In June 2009, the U.S. economy saw its second
steepest decline in 27 years. New jobless claims increased,
business inventories fell and exports plunged as bad economic news
persisted.
Will the once high-flying American wealth
machine continue to produce the vast inequalities of the past?
A new order is emerging on Wall Street after the worst crisis since the Great Depression — one in which just a couple of victors are starting to tower over the handful of financial titans that used to dominate the industry.
On Thursday, JPMorgan Chase became the latest big bank to announce stellar second-quarter earnings. Its $2.7 billion profit, after record gains for Goldman Sachs, underscores how the government’s effort to halt a collapse has also set the stage for a narrowing concentration of financial power.
NEW YORK - U.S. home foreclosure activity galloped to a record in the first half of the year, overwhelming broad efforts to remedy failing loans while job losses escalated.
Foreclosure filings jumped to a record 1.9 million on more than 1.5 million properties in the first six months of the year, RealtyTrac said on Thursday.
The number of properties drawing filings, which include notices of default and auctions, jumped 9.0 percent from the second half of 2008 and almost 15 percent from the first half of last year.
Connect the dots: Goldman Sachs made $3.44 billion in profit this past quarter, while the U.S deficit topped $1 trillion for the first time in the nation's history and appeared to be headed toward doubling that figure before the budget year is out. Since most of the increase in the federal deficit is due to bailing out the banks and salvaging the greater economy they helped destroy, why is the top investment bank doing so well?
For a while, the Wall Street meltdown gave the rich a bad name.
Even they seemed embarrassed by their own excess. There were reports of designer shops packaging purchases in plain paper bags.
But as going downscale lost its novelty, the rich have grown weary of their own embarrassment. Gratuitous extravagance is making a comeback. I noticed a Tiffany's ad in a Toronto newspaper last week for a "diamond solitaire on a platinum band of channel-set diamonds. From $3,550 to $1,000,000."
Our
economy has gone into the toilet over the past 30 years, and President Obama
and his advisors think "free trade" is the solution. Like Bill Clinton and both George Bush's, he's so enamored
of it he's even recommending it to poor African nations.
President Obama was elected with a large enough mandate for fundamental change that he could forge a fresh social compact, lock in place a new set of mutual obligations and rewrite the relationship between the state and the populace.
For the book I'm writing about unemployed Americans, I had no trouble finding
accountants,
brokers,
cashiers, or
die casters. Admittedly, I had to go out of town to interview the die casters. But when I arrived, alphabetically, at unemployed
editors, I had only to look in my address book.
Financiers were further from my life experience than either die casters or editors.
Is America on its way to becoming a boiled frog?
I’m referring, of course, to the proverbial frog that, placed in a pot of cold water that is gradually heated, never realizes the danger it’s in and is boiled alive. Real frogs will, in fact, jump out of the pot — but never mind. The hypothetical boiled frog is a useful metaphor for a very real problem: the difficulty of responding to disasters that creep up on you a bit at a time.
And creeping disasters are what we mostly face these days.
The so-called "green shoots" of recovery are turning brown in the scorching summer sun. In fact, the whole debate about when and how a recovery will begin is wrongly framed. On one side are the V-shapers who look back at prior recessions and conclude that the faster an economy drops, the faster it gets back on track. And because this economy fell off a cliff late last fall, they expect it to roar to life early next year. Hence the V shape.
