Slouching Towards Oblivion

Showing posts with label recession. Show all posts
Showing posts with label recession. Show all posts

Saturday, October 17, 2009

Larry Summers Speaks

Sounds a lot like he's warming up to do battle with Wall Street.  Should be interesting to see if he calls for any specifics.

From The Agonist.

Tuesday, October 06, 2009

10 Years Of Hell

One thing that hasn't seen much improvement under Obama is BLS's difficulties figuring out what's actually happening with unemployment.  I'd like to see somebody go back and chart the monthly stats as first reported against the real numbers that come out (quietly) several weeks later.

In case you can't see this well, go to calculatedriskblog.com

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Uh oh ("10 years of hell")

Per the good folks at Real News: hang onto your hats - it could be a bumpy ride.

I've felt for a while now that there's a couple of Real Estate shoes yet to drop.  Multi-Family Residential is one, and Commercial is another, but the really big one is that the system itself is teetering.  We have a very weak safety net of the kind that's needed to keep pumping some dollars into the economy even when people are outa work.  What makes unemployment so dangerous is that it smacks us twice: first, because people who aren't working a regular job aren't paying taxes; and second, they aren't buying anything but the bare necessities so there's less money circulating.

There's also the small matter of not fixing the problems that got us into this mess.  One of the take-aways from the video is that the big banking interests have dramatically increased their lobbying budgets.  I think we can expect long and rancorous fights over regulations - which will prob'ly shape the midterm elections next year. 

We'll see if Barney Frank and Chris Dodd manage to redeem themselves (Phil Gramm didn't do it all by himself, y'know).