Bloomberg's Best: Michael Feroli links the recovery to housing

March 23 (Bloomberg) -- Michael Feroli, is the chief U.S. economist at JPMorgan Securities LLC, and is one of the most accurate US economic forecasters. He has earned a "Bloomberg's Best" rating.

He talks about the grim outlook for the U.S. housing market. Purchases of new U.S. homes unexpectedly declined in February to the slowest pace on record and prices dropped to the lowest level since December 2003.

Home prices are expected to decline until mid-year 2012.

Feroli speaks with Mark Crumpton on Bloomberg Television's "Bottom Line."

Rightardia agrees with Feroli. Florida is a good example of what he is talking about with nearly one in five homes vacant.

Another government incentive for new home buyers is needed, something the stingy and stinky 212th Congress is unlikely to approve.

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Bloomberg: Douglas Holtz-Eakin supports raising the nation's debt ceiling

March 9 (Bloomberg) -- Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum and a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, talks about the need for congress to raise the nation's debt ceiling.

Holtz-Eakin was John McCain's economic adviser in the 2008 presidential campaign. 

Holtz-Eakin, speaking with Erik Schatzker on Bloomberg Television's "InsideTrack," also discusses fiscal policy. (

Source: Bloomberg


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NYT: How to End the Great Recession

By ROBERT B. REICH Published: September 2, 2010

THIS promises to be the worst Labor Day in the memory of most Americans. Organized labor is down to about 7 percent of the private work force. Members of non-organized labor — most of the rest of us — are unemployed, underemployed or underwater. The Labor Department reported on Friday that just 67,000 new private-sector jobs were created in August, while at least 125,000 are needed to keep up with the growth of the potential work force.

The national economy isn’t escaping the gravitational pull of the Great Recession. None of the standard booster rockets are working: near-zero short-term interest rates from the Fed, almost record-low borrowing costs in the bond market, a giant stimulus package and tax credits for small businesses that hire the long-term unemployed have all failed to do enough.

That’s because the real problem has to do with the structure of the economy, not the business cycle. . .But consumers no longer have the purchasing power to buy the goods and services they produce as workers; for some time now, their means haven’t kept up with what the growing economy could and should have been able to provide them.

This crisis began decades ago when a new wave of technology — things like satellite communications, container ships, computers and eventually the Internet — made it cheaper for American employers to use low-wage labor abroad or labor-replacing software here at home than to continue paying the typical worker a middle-class wage. Even though the American economy kept growing, hourly wages flattened. The median male worker earns less today, adjusted for inflation, than he did 30 years ago.

But for years American families kept spending as if their incomes were keeping pace with overall economic growth. And their spending fueled continued growth. How did families manage this trick? First, women streamed into the paid work force. By the late 1990s, more than 60 percent of mothers with young children worked outside the home (in 1966, only 24 percent did).


Second, everyone put in more hours. What families didn’t receive in wage increases they made up for in work increases. By the mid-2000s, the typical male worker was putting in roughly 100 hours more each year than two decades before, and the typical female worker about 200 hours more.

When American families couldn’t squeeze any more income out of these two coping mechanisms, they embarked on a third: going ever deeper into debt. This seemed painless — as long as home prices were soaring. From 2002 to 2007, American households extracted $2.3 trillion from their homes.

Eventually, of course, the debt bubble burst . . . Even if nearly everyone was employed, the vast middle class still wouldn’t have enough money to buy what the economy is capable of producing.

Where have all the economic gains gone? Mostly to the top. The economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty examined tax returns from 1913 to 2008. They discovered an interesting pattern. In the late 1970s, the richest 1 percent of American families took in about 9 percent of the nation’s total income; by 2007, the top 1 percent took in 23.5 percent of total income.

"Peter Schiff was right" and Art Laffer was wrong

Arthur Laffer was an economist during the Reagan era. Dr. Laffer’s economic influence in triggered a world-wide tax-cutting movement in the 1980s have earned him the distinction in many publications as "The Father of Supply-Side Economics." Laffer denied that the US economy was listing in 2006 and made a bet with Peter Schiff that the Schiff was was wrong about the financial storm that was brewing. Laffer has yet to pay off the bet.

Peter Schiff is one of the few people to accurately predict the financial crisis of 2007–2010, detailing in great depth its many specific facets such as the housing bubble and resulting subprime mortgage crisis, the automotive industry crisis and the banking and financial market collapse.


Much of his notoriety for the accurate predictions came from a video entitled "Peter Schiff was right" that was uploaded to the popular video sharing site YouTube in late 2008 and again in 2009, and subsequently went viral and garnered hundreds of thousands of views over the next few months.

The video consists of a compilation of clips of his many appearances on various financial news programs from networks including CNBC, Fox News, MSNBC and Bloomberg, most of which took place from 2005-2007.

In the segments Schiff explains specifically the fundamental problems he saw with the United States economy and the results they would ultimately lead to. In many cases the conversations led to debates in which other talking heads openly laughed at Schiff's assessments, stating they had no idea what he was talking about.

Schiff's constant warnings of a coming economic collapse earned him the moniker "Dr. Doom."

Schiif has compared former President George W. Bush to Herbert Hoover and President Barack Obama to FDR. Hoover was president when the Great Depression started. FDR has been credit for ending the Great Depression and leading the US during World War 2 to victory.


source: Wikipedia


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Zogby Interactive: U.S. Adults Struggle To Keep Up With Economic Changes

Released: August 27, 2009



 








UTICA, New York - Large numbers of U.S. adults can't keep up with economic changes and have seen their finances and quality of life decline since the start of the recession that started in 2008.

• 44% said the economy is changing faster than they are able to change their habits. 

• Only 12% are better off now than they were at the start of the recession. 
  

• 42% report that their quality of life has declined over that same period, and only 7% say it has improved. The rest, 51%, have had no change or are not sure.

Those conclusions are drawn from a Zogby Interactive survey of 41,175 adults conducted from July 2-27, 2009. The margin of error is +/- 0.5%.

Household income is the most consistent difference on all three questions. For example, 41% of those in households making $25,000 or less say they can't keep up. A plurality of all adults making $75,000 or more says they are keeping up.

See the complete article at http://www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews.cfm?ID=1736


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