Thread: The strongest economy in the world

LOS ANGELES -- Flooded with homeless encampments from its freeway underpasses to the chic sidewalks of Venice Beach, municipal officials here declared a public emergency on Tuesday, making Los Angeles the first city in the United States to take such a drastic step in response to its mounting problem with street dwellers.


The move stems partly from compassion, and in no small part from the rising tide of complaints about the homeless and the public nuisance they create. National experts on homelessness say Los Angeles has had a severe and persistent problem with people living on the streets rather than in shelters - the official estimate is 26,000. The mayor and city council have pledged a sizable and coordinated response, proposing Tuesday to spend at least US$100 million in the next year on housing and other services. They plan, among other things, to increase the length of time shelters are open and provide more rent subsidies to street people and those in shelters.


"Every single day we come to work, we see folks lying on this grass, a symbol of our city's intense crisis," Mayor Eric Garcetti said at a news conference at City Hall on Tuesday. "This city has pushed this problem from neighbourhood to neighbourhood for too long, from bureaucracy to bureaucracy."


In urban areas, including New York, Washington and San Francisco, rising housing costs and an uneven economic recovery have helped fuel a rise in homelessness. In some cities, officials have focused much of their efforts on enforcement policies to keep people from living in public spaces.


In places known for good weather like Honolulu and Tucson, Arizona, or for liberal politics - like Madison, Wisconsin - frustration has prompted crackdowns on large encampments. Some cities, like Seattle, have tried setting aside designated areas for homeless encampments. But to date, no city has claimed to have the perfect solution.


More @: L.A. to declare 'state of emergency' on homelessness, commit $100 million - LA Times

^Ship the refugees off to Syria.

A caparison between the Chinese and American economies.



China vs. United States: A Tale of Two Economies

Originally Posted by Black Heart

Originally Posted by Boon Mee

August jobs report: 94 million Americans no longer in the labor force. 5.1% unemployment rate don't mean shit...

August jobs report | 94 million | not in labor force | video

I wonder how many are scamming Social Security Disability.

Why cry about the little guys when there are do many big ones.

Uncle Sam’s Favorite Corporations
Identifying the Large Companies
that Dominate Federal Subsidies

Over the past 15 years, the federal government has provided $68 billion in grants and special tax credits to business, with two-thirds of the total going to large corporations.

During the same period, federal agencies have given the private sector hundreds of billions of dollars in loans, loan guarantees and bailout assistance, with the largest share going to major U.S. and foreign banks. These sums represent the portion of federal “corporate welfare” for which specific recipients can be identified.

These are among Good Jobs First’s key findings from the first comprehensive compilation of company-specific federal subsidy data. We assembled more than 160,000 award records from 137 federal programs to expand our Subsidy Tracker database, which since 2010 has provided access to comparable data from states and localities. This upgrade is Subsidy Tracker version 3.0.
The federal data was enhanced with Good Jobs First’s proprietary subsidiary-parent matching system, enabling users to see individual entries linked to more than 1,800 corporate parents, along with each parent’s total subsidies.
Other key findings:
•
Six parent companies have received $1 billion or more in federal grants and allocated tax credits (those awarded to specific companies) since 2000; 21 have received $500 million or more; and 98 have received $100 million or more. A group of 582 large companies account for 67 percent of the $68 billion total.
•
The largest recipient of grants and allocated tax credits is the Spanish energy company Iberdrola, which acquired them by investing heavily in U.S. power generation facilities, including wind farms that have made use of a renewable energy provision of the 2009 Recovery Act providing cash payments in lieu of tax credits. Iberdrola’s subsidy total is $2.2 billion. Other top grant/allocated tax credit recipients include NextEra Energy (parent of Florida Power & Light), NRG Energy, Southern Company, Summit Power and SCS Energy, each with more than $1 billion. The results exclude the numerous corporate tax breaks that cannot be attributed to individual companies.

America's poorest white town: abandoned by coal, swallowed by drugs | US news | The Guardian

To long to copy and paste.

Another country opens up a Chinese Yuan centre:

New Sino-German exchange opens with launch of 2 yuan-based ETFs | Asia Times

"A Sino-German joint venture named China Europe International Exchange (CEINEX) was launched in Frankfurt, Germany Wednesday, kicking off the trading of yuan-denominated exchange traded funds, reported Chinese state news agency Xinhua. Chen Han and Wu Jianhong, the executive board members of CEINEX, opened the new market place for RMB-denominated ETFs and bonds by ringing the bell on the trading floor of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange."

IMF approves yuan as a major world currency



"The decision on Monday by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Executive Board to include the Chinese currency RMB into its Special Drawing Rights (SDR) basket has won widespread applause.

IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde announced the decision on Monday noon after the vote by its executive board.
She said the board decided that RMB met all existing criteria and, effective Oct 1, 2016, the RMB is determined to be a freely usable currency and will be included in the SDR basket as a fifth currency, along with the US dollar, the euro, the Japanese yen and the British pound.

She explained that the date of launching the new SDR basket next October is to provide sufficient lead time for the IMF, its members and other SDR users to adjust to these changes.
Lagarde called the decision "an important milestone in the integration of the Chinese economy into the global financial system."



http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/busines...t_22592131.htm


Fill you yuan accounts today.

China and South Korea sign thier FTA, at last.



After months, Assembly ratifies FTA with China-INSIDE Korea JoongAng Daily

"The National Assembly approved Monday a long-stalled free trade agreement with China, Korea’s largest trading partner that has a market with a population of 1.3 billion.

The ruling and opposition parties passed the motion to ratify the Korea-China Free Trade Agreement (FTA), with 265 lawmakers participating. One hundred and ninety-six voted in favor of the FTA, with 33 against and 36 abstentions.

The pact was approved with a 1.6 trillion won ($1.38 billion) compensation package, which includes tax breaks and subsidies for the country’s farmers and fishermen for expected losses.

Once put into effect, the free trade deal will eliminate tariffs on $73 billion in Korea’s exports to China and $42 billion in its imports from China.

The National Assembly on Monday also ratified bilateral FTAs with Vietnam and New Zealand.

The Korea-China FTA, expected to eventually eliminate tariffs on about 90 percent of goods traded between the two countries, was finalized in November 2014. China and Korea officially signed the deal on June 1, and it will enter into force once the legislatures on both sides approve it. "

Are there really no jobs available or do the unemployed not feel able to accept just any job? Do they newly employed lose all of their government benefits or are the reductions geared to the wages earned?

Do you have any numbers on unemployed Mexicans in Ameristan?

Originally Posted by OhOh

Are there really no jobs available or do the unemployed not feel able to accept just any job?

From the data I read through (various sources) there are some jobs available but not enough to meet the supply of people entering the workforce every month.

Do they newly employed lose all of their government benefits or are the reductions geared to the wages earned?

iirc, if you pay is X amount per week the unemployment is reduced, and at a certain X amount it's $0.

As for Medicaid, I don't know.

Do you have any numbers on unemployed Mexicans in Ameristan?

I don't know if that can be calculated.

However, with the proposed 4th Amnesty and certain states being "sanctuary states" this has motivated some to come even though they do not have work nor have personal connections.

In the past they would come to work, save, buy a house in their home-country etc., but now some are coming so they can get in, and then qualify, or attempt to qualify for the proposed Amnesty.

Guatemalan and Honduran TV is telling people to "bring a child" because the chance of being deported is a lot smaller.

More than half of millennials have less than $1,000

Published: Dec 14, 2015

Millennials, they’re just like you! They’re struggling to save money.

More than half of millennials (nearly 52%) have less than $1,000 in savings, according to a recent survey from howmuch.net, a personal finance site. The study was carried out online by Google Consumer Surveys last month among more than 2,550 people ages 18 to 24 and ages 24 to 35. But before you fret about the younger Americans and their tendency to splurge on Instagram-worthy meals, while they hold out for the perfect job where their boss respects them and they get to be creative all the time, take note: About 62% of Americans overall have less than $1,000 in savings, a survey from personal finance GoBankingRates.com found earlier this year.

More than half of millennials have less than $1,000 - MarketWatch

The train is leaving the station. Has Thailand bought a ticket yet?

China starts work on Laos railway, eyeing farther horizons

TAMAKI KYOZUKA and TETSUYA ABE, Nikkei staff writers


"VIENTIANE/BEIJING -- The first Southeast Asian rail project to grow out of China's transcontinental vision for new economic links got underway Wednesday.

The president of Laos, Choummaly Sayasone, dug into a tidy pyramid of white sand at the groundbreaking ceremony in Vientiane for a roughly $6 billion segment of railroad that could eventually extend from the southern Chinese city of Kunming all the way to Singapore.





China is helping to finance and build it. Project contractor China Railway wants to put its reputation for reliability at home to work in Laos, General Manager Sheng Guangzu told the audience.







Roughly 430km of track will cut southward through Laos, from Boten, a town on the border with China, to the capital, which nestles against Thailand. It will go down as one of the biggest undertakings in infrastructure ever in Laos."

Thanks, OhOh.

Erm.....the US economic connection here?

Originally Posted by Black Heart

Thanks, OhOh.

Erm.....the US economic connection here?

Erm ... you connection to rational debate?

Originally Posted by Black Heart

Erm.....the US economic connection here?

WTF has the US got anything to do with this thread, whats' the title again?

Oh yes, the-strongest-economy-in-the-world.

Does the USA have an economy, I mean other than printing debt instruments?

This just one small announcement of a country actually investing in growing their and other countries economies, not bombing them and killing the countries citizens.

China hits India where it hurts ? Asia Times

"At a joint press conference by Yi and Thapa, the following details were revealed regarding bilateral ties:

• Opening of more border points for transit trade;
• A permanent arrangement for supplies of petroleum from China;
• A transit treaty to enable Nepal to access Chinese ports;
• Stepping up trade;
• Start of the post-disaster reconstruction projects in Nepal under China’s pledge of $500 million as aid;
• Agreement on economic and technical cooperation providing $140 million as grant-in-aid for repair and maintenance of the Araniko Highway; and,
• Abolition of visa by Nepal for Chinese tourists."

Originally Posted by OhOh

Originally Posted by Black Heart

Erm.....the US economic connection here?

WTF has the US got anything to do with this thread, whats' the title again?

Oh yes, the-strongest-economy-in-the-world.

Read the first post by the OP.

Originally Posted by Black Heart

Read the first post by the OP.

Oh, how the once mighty has fallen, 2006 FFS. Things change, the thread has evolved.

Originally Posted by OhOh

Originally Posted by Black Heart

Read the first post by the OP.

Oh, how the once mighty has fallen, 2006 FFS. Things change, the thread has evolved.

You missed my point.

I disagreed with the OP from the very beginning. My posts show that.

The US was NOT mighty, not mighty at all.

In fact back then things had been bad for a LONG TIME and were getting worse.


Read my posts back then.

But of course....Where are the lefty lib screamers?

No Inflation, No Interest, No Recovery: How Printing Money Enslaves the Middle
by JOHN HAYWARD29 Dec 2015157

There is a spirited argument among economists about whether the much-delayed “Obama Recovery” has arrived, and whether it’s anything to celebrate if so.

A real recovery, sufficient to begin healing the enormous damage to our workforce and pull government debt out of its death spiral, would be obvious. We wouldn’t have economists peering at spreadsheets with electron microscopes to detect it. Why should anyone celebrate an economy that leaves most workers with declining wages and a growing burden of debt?

Even left-wingers agree, uncomfortably, that “income inequality” got much worse under Obama, as the rich got richer, while the poor… didn’t. Left-wing analysts will tie themselves in knots trying to shift blame away from Obama and his policies for this state of affairs, with arguments that boil down to “this proves we need even more central planning and socialism to make everybody equal!”

Much of the debate over the maybe-recovery concerns the manipulation of government reports: the sense our vast bureaucracy is cooking the books to make the economy look more robust than it really is. A persistent complaint concerns the way inflation has been hidden, or almost redefined out of existence. (Ed Butowsky discussed this bureaucratic sleight-of-hand on Breitbart News Radio in November, noting that the government began concealing consumer inflation decades ago with some eye-popping formula changes.)

Now comes a fascinating article from Wolf Richter at Business Insider, which brings inflation games, currency manipulation, and near-zero interest rates together, into a unified field theory of how very low nominal consumer inflation has concealed skyrocketing asset inflation… leaving middle-class and low-income workers stuck with flat wages and debt slavery.

Governments across the industrialized world made themselves look better by tinkering with the money supply, lowering the bar for macro-economic success… and sold the Little Guy shackles of debt, at discount prices.

Richter’s key insight is that quantitative easing (QE, or “central banks printing lots of money” in layman’s terms) and near-zero interest rates for loans caused very little consumer inflation, with a few notable examples, so we’ve been treated to plenty of headlines about how inflation is totally under control… but QE caused “rampant asset price inflation, with stocks, bonds, real estate, classic cars, art … all skyrocketing over the years.”

In other words, the things rich people buy and trade have inflated, but most of life’s necessities and modest luxuries have not. That’s because, as Richter puts it: “The money never went to consumers in the form of wages. They would have spent most of it, thus driving up demand that could have created some inflationary pressures in consumer prices. But they never got this money.”

Unfortunately, because QE funneled money into big corporate and investor interests, wages flattened or declined, while household spending power for the poor and middle class declined. Low interest rates made it easy for them to borrow money to make up for lost purchasing power, especially for a few big-ticket purchases that have inflated enormously over the years – particularly health care and higher education. President Obama’s mind-boggling expenditures on both of those goods have done absolutely nothing to slow their inflation – on the contrary, ObamaCare’s meddling with student loans caused that debt bubble to explode.

Richter’s sobering diagnosis of what the Federal Reserve has done to workers:

The Fed keeps a hawk’s eye on wages, especially in the lower 80% of the workers. Its goal is to provide cheap labor to corporate America. And when wage inflation ticks up, the Fed can get quite radical about rate increases.

But because cheap labor makes for bad consumers, the Fed is trying to make cheap debt available to them, turning them into debt slaves, problem solved, for the moment.

So this is one lesson we learned: QE channeled to financial and corporate entities causes asset price inflation, not consumer price inflation. And it tends to exacerbate wage deflation at the lower 80% of households.

One of the exceptions is rent. When residential property prices soar, rents tend to follow. And rents have increased sharply in many cities. But unlike stocks, people have to live in these units, and when rents move beyond their reach, all kinds of things happen, including property price crashes.

That sounds like a far more clear and terrible example of “trickle-down economics” than anything liberals have attempted to slander with the term. Obama built on years of monetary manipulation to create an economy where the government is printing dollars and stuffing them in the pockets of big corporations and wealthy investors, vainly hoping they would invest the money in a way that created jobs, while the media cheerfully pumped out politically-useful stories about a roaring stock market. (Richter notes that what actually happened was a tsunami of money pouring into high-risk, high-yield investments, producing the combination of gluts and shortages that truly free markets are highly resistant to.)

Efforts to create a “perfect economy” tend to collapse into such absurdities as ballooning debt to pay skyrocketing prices for an increasingly poor higher-education product, or phantasmal dollars pouring into unproductive sectors that end up drowning in money. Central planners have a unique ability to annihilate wealth, leaving society with staggering debt levels – including our almost incomprehensible state and federal government debt – but very little to show for it.

Free markets can be rougher on some people in the short term, but they are far healthier over the long run. Winners and losers are discovered by fortune, rather than being assigned by political fiat, and in the process genuine needs are met. Wealth rises and falls, but it doesn’t just evaporate. By now everyone should understand that only real demand, and the exhilarating competition to profitably meet it, produces a robust job market and wage growth. (Did anyone really need further lessons on that score, after watching President Obama laugh it up after he discovered there’s no such thing as the “shovel-ready jobs” he extravagantly promised?)

The Western world is moving rapidly toward a stagnant feudal system populated only by rich aristocrats, rich government officials, and a vast lower class that needs welfare transfer payments to survive. Debt-burdened workers with flat wages, shaky job prospects, and government subsidies for their basic needs are serfs, not a vibrant and independent middle class of entrepreneurs selling their labor to the highest bidders.

If that vision of the future sounds nightmarish to you… well, you’re not a socialist. The Left sees the final and irreversible subjugation of the Middle Class at hand. Low-inflation, low-interest, low-growth debt slavery produces a society with little energy or inclination to challenge its ruling class.

Instead, be respectful of your betters and dutifully supply them with your votes, and they might just knock a few points off the interest rates on your loans, or kick your subsidies up a bit. Currency manipulation has combined with socialist politics to turn the road to serfdom into a superhighway.

No Inflation, No Interest, No Recovery: How Printing Money Enslaves the Middle Class - Breitbart

Originally Posted by Black Heart

You missed my point. I disagreed with the OP from the very beginning. My posts show that.

Your question was " What has this to do with the USA". My interpretation of the thread title is, "What is going on in the strongest economy in the world" and post items I see that may show how, whoever is judged to the worlds strongest, is doing. Good or bad.

I may have misentrepreted the original post but WTF!

Maybe I should await CUJO's ruling on this delicate matter.

A lengthy and informative article. Lot of things we know, but some stats that still make one have doubts about where the West is headed.

50% of workers today in the US workforce make LESS than in 1999.

Jon Talton / Columnist
Can jobs still provide a pathway to the American dream?
Originally published December 30, 2015 at 1:00 pm Updated December 30, 2015

....As a result of these tectonic shifts, half of wage earners make less than they did in 1999. While 50 percent of income growth during economic expansions in the last half of the 1970s went to the lowest 90 percent of earners, all the gains in this one have gone to the top 10 percent.

That bottom 90 percent is poorer than in 1987. Meanwhile, the share of income going to the top 1 percent continues to hit records. As of last year, 47 percent of households have no savings. The Social Security Administration reported that 51 percent of American workers made less than $30,000 a year


Rewards from work and productivity are also radically different from the era when the middle class was at its zenith.

Compared with the 1970s, workers make sharply less than the brass. According to the Economic Policy Institute, chief executives earned nearly 30 times the average worker in 1978. By 2014, it was 303 to 1. Profits also go more heavily to shareholders. As a result, labor’s share of national income has plummeted to its lowest level since measurements began in 1947.

A secure, full-time job with benefits was seen as an American birthright 40 years ago. Now it is much more difficult to find, with more people consigned to temp work or acting as private contractors.

This is romanticized as “the gig economy,” even though many caught in the trap would prefer “real” jobs. Unpredictable hours and earnings are the ugly reality for most. Except for a narrow elite, most workers have become commodities.

Another casualty of these changes has been the traditional ladder up. Throughout much of the 20th century, a person might stay at the same company his or her entire working life, moving up from the mailroom or the plant floor to become an executive or foreman, gathering skills along the way. Now many rungs have been removed, and more people are left behind.

As a result of these tectonic shifts, half of wage earners make less than they did in 1999. While 50 percent of income growth during economic expansions in the last half of the 1970s went to the lowest 90 percent of earners, all the gains in this one have gone to the top 10 percent.

That bottom 90 percent is poorer than in 1987. Meanwhile, the share of income going to the top 1 percent continues to hit records. As of last year, 47 percent of households have no savings. The Social Security Administration reported that 51 percent of American workers made less than $30,000 a year.

No wonder that inequality has widened to its worst since the eve of the Great Depression, even the Gilded Age of the late 19th century.

WORK IN THE very near future likely will be radically changed by a new generation of advanced automation, robots and artificial intelligence.

Robot co-pilots on airliners, autonomous ships, automated assembly lines where a handful of humans oversees hundreds of machines — all this is possible with today’s technology. Major railroads are exploring mile-long trains operated by only one crew member, where 40 years ago there were five.

Can jobs still provide a pathway to the American dream? | The Seattle Times

^Many European countries suffer the same dilemma. The notion that low wages will improve things has been shown to be a fallacy. The west now is competing on a global stage. The countries that develop and produce world class items will survive, but only if the local production costs of the items can match the less well developed ones.

Technology, as we have seen knows no boundaries if a local workforce can be trained well and management of the workforce is similar to developed countries.

it's not a pretty picture for the developed countries workers, who are used to producing the items consumed globally.