from 74.9 to 73.8. About the only good news in the report was that rising prices are no longer the concern they were earlier in the year, the one-year inflation outlook falling from 3.4 percent to 3.2 percent while the view in five years is that prices will be rising at a 2.7 percent rate, down from a 2.9 percent pace.
On October 14, 2011,
in Economy, Our Culture,
by Tim
The staff of GOP Presidential hopeful Herman Cain must be having a hard time shielding him from all the tales of woe here in the U.S. this week, what with reports of increasing poverty on the part of those who, somehow, haven’t been able to work hard enough and grow rich enough as every American should.
A Gallup poll showing that, as a percentage of the population, families in the U.S. are having more trouble putting food on the table than in China tops this week’s list of stories on the latest U.S. growth sector – poverty. Details are provide in this story at the Huffington Post.
Millions of Americans are currently weathering the effects of a slow economic recovery. Many Chinese, meanwhile, find themselves struggling less to keep their families fed, according to a recent Gallup report.
Nearly 20 percent of Americans say they’ve had trouble putting food on the table in the past 12 months, up from nine percent in 2008, the Gallup report found. That’s compared to six percent of Chinese respondents, down from 16 percent in 2008.
…
And while the Chinese middle class is growing, the ranks of the U.S. poor are swelling. The nation’s poverty rate jumped to 15.1 percent in 2010, the Cenus Bureau announced last month, as the total number of Americans in poverty grew to 46.2 million.
This similar report has been atop the main page at Yahoo! for the last hour or so, one more in a series of stories on this subject that make it hard for anyone to avoid.
On October 13, 2011,
in Economy, Our Culture,
by Tim
After more than four weeks, the Occupy Wall Street crowd shows no signs of going away anytime soon (though that might change as the weather gets colder) and we even have our own little Occupy event on tap for tomorrow here in Bozeman, Montana. It’s not exactly clear what they all want, but, one thing is certain, if there were more jobs to be had, there would be less people outside voicing their displeasure with their current condition.
From the Jimmy Margulies archive at NorthJersey.com
On October 7, 2011,
in Economy,
by Tim
The Labor Department reported that nonfarm payrolls increased by 103,000 in September and job gains for July and August were revised upward by a total of 99,000 (to 127,000 and 57,000, respectively), but the jobless rate held steady at 9.1 percent.
The gain in nonfarm payrolls last month was due in part to about 45,000 striking Verizon Communication employees returning to work during the survey period, however, both the professional & business services and the health care sectors also added 40,000+ jobs.
At 14.0 million, the number of unemployed persons was unchanged in September while the labor force participation rate was steady at 64.2 percent. The jobless rate has now been within a narrow range of between 9.0 and 9.2 percent for the last six months and a broader gauge of unemployment – the U6 under-employment metric that includes those settling for part-time work or who have given up looking for work – rose from 16.2 percent to 16.5 percent.
On September 9, 2011,
in Economy,
by Tim
I haven’t gone through President Obama’s proposed jobs bill in any detail and don’t intend to, but, based on this summary from this Economist story today, it sure looks a lot like the stimulus that was enacted a couple of years ago that, like the homebuyer tax credit and “cash for clunkers”, just delayed the inevitable result.
Bailing out state governments, extending jobless benefits, etc. all seem to presume that, somehow, the U.S. economy is going to return to its pre-2008 growth track and that all we need to do is give it a little help along the way. With each passing month, that seems more unlikely and it might be a good idea to begin adjusting to a more sustainable economy (i.e., one less dependent on credit, finance, and rising asset prices) sooner rather than later.
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