pt our flourishing economy
You’ve done it, America! You have already shed so many jobs that you are running out of remaining jobs to lose. That means new unemployment filings for last week were not quite as awful as unemployment filings for the previous week, and were the lowest since late January! We have turned a corner, etc!
Oh hey here is a novel idea: in order to save our tragically beleaguered financial system, we must 1) replace the management at failing banks and 2) liquidate the banks that are completely hosed beyond repair. This makes sense to pretty much everyone, and our new boyfriend Simon Johnson said something like that a while [...]
It’s another new new unemployment record, America! The happy month of March saw 669,000 U.S. jobs vanish, bringing the jobless rate up to 8.5% — the highest since the end of Reagan’s Lil’ Depression at the end of 1982. About 5 million jobs have now been lost in this current Great Recession. And stocks are [...]
Well, here is some depressing news! The hot new housing sector in the US isn’t houses at all: it’s shacks. That’s because the kind of people who used to be your next-door neighbor if you lived in a sort of marginal neighborhood in a largeish city are now squatters living under bridges in Fresno. Hell, [...]
Local advice dispenstress Andrea Rodgers is hosting an employment-fest at Lotus Lounge tonight, complete with headhunters, recruiters, and job opportunities for all! Or maybe just pink cocktails and sushi, but at least there’s hope.
LOOK AMERICA, WE GAVE CITIBANK A PROFIT! It’s sexytime on Wall Street today, and around the world! That’s right, a Global Stock Rally. Citigroup jumped a whole 30 percent and is now worth 1.3 shits. You know why? Because they announced that they’re having the best profit outlook for any quarter in years! HMM… we [...]
Yes, sure, a stock index is not an exact reflection of the economy — the market is usually about six months ahead of what’s actually happening, which is why unemployment can take so long to catch up with a sell-off, which is why the continued plunge of ALL major stock indices (worldwide!) is, um, terrifying?
A few lovers’ quarrels aside, people in DC and New York City just love to visit each other. We love it enough that an industry of low-cost bus services has given birth to itself just to meet our human demands. Sure, it’s not as sexy as a train, or as opulent as a fancy personal [...]
HERE’S SOMETHING DUMB TO READ: “If we’ve learned anything from the Bible, it’s that losers have to be punished. So, most Republicans will either starve to death over the next 12 years, in special jails, or they’ll convert!” [AOL Political Machine]
GDP FIGURES NOT SO BAD AFTER ALL: The economy “only” shrank by 3.8 percent last quarter! Victory! This number was buoyed by rising inventories, because nobody had money to buy things anymore. A half-million people lost their jobs in Q4, and home construction dropped 24 percent. Tim Geithner is going to fix this all, lickety-split. [...]
If you’re like most Americans, this blessed holiday season the grown-ups in your family agreed to buy presents “just for the kids” while everyone else huddled beneath a single thin quilt like Charlie Bucket’s grandparents. As a result, newly released holiday sales figures were unbelievably sucky. Congratulations, consumers! Your failure to continue to borrow and [...]
Ever go to a quaint marketplace in Mexico or Morocco or maybe some flea market in a sports arena parking lot on Sunday morning and haggle over the myriad gewgaws? That is what shopping in America will be like, next year! Or maybe right now. With 148,000 retail store closures in 2008 and another 73,000 [...]
