The eurozone is officially back in recession after three years of sluggish growth as the sovereign-debt crisis continues to impede recovery.
Figures out today (15 November) show that gross domestic product in the 17-country eurozone decreased by 0.1% between July and September after contracting by 0.2% in the three months before that.
The eurozone was last in recession in 2009, when the economy contracted for five successive quarters.
Who would have thought it? Warmist “scientists” have published a study claiming that in order to prevent catastrophic global warming we need permanent deep recession:
“If ‘business as usual’ conditions continue, economic contractions the size of the Great Recession or even bigger will be needed to reduce atmospheric levels of CO2.”So rather than trying to restart the economy, and create jobs, put money in people’s pockets, and stimulate growth, we should be hoping and praying for never-ending depression?
Science Daily — Global Warming: New Research Blames Economic Growth.
Keep on reading…
More voters are putting the blame on President Obama’s polices when it comes to today’s still-struggling economy. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of Likely Voters shows that 48% still place more blame on the economic recession that began under President George W. Bush, but that ties the lowest finding in nearly three years of tracking. Now, nearly as many (46%) say the current president’s policies are more to blame, the highest finding since August 2010.
The margin of sampling error for each survey is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- While most economists have stopped worrying that the U.S. will fall into a double-dip recession, one influential economist maintains his position that the nation won't be able to avoid a new downturn.
Lakshman Achuthan, co-founder of the Economic Cycle Research Institute, said on Friday that his research firm is sticking with the forecast it made in September: A new recession is inevitable, despite improvement in high-profile economic indicators, such as job creation and unemployment, and a stock market rally.
ECRI is one of the more widely respected firms on economic recessions, as it has never been wrong when forecasting that a recession would start, or failed to predict a recession well before it was widely accepted.
Achuthan predicts the recession will happen even without a new shock to the economy, such as a spike in oil and gas prices or a Greek sovereign debt default sparking a financial meltdown. If those things occur, he says they will simply make an inevitable recession more painful.
In fact, Achuthan said data gathered since his September forecast only confirms his view that economic growth has slowed to such a degree that a downturn is now unavoidable, likely by late summer.
"Now that we have several months of definitive hard data, this is not a forecast," he said, pointing to key measures that don't receive as much attention from the public or many economists. Keep on reading...
In 2009, the Internal Revenue Service set the minimum threshold for the top 1 percent of all wage-earners at $343,927 in annual income.
The number of Ohio taxpayers in that group fell by 24 percent during the recession, from more than 62,000 in 2007 to less than 47,000 in 2009, according to state tax data.
Rich hurt by market
The drop in their collective adjusted gross incomes was even more dramatic, plunging 47 percent to $68.4 billion from $128.5 billion.
The rich, especially millionaires, have been hurt by volatility in the stock market because they derive so much of their income from investments and capital gains, which include sales from stocks, real estate and bonds, economists said.
“There actually was a 43 percent decline of millionaires in Ohio, and nationally, the decline was 40 percent, so we are just mirroring the country,” said Gary Gudmundson, spokesman for the Ohio Department of Taxation.
(CNBC) — Think life is not as good as it used to be, at least in terms of your wallet? You’d be right about that. The standard of living for Americans has fallen longer and more steeply over the past three years than at any time since the US government began recording it five decades ago.
Bottom line: The average individual now has $1,315 less in disposable income than he or she did three years ago at the onset of the Great Recession – even though the recession ended, technically speaking, in mid-2009. That means less money to spend at the spa or the movies, less for vacations, new carpeting for the house, or dinner at a restaurant....
What has led to the most dramatic drop in the US standard of living since at least 1960? One factor is stagnant incomes: Real median income is down 9.8 percent since the start of the recession through this June, according to Sentier Research in Annapolis, Md., citing census bureau data. Another is falling net worth – think about the value of your home and, if you have one, your retirement portfolio. A third is rising consumer prices, with inflation eroding people’s buying power by 3.25 percent since mid-2008.
Income for American families declined more in the years following the economic recession than it did during the official recession itself, a new study shows.
During the recession, which economists say lasted from Dec. 2007 to June 2009, the median annual household income fell by 3.2 percent, from $55,309 to $53,518, according to a report authored by two former U.S. Census Bureau officials. But in the post-recession period from June 2009 to June 2011, the figure fell by 6.7 percent, from $53,518 in June 2009 to $49,909 in June 2011. …
The study found that during the post-recessionary period, families with just a male or female head with no spouse present saw a 7.3 percent decline in income compared to the 4.5 percent drop for married-couple households. Income for households with a head under the age of 25 fell by 9.5 percent, significantly more than the 5.5 percent decline for households with a head who is 45 to 54 years old.
(ECRI)- Early last week, ECRI notified clients that the U.S. economy is indeed tipping into a new recession. And there’s nothing that policy makers can do to head it off.
ECRI’s recession call isn’t based on just one or two leading indexes, but on dozens of specialized leading indexes, including the U.S. Long Leading Index, which was the first to turn down – before the Arab Spring and Japanese earthquake – to be followed by downturns in the Weekly Leading Index and other shorter-leading indexes. In fact, the most reliable forward-looking indicators are now collectively behaving as they did on the cusp of full-blown recessions, not “soft landings.”
Last year, amid the double-dip hysteria, we definitively ruled out an imminent recession based on leading indexes that began to turn up before QE2 was announced. Today, the key is that cyclical weakness is spreading widely from economic indicator to indicator in a telltale recessionary fashion.
Why should ECRI’s recession call be heeded? Perhaps because, as The Economist has noted, we’ve correctly called three recessions without any false alarms in-between. In contrast, most of those who’ve accurately predicted a recession or two have also been guilty of crying wolf – in 2010, 2005, 2003, 1998, 1995, or 1987.
A new recession isn’t simply a statistical event. It’s a vicious cycle that, once started, must run its course. Under certain circumstances, a drop in sales, for instance, lowers production, which results in declining employment and income, which in turn weakens sales further, all the while spreading like wildfire from industry to industry, region to region, and indicator to indicator. That’s what a recession is all about. Keep on reading...
(MSNBC)- The U.S. has entered a second recession. It may not be as bad as the first. Economists say that the Great Recession began in December 2007 and lasted until July 2009. That may be the way that the economy was seen through the eyes of experts, but many Americans do not believe that the 2008-2009 downturn ever ended. A Gallup poll released in April found that 29 percent of those queried thought the economy was in a “depression” and 26 percent said that the original recession had persisted into 2011.
It is any wonder that many Americans believe that the economic downturn is still in progress? Home prices have fallen to 2002 levels. Values have dropped nearly 50 percent in parts of Florida, California, Nevada and Arizona. Property values are also down that much in parts of troubled big cities like Detroit. Estimates are that as many as 11 million homes have underwater mortgages. Banks have inventories of as many as 2 million foreclosed homes which have not even been released to the market. Home prices could fall another 10 percent if current trends persist.
Perhaps the most powerful argument that the recession never ended or that a new one has begun is the persistence of unemployment. Fourteen million people are out of work. A third of those have been jobless for more than a year. May employment data showed the jobless rate rose unexpectedly and that the economy added only 58,000 jobs. Experts believe that the unemployment rate will not improve significantly until the monthly gain in jobs is consistently 300,000 jobs or more. And, at that rate the gains would have to go one for more than two years to bring the economy back to what is traditionally considered a reasonable unemployment figure.
(Zero Hedge) — There may be those among the less than brainwashed lemmingerati out there who have noticed what, as we have pointed out for the past month when reporting on the various manufacturing and regional Fed indices, has been an epic collapse in the appropriate data series. As John Lohman so kindly demonstrates, the two month implosion has been beyond epic, and while certainly the biggest drop in the past decade, may also be the all time worst ever.
To the point of this post: the last time we had an economic contraction of this magnitude was back in February of 2008, which was two months into the most acute recession in post-depression history. We are confident that once the groupthink wraps its head around the fact that the auto production based renaissance is not coming, and the economy officially tumbles into the commode of Ben Bernanke’s fiat dungeon, the NBER will determine (with an appropriate 12-18 month delay), that the current recession started in April of 2011.
"The Committee would need to consider whether further policy stimulus might become appropriate if the outlook were to worsen appreciably," it said. The economy might not regain its "longer-run path" until 2016.
"The Fed is throwing in the towel," said Gabriel Stein, of Lombard Street Research. "They are preparing to start QE again. This was predictable because the M3 broad money supply has been contracting for months."
The Fed minutes amount to a policy thunderbolt, evidence of how quickly the recovery has lost steam. Just weeks ago the Fed was mapping out withdrawal of stimulus.
WASHINGTON (AP) - President Barack Obama outlined new multibillion-dollar stimulus and jobs proposals Tuesday, saying the nation must continue to "spend our way out of this recession" until more Americans are back at work.
Without giving a price tag, Obama proposed a package of new spending for highway, bridge and other infrastructure projects, deeper tax breaks for small businesses and tax incentives to encourage people to make their homes more energy efficient.
The State University of New York at Buffalo won $390,000 to study young adults who drink malt liquor and smoke marijuana. The National Institutes of Health got $219,000 in funds to study whether female college students are more likely to “hook up” after drinking alcohol.
It's now official: The country has lost more jobs as a percentage of peak employment than any time since the Great Depression.
This includes the recessions of the early 1980s, even when they are combined.
“What the economy is going through is a very necessary and very healthy adjustment as families and the United States government goes back to living within their means,” stated Geithner in testimony before a joint House Agriculture and Financial Services hearing on the regulation of derivatives on Friday. Geithner predicted a “slower” recovery due to the “healthy dynamics” of the contraction of credit and increased personal savings.
I think it is time to call it "The Obama Recession." Using Obama's own numbers, we are now worse off than we would have been had Obama's stimulus not gone into effect.
Early in the Obama administration, his economic experts put out a report on the predicted effect of his recovery plan on jobs, "American Recovery and Reinvestment Act: Job Impact by Congressional District" . In that document is a reference to another document, "The Job Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan" , dated January 10, 2009.
I give you these references and links so you know what is shown below is real. In the second document, a figure shows the predicted unemployment rate with and without President Obama's stimulus package, the one that is supposed to "create or save" 3 million jobs.
That figure from January has been updated for reality through May's unemployment figure, the one just released today (Friday, June 5) by the blog Innocent Bystanders.
(click for larger view)
The figure should speak for itself. Not only are the actual unemployment numbers worse than predicted with the Recovery Plan, they are worse than predicted had there been no stimulus at all!
Recession hits Sesame Street: Sesame Workshop announces layoffs
Associated Press
NEW YORK -- The crisis on Wall Street is plaguing Sesame Street.
Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit producer of "Sesame Street" and other kids' programs, is cutting about one-fifth of its work force because of the economic downturn.
The New York-based company said Wednesday that it's eliminating 67 of 355 staff positions.
Declaring it is "not immune to the unprecedented challenges of today's economic environment," the company pronounced a need "to operate with fewer resources in order to achieve our strategic priorities." (excerpt) read more at dailyhearald.com
