Economics

Employment: Trending Down

"Charts and data provided by longtime correspondent B.C. reflect what many know from first-hand experience: employment is trending down. The growth rate of employment is declining over time, as positive growth weakens and recessionary declines deepen. Though the 3-year average annual change has improved to near-zero, the 5-year (i.e. longer-term trendline) is still solidly negative. There are two other trends in employment: 1. Decline of full-time jobs and the rise of part-time jobs 2. Stagnation of high-wage employment and increases in lower-wage job sectors." Continue reading →

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California Governor Calls for Legislation that will Increase Unemployment

"Gov. Jerry Brown says he supports a bill in the Legislature that would boost the California minimum wage next year and in 2016 by a total of $2 an hour, reports LaTi. The bill would raise the current $8-an-hour minimum wage to $9 on July 1, 2014, and to $10 on Jan. 1, 2016. The Governor, displaying a total lack of understanding of basic economics, said: 'The minimum wage has not kept pace with rising costs. This legislation is overdue and will help families that are struggling in this harsh economy.' What it will do is cause an increase in unemployment. Prices can't be regulated, wage prices or otherwise. It is basic supply and demand economics." Continue reading →

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David Stockman on his Book and the Bailouts

"The panic and bailouts that followed were really about protecting the bonuses and incomes of very wealthy and politically well-connected managers at banks and other heavily leveraged businesses that were eventually deemed too big to fail. What followed was a massive transfer of wealth from the taxpayers and middle-class savers, in the form of bailouts and zero interest rates on bank deposits imposed by the Fed, to the so-called One Percent. As I show in my book, none of this was necessary to save the larger economy, since the losses that would have taken place as a result of the collapse would have been largely limited to Wall Street." Continue reading →

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Treasury: $238b financial bailout ‘avoided catastrophe,’ only $3b outstanding

"The US Treasury said Wednesday the government’s massive response to the economic crisis five years ago paid off, avoiding a catastrophic breakdown of the financial system. In a report marking the anniversary of the bankruptcy of investment bank Lehman Brothers — which snowballed into the worst crisis since the 1930s — the Treasury defended deploying hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to save other banks, major financial institutions and auto companies. While the rescue effort required piling up government debt, it was necessary, said Treasury officials who briefed reporters." Continue reading →

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Mises’ Answer to Would-Be Conspirators: You Will Lose

"The heart, mind, and soul of Austrian school economics is this: the free market provides better information and better incentives to satisfy customers than any rival system can ever offer. Therefore, the free market will grow at the expense of central planning. The decentralized decisions of people with money -- decisions informed by market pricing -- will be more accurate than the centralized decisions of any committee. This is why I really do not pay a lot of attention to the Bilderberg, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Trilateral Commission. Ultimately, they are going to lose, just as their British equivalents and predecessors lost, 1914-1945. The digital genie is out of the bottle." Continue reading →

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CFR Floats Neo-Bretton Woods to Create a New Monetary System

"This article is bylined by Benn Steil of the Council on Foreign Relations. The groundwork is apparently being prepared. The plan has evidently always been a global currency. And it is marching closer. The world is in a mess and surely the post-Bretton Woods system is responsible for it. One hundred and fifty central banks now administer the world's money, many under the supervision of the mysterious Bank for International Settlements. Whatever goes on in the world financially is a product of what has gone before. With money stuff controlled the marketplace itself is organized and directed. The free market exists from a production standpoint but not from a demand standpoint." Continue reading →

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The Best U.S. Metros for Recent College Grads Looking for Work

"Across the nation's 50 largest metro areas, there were 15.8 million jobs in these fast-growing, highly educated fields as of 2013. New York leads with more than 66,000 openings, roughly ten percent of the total. L.A. is second with 39,508. That makes sense: N.Y. and L.A. are America's two largest metros. Together, they in fact account for nearly 3 million of these positions, nearly one in five of these estimated fast-growing, highly-educated jobs across the nation. Once we look beyond these two largest metros, the pattern diverges a bit from the size of a metro's population. Greater Washington, D.C., has the third largest number of estimated openings, 39,259." Continue reading →

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Journal Explores Incentive For False Results In Lab Tests For DUI

"A recent analysis published in the Criminal Justice Ethics academic journal suggests when technicians perform forensic analysis of blood and other evidence for cases such as drunk driving, the results can be influenced by built-in financial incentives to produce a conviction, arguing that even if false conviction rates are very low, a 3 percent error rate could put 33,000 innocent individuals behind bars every year. The primary problem, according to the paper, is that fourteen states reward crime labs with a bonus for each conviction they generate. North Carolina pays a $600 bounty 'upon conviction' to the law enforcement agency whose lab 'tested for the presence of alcohol.'" Continue reading →

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America’s Energy Boom and the Rising U.S. Dollar

"The petrodollar regime--that oil is bought and sold globally in U.S. dollars--is easy to understand. It boils down to these two principles: 1. Petroleum is the lifeblood of the global economy. 2. Any nation that can print its own currency and trade the conjured money for oil has an extraordinary advantage over nations that cannot trade freshly created money for oil. This is why many analysts trace much of America's foreign policy back to defending the petrodollar regime. In the normal course of things, anyone printing money in quantity would soon find the conjured currency bought fewer and fewer barrels of oil." Continue reading →

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