Economics by Chris
A simple economics blog.
It will be observed that this blog can veer left and right day by day.
If all you want is confirmation of your existing views,
it is recommended that you go elsewhere.
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"The Germans will pay up, accept eurobonds, and mobilise enormous firepower. But this won’t save monetary union in the end because it is not a debt crisis. It is a currency crisis. The weaker states are uncompetitive and you cannot force them to deflate their way back to competitiveness by cutting wages 30pc. The EU elites won’t admit it, but the euro experiment is over"
David Heathcoat-Amory, former UK Europe minister, 17/11/2011
(Source: globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com)
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Prediction from Greg Sargent
The ultra wealthy will spend a whole lot of undisclosed money on a whole lot of ads filled with a whole lot of lies designed to dupe a whole lot of struggling Americans into believing that their number one problem in life is a rag-tag band of nose-ringed hippies who somehow managed to compel our media to tentatively begin a discussion about this, and the very modest actions we should take to begin to change it.
Critics of Occupy Wall Street have a transparent objective: They want to persuade blue collar whites and ordinary middle class Americans to turn on the movement for cultural reasons — because its optics offend these voters’ cultural instincts — even if they broadly agree with its general principles and critique of what’s gone wrong.
This dovetails with a quote from John Cole I recently posted here (to much rending of garments and clutching of pearls from the very people he’s talking about):
“The greatest hoax of the last couple of decades has been the ability of the right wing to co-opt members of the struggling lower middle class and lower class and pretend they speak for them while enacting policies that enable the super-rich. They’ve used wedge issues like gay marriage and abortion and the baby Jeebus to alienate folks from their own economic interests, feeding them a steady diet of hatred of minorites, the educated, science, and, well, reality to create a voting block of people so guided by hatred of the ‘other’ that they would crawl over broken glass to cut their nose off to spite their face.”
I posted that quote from Cole on my G+, and the self-identified conservatives are livid about it. I don’t mean this as an attack on self-identified conservatives at all. I quote it because it breaks my heart.
And not that it matters, but the same thing can largely be said of Democrats since the election of 2000. I strongly believe that if Obama and the Democrats had behaved like the populists they claimed to be when they had majorities in both houses of congress, and actually done something to hold these Wall Street criminals accountable, #OWS wouldn’t be necessary.
Now we just have to hope that the #OWS protests capture enough attention for long enough to force the Democrats (because you can be damn sure it won’t be the GOP) to enact laws and policies that actually address and correct the things we’ve all been begging them to listen to for about ten years.
This is how a movement gets started, and it doesn’t end quickly or cleanly.
And it isn’t the job of the protesters to write the damn laws; that’s the job of the Congress, who need to work for The People instead of The Lobbyists.
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This just doesn’t happen anymore. And people wonder why we’re in a debt crisis?
(Source: listbutnotleast, via bitterrootvalley)
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silent rage 1.. :) http://i.imgur.com/2Jbqx.png
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“Wallstreet” Type People
Flier that was dropped from a financial office building in Chicago on #OccupyChicago morons. This was sent to me by a trusted source.
Full Transcript:
“We are Wall Street. It’s our job to make money. Whether it’s a commodity, stock, bond, or some hypothetical piece of fake paper, it doesn’t matter. We would trade baseball cards if it were profitable. I didn’t hear America complaining when the market was roaring to 14,000 and everyone’s 401k doubled every 3 years. Just like gambling, its not a problem until you lose. I’ve never heard of anyone going to Gamblers Anonymous because they won too much in Vegas.
Well now the market crapped out, & even though it has come back somewhat, the government and the average Joes are still looking for a scapegoat. God knows there has to be one for everything. Well, here we are.
Go ahead and continue to take us down, but you’re only going to hurt yourselves. What’s going to happen when we can’t find jobs on the Street anymore? Guess what: We’re going to take yours. We get up at 5am & work till 10pm or later. We’re used to not getting up to pee when we have a position. We don’t take an hour or more for a lunch break. We don’t demand a union. We don’t retire at 50 with a pension. We eat what we kill, and when the only thing left to eat is on your dinner plates, we’ll eat that.
For years teachers and other unionized labor have had us fooled. We were too busy working to notice. Do you really think that we are incapable of teaching 3rd graders and doing landscaping? We’re going to take your cushy jobs with tenure and 4 months off a year and whine just like you that we are so-o-o-o underpaid for building the youth of America. Say goodbye to your overtime and double time and a half. I’ll be hitting grounders to the high school baseball team for $5k extra a summer, thank you very much.
So now that we’re going to be making $85k a year without upside, Joe Mainstreet is going to have his revenge, right? Wrong! Guess what: we’re going to stop buying the new 80k car, we aren’t going to leave the 35 percent tip at our business dinners anymore. No more free rides on our backs. We’re going to landscape our own back yards, wash our cars with a garden hose in our driveways. Our money was your money. You spent it. When our money dries up, so does yours.
The difference is, you lived off of it, we rejoiced in it. The Obama administration and the Democratic National Committee might get their way and knock us off the top of the pyramid, but it’s really going to hurt like hell for them when our fat asses land directly on the middle class of America and knock them to the bottom.
We aren’t dinosaurs. We are smarter and more vicious than that, and we are going to survive. The question is, now that Obama & his administration are making Joe Mainstreet our food supply…will he? and will they?”
People on Wallstreet are there because they are greedier and more driven than ordinary people. They work longer and think harder, and will do anything to get success.
They are not in finance for a love of wise and prudent long term allocation of capital, but because its where one can make a lot of money very quickly. They don’t care about morality or the health of the nation or how Joe Sixpack pays for his trailer.
I always wanted to work in the City of London myself, but now I know I would never do it. I am not interested in being a vacuous crook, no matter how high the remuneration.
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"Occupy Wall Street continues to prove two things: liberals don’t know shit about economics and we live in a police state."
Adam Kokesh (via valeriyaaviva)
(via freebroccoli)
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"…earlier today China explicitly warned that it does not want to be seen as the dumb money. Sorry China, if you look around the table and you don’t see the dumb money, you are it:"
Tyler Durden, zerohedge.com
(Source: zerohedge.com)
- "We all know how to save the euro, it’s just no one knows how to get re-elected once we have"
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$1 billion stacked up
“A tightly-packed stack of new $1,000 bills totaling $1 billion would be 63 miles high.”
I’ve seen this, or something similar, going round the internet a lot lately. Its wrong.
First of all, the $100 dollar bill is the highest denomination bill printed, at least by the US Federal Reserve.
Correction:Looks like there actually were $1000 bills printed, but only in small quantities in 1928 and in the 1930s.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_denominations_of_United_States_currency
However, due to concern about counterfeiting and laundering, the $100 bill is the largest bill printed today.
Secondly, there would be 1,000,000 $1000 notes in $1 billion.
Keeping it metric we find that 63 miles is 101.4 kilometres.
1,000,000 notes ÷ 101.4 kilometers = 9861 notes per kilometer, or one note per 10 centimetres.
10 centimetres is about 4 inches.
According to trivia-library.com, new $1 Federal Reserve notes stack 233 to an inch. There are 3,991,680 inches in 63 miles. So if a $1000 note was the same thickness as a $1 note you would have $932 billion in your 63 mile high stack.
So I’m guessing the quote originally involved a trillion dollars, but got changed somewhere along the line (possibly in translation to French, which uses the word billion to refer to a trillion (1,000,000,000,000)). Its a big lingual problem, as a trillion is a thousand times a billion, not exactly a rounding error.
If the original quote was correct and referred to trillions, not billions, $1 billion in $1000 bills should be 101.4km ÷ 1000 = 101.4 metres high. Not even a mile, but probably still enough for a decent weekend in Dallas. - http://sites.google.com/site/artmarcovici/disclaimers
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A billion dollars in $100 notes.
