Industrial Era Capitalism was great for the past and it worked in that context; however, today it is our duty to configure a system for the post-automation society; the NEXT 50, 100, 200 years; bringing to bear the best of our collective intelligence, quantitative rigor, and intuitive forecasting capabilities, moving forward. For more than 50 years America's best and brightest have called for unconditional, LIVABLE #BasicIncome. It's time to join them. Here's why.
“Nearly everybody has been caught by surprise at the speed in which unemployment is increasing, and are groping for a response,” said Nicolas Véron, a fellow at Bruegel, a research center in Brussels that focuses on Europe’s role in the global economy.
Just last week, the new United States director of national intelligence, Dennis C. Blair, told Congress that instability caused by the global economic crisis had become the biggest security threat facing the United States, outpacing terrorism.
Unemployment in Britain is expected to rise to 9.5 percent by the middle of 2010, from 6.3 percent now, according to Peter Dixon, an economist with Commerzbank in London. Germany’s jobless rate could rise to 10.5 percent from 7.8 percent, he added.
Keep in mind, all these numbers are often and regularly intentionally understated by around half (give or takebecause they omit the previously and long-term unemployed. Compare U3 to U6 and note correlations so helpful to understating the case with uncanny symmetry.
On the other hand, some genius at JP Morgan is apparently helping to clarify the picture by exponential overstatement of the bubble collapse.
For starters, it would be called Structural Unemployment; and there is mounting, compelling evidence that this is precisely where we're headed. Not as punishment -- unless we are stupid and inflexible about it -- but as the logical outcome of the overwhelming success of industrialization. Nevertheless, it's also observed in nature that every metamorphosis is an excruciating process; an epiphany of existential crisis.
It’s hard to exaggerate how much economic trouble we’re in. The crisis began with housing, but the implosion of the Bush-era housing bubble has set economic dominoes falling not just in the United States, but around the world. -- Paul Krugman, New York Times, Feb 5, 2009
The BLS U.S. UNEMPLOYMENT PICTURE Right Now
Data extracted on: February 6, 2009 (8:47:17 PM)
SOURCE:Bureau of Labor Statistics Table A-12. Alternative measures of labor underutilization (Percent) Series Id:LNS13327709 Seasonal Adjusted Series title: (seas) Total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of all civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers Labor force status: Aggregated totals unemployed Type of data:Percent Age:16 years and over Percent/rates: Unemployed and mrg attached and pt for econ reas as percent of labor force plus marg attached
As you can see here we have an increase of 1.3% to 13.5% unemployment in December. Many people including myself think this is a better more accurate number for understanding the current unemployment situation.
It is also interesting to note that a loss of 1.3% of jobs from a labor force of about 254 million with slightly more then a 65% participation rate equals job losses of more then 1 million jobs from November to December. Almost double that which was reported.
Interesting also is that even though the scales are somewhat different (U6 at 6% unemployment is good) the U6 numbers represent a 10% increase in the unemployment rate vs just a 5.8% increase in the U3 from Nov to Dec.
Something to think about and keep an eye on going forward.
"In other words, unemployment has insidiously spread to almost one-fifth of the U.S. work force, a number much larger than the single-digit figure commonly bandied about in the press."
So if we're already at 18% to 20% real unemployment, and Davos is even partially correct that things are definitely going to get worse before they get better, how unlikely is 25% unemployment, really?
Not all that unlikely, at all. Friends, in case you haven't yet noticed, this is called a Disruptive Inflection Point. It's time to insist that our leaders shift gears into the Post-Industrial, Post-Information, Post-Scarcity policy mode.
I understand the paradox, it's easy to think that downturns must be because we don't have enough stuff. However, terabyte hard drives are $100. Brand new state-of-the-art netbooks with 1GB RAM and 8GB solid state drives (no moving parts) are $250. We have more than enough information age stuff. In fact, it's a crisis of context amidst runaway accelerating change, a crisis of abundance, and a crisis of resource skews; not a crisis of lack. Perhaps Toffler was simply a little ahead of schedule; perhaps his future shock has finally arrived.
Over the past few years, dishonest politicos failed to mention that Unemployment had gone down primarily due to people leaving the labor pool — not due to a surge of new job creation.
U.S. Labor Force Participation Rate
We also know that as far back as June 2008, Ritholtz pleaded, to no avail, of course:
Here is a modest proposal for all of the poor scribes (like me) who slog through the monthly NFP report: For the sake of more accurately describing the conditions in the labor market, let's begin reporting two measures of Unemployment: U3 as well as U6.
Its been pretty obvious for sometime that the Financial Media are doing a disservice to their readers by only reporting U3, given how dramatically it understates Unemployment. Indeed, consumer sentiment reports are at deep negative levels that only occur when Unemployment is much than what U3 has been saying. It is painfully obvious that U3 does not paint an accurate view of the Employment situation.
Its way past time to fix that.
Here's the experiment I propose: Let's start reporting both, with appropriate descriptions of each. Report U3, add U6, provide monthly and year over year changes. Let the reader see the full picture, via BLS data.
Finally, raise your hand if you think U6 is really, truly accurate. What, no hands? How many think the number is overstated? Really? Nobody? How about understated? That's what I thought. But by how much 10%? 50%? Can we really continue to sit around twiddling our thumbs and placing false hope in this "stimulus" that will essentially only bail out essential infrastructure companies? I think not.
So what do we do to adjust to this Disruptive Inflection Point? We legislate a U.S. Basic Income immediately and make it a model for The World.
The Basic Income solution to Structural Unemployment is nothing new, many of the world's leading intellectuals have seen this coming for a very long time:
One of the explanations behind structural unemployment came from Austrian and French social philosopher, André Gorz. He argues that it could be permanent in modern society. He therefore argues that a basic income could be a solution, and as he explain: "The connection between more and better has been broken; our needs for many products and services are already more than adequately met, and many of our as-yet-unsatisfied needs will be met not by producing more, but by producing differently, producing other things, or even producing less. This is especially true as regards our needs for air, water, space, silence, beauty, time and human contact...
Don't worry, be happy. Just hit control-alt-delete and everything will come right back to normal. Or not:
We don't know what we're getting into.
Now I saw the Swedes did this for their bank rescue a few years ago, and they did it very well; but as was admitted by the central bank governor, they knew what they were buying. They knew they were dodgy properties in Uppsala or somewhere; it was a small country, people knew what the bad debts or likely bad debts might be.
We haven't got a clue, in the big countries! And we don't know where these debts are. I don't think some of the banks fully know their exposure to the subprime market at the moment. I'm not sure they know their exposure to the high levels of business leveraging that are out, particularly private equity; a lot of which have to be repaid quite soon.
They don't know what's going to happen, if unemployment rockets, as it might, how many people are going to be able to pay their credit card bills, and how many people are going to be able to pay their mortgages, and what repossessions will take place. They don't know. And the idea that somehow, the munificent taxpayer, suddenly with their arms open, 'give us your rubbish' and so on; I think, is very dangerous.
We're beginning to get very close to straining the patience of the population and the voter and everybody else in this area. Our grandchildren will be paying some of these debts already incurred. Don't take for granted that this is a technical issue anymore, I've got a feeling its gonna' run a lot hotter and a lot more widely than this, and rather than experts talking about things, people are going to ... get this social unrest is going to start chipping in quite quickly ... and politicians will find themselves scrambling, pragmatically, through whatever circumstances they face.
Which comes back to that danger of protectionism, and trying to get yourself in a Swedish position so at leas you know what you're doing. At the moment, you don't know what you're doing, not with the great big banks of the western world and where their possible toxic assets lie. -- John Monks, GenSec, ETUC
"John Monks, General Secretary, European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC), Brussels, suggested that the real problem is that we still don’t know what we are getting into. “Social unrest is going to start chipping in quickly,” he said."
This is what is being passed off as a transcript? Why isn't the quotation below (at 35:45 in this archive video) in the sorry excuse for an abridged transcript of this event? Where are the comprehensive transcripts?
"We have given $150B to AIG -- one company -- and most of that money has disappeared; now that's one company. We would have put social security on a sound financial basis for a hundred years or more with the money we've been spending on the banks. Giving all the old age people in America security for the next one hundred years versus bailing out a few banks. That's the "bad bank" idea. If you go ahead with that, I think it raises real issues about social values." - Joseph E. Stiglitz
This is the same guy that wrote the following back on December 11, 2007. I'm open to hearing explanations as to why the following comments apparently are not readily archived on any U.S. financial sites, but rather most easily found in the Daily Times of Pakistan.
Global economy is exposed to America’s houses of cards By Joseph E. Stiglitz (Dec, 2007)
There are times when being proven right brings no pleasure. For several years I have argued that a housing bubble that had replaced the stock market bubble of the 1990s was supporting America’s economy. But no bubble can expand forever. With middle-class incomes in the United States stagnating, Americans could not afford ever more expensive homes.
Economists, as opposed to those who make their living gambling on stocks, make no claim to being able to predict when the day of reckoning will come, much less identifying the event that will bring down the house of cards. But the patterns are systematic, with consequences that unfold gradually, and painfully, over time.
There is a macro-story and a micro-story here. The macro-story is simple, but dramatic. Some, observing the crash of the sub-prime mortgage market, say, “Don’t worry, it is only a problem in the real estate sector.” But this overlooks the key role that the housing sector has played in the US economy, with direct investment in real estate and money taken out of houses through refinancing mortgages accounting for two-thirds to three-quarters of growth over the last six years.
Booming home prices gave Americans the confidence, and the financial wherewithal, to spend more than their income. America’s household savings rate was at levels not seen since the Depression, either negative or zero. With higher interest rates depressing housing prices, the game is over. As America moves to, say, a 4 percent savings rate (still small by normal standards), aggregate demand will weaken, and with it, the economy.
The micro-story is more dramatic. Record-low interest rates in 2001, 2002 and 2003 did not lead Americans to invest more - there was already excess capacity. Instead, easy money stimulated the economy by inducing households to refinance their mortgages, and to spend some of their capital.
It is one thing to borrow to make an investment, which strengthens balance sheets; it is another thing to borrow to finance a vacation or a consumption binge. But this is what Alan Greenspan encouraged Americans to do. When normal mortgages did not prime the pump enough, he encouraged them to take out variable-rate mortgages - at a time when interest rates had nowhere to go but up.
Predatory lenders went further, offering negative amortization loans, so the amount owed went up year after year. Now reality has hit: Newspapers report cases of borrowers whose mortgage payments exceed their entire income.
Globalisation implies that America’s mortgage problem has worldwide repercussions. America managed to pass off bad mortgages worth hundreds of billions of dollars to investors (including banks) around the world. They buried the bad mortgages in complicated instruments, buried them so deep that no one knew exactly how badly they were impaired, and no one could calculate how to re-price them quickly. In the face of such uncertainty, markets froze.
Those in financial markets who believe in free markets have temporarily abandoned their faith. While the US Treasury and the International Monetary Fund warned East Asian countries facing financial crises 10 years ago against the risks of bailouts and told them not to raise their interest rates, the US ignored its own lectures about moral hazard effects, bought up billions in mortgages, and lowered interest rates.
But lower short-term interest rates have led to higher medium-term rates, which are more relevant for the mortgage market. It may make sense for central banks (or Fannie Mae, America’s major government-sponsored mortgage company) to buy mortgage-backed securities in order to help provide market liquidity. But those from whom they buy them should provide a guarantee, so the public does not have to pay the price for their bad investment decisions. Equity owners in banks should not get a free ride.
It is the victims of predatory lenders who need government help. With mortgages amounting to 95 percent or more of the value of the house, debt restructuring will not be easy. What is required is to give individuals with excessive indebtedness an expedited way to a fresh start: for example, a special bankruptcy provision allowing them to recover, say, 75 percent of the equity they originally put into the house, with the lenders bearing the cost. There are many lessons for America, and the rest of the world; but among them is the need for greater financial sector regulation, especially better protection against predatory lending, and more transparency.
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