Thread: The strongest economy in the world

^ Txs for the update, MM.

The Most Frightening Jobs Chart Since the Great Depression:



and what makes it all the worse is BO owns the entire mess...

He does now, and it looks like he will own it for the next seven years.

I wonder if the GOP will be able to mount a coherent message in this time frame?

Originally Posted by sabang

He does now, and it looks like he will own it for the next three years.

I wonder if the GOP will be able to mount a coherent message in this time frame?

I don't know if America will last that long w/out a revolution...
this guy is worse than that other one-term wonder - Jimmuh - watch out for that rabbit - Carter

Originally Posted by Boon Mee

Originally Posted by sabang

He does now, and it looks like he will own it for the next three years.

I wonder if the GOP will be able to mount a coherent message in this time frame?

I don't know if America will last that long w/out a revolution...
this guy is worse than that other one-term wonder - Jimmuh - watch out for that rabbit - Carter

Until now, probably the worst president ever.

^ But Obama is cuter.

More unmissable stuff from Matt Tiabbi at rolling Stone magazine

Originally Posted by Spin

More unmissable stuff from Matt Tiabbi at rolling Stone magazine

This Tiabbi, is doing his homework. Disturbing info. Just think of how much we don't know.

"Ten Trillion and Counting"

FRONTLINE: ten trillion and counting | PBS

Originally Posted by Spin

More unmissable stuff from Matt Tiabbi at rolling Stone magazine

Thanks to Spin for that link (send you a green when I have some ammo), although right now I wish I had never read it, very very horrible and scary, how this is being allowed to go on is incredible, can we ever get back to that you can only sell something that you actually have in your "hand" and own, they say that will slow down the market, but who will in reality be most hurt by that, speculators ?

Who ever came up with all this selling and buying stuff you only have a promise of acquiring, for a normal person like me without any knowledge of stock markets, options ect. it seems that the only people to really benefit from all this ghost trading is the speculators, traders/trading company's and big bank finance, all somebody that actually produce nothing of real value, it's all paper-money being pushed around and multiplying but with nothing of real value to back it up making a lot of people rich beyond belief without never having produced a thing of value to society.
Yet this bunch of bandits are being held in awe by everybody.

They can destroy perfectly healthy company's that are producing real value sell-able goods with a profit, the life's work of somebody and the lifeblood of a lot of employees, a good company like that can be destroyed just because somebody decides to make a "killing" by spreading some false rumours and then watch the disintegration while they make money on the death of the company.

Something is seriously wrong with our politicians who have allowed this to come so far, and something is seriously wrong with our sense of values that we haven't "lynched" those guys a long time ago.

I don't know how much from this man is actually true, but if only half or one quarter is true it leaves me shocked and dismayed, and with a real nasty taste in my mouth, I feel I need to go and gargle in Listerine and disinfect my eyes just from having read this piece from Matt Tiabby at Rolling Stone magazine, these people all need to go down and spend serious time in prison, I wonder if that will ever happen ?.

As a side question? could the resent roumors about a certain persons health that made the Thai stock market tumble down almost 8% in one day, be some sort of similar scheme by someone wanting to make some quick money?

Originally Posted by Spin

More unmissable stuff from Matt Tiabbi at rolling Stone magazine

I sniff Soros.

Originally Posted by larvidchr

these people all need to go down and spend serious time in prison

It will never happen, although they are indeed, human filth.

Originally Posted by larvidchr

Something is seriously wrong with our politicians who have allowed this to come so far

They are corrupt. Moreso than anything you see in Thailand.

Originally Posted by larvidchr

I don't know how much from this man is actually true, but if only half or one quarter is true it leaves me shocked and dismayed

My best guess is that the story is based on more than 75% facts, fleshed out with a bit of hot air.

My belief is that all the big companies were under more or less equal pressure and difficulties at the time, however, the thing that is key for me is the fact that Paulson is ex Goldman and history shows that he is a piece of shit when you consider his actions at the time and how they relate to helping Goldman and not others.

Originally Posted by larvidchr

this bunch of bandits are being held in awe by everybody.

No they are scum, all of them, Blankfein, Bernanke, Geithner, Paulson, Thain, Lewis, Dimon.......every last one of them has not a single strand of decency in them.

If you come to understand what this crisis has been all about, ie: protecting the wealthy from taking losses, and instead using public money to protect the rich. Then you'll know. Simple really.

This guy knows where things are heading.
"Paul Krugman Princeton University; The New York Times

What would a crisis in confidence in the U.S. government look like?
Well, we've seen it happen to Iceland. It's an advanced country but a small one. Suddenly people demand very high premiums for U.S. government bonds. Let's say the interest rate on 30-year euro bonds is 3 percent, but people are demanding 9 percent for U.S. bonds -- big spread, which then depresses [demand for U.S. bonds]. Capital is not flowing into the United States, very weak dollar.
Now, we've got a lot of lucky things about America; we're a blessed country in these respects. When Argentina -- which had a level of debt relative to the size of an economy not so different from ours, actually -- when Argentina lost the confidence of the markets in 2002, the Argentine peso plunged. And this was a terrible problem because lots of Argentine companies had borrowed abroad, and they had borrowed in dollars. And so they had assets in pesos but liabilities in dollars, and basically everybody went bankrupt.
The United States has borrowed a lot of money abroad in dollars, and America borrowing dollars is not the same as Argentina borrowing dollars. If the dollar plunges, the capital losses are going to fall on the Reserve Bank of China and Japanese pension funds, not on the United States. In fact, because we actually also have a lot of assets overseas, if you think of America just as a single entity, our balance sheet actually gets better when the dollar folds. ... So I don't think we're that vulnerable to a crisis of confidence, although if you stretch it far enough, then you can start to get into trouble. But we have a lot of running room. ..."

Originally Posted by larvidchr

Who ever came up with all this selling and buying stuff you only have a promise of acquiring, for a normal person like me without any knowledge of stock markets, options ect. it seems that the only people to really benefit from all this ghost trading is the speculators, traders/trading company's and big bank finance, all somebody that actually produce nothing of real value, it's all paper-money being pushed around and multiplying but with nothing of real value to back it up making a lot of people rich beyond belief without never having produced a thing of value to society.

The promise to pay later (aka credit) only works if a country can come up with the goods and services to actually service the debt. Paying off debt with more debt and by printing more paper fiat currency does not manage the debt in the long term. Its like asking the store keeper for more credit and paying him off with cheques that bounce at the end of the month. In the end somebody has to take the loss if no real attempt to pay down the debt is made. In the micro domestic scale example it would be the store keeper who is trading real goods for debt. In the macro world economic scale it will be places like China and Japan mainly who take the loss when the $US depreciates significantly. But its not only China and Japan who will take the loss as virtually every country holds large foreign currency reserves in $USs since it replaced gold as a store of a countries wealth in 1971. And virtually every country on earth will take their share of the loss.

Its the greatest scam in the history of the world. And its unfolding before us right now.

^
Thanks for your take on this Panda.
I believe you are right in as far as I firmly believe that all the rumours about Nations going away from the Dollar is not just smoke but that there is a fire burning, obviously they wont come right out and say it openly all of them, that would undermine the dollar to the point of a crash and thus they would loose big time, they are doing it slowly and on the quiet, securing that they have other currency's in their reserves so they in the future wont be so vulnerable and dependant on just one currency.

It would make no sense if they where not doing this, the leaders of other nations must act to protect their own economies it's their job.

Some remarks from prominent economic experts in the US to the effect that they don't care, and cant see a big problem in the dollar loosing massive value against other currency's since it will just be foreign debt holders that will loose, would worry me if I was a Chinese leader, I would know that the US if it came to a crunch would happily let others take the loss, that in turn would make me reduce my risk in said currency as a matter of urgency.

You have mentioned this scenario many times in the past Panda, if you where the leader of a nation holding almost solely US dollars in reserves, would you not try to get out slowly and diversify your risk, but without crashing the currency, it seems the logical thing to do ?

The $US trading value has been in steady decline against other major currencies for the past 7 years. US Dollar Index
All at a time when USA has been going deeper and deeper into debt.
Debt written in $USs, and of course since the US owns the worlds money printing press USA is able to shift the cost ,in real terms, of that debt to other countries.
The trade off there is gradual depreciacion of the $US and the gradual shift away from writing world trade business in $USs.
Over the past few years there has been a shift away from the $US as the currency of world trade and towards the Euro. However, most people of reasonable intelligence recognize that a move to replace the $US hegemony with a Euro based hegemony would simply recreate the same problem down the line.
Hence all the talk about creating a new world trading currency that is more stable and flexible. Recent rumors put the completion date for the changeover (to what ever they decide on) at 9 years time in 2018. Its all rumour and denied by the world powers, but does make a lot of sense to gradually adjust the medium of the worlds trading system. These rumours are being reported so consistently now that I do believe there are moves afoot by the world governments to replace the $US (and Euro to a lesser extent) hegemony with a more viable world trading currency. Why the secrecy? Well, I guess its to avoid panic selling of $USs that would hurt the very governments trying to stabilize the system. But the facts will have to be made public sooner or later and its bound to cause a huge depreciation in the $US trading value at least until the dust settles and things get into some kind of rational equilibrium.

In the meantime the US government is milking the $US hegemony for all its worth by selling massive debt and printing $trillions in paper money to prop up an economy that has lived so far above its means for so long at the expense of other countries. The party is nearly over for the people of USA. Soon they will have to compete with the rest of the world on a level playing field. But not so bad really as it will mean more reliance on domestic production rather than cheap imports. And that will be good for employment and taxation for the US government to pay back their international debts all be it at the reduced $US trading rate. It wont take much for the USA to get back as a nett exporter again and start paying off its debt. A further 30% reduction in the trading value of the $US would put USA in a great position to competitive again. Bottom line of course is that the average working Joe in the land of freedom and democracy will have to work a bit harder for less (aka inflation), but at least he will have a job.

I just hope our world leaders get it right this time. The experiment with the $US hegemony has lasted almost 40 years so far, and while it has provided a lot of economic progress during its ascension, it has cumulated in a debt ridden mess with a parasitic USA bleeding the rest of the world of wealth.
When the world accepted the $US hegemony completely divorced from the gold standard in 1971, they did so believing that USA had the productivity of real goods and services to back the trading value of the $US. And based on the US economic performance of the previous several decades that was certainly a given at the time. Unfortunately, the way its ended up is that USA couldn't resist the temptation to abuse their privileged position and ended up as a huge debtor nation rather than a producer of real goods to back up the value of their world currency.

Originally Posted by Panda

This guy knows where things are heading.
"Paul Krugman Princeton University; The New York Times

What would a crisis in confidence in the U.S. government look like?
Well, we've seen it happen to Iceland. It's an advanced country but a small one. Suddenly people demand very high premiums for U.S. government bonds. Let's say the interest rate on 30-year euro bonds is 3 percent, but people are demanding 9 percent for U.S. bonds -- big spread, which then depresses [demand for U.S. bonds]. Capital is not flowing into the United States, very weak dollar.
Now, we've got a lot of lucky things about America; we're a blessed country in these respects. When Argentina -- which had a level of debt relative to the size of an economy not so different from ours, actually -- when Argentina lost the confidence of the markets in 2002, the Argentine peso plunged. And this was a terrible problem because lots of Argentine companies had borrowed abroad, and they had borrowed in dollars. And so they had assets in pesos but liabilities in dollars, and basically everybody went bankrupt.
The United States has borrowed a lot of money abroad in dollars, and America borrowing dollars is not the same as Argentina borrowing dollars. If the dollar plunges, the capital losses are going to fall on the Reserve Bank of China and Japanese pension funds, not on the United States. In fact, because we actually also have a lot of assets overseas, if you think of America just as a single entity, our balance sheet actually gets better when the dollar folds. ... So I don't think we're that vulnerable to a crisis of confidence, although if you stretch it far enough, then you can start to get into trouble. But we have a lot of running room. ..."

A possibly prophetic quote.

I note your bold - well, done. Then my bold.

And the Argentian peso. Different circumstances than the US, but he did mention Argentina, even the note the differences - he noted Argentina.

Job Market: Lots of candidates searching. Being over-qualified can kill your chances:

To say the job market is extremely difficult is quite an understatement.

As unemployment rises, the pool of qualified and overqualified applicants for any listed job rises as well. Making things more difficult, is being even slightly overqualified can cost you the job.

To see how and why being overqualified can cost you, please consider $13 an Hour? 500 Sign Up, 1 Wins a Job.

C.R. England, a nationwide trucking company, needed an administrative assistant for its bustling driver training school here. Responsibilities included data entry, assembling paperwork and making copies.

It was a bona-fide opening at a decent wage, making it the rarest of commodities here in northwest Indiana, where steel industry layoffs have helped drive unemployment to about 10 percent.

When Stacey Ross, C. R. England’s head of corporate recruiting, arrived at her desk at the company’s Salt Lake City headquarters the next Monday, she found about 300 applications in the company’s e-mail inbox. And the fax machine had spit out an inch-and-a-half thick stack of résumés before running out of paper. By the time she pulled the posting off Careerbuilder.com later in the day, she guessed nearly 500 people had applied for the $13-an-hour job. “It was just shocking,” she said. “I had never seen anything so big.”

The 34-year-old recruiter decided the fairest approach was simply to start at the beginning, reviewing résumés in the order in which they came in. When she found a desirable candidate, she called to ask a few preliminary questions, before forwarding the name along to Chris Kelsey, the school’s director.

She dropped significantly overqualified candidates right away, reasoning that they would leave when the economy improved. Among them was a former I.B.M. business analyst with 18 years experience; a former director of human resources; and someone with a master’s degree and 12 years at Deloitte & Touche, the accounting firm.

Mr. Kelsey, 33, had just promoted one of his three administrative assistants, who handle the paperwork needed for drivers to hit the road. He needed a replacement quickly.

To make the task easier, he decided they should be even more rigorous in ruling out anyone who appeared even slightly overqualified.

“We like to get the fair and middling talent that will work for the wages and groom them from within,” he said.

In other words, he said, he did not want the former bank branch manager Ms. Ross had sent, or the woman who had once owned a trucking company, or even the former legal secretary.

[It came down to two candidates both invited back for a second interview].

Mr. Kelsey marched through many of his questions again. Then, trying to gauge ability to be assertive among truck drivers, he added a new hypothetical: if she were in the stands at a baseball game and a foul ball came her way, would she stand up to try to catch it, or wait in her seat and hope it fell her way?

The other finalist had said she would wait. But Ms. Block said immediately that she would jump up to grab it.

Mr. Kelsey decided he had found his hire.

Applicant Pool


•I.B.M. business analyst with 18 years experience.
•A former director of human resources.
•Someone with a master’s degree and 12 years at Deloitte & Touche, the accounting firm.
•A former bank branch manager.
•A woman who once owned a trucking company.

All of the above were immediately disqualified as being overqualified.

To land a job you have to be the perfect candidate, near the top of the stack of résumés, neither underqualified nor the slightest bit overqualified and you have to be willing to grab at a fly ball (show eagerness to jump at passing opportunities).

It does not get much harder than that, and there will be no feedback to applicants turned away. Indeed they may have received so many résumés they did not even get to yours.

Dumb Down Guessing Game


Will it help to "dumb down" your résumé when applying for something you are clearly overqualified for? In this case the answer was clearly yes. In general, I am not sure.

One now faces a guessing game of what each individual company's hiring process is. Adding extra marginal qualifications to a résumé may or may not be the best thing to do.

Being extremely overqualified though, is likely a kiss of death. Yet, I cannot recommend grossly distorting a résumé hoping for a position.

Some candidates are so overqualified and out of work so long (always a negative factor) that they will never work again. Retraining for news skills hardly seems like it can work. The pool of perfectly qualified applicants with practical on the job actual experience is simply too great.

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogsp...qualified.html

Existing home sales rebound to 2-year high

Sales of previously owned U.S. homes surged to their highest level in over two years in September, a survey showed on Friday, providing further evidence the housing market and economy were on the mend.

The National Association of Realtors (NAR) said sales surged 9.4 percent to an annual rate of 5.57 million units, the highest level since July 2007, from a downwardly revised 5.09 million units in August.

Analysts polled by Reuters had expected September sales to rise to a 5.35 million unit pace from the previously reported 5.10 million units in August.

Existing home sales rebound to 2-year high | Reuters

Good news indeed, but employment remains the big one, as do the structural problems facing the US economy in the longer term.

Ironically the banking sector, so lavishly bailed out by the US taxpayer, is engaged in a lobby war to water down or destroy Obamas proposals to increase regulation- Most informed comment I've read suggests that these proposals don't go nearly far enough in the first place.

With Bear Sterns and Lehmans gone, the Investment banking sector is now even more dangerously concentrated in the hands of the Big three- Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Merrill Lynch (now part of BofA).

In ten years the debt is projected to be a mere $23 trillion...

Boomers turning 65 will make current Medicare/Medicade/Social Security obligations completely unsustainable within 20 years

Originally Posted by Hootad Binky

In ten years the debt is projected to be a mere $23 trillion...

Boomers turning 65 will make current Medicare/Medicade/Social Security obligations completely unsustainable within 20 years

Very true, Hootad, and welcome back to the board.

Medicare will be in trouble in far less than 20 years.

A quote taken from the CIA World FactBook regarding the US economy, ---

"The onrush of technology largely explains the gradual development of a "two-tier labor market" in which those at the bottom lack the education and the professional/technical skills of those at the top and, more and more, fail to get comparable pay raises, health insurance coverage, and other benefits. Since 1975, practically all the gains in household income have gone to the top 20% of households."
https://www.cia.gov/library/publicat...k/geos/us.html

The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. And when things go bad its the poor who have to bail out the rich as its the rich folks who drive the economy and create the jobs for the poor.

Lean and mean economic practices do certainly give a competitive edge in industry. However one does have to ask if having 80% of the population (12% of whom are living below the poverty line) virtually stagnant in their standard of living is really what good government should be about in a democracy.

There is an old saying,--- if you put a frog in a pot of hot water he will jump straight out. But if you put him in a pot of cool water and slowly turn up the heat, he will sit there and cook. A fitting analogy as to where the majority of US citizens have been for the past 4 decades, all be it masked by the availability of easy credit. Now the heat has suddenly been turned up with the world economic crisis its a case of socializing private debt with the working class subsidizing the rich. However, when things were going well, private profit was private with very little flowing on to the working class in the way of increased wages and social benefits such as health care. USA certainly lags well behind virtually all other developed nations in theses regards.

I see some parallels between the Thai Oligarchical economic system and USA in this regard. Bottom line of course is that USA is a democracy and its up to the people themselves to vote for a government that will improve their lot.