Thread: The strongest economy in the world

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

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.

A massive number are scamming SSD Black Heart...and lets not forget food stamps are still at all time highs. The whole EBT card thing is a total scam.

Meanwhile petrol prices are due to hit their lowest since 2004.

More to come when Iran crude hits the market. Some predicting $15 a barrel.

Originally Posted by Deckwan

A massive number are scamming SSD Black Heart...and lets not forget food stamps are still at all time highs. The whole EBT card thing is a total scam.

Agreed.

I'll have to google the "EBT card." Don't recall what that is.

Who is creating jobs in the US?



Heh...media bootlicks indeed.

Rick Perry's Texas responsible for US job creation | RedState

Always liked Texas. Texas will survive

Originally Posted by Boon Mee

Heh...media bootlicks indeed.

Didn't we already go through this several months back?

Chart above from January and has already been criticized as misleading by several sources including Bloomberg and FactCheck.

A Tale of Two Jobs Numbers
A Tale of Two Jobs Numbers

Energy, Texas and Job Creation
Energy, Texas and Job Creation - Bloomberg View

Originally Posted by Boon Mee

Rick Perry's Texas responsible for US job creation | RedState

On the topic of Rick Perry.

Extra! Extra! Read All About It!

Perry dops out of race (like he had a chance anyway.)

NationalJournal

What it's like to live on $2 a day in the United States

In the United States, we often talk about poverty as a line: You are above it or below it; you escape it or can’t get out of it. Every year, the government defines that line with a number. Right now, if you’re in a family of four, you’re considered poor if you get by on less than $16.60 per day.


What we tend to ignore, though — and almost never bother to quantify — is the vast spectrum of poverty itself. And that’s why a new book, “$2 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America,” by Kathryn J. Edin and H. Luke Shaefer, is so eye-opening. It exposes in devastating detail the lives of millions of Americans who aren’t just in poverty, but extreme poverty, the kind you’d normally associate with the developing world. Edin and Shaefer crunched census data and other numbers and calculated that 1.5 million American households are surviving on no more than $2 per day, per person. They also found that the number of households in such straits had doubled in the previous decade and a half.


It’s worth pondering for a moment just how difficult it is to survive on $2 per day. That’s a single gallon of gasoline. Or half a gallon of milk. If you took a D.C. bus this morning, you have 25 cents left for dinner. Among this group in extreme poverty, some get a boost from housing subsidies. Many collect food stamps — an essential part of survival. But so complete is their destitution, they have little means to climb out. (The book described one woman who scored a job interview, couldn’t afford transportation, walked 20 blocks to get there, and showed up looking haggard and drenched in sweat. She didn’t get hired.)


Edin is a professor specializing in poverty at Johns Hopkins University. Shaefer is an associate professor of social work and public policy at the University of Michigan. In several years of research that led to this book, they set up field offices both urban and rural — in Chicago, in Cleveland, in Johnson City, Tenn., in the Mississippi Delta — and tried to document this jarring form of American poverty.


Here is what they found about the lives of the extreme poor:

The Federal minimum wage in America is $7.25 an hour, minus taxes, and in Thailand it is (or was) $9 a day. With the prices of housing and food in the US, I suspect one could probably live better in Thailand on its minimum wage than in the US on theirs.

^ What a sad realization. You are right.

The woman who cleans my house one day a week has a full time factory job making the minimum wage of 300 baht per day. Her live-in boyfriend probably makes even less at his odd jobs. A few months back she was able to make down payment and get a bank loan for a nice little house of her own.

No way a couple in the US making minimum wage could save up for a down payment, much less get a bank loan.

Originally Posted by misskit

^ What a sad realization. You are right.

The woman who cleans my house one day a week has a full time factory job making the minimum wage of 300 baht per day. Her live-in boyfriend probably makes even less at his odd jobs. A few months back she was able to make down payment and get a bank loan for a nice little house of her own.

No way a couple in the US making minimum wage could save up for a down payment, much less get a bank loan.

Think that's the problem in most western countries, minimum wages do not reflect the living costs.
Add to that the over regulation of everything you can do, from type of house you can live in, to what work you can do.

Free enterprise is pretty well outlawed, the poor can't set up a small business, cutting grass, window washing, laboring etc. everything is controlled.
You probably get done faster for selling sandwiches from a hand cart with out the permits, tax records etc, then for dealing drugs.

As said, I do rubber here, could grow it in Australia's north, a couple could get off welfare, built a small home on the plantation and live a reasonable life.
But, after you take into account, taxes, of many types, compulsory licenses, permits, the list goes on, you'd be paying out more then you earned.

Total control is the name of the game, governments set the bare minimum, that's needed to stop civil uprisings.
The word wage slave, says it all.

I can second that

Originally Posted by jamescollister

Think that's the problem in most western countries, minimum wages do not reflect the living costs.
Add to that the over regulation of everything you can do, from type of house you can live in, to what work you can do.
Free enterprise is pretty well outlawed, the poor can't set up a small business, cutting grass, window washing, laboring etc. everything is controlled.
You probably get done faster for selling sandwiches from a hand cart with out the permits, tax records etc, then for dealing drugs.
As said, I do rubber here, could grow it in Australia's north, a couple could get off welfare, built a small home on the plantation and live a reasonable life.
But, after you take into account, taxes, of many types, compulsory licenses, permits, the list goes on, you'd be paying out more then you earned.
Total control is the name of the game, governments set the bare minimum, that's needed to stop civil uprisings.
The word wage slave, says it all.

Originally Posted by baldrick

at the FOMC this thursday there will be an announcement on its rate decision

all the finance scum have been buying for the last 6 months in anticipation of a rise

I don't think they will raise the rates as their economy is not that flash and the rest of the world is pretty shaky

will the banksters have to dump their positions and will there be a bit of a USD tumble ?

One of the scenarios been discussed by the "pundits" is a miniscule raise of rates.

Say. .30 of a percent of even .10%.

For "psychological reasons."

Some are saying that the Fed is in a hole and whatever they do it will only get worse. One reason for a token rate rise given is that they can have something to reverse when the situation gets even worse, for another sheeple headline.

Under the umbrella | The Economist

^
Nice article, Spliff.

The relationship growth I see in Thailand is very ASEAN targeted. If the Chinese and US can be accepted by the ASEAN countries as partners there should be no problems. The indigenous Chines citizens in Thailand also have long commercial ties with both countries.

But is western centric organisations can come up with a stick maybe they should look at themselves first.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opini...679_story.html

Donald Trump’s presidential bid is centered on the promise of his personal talents. He says he’s the “most successful person ever to run for the presidency, by far.” (George Washington and Dwight Eisenhower, sit down!) But if there is an idea animating his candidacy, it is that the United States is being badly beaten by its economic competitors. In his speech on foreign policy this week, Trump explained that America is being bested by countries such as China, Japan and Mexico because their leaders are “smarter, more cunning and sharper than our leaders.” “They’re killing us,” he often says.

This is an odd moment to make these charges because the reality is almost entirely the opposite. The United States is more dominant on the global economic landscape than at any point since the heyday of Bill Clinton’s presidency — perhaps even more so.

Last quarter, the U.S. economy grew at a 3.7 percent clip. Annual growth now is almost twice that of Europe and four times that of Japan. Unemployment is at 5.1 percent, the lowest in seven years. The deficit as a percentage of gross domestic product (2.8 percent in 2014) is at its lowest since 2007.

“The U.S. has come out of the 2008 crisis better than all the others,” says Ruchir Sharma, head of global macro investing at Morgan Stanley. “Americans have reduced their debt burden more than the Europeans, while China’s debt has skyrocketed to extremely dangerous levels. If you look outside of China, U.S. growth is actually faster even than the emerging markets. Since the 2008 crisis, U.S. equity markets have outperformed all others — in fact 9 out of the 10 most valuable companies in the world are now American. The dollar is the currency of choice. Global growth is not what it used to be, but in a bad neighborhood, the U.S. has the best house by far.” Sharma points out that for the past four years, the United States’ share of global GDP has increased while Europe’s and Japan’s have moved down.

When I was in Europe last week, businessmen there were concerned with what they saw as a new level of U.S. dominance in everything from technology to entertainment to finance. Consider America’s big banks. They were at the epicenter of the financial crisis and were badly battered by it. Since then, bankers have complained that they’ve faced uncertainty about government policies, overzealous regulators trying to compensate for their laxness before the crisis and the unwieldy burdens of the Dodd-Frank law.

At the Family Leadership Summit in Ames, Iowa, Donald Trump said "we need somebody who can take our jobs back from Mexico," because "we're going to hell."

Well, U.S. banks today are more dominant than ever. The Wall Street Journal notes that in the past five years, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have increased in value by $254.6 billion. In the same period, their European competitors, Barclays, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, UBS and Royal Bank of Scotland added just $9.5 billion. In July, Barclays Chairman John McFarlane was asked by the Wall Street Journal if America’s banks were eating European lenders’ lunch. He replied: “They are doing a good job of it.” He added that the U.S. banks “are the only ones that really claim to be global and successful.”

To compare the United States’ performance and leadership to Mexico’s, Japan’s and China’s is particularly ill-timed. Trump might be stuck in a 1980s time warp on Japan. When his “The Art of the Deal” was published in 1987, Americans were envious of Japan’s brilliant leaders, who were said to be outsmarting the United States at every turn. Since then, Japan has become the poster child for economic stagnation and political paralysis. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has been unwilling or unable to get his promised reforms enacted, and the country’s economy continues to shrink.

Mexico is watching its growth collapse. While its president, Enrique Peña Nieto, is a courageous and intelligent leader who has made some very bold decisions, he has also made some significant missteps. Most important, the country was ill-prepared for plunging oil prices that have battered government revenues and growth.

China has had three decades of supercharged growth and competent government policy. But in the past few years, Beijing went on a borrowing binge, running up its total debt to levels that are unprecedented, according to Sharma. And in the past two months it has made mistakes in managing both its equity markets and currency — mistakes that have cost $400 billion, the Financial Times reports.

Of course, the United States has problems that are worrying, such as wage stagnation and low labor-force participation. But the important comparison is not to some ideal fantasy of what America might be but to other countries in the real world. And the facts show, Mr. Trump, we’re killing them .