The Glade 4.0

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-1 ... -rate.html



Nothing can go wrong with this plan right?

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"Life isn't divided into genres. It's a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky."
— Alan Moore

Whatever happened to Audit the Fed?

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Dead in the Senate I think, do you believe Reid would let that show up in the light of day?

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"Life isn't divided into genres. It's a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky."
— Alan Moore

In addition to the 40 billion a month they've added another 45 billion a month in guaranteed bond purchases.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

They also promised that QE would continue until unemployment is below 6.5%.

If only they promised EQ would also do so.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Khross is just mad that Obama controls more Doombots than he does.

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A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. ~ John Stuart Mill

Obama doesn't have Doombots. He has Doomtwits. As for the real questions for this thread ...

Obama's Weimaring our Republic. Everyone of you **** who voted for him lost that bet. The economy has tracked exactly like I predicted it would under Obama, and you guys who supported him don't want to admit it.

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What is there to admit? A slow recovery with lagging employment and stagnant wages has pretty much been the mainstream consensus prediction for years. I'm pretty sure most reasonably informed Obama voters were fully aware of that and cast their vote for Obama precisely because they think the Dems are better able to manage that situation (and the long-term structural factors that led to it) than the Reps. Or was there some other, counter-consensus prediction you made that has since been borne out?

Uhm, from what I've gathered from his other posts, he's of the opinion that the federal reserve, our legislators, every mainstream economist, and the mainstream media are all part of a massive shadow conspiracy to foist on us a "solution" to the economic malaise that actually doesn't work, (QE) in order to use it to rob us of our wealth.

RangerDave:

Really? Unemployment is dropping because the volume of people leaving the workforce is still exorbitant. The value of our currency relative to 4 years ago is laughable; job creation is negative in all meaningful and durable sectors; and we continue to export technology, money, resources, and education while widening social nets we can't afford. An inordinate number of our population has no financial investiture in their own society; educational quality and value continues to erode in face of some one's delusional notion that education is an entitlement.

Things are all **** up, getting worse, and you guys keep buying into the big false dilemma.

It's not a choice between Obama and Romney.

It's a choice between the establishment and the individual.

So tell me, because I really want to know ...

How the **** do you borrow your way out of debt?

And how do you spend yourself into liquidity?

We're in a depression; your President is a demagogue of the worst variety and a power hungry narcissistic nitwit who doesn't understand a god damn thing. It didn't work for FDR; it's not working for Obama and the delusion of the Great Society is falling apart ...

And you guys keep screaming, "He's better than Romney!"

I don't give a rat's **** about Romney. I want people who consider themselves intelligent to get together and shout, "**** this noise!" I don't care how you do it, but voting for Obama isn't it, and voting for Romney wasn't it either.

In any case, let me know when you figure out how to borrow your way out of debt.

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If you want people to look past Obama and Romney, you first need to convince them that the economy is as bad as you say it is. Also, avoid the insulting "you can't spend your way out of debt!" sound bites. No one is claiming that QE or the government's current policies are going to reduce the debt.

In a recent post you claimed inflation was at 20%, a completely ludicrous number that, to a layperson, has absolutely no basis in reality. At best it makes you look like an ivory tower academic and at worst a nutjob conspiracy theorist. I'm fairly certain I would have noticed if the price I pay for things doubled over the past four years. When people claim this, it looks to me like they just looked at the 5-year price of gold and decided to claim that is the inflation rate.

You can't spend your way out of debt is anything but a sound bite. The Penn Central tried that and failed pretty spectacularly, and unsurprisingly found themselves doing so because of 60 years of the Congress buying votes with transportation policy. Now that its run out of industries to run into thw ground and bail out, its doing that to itself.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Xequecal,
Yes real unemployment is close to 20%
the number the government gives you only accounts for those collecting benefits that are seeking work, it doesn't consider the long time unemployed who no longer collect benefits, the under employed the marginally employed or those for some reason are considered dropped out of the labor force.
The united states employment ratio is at an all time low. the disability recipients are at an all time high.

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History of the Condom
In 1272, the Muslim Arabs invented the condom, using a goat's lower intestine.
In 1873, the British somewhat refined the idea, by taking the intestine out of the goat first.

It's like you just listen to the news on the major networks and do no independent examination. This can't be true can it? You know the major media are simply repeater systems for the NYT, the AP, and whomever occupies the Whitehouse.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Actually, I've been keeping track of what I pay for things over the past few years, because people keep claiming ludicrous rates of inflation. And I've found that the prices on the things I buy go up about 3-4% a year.

The exact same meal I buy a lot at the cafeteria I visit went from $5.27 one year to $5.49 next year to $5.71 the year after that. I pay $655 in rent for a 1-bedroom compared to $540 seven years ago for my first apartment. I have a credit card with a 6.4% APR, why would they even offer this if inflation was 20%? I could max the thing out and make money. When that lady burned herself with her coffee at McDonalds in 1992, that coffee cost 49 cents. Today it's 99 cents, consistent with average inflation of 3.5% over 20 years.

Is all this anecdotal? Sure, but I'm not seeing 20% inflation. And I'm willing to bet most people aren't seeing prices rise by that much. If they were, they would be pissed off about it, but they aren't. Sure, there's probably some definition of "inflation" that you can use on some complicated set of data somewhere that does show 20%, but the average person doesn't give a **** about that. They care about how much the prices they pay for things they buy everyday are rising, not your data sets.

You know what I think? I think that the massive erasure of wealth caused by the housing crisis would have left us with 15% deflation per year if the federal reserve had done nothing, and all that printed money just brought us back up to 3%. That's where "20% inflation" comes from.

Not sure where else to put this but they've been running IBEW ads here and I couldn't figure out why until I listened, "America is making a comeback" which if memory serves was the same message GM delivered pre-election. Have the Unions become defacto PACS for Obama?

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I assume you're referring to the U6 unemployment rate (roughly 14.4%, not 20%), but the U6 rate is no more "real" than the U3 rate that gets reported as the official rate. They just measure different things, so both are useful in different ways. Also, I don't think U3 counts only people receiving benefits; I think it counts everyone who is currently unemployed but who is available to work and has actively looked for work at least once in the last 4 weeks.

All that said, the timing of the Right's new-found love for U6 (i.e. during Obama's presidency) is pretty transparent partisanship - I guarantee that during the next Republican administration, you'll be more likely to see Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity doing a drag show than to see them referring to U6 as the "real" unemployment rate!

The only point in your favor here, is I fully agree that the Republicans would have done no better at managing the economic situation than Obama. Colossal incompetence is colossal incompetence, and is pervasive throughout both parties. Ron Paul was the only "chance" at electing someone capable of managing it properly you had, if you count the proverbial "Snowball's chance in hell" as a chance.

You cannot spend your way out of a predicament that was caused by deficit spending in the first place.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
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Obviously it's a rather unilluminating tautology to say you can't "borrow your way out of debt", but borrowing can certainly be part of an overall debt-reduction strategy. For instance, if I refi my mortgage at a lower rate, even though the principal remains the same, the total payments over the life of the loan will be reduced. Likewise, borrowing $10k to buy a car so I can accept a more distant job that pays me an extra $20k/yr would reduce my overall debt load after the first 6 months (roughly speaking), which, incidentally, also amounts to "spending myself into liquidity". In addition, every time a company borrows money to fund an expansion that generates revenues in excess of debt service or a refit that generates efficiency gains and cost-savings in excess of debt service, and uses that excess to pay down other debt, that company has "borrowed its way out of debt" and/or has "spent itself into liquidity". Further, if interest rates are expected to rise, it can make sense to borrow now (at a locked-in rate, of course) rather than later, so that your overall debt (principal + interest) will be lower. Similarly, if inflation is going up, borrowing now and repaying with "cheaper" dollars later can certainly make sense too.

Personal/corporate finance isn't always analogous to national economic issues, of course, but there are similar kinds of examples. The US government can borrow at lower rates now than are likely to be available in the coming years; it can set a higher inflation target and pay back debt more cheaply; it can fund programs like education and infrastructure that are expected to generate a higher "return" in the form of a growing economy and increasing tax revenues; it can borrow to fund programs now that reduce expenses later (again, like education or juicing the economy to increase growth and reduce long-term unemployment); and so on.

Now, we can argue about the likelihood of a positive return from various debt-funded expenditures, but like Xeq said, "you can't borrow your way out of debt" and "you can't spend yourself into liquidity" are just soundbites that are rhetorically appealing but substantively hollow and misleading.

Inflation and interest rates simultaneously rising is in itself a major problem. I mean, the fed could monetize its entire debt tomorrow if it chose, but the effect on the economy would be brutal. Merely dealing with the debt isn't the crisis. Doing so in a way that minimizes the impact to the economy ... and the economy is in some serious need of deflationary pressure at the moment.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

That's all fine and dandy except that unlike a business the government does not actually analyze things based on rates of return. Government agencies may do so, but the ultimate spending decisions made by Congress are not really made on that basis, but on the political desires of the Senators and Representatives and the wishes of their constituents, and those political desires are far more often based on simplistic imaginings of how things should be than how they are.

The money is being spent based on what people want and on things they believe are obligations of society, not based on any business based strategy to actually cut debt in the long run.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I was IBEW for a long time. The management delivers votes to Democrats at all costs, and in return they recieved protection and preferential treatment. Year after year we were told that we were to support certain canidates or we would not recieve job assignments. Period.

When it got so bad that members started protesting and getting proof, cell phones/recording devices were banned at meetings. Then the business managers computer came up stolen, along with hard copies of documents being requested by members.

This is how locals 98, 380 and 126 ran things.

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A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. ~ John Stuart Mill

Without endorsing a 20% rate, I'd like to point out that not only is this anecdotal, it's irrational. You're comparing prepared food, which obfuscates the food inflation cost behind the retailer, who has a motivation to keep costs down and may therefore have switched vendors. You're comparing two separate domiciles, which is therefore 100% irrelevant. And as for the credit card, I guarantee that's not the long-term permanent rate on that card. I haven't seen a CC under 10-14% for years.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

I cut and paste that from my last online bill, I dunno what to tell you about that. I've had that card since 2004, they gave me 0% interest for the first year and then it switched to 6.74%. It's never changed from that number since.

However, my point is that this supposed inflation is simply not visible to the average person. My prices don't go up that much, and I'm willing to bet that's true for most people. If this inflation exists at all, it requires a large amount of expertise in economics to even see any real evidence of. This is unlike, say, Carter's administration when the high inflation was blatantly obvious. So when you tell them that inflation is at this level, of course they're going to dismiss you. "You're full of ****, I don't pay 20% more for anything than I did last year." Even if the high inflation rate is technically accurate, why the hell should they even care if their prices aren't going up? It's just a definition in some Economics textbook somewhere.