Dypere om amerikansk arbeidsledighet

Guest Post: How Bad Will Unemployment Get, And What Can We Do About It?(George Washington / Naked Capitalism, takk til TAE)

Langt, men svært lesverdig om situasjonen i USA. OK GW gjør den utrolig lite tillitvekkende feilen at han sier "negative feedback loop" når han åpenbart mener positiv feedback... Feedback og forskjellen på positiv og negativ feedback er helt essensielt å forstå... men likevel.

"It’s impossible to overstate how bad this is"

Amerikansk arbeidsledighet

Ritholz postet denne i går, og kommenterte at dette beviser at Den Store Resesjonen ikke er en ny Depresjon:



Vel, Denninger skummer fra munnvikene (hmmm når gjør han ikke det?) i The Government's Effort Has Failed...

At the same time the supposed "official" statistics say we lost 216,000 jobs. Unfortunately the household survey, in the same release, says something different. Their "official" numbers on the household survey say 466,000 fewer people were working, not 216,000. But it gets even worse than that when you dig into the actual data.

If you look on page 10 in the Household Survey you see the line "Employed." July to August that number declined not 216,000, not 466,000, but a staggering nine hundred and eighty-one thousand people.

So where did the rest go? They gave up. Note that the counted "unemployed" actually fell by 378,000 people. Those are people who simply aren't looking any more - they have deduced that there is no point to searching for a job.

The BLS doesn't count those people as "unemployed" but the merchant on the corner and the bank next door sure as hell do.

For ikke snakke om de arbeidsledige selv...

Og som Mish sier, "anyone 16 years old without a job in 1930 was considered unemployed". Vel, pr. i dag forventes vel 16-åringer å gå på skole, men likevel: Et mål på "arbeidsledighet" som bare innbefatter aktive arbeidssøkere, og utelukker langtidsledige i en situasjon der nettopp mengden langtidsledige er rekordhøyt og raskt økende, er fullstendig irrelevant og svært misvisende -- og å basere viktige avgjørelser på svært misvisende tall er farlig.

Det virker åpenbart at arbeidsledigheten i USA pr. nå er EPISK.

En bortkastet krise

 

Tactical Error: Health Care vs Finance Regulatory Reform (Ritholz / The Big Picture)

I believe the brain trust behind the Obama White House has made a huge tactical error.

As Rahm Emmanuel likes to say, one should "never waste a crisis" — and the White House has done just that.

There was a narrow window to effect a full regulatory reform of Wall Street, the Banking Industry and other causes of the collapse. Instead, the WH tacked in a different direction top pursue healthcare reform.

This was an enormous miscalculation.

Jeg skrev i USA i trøbbel at "En skikkelig leder, i spissen for et politisk/administrativt apparat med ekte makt, hadde kunnet benytte krisestemningen rundt presidentskiftet i januar til å mobilisere landet. Fortelle amerikanerne at de står i kloakk til over overleppa med noe tongt rundt beina"...  Jeg nevnte ikke finansreform da, men det burde jeg ha gjort...

 

Nå er reform av finanssystemet noe av en fiks idé for Ritholz, men jeg tror han er inne på noe. Finanssystemet er i en nøkkelposisjon... dersom myndighetetene klarer/hadde klart å begrense makten dets, hadde alt annet blitt mye enklere... sannsynligvis også å gjennomføre sosiale reformer.

 

For de reformene er nødvendige. Et skikkelig sikkerhetsnett for arbeidsledige og uføre er for det første den beste formen for Keynesiansk stimulus (ref Galbraith d.y.), for det andre er det påkrevd for å unngå store mengder desperat fattigdom og holde landet sammen.

 

Men nå ser alt ut til å koke bort i kålen.

 

 

 

A Seedy Practice

Do Seed Companies Control GM Crop Research? (Scientific American)

Unfortunately, it is impossible to verify that genetically modified crops perform as advertised. That is because agritech companies have given themselves veto power over the work of independent researchers.

To purchase genetically modified seeds, a customer must sign an agreement that limits what can be done with them. (If you have installed software recently, you will recognize the concept of the end-user agreement.) Agreements are considered necessary to protect a company’s intellectual property, and they justifiably preclude the replication of the genetic enhancements that make the seeds unique. But agritech companies such as Monsanto, Pioneer and Syngenta go further. For a decade their user agreements have explicitly forbidden the use of the seeds for any independent research. Under the threat of litigation, scientists cannot test a seed to explore the different conditions under which it thrives or fails. They cannot compare seeds from one company against those from another company. And perhaps most important, they cannot examine whether the genetically modified crops lead to unintended environmental side effects.

Research on genetically modified seeds is still published, of course. But only studies that the seed companies have approved ever see the light of a peer-reviewed journal.

Ikke noe nytt egentlig, men like fullt forkastelig.

Forskning må være fri, ellers er den ikke verdig navnet.

Open Source!

Hvem kontrollerer verdens aksjer?

Study Says World's Stocks Controlled by Select Few (InsideScience.org)

"You start off with these huge national networks that are really big, quite dense," Glattfelder said. “From that you're able to ... unveil the important structure in this original big network. You then realize most of the network isn't at all important."

The most pared-down backbones exist in Anglo-Saxon countries, including the U.S., Australia, and the U.K. Paradoxically; these same countries are considered by economists to have the most widely-held stocks in the world, with ownership of companies tending to be spread out among many investors. But while each American company may link to many owners, Glattfelder and Battiston's analysis found that the owners varied little from stock to stock, meaning that comparatively few hands are holding the reins of the entire market.

“If you would look at this locally, it's always distributed,” Glattfelder said. “If you then look at who is at the end of these links, you find that it's the same guys, [which] is not something you'd expect from the local view.”

... det var altså de sveitsiske forskerne Stefano Battiston og James Glattfelder.

Leste denne forrige uke, men mistet linken... heldigvis dukket den opp igjen hos Ritholz. Takk, Barry.

Chomsky om krisene

Crisis and Hope - Theirs and ours (Noam Chomsky / Boston Review)

Chomsky favner bredt og bruker mange ord, men som han selv sier innledningsvis, "There are numerous very severe crises, interwoven in ways that preclude any clear separation". En smakebit:

In substantial measure, the food crisis plaguing much of the South and the financial crisis of the North have a common source: the shift toward neoliberalism since the 1970s, which brought to an end the Bretton Woods system instituted by the United States and United Kingdom after World War II. The architects of Bretton Woods, John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White, anticipated that its core principles—including capital controls and regulated currencies—would lead to rapid and relatively balanced economic growth and would also free governments to institute the social democratic programs that had very strong public support. Mostly, they were vindicated on both counts. Many economists call the years that followed, until the 1970s, the “golden age of capitalism.”

The “golden age” saw not only unprecedented and relatively egalitarian growth, but also the introduction of welfare-state measures. As Keynes and White were aware, free capital movement and speculation inhibit those options. To quote from the professional literature, free flow of capital creates a “virtual senate” of lenders and investors who carry out a “moment-by-moment referendum” on government policies, and if they find them irrational—that is, designed to help people, not profits—they vote against them by capital flight, attacks on currency, and other means. Democratic governments therefore have a “dual constituency”: the population, and the virtual senate, who typically prevail.

Det burde vel ikke være nødvendig å påpeke at frihandelens profeter stadig hevder at "frihandel + demokrati = sant"; at det første og viktigste steget på veien mot demokrati er å åpne for frihandel med Vesten... Jfr også Galbraiths kommentarer om Kinas styrke og deres underutviklede kapitalmarked som jeg postet tidligere... Videre:

Large-scale state intervention in the economy is not just a phenomenon of the post-World War II era, either. On the contrary, the state has always been a central factor in economic development. Once they gained their independence, the American colonies were free to abandon the orthodox economic policies that dictated adherence to their comparative advantage in export of primary commodities while importing superior British manufacturing goods. Instead, the Hamiltonian economy imposed very high tariffs so that an industrial economy could develop: textiles, steel, and much else. The eminent economic historian Paul Bairoch describes the United States as “the mother country and bastion of modern protectionism,” with the highest tariffs in the world during its great growth period.

"The state has always been a central factor in economic development"... En sterk påstand i lys av de fremherskende neoliberalistiske/neoklassiske memene; men jeg er ikke i tvil om det er riktig, jfr. tidligere ref. til Galbraih jr. og sr, og Reinert.

litt realisme på e24

 

Tror på energikrise i 2012 (e24)

Det siste året har oljeselskapene droppet investeringsprosjekter over en lav sko. Men kuttene er ikke begrenset til olje.

- Både i kull og gass, og ikke minst innen fornybar energi, er investeringene redusert kraftig, sier Saltvedt.

Hun mener derfor en storstilt og verdensomspennende energikrise er sannsynlig i løpet av noen år.

OK, jeg mener energikrisen hadde vært uunngåelig selv uten finanskrisen; men at finans"krisen" (vi kan vel ikke kalle noe som kommer til å vare i årevis en krise, kan vi vel?) flytter den fram i tid og forverrer den virker klart.

 

Saltvedt er ikke helt klar på hvorfor oljeprisen er såpass høy som den er, hun sier at "oljemarkedet er dominert av optimistene", hva nå enn det skal bety... Jeg tror det mest sannsynlige er at det er nullrente og "krisepakker" som tvinger olje oppover -- altså at det fungerer (har fungert?) som en sikker valuta for folk som trenger et sted å parkere penger (ref. min kommentar her).

 

Frykter kraftig fall i oljeproduksjonen (e24)

 

Prognosen viser en avtagende oljeproduksjon hvert eneste år i den kommende femårsperioden, og nedgangen er om lag 10 prosent større enn tidligere forutsatt.

 

Ingen bombe for dem som har fulgt med; les f.eks. A Decline Rate Study of Norwegian Oil Production (PDF!, Global Energy Systems/Uppsala Univ., Höök & Aleklett):

 

The conclusion from the forecast is that Norway will barely be an oil exporter by 2030, with only a few hundred thousand barrels of oil available for export in the best case. This will have dramatic consequences for the Norwegian economy and for the world, as Norway presently is the world third largest oil exporter.

 

Vi kommer riktignok til å produsere stadig mer gass fremover, men jeg har mine tvil om det kan veie opp for tapt olje. I USA iaf er gassprisen en tur i kjellær'n for øyeblikket... men gassmarkedet er vel ikke like globalisert som oljemarkedet... jeg må lese meg opp litt på gass skjønner jeg...