by Damozel | With demand for US goods and services disappearing, "workers who produce them are losing their jobs by the tens of thousands." (NYT) Read, and be afraid:
Layoffs have arrived in force, like a wrenching second act in the unfolding crisis. In just the last two weeks, the list of companies announcing their intention to cut workers has read like a Who’s Who of corporate America: Merck, Yahoo, General Electric, Xerox, Pratt & Whitney, Goldman Sachs, Whirlpool, Bank of America, Alcoa, Coca-Cola, the Detroit automakers and nearly all the airlines.
When October’s job losses are announced on Nov. 7, three days after the presidential election, many economists expect the number to exceed 200,000. The current unemployment rate of 6.1 percent is likely to rise, perhaps significantly.
“My view is that it will be near 8 or 8.5 percent by the end of next year,” said Nigel Gault, chief domestic economist at Global Insight, offering a forecast others share. That would be the highest unemployment rate since the deep recession of the early 1980s....
In September alone, 2,269 employers each laid off 50 people or more, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported, up sharply from the spring and summer months, and the highest number since September 2001, when the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks coincided with a recession to spook employers. A spike in 2005 was related to Hurricane Katrina.
The financial services industry has been cutting jobs since last summer, when the credit crisis took hold. By some estimates, 300,000 jobs will disappear from banks, mutual fund groups, hedge funds and other financial services companies before the crisis subsides — 35,000 of them in New York.
Goldman Sachs alone, among the best performers on Wall Street, has announced plans to cut 10 percent of its work force, which stood at 32,594 at the end of last month.
The current unemployment rate, 6.1 percent — up more than a percentage point since April — is still relatively mild by post-World War II standards. The highest level since the Great Depression, 10.8 percent, came in November and December of 1982 as the economy was shaking off a severe recession.
The unemployment rate hit 9 percent during the mid-1970s recession, and 7.8 percent in the 1990-1991 downturn. The next peak, 6.3 percent, occurred in June 2003, during a long jobless recovery in the aftermath of the 2001 recession. (NYT)
The recession, says Brad DeLong, "is gathering speed."
Nobel winning economist Paul Krugman (yep---we're all going to say it every time; so get used to it) saw the handwriting on the wall as it was being written. Naturally, nobody listened. Has the economic meltdown changed everything?
As someone who’s spent a lot of time arguing against conservative economic dogma, I’d like to believe that the bad news convinced many Americans, once and for all, that the right’s economic ideas are wrong and progressive ideas are right. And there’s certainly something to that. These days, with even Alan Greenspan admitting that he was wrong to believe that the financial industry could regulate itself, Reaganesque rhetoric about the magic of the marketplace and the evils of government intervention sounds ridiculous.
"Let us now praise Alan Greenspan," says Krugman, "At least he’s admitting that he got something wrong. That’s actually rare these days, especially among the people Greenspan associates with."
Yes, it's true---at this stage, even Alan Greenspan no longer believes as he once did in the "free market."
"[O]n Thursday, almost three years after stepping down as chairman of the Federal Reserve, a humbled Mr. Greenspan admitted that he had put too much faith in the self-correcting power of free markets and had failed to anticipate the self-destructive power of wanton mortgage lending.
'Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders' equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief,' he told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. (NYT)
Krugman argues that one effect of the crisis should be to force American culture to grow up. We do seem to have been in a state of arrested development during my lifetime.
He thinks people have seen that it is time to get serious and that Obama's ascendancy reflects this. (Brad DeLong, on the other hand, thinks our useless media makes any sustained seriousness unlikely.)
Margaret Atwood, one of my top five contemporary novelists, has apparently written a book called Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth which I shall certainly read.
In the meantime, she's written a fascinating piece at The New York Times. Atwood argues that the credit crisis and its effects are symptomatic of a deeper crisis----a moral one. Even more than Krugman she thinks we need to look at the deeper significance of our current crisis.
[W]e’re deluding ourselves if we assume that we can recover from the crisis of 2008 so quickly and easily simply by watching the Dow creep upward. The wounds go deeper than that. To heal them, we must repair the broken moral balance that let this chaos loose.
Debt — who owes what to whom, or to what, and how that debt gets paid — is a subject much larger than money. It has to do with our basic sense of fairness, a sense that is embedded in all of our exchanges with our fellow human beings.
But at some point we stopped seeing debt as a simple personal relationship. The human factor became diminished....In Aramaic, the language that Jesus himself spoke, the word for “debt” and the word for “sin” are the same. And although many people assume that “debts” in these contexts refer to spiritual debts or trespasses, debts are also considered sins. If you don’t pay back what’s owed, you cause harm to others. (NYT)
Atwood, like Krugman, argues for a readjustment in our priorities--while recognizing that this can only happen after the broken system is repaired.
As for what will happen to us next, I have no safe answers. If fair regulations are established and credibility is restored, people will stop walking around in a daze, roll up their sleeves and start picking up the pieces. Things unconnected with money will be valued more — friends, family, a walk in the woods. “I” will be spoken less, “we” will return, as people recognize that there is such a thing as the common good.
On the other hand, if fair regulations are not established and rebuilding seems impossible, we could have social unrest on a scale we haven’t seen for years.
Is there any bright side to this? Perhaps we’ll have some breathing room — a chance to re-evaluate our goals and to take stock of our relationship to the living planet from which we derive all our nourishment, and without which debt finally won’t matter. (NYT).
Is there any bright side anywhere? I suppose if it creates real change in the world's and America's attitude about the importance of perpetual consumption there might be.
Memeorandum has more blogger reactions here.
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Mortgage lending played a big part in our current economic crisis, which has been a significant topic that is disturbing the standards and values of America. Conversely, this problem does not target the American people alone, but has navigated to other parts of the world. The International Herald Tribune explicates the worldwide credit crunch that is happening in Europe as well. Small businesses like Dominique Boudier’s printing company, outside of Paris, generally depend upon credit with its suppliers in order to maintain the functioning of the company, and her creditors are cutting back their offerings by half. This was approved by the suppliers’ credit insurance companies. Like many others, Boudier’s business needs added cash flow to make up for their major fallbacks, considering a typical 60-day lag time in which clients pay. The future of her company appears shackled without the assistance of her own bank. Her bank, like many other banks across Europe, began to put their money to sleep instead of investing it back into other banks or the economy in general. When the banks began to fall short and liquidity was disrupted, the credit began to dry up. More or less, the European Central Bank is quite similar to America’s Federal Reserve Bank. They utilize a method which is based on the ability to create as much fiat money as necessary. Fiat-money currency, which in fact is credit money, loses value once the government refuses to further guarantee its value. We see this in high inflation rates as the world’s credit crumble. People believe stronger private banking systems that make responsible decisions can solve this problem. Until then, payday advance loans will surely be manageably obtainable for consumers who need immediate short-term help and can no longer depend on a faltering central banking system.
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Posted by: Payday Loan Advocate | October 27, 2008 at 06:08 AM
Mortgage lending played a big part in our current economic crisis, which has been a significant topic that is disturbing the standards and values of America. Conversely, this problem does not target the American people alone, but has navigated to other parts of the world. The International Herald Tribune explicates the worldwide credit crunch that is happening in Europe as well. Small businesses like Dominique Boudier’s printing company, outside of Paris, generally depend upon credit with its suppliers in order to maintain the functioning of the company, and her creditors are cutting back their offerings by half. This was approved by the suppliers’ credit insurance companies. Like many others, Boudier’s business needs added cash flow to make up for their major fallbacks, considering a typical 60-day lag time in which clients pay. The future of her company appears shackled without the assistance of her own bank. Her bank, like many other banks across Europe, began to put their money to sleep instead of investing it back into other banks or the economy in general. When the banks began to fall short and liquidity was disrupted, the credit began to dry up. More or less, the European Central Bank is quite similar to America’s Federal Reserve Bank. They utilize a method which is based on the ability to create as much fiat money as necessary. Fiat-money currency, which in fact is credit money, loses value once the government refuses to further guarantee its value. We see this in high inflation rates as the world’s credit crumble. People believe stronger private banking systems that make responsible decisions can solve this problem. Until then, payday advance loans will surely be manageably obtainable for consumers who need immediate short-term help and can no longer depend on a faltering central banking system.
Post Courtesy of Personal Money Store
Professional Blogging Team
Feed Back: 1-866-641-3406
Home: http://personalmoneystore.com/NoFaxPaydayLoans.html
Blog: http://personalmoneystore.com/moneyblog/
Posted by: Payday Loan Advocate | October 27, 2008 at 06:09 AM