Here are my morning reads for your edification:
• Bernanke fires off a letter to Congress about Bloomberg article (Fed); Bloomberg News Responds point by point to Bernanke (Bloomberg)
• Glaeser: Why More Retail Jobs Won’t Fix U.S. Unemployment (Bloomberg)
• Daily Shopmas Spend-o-Meter (Holiday Retail Sales)
• Investor sees huge cost to settle mortgage mess (Reuters) see also After Banks’ Mistakes, Homeowners Pick Up Pieces (NPR)
• German official pessimistic over crisis summit (AP)
• Super Rich vs. 99%: Class war will explode (Market Watch) see also Titans of the Financial Crisis: Where Are They Now? (Minyanville)
• Ha-ha: OpenTable’s Collapsing Shares Signal Anxiety Over New Competitors: Retail (Bloomberg) (I don’t care for Open Table)
• NYT Columnist two-fer:
…..-Thomas Friedman Errata (Guernica Mag)
…..-Is David Brooks a “Wonky Liberal” ? (NYT)
• Gingrich fighting massive debt racked up in campaign’s extravagant early days (Washington Post)
• Potentially Earth-Like Planet Has Right Temperature for Life (Wired)
WTF are you reading?
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S&P 500 Volatility: August – December
Source: Bespoke Investment Group
Category: Financial Press
Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor implied. If you could repeat previously discredited memes or steer the conversation into irrelevant, off topic discussions, it would be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are, after all, anonymous.
“Earth-Like Planet Has Right Temperature for Life” .. and who should care ? concentrate on the problems at hand .. one being the economic system to build a spaceship to get 600 light years away will never come to light with this bunch of monkeys running this globe
(but -hey – great work if you can get it)
Kudos to Bloomberg. They had to go to federal court and win to get their data.
Bloomberg 2 FRB 0 in this baseball game.
Re. Glaeser: Why More Retail Jobs Won’t Fix U.S. Unemployment
Only in Bloomberg opinion-land can more people selling things and in sales support be bad for an economy.
We are not the Soviet Union.
Who edits this guy and Baum?
Gosh, you don’t mean to say that Bloomberg and others misrepresented the “Bernanke Put”….who are you going to believe? I will tell you it won’t be Benny on this side. He appears to be a liar at best and something worse at worst.
I have just finishing reading an article from CourtHouse News:
http://www.courthousenews.com/2011/12/07/42015.htm
Excerpt:
“This is yet another tale of Bank of America cheating its customers,” the complaint states. “In 2005, plaintiffs obtained a residential mortgage loan. Bank of America subsequently bought the servicing rights to the loan. From the time the loan was issued, plaintiffs complied with their obligations under the loan agreement. They made their monthly payments, maintained the required homeowner’s insurance coverage and timely paid their property taxes. Nonetheless, in December 2009, plaintiffs noticed on their monthly mortgage statement that Bank of America paid their property taxes and homeowner’s insurance without the plaintiffs’ knowledge or consent, and even though plaintiffs also paid them. To fund the impound account, and without informing the plaintiffs, Bank of America took money from plaintiffs’ monthly mortgage payment, not leaving enough to cover plaintiffs’ monthly mortgage payment, throwing plaintiffs into default. Once in default, Bank of America, as the loan servicer, was ale to charge additional fees and penalties. Bank of America also falsely reported to credit agencies that plaintiffs were in default on their mortgage.”
Greg,
Frantically rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic is very hard work. It’s healthy to take a break once in a while to gaze at the shiny things in the night sky ;)
Harvard debuts in AP Top 25 men’s basketball poll
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5ipPq6e5EpZ5I3uqrXcmicPHZyNFw?docId=2ee30f26d509474b8bcaee270c666914
Effete Eggheads Enter Every-guy Elysium
Thanksgiving leftovers:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-features/what-price-the-new-democracy-goldman-sachs-conquers-europe-6264091.html
The Rate of Production of fossil fuels the limiting factor for sustaining industrial civilization.
The End of Growth in the United States
Care to forecast the US will return to economic growth, given energy prices and aggregate levels of debt in the OECD nations? Good luck with that… As I have written before, the energy limit and total debt now trump the tiresome argument between Austrians and Keynesians, rendering the conversation moot.
http://gregor.us/oil/the-end-of-growth-in-the-united-states/
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The Lesson That Pearl Harbor Should Teach Us
In the desperate scramble for scarce resources governments will do desperate things…
Think about what Japan did in December of 1941. They provoked a war with a superpower that was many times its industrial superior, all because its oil supply source was cut off.
http://www.countercurrents.org/murray051211.htm
(note also Nazi Germany’s desperate last-ditch attempts at securing fuel from any and all sources prior to the end of WWII… too little, too late)
Greg,
re. “concentrate on the problems”
Rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic can be exhausting. It is good to take a break once in a while and just stare at the stars ;)
Who is that Paul Farrell guy? You link his articles all the time. Guy sounds completely loony.
Is David Brooks a “Wonky Liberal?” Please. I’ve analyzed his writing (on-and-off) for over a decade. He’s a not-so-closeted Conservative that uses warm, fuzzy linguistics to make his opinions appear more reasonable and centrist than they really are. He’s essentially the very clever, subtle and mediagenic face of Frank Luntz.
~B-I-M
@ews: Some of Farrell’s stuff admittedly has a “gloom-and-doom” valence, but do you think most of the right-wing radio mouthpieces reflect mainstream thinking? As I see it, it’s part of a continuum of thought… take what you like, leave the rest behind.
~B-I-M
The perils of academic economics
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/48b6a70e-1ffd-11e1-8662-00144feabdc0.html
Bloomberg Businessweek
Relatively Hard Times
December 5, 2011
The Great Recession has left even the richest Americans at least a little poorer. Don’t worry too much for them, though–they’ll be the first to benefit when the economy recovers
According to an IRS analysis of 2009 tax returns, the rich aren’t doing as well as they were a few years back. The number of taxpayers with an adjusted gross income of $10 million or more dropped 55 percent from 2007 to 2009, to about 8,200 taxpayers. Their collective income fell to $240 billion in 2009 from $562 billion two years earlier.
[graphic charts and stats at URL]
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/relatively-hard-times-12012011-gfx.html
Test
Re: “Why More Retail Jobs Won’t Fix U.S. Unemployment”
Retail jobs in enough numbers could make the unemployment statistic look better, but that just papers over the problem.
Retail jobs tend to be low pay, less than full time, and require workers to change schedules often. As such, they make it difficult, expensive, or impossible to pay for health insurance, save adequate money for retirement, attend classes for new degrees/skills, or save money for a child’s college education.
The GOP demonized Obama for being a “university professor” a the University of Chicago, yet revel in Newt’s brains, experience, and leadership even though he was an assistant prof. at the history department at West Georgia College., the GOP’s situational “logic.”
Never-Wrong Pundit Picks Obama to Win in 2012
http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/washington-whispers/2011/08/30/never-wrong-pundit-picks-obama-to-win-in-2012
I personally wouldn’t mind Obama’s brand of market-doubling Socialism for four more years.
I imagine Bloomberg editors, in responding to Chairman Bernanke’s letter to Congress, missed Prof. James Hamilton’s analyses yesterday.
ottnott @ 2:31pm .. true .. not much disposable income in those jobs .. not much faith in an advanced lifestyle so collections don’t pile up … “Socialism” branded “bad” .. that tv and sports has wrecked us for 2 generations to come .. you’ll see what a race to the bottom means … money has 2 purposes – divy up commodities & spur climbing out of bed & going to work and working .. this system is failing at proper allocation of those .. our system is superior at embedded systems taking care of the old enablers via lockboxes
[...] your attention to what I found to be an excellent op-ed by Edward Glaeser at Bloomberg (hat tip: Barry Ritholtz) on why we shouldn’t expect retail sales to fill in the gaping hole in employment: But it [...]