FRBC: Normal Recovery, Elevated Unemployment Levels

This item was surfaced by My6Sense Digital Intuition, and shared by Pixelpipe on Android. The subject line was properly posted, but this link to the actual post didn't make it through. This entire entry is a post-edit to that mobile curation attempt. :-)

More Responsibility. Less Pay. More Risk. Less Reward.

"A statistical slaughterhouse of historic proportion. 30 percent of jobless people 55 or older have been out of work for a year or longer, a higher rate than any other age group; some may never find another job." Amplify’d from www.mercurynews.com

Americans in their 50s especially hard-hit by recession

In this bloody free-for-all of a recession, Americans in their 50s are really taking it hard on the chin.

"Is it because we're in our 50s?'' Kahn wonders. "What else could it be? Someone on the other end is looking at our résumés, doing the math and thinking, this woman's a fuddy-duddy. I feel like we've been put out to pasture. It's like we're reaching retirement age, but we're not ready for retirement."

Peek inside this statistical slaughterhouse: As older Americans headed for retirement, the recession cut into their plans, sending retirement account balances down 32 percent from a peak of $8.7 trillion in September 2007 to $5.9 trillion in March 2009, according to AARP. As the recession kicked in, more than one of every four foreclosures and delinquencies involved Americans age 50 and older, this on top of the decade's already sharp increase in bankruptcy filings for the 55-and-above set.

Some may never find another job: A Pew Economic Policy Group report in April said nearly 30 percent of jobless people 55 or older have been out of work for a year or longer, a higher rate than any other age group.

It is a demographic squeeze play of historic proportion, with a jobless rate not seen since the Great Depression.

In a sign of the angst gripping many who see their retirement fading into the future, a poll this year of people ages 44 to 75 found that more than three in five fear depleting their assets more than they fear dying.

"Typically," he says, "they've been downsized out of a job or else put into another position with more responsibility for less pay, and that puts even more stress on their lives, financially and emotionally."

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How Social Capitalism Can Hedge Market Capitalism

Daniel Robles, The Ingenesist Project:

Today, we have one of the most extraordinary opportunities in human history playing out before our eyes. Social Capitalism is no longer merely a band-aid for an amoral Market Capitalism, it is a new form of Capitalism in it’s own right. In the age of social media, many entrepreneurs no longer allocate land, labor, and financial capital as a primary means of production. Rather, they deploy social capital, creative capital, and intellectual capital to the production of a vast amount of “value” that is stored and exchanged in communities.

A new financial instrument is described which can be capitalized and securitized to form the basis of a fungible social currency to hedge the dollar. The net result could create a condition where Wall Street priorities are subservient to social priorities rather than social priorities being subservient to Wall Street priorities.

Percentage of U.S. Adults at Work is Lower Now, Than Six Months Ago

NPR Marketplace Commentator David Frum: Old assumptions equal a stagnant economy:

Supposedly, the recession ended last summer. Yet the percentage of adult Americans at work is lower now than it was six months ago. Businesses continue to shed jobs faster than they create them.

The risk that employment will decline further as the Obama Administration's fiscal stimulus ends is very real. Consumers are not spending, because they feel poor -- and getting poorer. They borrowed a lot of money in the 1990s and 2000s. Their equity in their homes has shrunk or disappeared.

These wretched figures should force us to rethink old assumptions.

The 2007-2008 economic collapse was a really, really big calamity. Yet, we have not taken that calamity's big lessons. Yes, we've tightened bank regulation a little. It will be tougher in the future for banks to bet 30 times their capital that uncredit-worthy borrowers will somehow find the money to repay huge loans. But the idea that home ownership is for everybody? That capital gains from housing will compensate ordinary Americans for stagnant wages? That we can raise living standards while importing a million low-wage workers every year?

On those fundamentals, Albert Einstein's old lament still holds: Everything has changed -- except our thinking.

Plutonomy: A Hate Story

Worth the re-run after tonight's re-watch of Capitalism: A Love Story.
Plutonomy

As Goes Walmart ...

... so goes America.

August 17, 2010 - The New Normal
U.S. Profits UP & UP ; Sales & Jobs DOWN & DOWN

Hello? Are we reaching?

Attacking Social Security vs Adaptive Social Security

Attacking Social Security:

"It’s a lot easier to imagine working until you’re 70 if you have a comfortable office job than if you’re engaged in manual labor. America is becoming an increasingly unequal society — and the growing disparities extend to matters of life and death. Life expectancy at age 65 has risen a lot at the top of the income distribution, but much less for lower-income workers. And remember, the retirement age is already scheduled to rise under current law.

So let’s beat back this unnecessary, unfair and — let’s not mince words — cruel attack on working Americans. Big cuts in Social Security should not be on the table." - Paul Krugman

Adaptive Social Security: When we implement the guaranteed U.S. Basic Income it will permanently fix all of this and make the costly means-tested and perpetually gamed welfare system obsolete, saving billions of dollars and improving both individual and institutional integrity of the entire system, because there is no longer any incentive to lie, cheat, or steal from a system which, as currently designed, encourages that kind of maladaptive behavior.

More Evidence that 20th Century Industrial Age Capitalism is Trapped in what's called an "Inverted Credibility Curve"

So, this Digg of a Network World article reports that:

Tech workers are trapped in what's called "an inverted wage curve," according to a report released this week by Yoh Services.

This rare trend occurs when demand for skilled workers is increasing, while wages are decreasing. Usually -- according to the economic law of supply and demand -- increased demand for a particular set of skilled workers results in rising wages.

Usually. Right. Sure. Rare trend my arse. It's all engineering, from stem to stern. 1,000 words worth of concatenated cliches passed off as a news article -- the going best practice for cost-cutting mass media, shipping commodity newswire mash-ups and clip-downs in lieu of what used to be journalism -- doesn't even serve as a band-aid, let alone providing direct pressure to the massive hemorrhaging of what used to be a U.S. labor market.

Feel free to read the rest of the blog to get up to speed on the details and why this whole jobs narrative is functionally obsolete. It isn't even wrong or stupid anymore. It just doesn't matter at all. It's simply, increasingly, irrelevant.