Recession

[rowyn]

[Poll #1760906]

Posted via LiveJournal app for Android.

Comments

[chipuni.livejournal.com]

"It's a recession when your neighbor is out of work, and it's a depression when you are out of work."

Eli has only found temporary work so far, so it's close to a recession.

[zeeth_kyrah]

While signs of improvement are happening, I feel that things haven't really changed. If it happens, it's going to involve a lot of people suddenly going back to work.

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

Funny how certain connected corporations are able to take tax money while exporting jobs overseas, and claim profits. But those of us in the trenches who have no jobs and are losing our homes, do we get any money or tax relief from that same govt.?

I don't accept the rational for "recession over" as every single person could be out of work and starving in the street while the companies could still show record profits.

[rowyn]

Heh. Lut is unemployed and my bank is still shrinking, so it still feels like a recession to me.

[rowyn]

It sort of feels like we've stabalized at "sucky". :(

[rowyn]

The "recession over" metric is "the point at which things stop getting worse", based (usually) on GDP: the value of everything produced/provided in a year by a country. It's not based on corporate profitability -- theoretically, companies could be losing money even while GDP grew.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

It seems to be turning around. On average more of my friends are finding jobs, and the company I work for is hiring again instead of talking about massive layoffs (they didn't even finish the original planned layoffs).

And of course more of the news-style news is good than two years ago although like other people said personal anecdotes 'feel' more important than actual data.

not just because I'm depressed

[tahkhleet.livejournal.com]

...I'd say much worse on three counts

( 1 ) there's a bout a million people living in shantytowns in the USA now and this is now accepted as normal. No welfare for adults despite the fact a goodly portion of those people exhausted full UI and no sane person would live in a tent city rather than a real house just so they can avoid the responsibilities and burdens of a job.

( 2 ) Political meltdown. You're about to default on the debt because the republicans say an 83-17% split on cuts to tax raises isn't good enough when their program is 85-15. Raising the debt's interest rate over 2% is the sign of war to the knife. Politics is never friendly, but this is...bad

(3) Regulatory capture: the banks destroyed enormous depositor wealth with their reckless derivatives trading...have they committed to repaying the government for the massive Treasury purchases (this isn't even TARP, this is the other mountain of money that got shovelled to the banks quietly by the Fed)? no, and the banks are still continuing in the same reckless derivatives trading with no reforms or changes or accountability. So basically, they defaulted on their fidcuiary duty to their depositors and then took money out of their depositor's future income streams on top of it, and are set to lose that future income stream derived money too. (Because even if the Fed's balance sheet is separate from the gov't, technically, they can't just arbitrarily take that much debt without an economic effect)

The world's pretty borked economically. We never solved the crisis of overproduction in the modern economy and its come back to devour us.

Re: not just because I'm depressed

[rowyn]

Yeah, we averted 'economic collapse through panic' but it's not clear that we're not going to get 'economic collapse because there's just nothing there'.

If Congress lets the US gov default on her debt, I'm never voting Democrat OR Republican again. Screw them both, and I don't care who points fingers at whom.

[rowyn]

I'm glad your place is hiring. Mine isn't, although they ended the wage freeze. Or at least paused it long enough to give everyone a teeny raise.

[rowyn]

What's the news-style news you hear that's good? Some good news would be nice, and most of what I hear is more stagnant than good. :/

[level-head.livejournal.com]

The metric is tinkered with to achieve political effects. Sometimes it's GDP, sometimes it is employment; it depends on what metric will result in Republicans to blame. For example, the collapse of the markets in mid 2000 was post-dated to March of 2001 so that it would occur on Bush's watch, but once a recession was announced at the end of Bush's term, it was pre-dated by a year, and then later two years, to disconnected it from the Democratic takeover of Congress in 2007.

===|==============/ Level Head

(pouts)

[tahkhleet.livejournal.com]

you're supposed to say I'm being an alarmist and that I need to go drum or someting o_o (hides under the couch)

Re: (pouts)

[rowyn]

And here I thought you got tired of my Pollyanna. >:) Okay, yes, I do think you're being alarmist. For one, I am confident that the politicians have more self-preservation than to let the US default (and the president alone has the power to make sure the debt gets paid, if not to avoid other catastrophic consequences, like not paying the military or medicare.)

I don't think the whole economy is going to collapse, but I am worried that this is the new normal, and things are going to stay about like this (give or take some more bubbles+busts) for another decade or two before we see real and lasting improvement.

[rowyn]

I think it's pretty clear that the Internet bubble was on Clinton's watch, and the housing on Bush's, and that both parties had a hand in fomenting each.

[ladyperegrine.livejournal.com]

Yes. This.

[rowyn]

And on the one hand, it's nice that it stabalized where there's still 90% employment and the credit and stock markets still exist. On the other ... this is still pretty crappy. And the only way we can get out from under the mountain of national debt is to grow, and we're not.

Re: (pouts)

[octantis.livejournal.com]

While I think things are improved from the disaster a while back, I think there may be some degree of 'new normal' in this just because we've been living beyond our means for decades now.

Our culture is finding that limitless waste, entitlement to convenience and excess, greed, and grabs for short term gain with no foresight is resulting in a crumbling empire? That the corporations that we've been giving everything to hand over fist don't actually care about us or this country? Our country where 'competitive eating' is a sport? Shocking.

Sorry about my tone, none of this is directed at you of course, I'm just frustrated and doing the clawing at the sky motion. I think we could turn this around if we started working together again with an ideal for improving our country and ourselves. Maybe realize that entities we build specifically and solely to gather money and power will just keep doing it.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

That's how I'm reading it, which makes it worse than it was before because, while the same number of people are actively hurting, more people are uncomfortable or afraid for their future prospects.

alas

[tahkhleet.livejournal.com]

I'm hiding under the couch from this being the new normal. I don't think the country's going to handle the reshaping of the social pyramid well. And when the pious poor finally realize the Republicans are NOT their party...(shudder)

(meeps sympathetically)

[tahkhleet.livejournal.com]

My viewpoint is the human race is near the end of its lifespan, fallen prey to the evolutionary equivalent of early onset Alzheimer's. I find this makes it easier to deal with the headlong rush toward self destruction. Its just another Kobyashi Maru scenario, existence has those sometimes :(

Re: (meeps sympathetically)

[rowyn]

Hee! We survived M.A.D. with the Soviet Union. I think we can get through this, too. It's a depressing time compared to the 90s when we all felt like the singularity was coming or something, but it's not as bad as the Great Depression.

Re: alas

[jurann.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't put too much stock in the idea of a Christian Uprising. Pew statistics (awesome pun) quite clearly show a rising trend in American atheism and a falling-off of devout adherence to anything of faith. While 85% of Americans may still "believe in God", less than half of those go to church regularly and even fewer are willing to die for their beliefs. Now, a proletariat uprising? Personally I think that's just what America needs. ;)

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

It's fairly stagnant but most of the reports on things like GDP and unemployment are in the 'slightly better' range?

Not to mention signs that THIS MUCH pain in the american labor market was enough to start bringing manufacturing and support jobs back from China and India. I would have guessed that we'd need to get a lot worse for that to happen.

Re: (meeps sympathetically)

[octantis.livejournal.com]

For what it's worth, while I believe it's inevitable that we as a species will face a true catastrophic occurrence, be it by our own hand or a quirk of fate, there are so many factors involved in a potential scenario and in our own remarkably varied and adaptable species that I think it's possible for us to avoid eradication. In fact I think it would be very difficult to eradicate the entire human species, we're like germs or bugs. Someone somewhere is going to slip into a crack.

And lest that sound negative, I believe the world will change around us, and there will be tragic waste and injustice, but as long as humans exist, human ingenuity, expression, and development will too, and it will be influenced by what we plebes leave behind in the form of art, literature, and history.

Re: (meeps sympathetically)

[octantis.livejournal.com]

(And honestly, the ingenuity, expression, and philosophical development matters more than the meat anyway.)

[level-head.livejournal.com]

The bubbles, certainly. It was the timing of the ending of them that had been tinkered with.

Most folks think (and write in the New York Times) that Bush inherited a perfectly good economy and somehow messed it up.

The loss of half of the NASDAQ market's value during 2000 seems not to phase them.

===|==============/ Level Head

the american revolution started with less

[tahkhleet.livejournal.com]

since the Obama election ammunition and small arms sales have skyrocketed. There are a hard core of Christian fundies willing to die for their beliefs, they just keep putting it off and putting it off thinking maybe some regular political concern will keep life tolerable for them. But the point is they're armed and ready and the breakup of Yugoslavia shows what we can expect to come of that if they finally decide its time to go to war. When they realize that more and more of their friends are being dumped in the trash when they have no means to help these friends themselves and that their opinion leaders finally start blaming the entire political establishment for this...there's already some signs of the beginning of this . Alex Jones has a substantial audience a significant portion of whom are arriving at a bipartisan hatred of the estbalishment.

Wouldn't rest that easy. This is how things got rolling in Germany, a huge mass of people with clear enemies to blame pressing problems on following a rhetoric of "sufficient force will solve our problems".

The American revolution started with something like 3% of the population in arms. if we count 33% of the population as hard core fundies, half of that's male, half of that's potentially of fighting age, and even half of that aggravated enough to start shooting, we're over the threshold NOW if they all decide to get going, never mind opportunists or the desperate whose lives the Armed Forces wrecked and are wondering why they're still loyal to the Republic....

Re: the american revolution started with less

[jurann.livejournal.com]

Wow, Rowyn was right about you being alarmist. ;D If you think that the portion of the US population that is "hardcore fundies" is anywhere NEAR 33% then I'd have to say you're BADLY off - by a full order of magnitude!

I, for one, am one of the well-armed atheists - and I think that gun sales have been skyrocketing NOT because of Obamaism and fear on the other side of the isle, but due to widespread fear of economic collapse. Should the economy collapse in the US, you can be sure that things will revert to a less-peaceful "wild west" type state of being, where owning arms will be a necessary part of "having" anything. Everyone is arming up right now, not just the fundies...

Re: the american revolution started with less

[tahkhleet.livejournal.com]

My best armed friend lives in Minneapolis and he says at the gun shows the vast majority of people there are staunch Christians and Christian milita. Minneapolis is a pretty liberal area despite being in the Midwest, was my impression. (He acts the part to avoid getting in trouble for getting his own stuff.)

The vast majority of liberals/progressives/nonfundies I know don't own a gun, never would, and have no plans to acquire them. But I don't get out much. So I dearly hope you're right all the same.

The 33% is these are the ones who identify by the technical definition of Fundamentalist. Perhaps they're not all hardcore, but they are the ones who feel the existence of non fundamentalist Americans is a state of seige upon their nice, pure communities. The essay "Red Family, Blue Family" notes that as far as these people are concerned there ISN'T such a thing as peaceful coexistence because the existence of other ways of life encourages desertion from theirs and disobedience and they won't accept that. Orcinius discusses the "Eliminationist" rhetoric and the parallels to such rhetoric in Weimar Germany...

I think we're in a great deal of trouble.

[bradhicks.livejournal.com]

10% unemployment does not equal 90% employment; there are other categories that all add up to "wants and needs a job, and of working age, but the Labor Department has a whole host of excuses not to count them as being in the labor market." Add all those up (myself included) and 10% unemployment means about 78% employed.

Watch the fireworks if it hits 75%. Or, if the debt ceiling talks completely collapse and the August SSDI checks don't go out, "fireworks" won't even begin to describe what'll happen -- tens of thousands of out of work combat-ready and heavily armed Afghan and Iraq war veterans, and about half a million other people on top of that, only count as "not unemployed" because social workers are using SSDI as the dumping ground for the long-term unemployed.

This is what's so evil about the Econ Board definition of "recession" - as long as US corporate profits are still rising, as long as they're not receding, the US could be at 99.9% unemployed and it still wouldn't count as a recession.

[rowyn]

Fair enough.

I am reminded of how everyone complained about the 'jobless recovery' in 2004 or so. When unemployment was a third lower than what it is now. D:

Re: the american revolution started with less

[rowyn]

Sweetie, less than half of the US population goes to any denomination of church, from the most liberal to the most conservative. The conservative Christians I know complain about how their congregations are small and being overrun by liberal-value churches that, for example, ordain openly gay people. I think I would have noticed if a third of my country was wanna-be killers.

[rowyn]

That's a good point. :/

[rowyn]

You're like the one bright spot in a sea of unhappy comments on this post. O.o

Unemployment is down a little from its high (9.2% vs 10%) and GDP is up a little, but it's not clear to me whether this is because stuff like the stimulus worked and we're recovering, or stuff like the stimulus is propping up the economy, which will collapse again because we can't afford to keep it up indefinitely. :/

OTOH, I am not nearly as pessimistic as most of my commenters, and I will certainly be delighted to be wrong on the side of too much worry. :)