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Saturday, May 8, 2010
The Global Economic Crisis, The Great Depression of the XXI Century
In all major regions of the world, the economic recession is deep-seated, resulting in mass unemployment, the collapse of state social programs and the impoverishment of millions of people. The economic crisis is accompanied by a worldwide process of militarization, a "war without borders" led by the United States of America and its NATO allies. The conduct of the Pentagon’s "long war" is intimately related to the restructuring of the global economy.
We are not dealing with a narrowly defined economic crisis or recession. The global financial architecture sustains strategic and national security objectives. In turn, the U.S.-NATO military agenda serves to endorse a powerful business elite which relentlessly overshadows and undermines the functions of civilian government. (more)
US Unemployment Now 9.9%
The first positive, if dubious, print on employment in 2½ years came in from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) this morning. The highlights…
- 290,000 jobs added last month -- 231,000 of them in the private sector
- U-3 unemployment rose from 9.7% to 9.9%
- The U-6 figure, including the underemployed, rose from 16.9% to 17.1%
- The average workweek grew from 34.0 hours to 34.1
So why the rise in the unemployment rate?
The Labor Department games that number to exclude “discouraged workers” who’ve given up looking for work. Even U-6 excludes discouraged workers who gave up more than a year ago. As some of those people regain confidence and begin looking for work again, the labor pool gets deeper.
Oh, irony… the quants’ statistical sleight of hand is coming back to bite them, yet again.
Still, there are a number of positive take-aways…
- Census hiring accounts for only one in five of the new jobs added last month
- Even accounting for the Census, we’ve added substantially more jobs than the 100,000 needed just to keep pace with population growth. That hasn’t happened since November 2007
Of course, that’s assuming the numbers haven’t been gamed in other ways. Heh. We’ll find out next month when the revision gets filed away in some dusty backroom of 2 Massachusetts Ave. NE in Washington. Agora Financial
Flight to Safety
So who are the beneficiaries when stocks perform the sort of high-diving act they did yesterday? Just what you’d expect…
Remember all that talk about the 10-year Treasury yield breaching 4%? That was so last month. This morning, the benchmark note sports a yield of 3.43%. A 30-year fixed mortgage can be had for almost 5% again.
The dollar index, for its part, is just a breath away from 85, near Panic of ’08 highs.
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