Letters to the Editor
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It's a feedback loop...
The housing crisis has been precipitated in large part by the inability of many people to meet their rising mortgage payments with stagnant wages and salaries. Those payments themselves are rising because of the endless string of refinancings, often with an adjustable rate as the vehicle.
Now, consumer spending is falling - because people are flat-out tapped. So corporate America is seeing, for the first time, a loss of retail customers. No demand = no need for products and services. No need for products and services = redundant staff job losses. The next step might well be even more foreclosures and there goes the last of the wedges holding things up.
This is ominous, no doubt of that.
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Here's what I'm missing
Where I live every single square foot of brushland is being torn down to make room for endless professional office space. Space that rarely if ever gets rented and before it does, someone slaps up another 50,000 sqft right next door. Row after row of empty office space that at best is half filled with insurance brokers, real estate brokers, accountants, lawyers, chiropractors...
Well someone must be getting rich off some wrinkle in the tax law I don't know about.
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Ignorant Fools
It's stunning how little the Fed board knows about our economy.
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Unemployed construction workers are back in Mexico
The demograpics of the U.S. construction work force suggests that the job losses would never show up here. That they finally did bodes badly for working Americans, but worse for the Mexicans who returned home to find out that their diet staple tortillas are a lot more expensive, and everything else probably, thanks to the ethanol program in this country. While inflation didn't find its way back into the United States from China, for a long long while, you can bet it will be a long time before it is taken out of the system, which means something like stagflation, inflation which persists through a recession, and destagflation probably, rising prices, and falling interest rates. Rising rates provide the savers in this country with a hedge against the ravages of monetary excess. This next recession will a doozy, and worse.
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Economy = not good
The economy is not good and it's going to get a whole lot worse. I don't know how any reasonably intelligent person can read about consumer debt load, stagnant wages, rising healthcare costs, etc. and think that things are going well for most Americans.
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Andrew is Google 'News`ed'
As we speak.
Which was nice.
[And then I looked back...and it was gone.
really fluid dynamics, that page]
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When will it end?
"Greed" comes to mind here - both on the part of businesses and consumers, who both drive the market in a vicious circle. Greed by businesses that convince consumers that they can afford overpriced McMansions, more credit cards, and other goods. Greed by consumers who feel the need to engage in conspicuous consumption in light of the fact that nothing - not even that $100,000 paycheck - is secure. It's a prime example of the free market system run amok, in much the same way that it did in the 80's. I suppose the only saving grace is that this process is, indeed, cyclical - eventually, the market corrects itself. Unfortunately, it's often at the expense of many businesses, and ultimately, consumers.
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4000 jobs - don't make me laugh...
"What's more, in another poke in the eye to the received wisdom, the job picture was much worse in both June and July than originally reported: Revisions slashed June by a whopping 57,000 slots and July by 24,000.
Nor is that the whole sad story. For were it not for the enhancement of August's sickly totals by a formidable 120,000 jobs mythically created by the BLS's "birth/death" contraption, the final tally would have been downright ugly. And the so-called household data, which bulls used to eagerly parade because it consistently outdid the establishment count, continued this year's dismal -- or, should we say, accurate -- performance, shedding 316,000 jobs last month."
Alan Abelson - Barron's column - The Big Stall
That BLS Phantom Jobs Generator needs to be thrown on the scrap heap for good.
Paging Wiley Coyote...