Economy

Exposing the Student Loan Racket (Infographic) Student loan debt, now at $830 billion, has surpassed credit card debt—a statement not likely to have been heard 20 years ago. Student loans, unlike any other form of debt, CANNOT be forgiven via bankruptcy—these loans MUST be repaid. Is this the next bubble to burst? Personally I...
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By any measure this has been a hard and long recession, and many of us are not convinced it is over.  Particularly worrisome is the millions of men who have dropped off the face of employment statistics.  Men who have just disappeared.  No statistic the Federal Government keeps tracks them.  If they are working...
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Regional and State Employment and Unemployment Summary (BLS.gov) If you click on the graph to the right and expand or zoom in on Connecticut you can barely see a tiny bit of blue.  That blue represents job growth since the MAX jobs lost point during the 2007 Recession as of this past May 2011. ...
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The U.S. Treasury has been dipping, or as it is also known “disinvesting”, into the G-fund and the Civil Service Retirement and Disability Fund (CSRDF). In a nutshell, since the debt ceiling breach in mid May, Tim Geithner has replaced one IOU (that of the Fed) with another (that of the Treasury) in the...
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From The Zillow Blog: Home values are still falling, but not as quickly as they were late last year. From March to April, the Zillow Home Value Index declined 0.77%, compared with a decline of 0.89% from November to December 2010. While that’s a positive sign, home values are still falling too rapidly for...
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The government long ago, (Jimmy Carter time frame) eliminated certain items from the official calculation of the rate of inflation.  Specifically food and energy (gas).  The graph below calculates inflation with the old formula with food and energy included and compares with the new and improved government approved inflation rate.   The data speaks for...
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The National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) will release their April survey on Tuesday, June 14th. Here is a pre-release of the employment results from NFIB: NFIB Jobs Statement: On Main Street, Job Creation is Collapsing “After solid job gains early in the year, progress has slowed to a trickle … meaningful job creation...
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In 2010 Foxconn (A company) in Taiwan hired 300,000 employees while in USA we added 937,000 non-farm jobs For every 100 people employed last month, two will lose jobs and 3 will drop out of the labor force in next month. Average tenure of a new employee is 3 years 2 months (includes CEO’s)....
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Rising Above the Gathering Storm, Revisited: Rapidly Approaching Category 5 http://www.nap.edu/catalog/12999.html Executive Summary A Few Factoids Thirty years ago, ten percent of California’s general fund went to higher education and three percent to prisons. Today, nearly eleven percent goes to prisons and eight percent to higher education.1 China is now second in the world...
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Lee Pacchia of Bloomberg Law interviews Harvey Miller on the new bankruptcy procedures pushed through by congress. Essentially limiting the rights of creditors.
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Seems nothing is safe, insurance companies are looking at mining all the social information about you available publicly to help determine your insurance rates, car, life, medical are all fair game. From the Wall Street Journal ….a consultant helped explain Deloitte’s concept by discussing imaginary 40-year-old insurance buyers, “Beth” and “Sarah.” Using readily available...
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This seems to be the economic policy question of the hour. It might be worth recalling that last month, the Wall Street Journal polled economists about this question. Of those who expressed an opinion, here are the results: * 6 percent said no, all the tax cuts should be allowed to expire, * 24...
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Every year, the Americans for Tax Reform Foundation and the Center for Fiscal Accountability calculate Cost of Government Day. This is the day on which the average American has earned enough gross income to pay off his or her share of the spending and regulatory burdens imposed by government at the federal, state, and...
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Play are these Government programs designed to end the recession real or fake? //
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Or why the economy is stuck in neutral. Check out the hiring woes of Michael P. Fleischer, at Ramsey, N.J.’s Bogen Communications Inc. Fleischer gives the case of the median-pay employee at his company. She makes $59,000 a year: Before that money hits her bank, it is reduced by the $2,376 she pays as her...
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