What Would You Do for House Payments of $50?

Anything! You shout with palpitating anticipation of scoring The Deal of the Millennium.

Oh, wait; actually, we'd do anything but move there.

But, but, but ... if CAPITALISM is omnipotent and MARKETS are omniscient, that place should be overwhelmed with buyers right now. And look, look, look, we have CURVES and GRAPHS that *PROVE* that Invisible Make Believe Theoretical Real Equilibrium-Claus is just about to slide down the chimney with toys and make-busy fake jobs for all the good little wage slave boys and girls.

We'll be back to the Normal That Caused All This in no time! Just tap your heals three times and join the rest of us in the BOTTOM 90% of Americans who work two jobs for just enough money to pay rent -- just like our Share Cropper great grandparents -- and repeat:

"There's no place called home. There's no place called home. There's no place called home."

Concerto for Squealing Piggies and Harried Hoarders in “F” Major

Big man, pig man, ha ha, charade you are
You well heeled big wheel, ha ha, charade you are
And when your hand is on your heart …
You're nearly a good laugh
Almost a joker
With your head down in the pig pen
Sayin’ "keep on diggy’in"
Pig stain on your fat chin
What do you hope to find?
When you're down in the pig mine
You're nearly a laugh
You're nearly a laugh
But you're really a cry …

-- Roger Waters, on Animals

We can be confident that we’re making progress when the turrets of the Grand Old Pedantic party are reduced to loading up histrionic emotional pejoratives as their last bastion of defense:

“The assumption that the pursuit of self-interest within the rules and conventions of society will also promote the public interest may be succeeded by a mushy collectivist pseudo-altruism, in which jealousy and envy are given a free ride …”

Right. It’s jealousy and envy, not empirical observation of Unsustainable Resource Skews which are functionally equivalent to massive blood clots lodged throughout the global economic circulatory system. Note to the non-empirically minded: if you clot up 42% of your vital bodily fluids, into any 1% of your body; or, if you clot up nearly 70% of any resource into 5% of any system; that, my friend, is unsustainable unto immediate herky-jerky death.

I don’t know how that makes you feel, emotionally, but any presiding physician’s recorded Time of Death is just another cold, analytical statistic.

After all, if I might mirror an astonishingly articulate miscarriage of fact by our good friends at FT, “There is a risk that empirically dubious but emotionally attractive interpretations, which enshrine wild west, every man for himself, bar room brawl capitalism; and which call for a rapid return to the failed status quo, could gain ground.” Which is merely to say:

First they ignore us, then they laugh at us, then they attack us, then they copy us, then we win. Same as it ever was.

“Victims of your own success, unite! You have nothing to lose but your Unsustainable Resource Skews.”

Back To Normal

So you just want everything to go back to normal? Really?



Click here to view if the Seesmic Embed keeps flaking out on you.

Mad props to the one and only KDFA!

Does 13.3% U3 Unemployment Imply 30% U6 by Year End?

Sure, you can snap back with a quick and quippy Kudlow NO, but to do so without considering the data courtesy of the eponymous Big Picture thinker himself, Barry Ritholtz, might be a bit hasty, to say the least:

Bob Bronson "suggests that you bullishly extrapolate the “less worse” downtick in the Continuing Claims just reported, assuming the trend continues in a straight line without interruption, which is extremely unlikely (see the dotted arrows in chart below). He reaches an Unemployment Rate of 13.0% before yearend: 32 weeks times an average 0.15% increase (declining from 0.30% to 0.00%) added to 8.9% = 13.3%."

It's definitely time to Read More.

Oh, and Happy Mother's Day. Right.

What if 30% and Growing Unemployment is Equilibrium

In February, we asked What if 25% and Growing Real U.S. Unemployment is Equilibrium? Today, given the ongoing trend we see in today's unemployment situation report below and yesterday's comments from collaborators at the National Employment Law Project and UC-Berkeley, we have to upgrade this query to the 30% level.

We're nearly at one out of four laid-off workers has already been out of work for six months. That's Andrew Stettner at the National Employment Law Project. He and his research partners at UC-Berkeley predict the share of long-term unemployed will hit 30 percent by next year.

This, while reporters chirp this morning, "the unemployment situation IMPROVED this month," fixating on a modest Decrease in the Rate of Decrease; whereas U-6 is vastly more reflective of reality, even if it too suffers the usual statistical challenges that result in unavoidable understatement. We can only count that which presents itself for counting. All too often, these numbers are like counting the ants we can see on the surface and calling it the whole anthill. The counting itself is accurate enough, the physical reality ... um, not so much.

Debunking the Devil Formerly Known as Godless Socialism

From an extraordinarily timely NYT article:

Such things are easy for an American to ridicule; you don’t have to be a Fox News commentator to sneer at what, in the midst of a global financial crisis, seems like [OMG!] Socialism Gone Wild.

But there’s more to it.

This was one of the puzzling features of the Netherlands — the Dutch pioneered the multinational corporation and advanced the concept of shares of stock, and last year the country was the third-largest investor in U.S. businesses — and yet it has what I had been led to believe was a vast, socialistic welfare state. How can these [seemingly] polar-opposite value systems coexist?

Thank you for the referral, Georges!

Maladaptive: America's 'Financial Oligarchy'

Goldman and the privateering pirates of Wall Street "believe that this is their economy." FAIL.

Click to listen to today's Fresh Air from WHYY:

In his article "The Quiet Coup" in the May issue of The Atlantic Monthly, former (2007-2008) International Monetary Fund chief economist Simon Johnson says that U.S. suffers from "financial oligarchies."

Unless the U.S. breaks up its financial oligarchy, Johnson -- now a professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management -- warns that America could face a crisis that "could, in fact, be worse than the Great Depression -- because the world is now so much more interconnected and because the banking sector is now so big."

[ SOURCE: NPR ]

A Red-Baiting April Fool's FAIL for 2009

is this forwarded email an April Fool's joke? ;-) i think it must be. there are no links to source data or text of any pending legislation. looks like yet another random smattering of red-baiting euphemisms. granted, i think there are important mistakes speaker pelosi has made, typical of any politician; however, taking the initiative to address the underlying symptoms of unsustainable resource skews in america is not among her failings. surely, specific tactics and methods need rigorous cross checking; however, the strategy of addressing malignancies grown from free radical capitalism is thrust upon all of us, regardless of political persuasion.

for those interested, specific comments follow this subject email.

> --- On Mon, 3/30/09, Some Random Interwebber wrote:
>
> From: Some Random Interwebber
> Subject: Fwd: Fw: Tax on Retirement Income
> To: A Select Group to Probe Responses, Perhaps
> Date: Monday, March 30, 2009, 8:49 PM
>
>
> I am scared for our county.
>
> >
> > Windfall Tax on Retirement Income
> >
> > Adding a tax to your
> > retirement is simply another way of saying to the American
> > people, you're so darn stupid that we're going to
> > keep doing this until we drain every cent from you.
> > That's what the Speaker of the House is saying. Read
> > below...............
> >
> > Nancy Pelosi wants a
> > Windfall Tax on Retirement Income. In other words tax what
> > you have made by investing toward your retirement. This
> > woman is a nut case! You aren't going to believe this.
> >
> > Madam speaker Nancy
> > Pelosi wants to put a Windfall Tax on all stock market
> > profits (including Retirement fund, 401K and Mutual Funds!
> > Alas, it is true - all to help the 12 M illion Illegal
> > Immigrants and other unemployed Minorities!
> >
> > This woman is
> > frightening.
> >
> > She quotes..' We need
> > to work toward the goal of equalizing income, (didn't
> > Marx say something like this?), in our country and at the
> > same time limiting the amount the rich can invest.' (I
> > am not rich, are you?)
> >
> > When asked how these new
> > tax dollars would be spent, she replied:
> > 'We need to raise the
> > standard of living of our poor, unemployed and minorities.
> > For example, we have an estimated 12 million illegal
> > immigrants in our country who need our help along with
> > millions of unemployed minorities. Stock market windfall
> > profits taxes could go a long way to guarantee these people
> > the standard of living they would like to have as
> > 'Americans'.'
> > (Read that quote again and
> > again and let it sink in.) 'Lower your retirement, give
> > it to others who have not worked as you have for it'.
> >
> > Send it on to your
> > friends. I just did!! This lady is out of her mind and she
> > is the speaker of the house
> >

so, let's take a moment to pretend that this is not an April Fool's joke. what if someone were actually 'scared' of the undeniable necessity of correcting the decades of unsustainable hoarding that have become a malignant tumor that is so intimately intertwined within the very sinews of the american economy that, literally, any attempt to extract the tumor creates an existential risk to the entire body? let's have some fun with that thought experiment, shall we?

first, i'm worried that writer says he is scared. unsubstantiated fear is seldom an adaptive emotional response to any crisis; particularly in times of increasing and rapidly accelerating socio-technical changes. i like this old acronym, first heard from a Texas preacher during a 1980's downturn:

F.E.A.R. is all too often False Evidence Appearing Real.

as we see it today, at the core of a disturbingly normalized culture of unmitigated capitalist corruption are massive, unsustainable resource skews in america.

we've used this analogy before, and it's worth repeating. an economy is a circulatory system and just like the body, if 70%+ of the blood (liquid net worth) is pooled in less than 1%, or even 5%, or 10% of the body, that's going to kill the whole body every time. there is no other remedy for failed circulation but healthy circulation. we can pump in plasma while we clear the massive clots, but the clots must be dissolved. our system can not be hooked up to plasma transfusions for the long term; not even the medium term.

our emailer uses the name of marx as nearly synonymous with pure evil or utter market destruction. this is a grossly over-simplified and wildly popular misconception.

marx was often exactly right about many of the ultimate human outcomes of capitalism, though lenin thoroughly proved that violent revolt was the exact WRONG way to correct capitalism's shortcomings.

another popular misconception is that socialism is functionally equivalent to communism. a close corollary assumes that economic models are a zero sum games, each mutually exclusive from the other. naturally, such easy sound bites regularly pepper emotional outcries from financial entertainers such as santelli, cramer, or kudlow precisely because they constitute an EASY button for pushing viewer emotions.

unfortunately, repeated pressing of this EASY button is one of the most intellectually dishonest, populist fear-mongering tactics of the day, and these guys fully know better. perhaps oddly enough, cramer seems to come across as just a little less dishonest than kudlow in this regard. cramer seems more of a pragmatist while kudlow reliably portrays the ideologue.

while there is still far too much of a strong, negative knee-jerk stigma attached to the following words (probably because so few have studied the actual ideas), Free Market Socialism maintains and even improves upon the best of vibrant Free Markets -- which are uncompromisingly required to create Stuff, Services, and Wealth -- while simultaneously acknowledging that every part of the economic body is vital to that creative process, right down to a seemingly insignificant tiny baby toe.

at a bare minimum, america needs some form of universal healthcare and a universal basic income just in order to continue the adaptive evolution of our wonderful american experiment. these two requirements are not ideologically based 'demands' rather, they are functional requirements, essentially equivalent to Henry Ford's 'welfare capitalism' innovation (which many considered communistic): the 8 hour, $5 day.

today, we are again hearing similar philosophical opposition to today's required economic adaptations. this, in spite of the empirical historical reality that had Ford's 8 hour, $5/day "socialistic spreading of the wealth" not been abandoned, it may have continued to 'stimulate the economy' at the edges, where all stimulus is undeniably most effective in spurring consumption.

meanwhile, here on the cusp of Depression 2.0, we face additional and new complex challenges, on top of those created by the utter moral collapse of wild west renegade capitalism. from VC's and (former) captains of industry, to mentally ill veterans on the street, to the burgeoning 25% structurally unemployed (due to the *success* of early stage industrial capitalism), to an ever-growing and vibrant demographic of citizen scholars; each and every one of us is more globally interdependent than ever. the era of Shared Fate is indeed upon us. we're all in this together.

at the very tip of socioeconomic evolution, dramatic morphological change is happening right before our very eyes.

now is the time for the most experienced, tried, and true of america to participate in and shape these changes. obviously, evolutionary change can never be put back into the bottle; we can choose to adapt and thrive, be sidelined, or become ... as our previous president might have said, "extinctified."