Category Archives: Front Page

Who is going to save the real economy?

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The amount of money that has been promised to back stop the financial system is unreal. The logic behind these sums is that the fear engulfing the financial system was unwarranted. But now data has come out showing that the real economy started cliff diving before the financial system started to unravel.

From the New York Times….

The retail sales report, released by the Commerce Department, showed that automobile sales took the biggest hit last month, falling about 4 percent. A broad range of products sat unsold in stores as well, including furniture, electronics, and clothing. At department stores, sales fell 1.5 percent.

“There is almost nothing positive to say about these figures,” Rob Carnell, an economist at ING Bank, wrote in a note.

Even a sharp drop in gasoline prices did not lure Americans back to the mall. A measure of inflation at the producer level, the Producer Price Index, fell 0.4 percent in September as energy prices fell on the back of cheaper oil.

But prices for many other products stayed high; outside of energy products, businesses and wholesalers paid 0.4 percent more for finished goods in September than in August, according to the Labor Department.

In the last year, producer prices are up 8.7 percent, a big jump and a sign of faster inflation. Even outside of gasoline, prices are up 4 percent for the year.

A measure of conditions in the manufacturing industry, released by the Fed on Wednesday, plunged to the lowest level since the survey began in 1991. The Empire State survey dropped to minus 24.6 as demand for factory orders plummeted in October. The reading was at minus 7.4 in September.

The Stories Not Told….

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From Abu Muqawama…..

Why was this story not reported from Afghanistan? Because it is well understood by the journalists who cover Afghanistan that reporting on the connection between Karzai and the drug trade is a good way to get you (the Western journalist) thrown out of the country and all your local staff either killed or thrown in prison. For quite some time now, major Western news sources have been struggling to figure out some way to both report the story while at the same time ensuring the safety of their local staffs. (Talk about ethical dilemmas…) The New York Times was the first to find the solution by filing a report that drew primarily upon sources within the DEA and the Department of State but not to a significant degree upon the reporting of its staff in Afghanistan. (Carlotta Gall only ‘contributed reporting’ from Kabul. For her part, she wins Abu Muqawama’s Team Player award for letting this story be filed under James Risen’s byline.)

This story got told because the people at New York Times really wanted it told. But a lot of stories are not told for very reasons that New York Times played games with its bylines. The threat of violence and prospect of losing access to key players has kept a lot of stories from the light of day for a long time.

Agreed

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From Eurek Alert…..

“We found that vitamin D insufficiency may have a unique association with Parkinson’s, which is intriguing and warrants further investigation,” Evatt says.

I would think that vitamin D insufficiency would be caused by the affects of Parkinson’s itself. If you have Parkinson’s you probably don’t go outside as much for one thing. But if that was true why don’t Alzheimer’s patients demonstrate a similar high level of vitamin D insufficiency?

Overall this study will probably lead to nowhere. The study is small enough that the statistics probably do not mean anything. But it is still worth looking into.

Essay of the Week: 10/12/08-10/18/08

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All too often intellectuals, whether they are believers or skeptics, treat the Bible as some kind of engineering document. They argue over the Bible as if it were a blue print for building a plane and every particular must be examined in order to determine if the plane will fly. The whole question of the Bible becomes a question of utility with the believer arguing that it is useful and the skeptic arguing that it has no use.

Rarely will you see the Bible treated as a work of art in which the intentions behind it matter as much as the particulars. Rarely will anyone ask the question “what effect is the Bible trying to achieve?”

Like all manmade distinctions, this distinction that we are trying to make is a little bit artificial. You cannot really divide people’s approaches to the Bible so neatly. Yet if you read G. K. Chesterton’s Introduction To The Book of Job perhaps you will understand what we are trying to say.

One might not agree with everything that G. K. says. But as an artist himself, he knew something about how to approach a work of art.

States That Are In Trouble

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From Business Week…..

California is going to Washington, D.C., to ask for $7 billion to cover its budget shortfall. Otherwise it won’t be able to pay for its teachers, cops, firemen, and other essential services. Unfortunately, California won’t be alone. A number of other states are experiencing a huge dive in tax revenue and could be going cap in hand to Uncle Sam alarmingly soon. How bad could it get? The potential cost for all the 31 states facing both major and minor shortfalls could be as much as $53.4 billion.

The data is based on a study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities released at the end of September and shows the states that have seen the biggest shortfalls in tax revenue in their fiscal 2009 budgets.

Read the article to see a list of the states that are in trouble. As bad as this list seems, I am pretty sure that it is already out of date. New York’s short fall in particular looks too small considering the melt down of the stock market and how much Wall Street impacts New York’s budget.

Europe's real problem

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From Vox….

For the fifth year in a row, emigration from the Netherlands exceeded immigration last year, reaching 123,000 emigrants, which amounts to 7.5 emigrants per 1000 inhabitants. Dutch media has repeatedly reported this phenomenon because it caught demographic forecasters by surprise. The last emigration wave occurred fifty years ago, and at present the Netherlands is the only Western European country experiencing net emigration, although similar trends are visible in the UK (Salt and Rees, 2006) and to lesser extent in Germany.

According to Baron Bodissey, a comparable outflow in the US would be 2.3 million people leaving the country. Most of these emigrants are moving to other places in Europe so some might argue that this not really a problem for Europe as a whole. But this attitude overlooks the real problem.

There seems a growing trend in Europe of the professional classes feeling little attachment to their native soil. Thus, they are more and more willing to uproot and go to where they think they can get a better deal. In the long run this is going to make it even harder to sustain Europe’s social model. It is hard to tax the better off to support the less well off if better off are willing to leave.

Today gives a whole new meaning to the word wild

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From AP….

Wall Street capped its worst week ever with a wild session Friday that saw the Dow Jones industrials rocket within a 1,000 point range before closing with a relatively mild loss and the Nasdaq composite index actually end with a modest advance. Investors were still agonizing over frozen credit markets, but seven days of massive losses made many stocks tempting for traders looking for bargains.

That is a whole year’s worth of price changes in one day.