Fed To Auction Another $100bn To Banks

[SirNitram]

And yet I'll bet there's still financial incentives offered to farmers in the US not to make and ship crops.

Isn't that partly intended to try and make sure that we don't over-farm land into uselessness? I think we should be more worried over farmers rejecting such incentives en masse in favor of growing "biofuel" crops.

Proper crop rotation does that. No, I mean growing and setting fire to your crops, because the government doesn't want the price falling.

[Admiral Valdemar]

They did that during the Great Depression to keep food prices high and someone in the WSJ this week said the government should bulldoze houses to inflate house prices. You can't make this shit up.

[Big Orange]

and someone in the WSJ this week said the government should bulldoze houses to inflate house prices

Why fight to keep prices sky high when the whole process is as artificial as a high induced by happy pills, with the same inevitable crash?

And according to Bob Stout from the aformentioned Independent blog:

There is a very big lie going through the United States about the unemployment level of this country. We have spoke to people who know some of the leading economists of the United States and they have said the realistic number is around 20% unemployment. Listen folks, you cannot believe the popular media or politicians, they are trained to misled the general public.

This country is in the worst financial shape since the 1929 Depression, all the leading indicators are showing that our country is going from a recession to a total DEPRESSION, in the third quarter of 2008. Once the ball gets started rolling, nothing can stop it!

A potentially doubtful and anecdotal source, but fucking terrifying if true (but considering the stripping down of manufacturing in the USA, importing foreign goods and also moving administration abroad, a logical result).

[Oni Koneko Damien]

And yet I'll bet there's still financial incentives offered to farmers in the US not to make and ship crops.

Isn't that partly intended to try and make sure that we don't over-farm land into uselessness? I think we should be more worried over farmers rejecting such incentives en masse in favor of growing "biofuel" crops.

Proper crop rotation does that. No, I mean growing and setting fire to your crops, because the government doesn't want the price falling.

I thought this was also responsible for high fructose corn syrup being in practically everything.

[The Yosemite Bear]

welcome to the fall of a 200 year old civilization...

[brianeyci]

A potentially doubtful and anecdotal source, but fucking terrifying if true (but considering the stripping down of manufacturing in the USA, importing foreign goods and also moving administration abroad, a logical result).

It is not hard to believe. Firstly, I personally do not count part-timers as having a full-time job, and if someone is working part-time he's likely not making ends meet or is sharing expenses with someone. Looks like 40 million people are working part-time in the United States right now. That's already 13% added on top of the 5% who can't find work at all, higher if you take out all the people who don't want to or can't work like children or the elderly.

Nextly are the shit jobs that are full time. Did you know that 15 bucks an hour is 30k a year? How many Americans on this board make 15 bucks an hour who are not working in the government? Take out government work and military work and not too many people make that real wage after taxes.

So I would not be shocked if a sane calculation of unemployment was around 25% or so in the US right now. Of course I fully expect the economic weiners to come in and call bullshit on me, but the consequences of unemployment are what's important, not employment itself, so I feel perfectly justified to call someone working "unemployed" if that work is not enough to make ends meet. Slave labor is not employment.

[The Yosemite Bear]

close too it, I was making 18/hr has a cook.

[Big Orange]

*Snip*[/i[

My parents are not making as much money as they used to, but then again they're both mid to late fifty somethings and not far off from retirement, yet in my age group being reliably employed is not guaranteed if companies are cutting many things to the bone to be set up overseas and are more willing to take in Eastern Europeans that can be paid only a quater as much as a typical 16 to 24 year old native (which has caused problems). A semi-old article from before the begining of the 2008 recession states that Britain's unemployment figures are also similarily fiddled and I've gathered that the current economic meltdown has led to many redundancies of bank/insurance workers in London.

[Elfdart]

Is real-estate really a good investment? Let's take someone who bought a house in Toronto back in the 1980s for $200,000. At the peak of the real estate market, that same house might fetched $600,000 to $800,000 depending on circumstances. That's a gain of 3x to 4x, which looks pretty impressive.

Sorry, I took his post to mean he was looking to buy a house to live in, not for speculation.

[brianeyci]

*Snip*[/i[

My parents are not making as much money as they used to, but then again they're both mid to late fifty somethings and not far off from retirement, yet in my age group being reliably employed is not guaranteed if companies are cutting many things to the bone to be set up overseas and are more willing to take in Eastern Europeans that can be paid only a quater as much as a typical 16 to 24 year old native (which has caused problems). A semi-old article from before the begining of the 2008 recession states that Britain's unemployment figures are also similarily fiddled and I've gathered that the current economic meltdown has led to many redundancies of bank/insurance workers in London.

Over here the growth in employment is driven by government hiring. The private sector is contracting like shit while the public sector is expanding. Sounds great right? Not when the whole thing's top heavy, with a one quarter increase in "consultants" and people making 100k+ per year or more.

That is the real problem with the EU: huge income disparities between the richest and the poorest. The idea is to get into a niche that your Eastern European counterparts can't match. If a company just needs warm bodies or needs to train people from the ground up, they'll take people with low expectations. But if they need a specific skillset, they'll look for people who already have it. A two-year community college diploma is competitive with a liberal arts degree like never before.

Immigrating large numbers of highly skilled workers is stupid. There's no point to creating a highly educated underclass, and tricking skilled workers into thinking they'll fit in as soon as they arrive is a joke.

[Gerald Tarrant]

It is not hard to believe. Firstly, I personally do not count part-timers as having a full-time job, and if someone is working part-time he's likely not making ends meet or is sharing expenses with someone. Looks like 40 million people are working part-time in the United States right now. That's already 13% added on top of the 5% who can't find work at all, higher if you take out all the people who don't want to or can't work like children or the elderly.

Nextly are the shit jobs that are full time. Did you know that 15 bucks an hour is 30k a year? How many Americans on this board make 15 bucks an hour who are not working in the government? Take out government work and military work and not too many people make that real wage after taxes.

So I would not be shocked if a sane calculation of unemployment was around 25% or so in the US right now. Of course I fully expect the economic weiners to come in and call bullshit on me, but the consequences of unemployment are what's important, not employment itself, so I feel perfectly justified to call someone working "unemployed" if that work is not enough to make ends meet. Slave labor is not employment.

The BLS publishes what's called U-6, I believe that's the number you might be interested in.

U-6 Total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers

The Report
U-6
This is not "seasonally adjusted" (whatever that means)

March '07 8.3
Feb '08 9.5
March '08 9.3

[phongn]

Seasonal adjustments means exactly that - the numbers are modified depending on time-of-year, to account for various temporal factors. Certain types of employment, for example, may go up during the Christmas shopping season, or industrial output may go down as auto factories retool for the next model-year.

[Big Orange]

Immigrating large numbers of highly skilled workers is stupid. There's no point to creating a highly educated underclass, and tricking skilled workers into thinking they'll fit in as soon as they arrive is a joke.

Some Eastern Workers are highly skilled in blue collar jobs (such as plumbing and electrical repairs etc) while many others are not (ditch digging, road sweeping), but either way the influx of workers from the EU countries has disturbed the job market and making Britain's lower class bigger. And it has bugger all to do with race, when the MPs (that supported non-white immigartion back in the 1960s) and other earlier immigrants complain about housing and social services being heavily strained by the influx (while Poland and Romania have much reduced labor pools, slowing down many civil projects. But more recently many EE immigrants are moving back, even though some unlucky ones have been rendered homeless in the UK).

But I'm trying to dodge this big bullet by accepting a menial job placement at a big city hotel and going into night school for maths and IT courses.