Your assumptions are misinformed. Americans don't start working immediately after they've become age-eligible to do so for a multitude of reasons including school/family/friends obligations. 1.1M jobs keeps up with population growth and, eventually, will outpace it when younger people get into the workforce and start businesses that create jobs.
Sorry, I don't get it. If we add 3m new people a year to the population starting today then eventually we will only require 1M new jobs a year to support that? Hell, even if all the women become housewives that still doesn't add and going by your 1.1M number doesn't that mean we created 100,000 fewer jobs last year then need to simply keep up with the population growth? That means we have an additional 100,000 people who wish to be employed but can not find employment.
I'm sorry to say you're horribly misinformed about how much we're on pace to recoup:
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6AS63W20101130
Sure... from TARP itself. You didn't answer the question though, exactly what happened with the bad debt that caused this mess? Where did it go?
I do agree that our laws need to change for bankers, but it has already gotten substantially better.
Yeah right. Bribery, front running, bid rigging, market manipulation, blatant insider trading, fuckloads of fraud committed to get us in this mess (with massive profits kept from that fraud), hundreds of thousands of cases of perjury, a fuckload of MBS in which the titles were not properly transfered meaning the banks could be forced to buy them back, backdoor bailout after backdoor bailout (not counted in your TARP numbers), a housing market that has been artificially propped up and will likely start falling again, etc.... Oh, most of that stuff is a crime, would you like to guess how many indictments we have seen?
Food and energy is always like that, sorry. Especially energy. And those fluctuate downward as well. Where were you in asking for those downward price movements in food and energy to be counted as deflation when they occurred? No doubt silent.
Bullshit. They may fluctuate but the ramp in commodities is not normal nor is it constrained to just food and energy. We are talking 35% - 50% ramps in a lot of them. ALL commodities have been on a tear so try again.
You mean when someone is misinformed and delusional enough to believe anything but the truth, they'll believe the delusion before the truth? Sorry, reality is reality and this year's double digit returns are indisputable and already on the books. It happened. Deal with it.
Yup. Exactly the same can be said about the gains all the up to damn near 14K on the DOW in Oct' 07. It happened too, it was real, returns indisputable, etc... Same thing with the .com bubble. Looking back at those times now we can easily see that the market couldn't reasonably account for those valuations because of economic reality. I simply asked about the economic reality right now that supports current valuations. I assume you are going to stick with not answering that question.
Please be specific, your layman bullshit is just tiring.
Mark to myth = legalized accounting fraud because it allows banks to value an asset far above fair market value (ie. what they can sell it for). That is why the FDIC was seeing 40% losses after taking over some failed banks, that should NEVER happen and when it does it means someone cooked the books.
I can make my business show a huge gain in value if I get to pretend my assets are worth more than they really are. If I did that would the value of my business actually be greater though?
What part of the Federal Reserve's monopoly over (some) interest rates between 1913-2010 was inferior to any similar period in U.S. history. Please be specific. Also, I don't see any significant consequences of raising interest rates in a booming economy as long as they're done carefully
I am not even going to bother researching the first question and I will admit that the answer is probably none. I am not a gold bug nor do I think we should have a gold backed currency or any of that bullshit. Its just not a good idea to back your currency with something that is mostly produced and therefore the supply is controlled, by other nations. However, I have seen proposals for a "mechanical" monetary system that makes much more sense.
With that said, I wouldn't be banging the Fed drum to hard. Whats a dollars value today compared to 1913? Something like 7%. Doesn't sound very good to me, I am not sure why people think no inflation and no deflation policy is a bad thing.
As far as interest rates, you are clueless. People do NOT buy houses based on price they buy them based on payment. A family can afford $1K/month for a mortgage payment can "afford" a $200K loan at 4.5%. At 7.5% they can afford a $150,000 loan with that same $1K/month payment, a loss of 25% of their "home purchasing power". That would utterly destroy what is left of the housing market. Next up, the Federal budget.
It'll mean the feds will be forced to borrow less, reducing national debt, in the face of expensive gov't financing. Rising interest rates means nothing if they borrowed at a fixed interest rate too.
Guess you didn't do your homework.
Currently the Federal government must roll over damn near ALL of its
existing debt approximately every 4 years. You see we moved all of our debt to the short end during historically low interest rates to temporarily make the budget look better and it has worked so far. That is why we currently pay less interest on the national debt then we did in the Bush years despite having a lot more debt.
No such thing as a free lunch though, what that also means is that when the interest rates return to historic norms, or hell any significant rise at all, the interest we owe on
existing debt will rise dramatically and extremely quickly. To add a bit of perspective, in 2010 the Feds collected roughly enough to cover JUST mandatory spending (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and interest payments on debt) and thats it. Everything else went on the ye ole credit card including Defense, DOE, Education, Transportation, Ag, Homeland Defense, the light bill for the White House, Congressional budget, everything. A very moderate bump in the interest we must pay on our debt puts us into the "paying one credit card with another credit card" category as we would have to borrow to cover the increase in interest payments. Creditors tend to call that activity risky.
Except the math isn't on your side, since you haven't been the least bit specific.
Bad debt still in the system, what was fixed? Banks holding assets far above their market rate. National debt on the short end means almost instant increase in costs as bonds return to historical norms, housing market gets body slammed if interest rates go up a few points, the last two are why the Fed is locked into ZIRP, the Federal government replacing a fuckton of GDP with borrowed money, etc...
In fact, you haven't cited a single figure that we should be worried about, other than vaguely referring to national debt which, of course, everyone acknowledges and is a misnomer to begin with.
Familiar at all with exponents and what a chart looks like after a long period of time of one side growing X% greater than the other side?
Federal spending compared to GDP:
Outstanding debt:
You are arguing about the stock market which has often been considerably wrong. I am arguing the underlying economics which eventually catches up with bad bets in the market. There is no argument that the market is up huge but WHY is it up huge? Perhaps you think that the .gov can replace private spending with deficit spending forever? Or perhaps no negative effects will occur when they pull that spending out? Or maybe the actual consumer is just doing a hellofa lot better now than a year ago and will continue to get a hellofa lot better this year (kinda hard when you don't have a job and have lost considerable equity if you had any and 1 in 10 homeowners is actually underwater on their home loan but whatever)? Or maybe the States will pick up the slack because they are all doing so well?
That is the "math" I am talking about, not a single year of the DOW.