Political Economy category archive

Perhaps a bit of sunshine: Under half a mil for the first in a month of Sundays.

Initial claims for state unemployment benefits slid to a seasonally adjusted 466,000 in the week ended November 21, from a revised 501,000 in the prior week, the Labor Department said.

(snip)

It was the fourth consecutive week of declines in seasonally adjusted claims, and marked a steady march lower from a recent peak of 674,000 in late March. Analysts say claims must fall below 400,000 to signal payrolls growth, which would be a critical indicator of recovery from the worst recession since the 1930s.

Analysts polled by Reuters were expecting a more modest slip to 500,000 claims from the previously reported 505,000.

Aside: Reuters analysts continue their sterling record. Next time I go to the track, I won’t be asking them to help me pick the exacta.

And, as a long time SEC fan, I generally loathe everything Big Ten on principle.

Ohio’s attorney general sued Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s and Fitch Ratings on Friday, asserting that they provided misleading credit ratings that led to hundreds of millions of losses for state funds.

The persons who certified the bad paper are just as culpable as the ones who printed it.

Via Balloon Juice.

Still over half a mil:

Initial jobless claims were unchanged at 505,000 in the week ended Nov. 14, in line with the median forecast of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News, Labor Department figures showed today in Washington. The number of people collecting unemployment insurance dropped in the prior week, while those getting extended payments jumped.

The loss of 7.3 million jobs since the recession began in December 2007, the biggest drop of any postwar economic slump, makes an acceleration in firings less likely as consumers begin to spend. A rebound in hiring may take longer to develop as companies have ample room to boost hours for current employees before taking on additional staff.</blockquote>

November 19, 2009 | Posted by: Frank | Posted in: Political Economy | Bookmark this post

Thoreau at Unqualified Offerings applies Wall Street strategy to lexicography:

Perhaps I should start selling assets based on buzzword usage. I’ll go out to Riverside County (real estate there is so cheap right now! better buy it fast because it won’t stay cheap!) and open a for-profit school that doesn’t actually teach any students but generates huge volumes of paperwork full of buzzwords, sell assets based on these buzzwords, then get out of the market before the bubble bursts. And once it does, I’ll explain that your children will never learn to read if you don’t give me a trillion dollars.

Glimmers. Almost under half a mil.

From Reuters:

Initial claims for state unemployment benefits dropped last week to a seasonally adjusted 502,000, the lowest since January, from a revised 514,000 the prior week. Analysts polled by Reuters had expected initial claims to fall to 510,000 from an initially reported 512,000.

The long-term and two-week figures are also down. Statistics at the link.

Aside: The damage left behind by years of the Republican Economic Theory that the Rich Can Do No Wrong is truly staggering. As is the economy.

Marc Lamont Hill on the November 2, 2009, episode of Radio Times, Hour One:

Fox News is to news as professional wrestling is to sports.

Follow the link and search the archives for November 2 or listen here (mp3).

Before the insurance companies bleed us dry.

In a nutshell:

“My pay has been increasing at the same rate as inflation,” said Hill, who is divorced and lives in Portsmouth. “But with health care costs increasing much more, I’m falling behind. And I suppose that many others are in the same boat.”

To pay the fines. Bloomberg:

Since May 2004, Pfizer, Eli Lilly & Co., Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. and four other drug companies have paid a total of $7 billion in fines and penalties. Six of the companies admitted in court that they marketed medicines for unapproved uses.

In September 2007, New York-based Bristol-Myers paid $515 million — without admitting or denying wrongdoing — to federal and state governments in a civil lawsuit brought by the Justice Department. The six other companies pleaded guilty in criminal cases.

In January 2009, Indianapolis-based Lilly, the largest U.S. psychiatric drug maker, pleaded guilty and paid $1.42 billion in fines and penalties to settle charges that it had for at least four years illegally marketed Zyprexa, a drug approved for the treatment of schizophrenia, as a remedy for dementia in elderly patients.

In five company-sponsored clinical trials, 31 people out of 1,184 participants died after taking the drug for dementia — twice the death rate for those taking a placebo. Those findings were reported in an October 2005 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Still over half a mil:

The Labor Department also reported that initial claims for state unemployment benefits dropped to 512,000 in the week ended October 31, the lowest level since early January. Markets had expected a decline to only 523,000, from the 530,000 reported in the prior week.

The story also reports that productivity is up, but that the pace probably cannot be sustained by the existing workforce, so that hiring may increase. In other news, it doesn’t look like a lot of the hiring will be for Christmas help.

More than half of U.S. retail chains posted October sales that fell short of Wall Street’s heightened expectations, raising doubts about a widespread recovery for the holiday season.

Maybe the two writers should talk to each other.

This is kind of scary.

That (description of moving a 1,000 pound woman to an ambulance–ed.) was an extreme example of something city ambulance crews here and around the country are seeing more of: super-heavy patients.

To help accommodate them – and to cut down on the rash of back injuries suffered by paramedics and firefighters trying to lift them – agencies have invested in costly equipment and modified some of their practices.

Portsmouth (Va,) in recent years has replaced its standard gurneys with battery-driven hydraulic “power stretchers,” said Capt. Paul Hoyle, Emergency Medical Services manager. They’re rated to safely hold 700 pounds and lift at the touch of a button, at nearly the cost of a small car: $8,000 apiece.

Virginia Beach rescue squads added electric lifts to fewer than a dozen of their stretchers, said Bruce Nedelka, EMS division chief.

Medical Transport, a private ambulance service, has added eight oversized stretchers to its statewide fleet, four of them in South Hampton Roads, said Elizabeth Beatty, district field supervisor. Her company also operates an oversized ambulance, based in Virginia Beach, that gets requests from across Virginia.

I’m sort of torn here. When I watch the antics of those who want to turn being 10 pounds overweight into a pre-existing condition for health insurance premiums, I scream, “Blaming the victim!”

Nevertheless, 700 pounds plus is slightly more than 10 pounds overweight. Although there can be physiological or genetic causes, they do not seem to explain the explosion of obesity, but in numbers and amount.

All it takes to see that is a walk down the street.

Frankly, I think it has more to do with making Cheetos, Big Macs, and Super-Sizing part of the American Way of Life than with anyone’s personal culpability.

Full Disclosure: I hate Big Macs. I like Cheetos. In fact, I like anything that tastes like cheese, no matter how artificial and no matter how orange it leaves my fingers. I like real cheese even better.

A windfall tax on the banksters’ obscene bonus “pay for attendance” culture:

Government must take on a new strategic authority to build the economy of the future. Its first step must be to end the power of the banking oligarchy and reassure the public that its capture of the political elite is over. The Compass campaign for a windfall tax on bankers’ bonuses is an essential first step in reasserting democracy and bringing the business elite to account. A windfall tax would mark the start of the longer term transformation of the banking sector which will be necessary to meet the challenges of future economic development.

Republican Economic Theory at work:

Defaults by small and medium-sized U.S. businesses on the loans, leases and lines of credit they use to finance capital equipment investment rose in September as lenders remained reluctant to extend fresh financing, PayNet Inc reported on Friday.

The fee hand of the market at work:

Consumer advocates say companies are taking advantage of the recession and the growing number of uninsured people — 1 in 5 American adults under age 65 — to sell “health coverage” that evaporates when customers try to use it, or provides far less than promised.

Just last month, Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson sued two out-of-state companies for allegedly misleading customers with phony claims about their health plans; and ten more investigations are underway, she said.

Via Atrios.

Matt Browner Hamlin (emphasis added):

The hypocrisy of how the contracts of Wall Street executives are being treated versus those of union workers is simply stunning. All I want to see in an economic crisis is fairness. If contracts are inviolable, they are inviolable for everyone, regardless of whether they are between blue collar workers in factories, white collar workers in office complexes, or the multi-millionaire executives on Wall Street. If the economic crisis demands that auto workers take a haircut on their pay, benefits, and pensions, Wall Street executives must be held to the same standard. Conversely, if the contracts between big banks and investment firms and their top executives simply cannot be changed, then it’s time to go back and honor the contracts between the auto industry and organized labor. It’s that simple.

If you slurp at the public trough, expect public strings. Frankly, it’s about time (or even much too late) that these bozos realized our money kept them in country club memberships:

The Treasury Department yesterday ordered seven companies that received billions of dollars in government bailouts to halve total compensation for their top executives. But the big reductions will not apply to pay earned before November.

Kenneth Feinberg, the Treasury official leading the pay review, said average salaries for the top 25 executives would be cut 90 percent starting next month.

The action will apply to the top executives at Bank of America Corp., American International Group Inc., Citigroup Inc., General Motors Co., GMAC L.L.C., Chrysler L.L.C., and Chrysler Financial.

Aside: Am I the only person who finds the expression “take a haircut” to refer to taking a loss somewhere on a continuum between stupid and fatuous?

Hamlin link via Eschaton.

(The) International Paper Co. mill that has been the been Franklin’s (Franklin, Va.–ed.) heart for generations will close, perhaps as soon as next spring.

“It’s a travesty, a real travesty,” (Mayor) Councill said. “We have 1,100 families to take care of. We want to help, sustain and find work for these people.”

My high school played Franklin in sports, which required a two and a half hour trip across the Bay to get to the games. And. when I was a young ‘un, we drove through Franklin twice a year on the way to visit my grandmother in South Carolina back.

We would always joke that the smell of the mill was the smell of money. Back then, it was still Union-Bag Camp Paper Co.

Franklin was a neat, well-kept little town on U. S. 58 out in the country (since then, the suburbs of the Hampton Roads area area have marched relentlessly towards it and it is no longer out in the country).

I guess it will no longer have the smell of money.

Read more »

Still over half a mil. What’s missing from the snippet on continuing claims is how many persons had their unemployment insurance expire.

Initial claims for state jobless insurance increased 11,000 to a seasonally adjusted 531,000 in the week ended Oct. 17 from a revised 520,000 the prior week, the Labor Department said, after declining for two consecutive weeks.

(major snippage)

There were more encouraging signs, with the number of people collecting long-term unemployment benefits dropping 98,000 to 5.92 million in the week ended Oct. 10, the latest week for which the data is available.

That was the lowest level since March and it was the first time that continuing claims fell below the 6 million mark since April.

I’m making no claims about the supernatural pro or con, but this sure applies to the adherents of the Republican orthodoxy.

Contrary to what Republicans say, a trip to the emergency room does not constitute health care coverage.

Because health insurance and employment go together, this year’s devastating job losses have likely increased the ranks of the uninsured by four million people, including nearly 200,000 in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

The new age rage:

Growing numbers of Americans who have lost houses to foreclosure are landing in homeless shelters, according to social service groups and a recent report by a coalition of housing advocates.

Only three years ago, foreclosure was rarely a factor in how people became homeless. But among the homeless people that social service agencies have helped over the last year, an average of 10 percent lost homes to foreclosure, according to “Foreclosure to Homelessness 2009,” a survey produced by the National Coalition for the Homeless and six other advocacy groups.

Check those C-Notes: