Yesterday the Dow rose 203 points on news about employment. A “mere” 512,000 more Americans lost their jobs last week, the 51st consecutive week that weekly job loses exceeded 500,000, This number nonetheless not only beat analyst expectations, it was a bit lower than some previous months job loses. It thus convinced traders that today’s non-farm jobs report for October would show that “only” 150,000 more people were collecting unemployment insurance last month and the...

When it comes to the economy, the people running this Administration’s policies aren’t stupid. No, sir. They’re very smart. Too smart, in fact. That’s their problem — and the reason the Democrats took such a whacking in yesterday’s elections. By virtue of their excessive intelligence, these policy setters have been fixated on “the economy” and not on the economic lives that most Americans (including the independents who abandoned the Dems in droves this...

Should the U.S. Treasury Department be privatized? Should Goldman Sachs get the contract to operate it? Some people might ask why we should bother to formalize what has actually been the case informally for years. After all, the last Secretary of the Treasury, Hank Paulson, headed GS before deigning to serve in Washington. And the present occupant of Paulson’s job, Tim Geithner, according to phone logs recently made public, looks to GS almost obsessively when it comes to running his department...

Raised as a Pashtun, he’s that people’s star A local tribal hero hailed near and far He spent some years a’crusin’ down in Kandahar At three was selling carpets in its bustling bazaar Hamid, Hamid Karzai, king of the slick veneer. In the final Cold War’s chapter, the Russkie soldiers came Adding a new chapter to the old Afghan Great Game Hamid joined the CIA, the failing bear to tame And when the smoke had cleared away he’d won himself a name Hamid, Hamid Karzai,...

Too bad about the Obama Administration. It actually seemed to show some promise in its early months. It actually seemed to have a real commitment to change, a desire to see in crises at home and abroad opportunities to strike out in different directions that would lead to a brighter future for Americans and the world generally. But now it’s clear. That ain’t gonna happen. On the domestic front we’ve seen the sad and in many ways incomprehensible continuation of Bush-era economics....

Try to imagine. It’s 20 years ago. It’s 1989 and you come across the following headline, a headline that actually appeared on today’s New York Times website: “China Helps Build Huge Texas Wind Farm.” In 1989 you probably would have laughed, thinking this headline was totally whacky. So whacky that it must really have been picked up from that year’s equivalent of The Onion. But you’re curious about this ridiculous headline so you read the story that goes...

You’ll be seeing many variants of this headline today: “Economy growing, but not jobs.” Like so much of recent economic reporting, it’s deceptive. It suggests a kind of balance between two things of equal weight and importance, one good (economic growth) and one bad (unemployment). Such a deception implies that except for a difficult jobs situation, other key elements of the economy are improving. No. Alas, no. Our overall economy remains very sickly, a jump in quarterly...

In the day or two we”ll likely get an official announcement that the recession has ended. If it comes along as expected, it will be based on readings showing that the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) rose in the recently ended third quarter. Economists, a group where unemployment is currently unknown, will hail the report. So, too, will stock analysts whose expectations are invariably exceeded, along with officials in Washington whose own policies have allowed Wall Street to chalk up record bonuses,...

A lyric from an old Blues song goes, “Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.” There’s a similar disconnect when it comes to the relationship of government to small business. Every government says it wants to help this critically important sector of the U.S. economy. But in countless ways, year by year, most governments continue to make it more difficult for such enterprises to operate profitably. A government supported stock market bubble that has been inflating...

Now it’s time to return to Silverstein Family’s Pledge Cental. Mike Silverstein, how are things going over there? A little slow, Sylvia. And frankly, I’m disappointed. We only ask for financial help from our freinds and neighbors five or six times a year. But the phones are pretty quiet now. Can I interrupt you for a second, Mike? Certainly, Sylvia. As Mike has been saying, we can’t get along without your help. We can’t continue to do the things we do, the things so...

Statistics, the things economists use to justify their professional existences, haven’t always been highly regarded by people who aren’t economists. Mark Twain, for example, once noted that “there are lies, damn lies and statistics,” with the later being the worst lies of all. To test this view, let’s look at the batch of stats that came our way in just today. Leading indicators, a really big one for our economist friends, rose for the sixth straight month, last month...

Americans love movie rereads. The same types of characters in the same types of places doing the same types of things in only slightly different ways. Think Star Wars. Think Matrix. Think the Smokey flicks. We also seem to love political disaster retreads. Think Vietnam. Think Iraq. Think what’s about to happen in Afghanistan. One good way to appreciate the newest addition to the ongoing America’s Empire Goes Down The Toilet saga is thus to view the Afghanistan drama as if it were a...

I vaguely remember a Canadian politician named Pierre Trudeau. He did some important things for his country, I believe, but I can’t be sure because I’m not much on Canadian history. But one thing I do remember quite well about the man was his campaign song. It was called “Pierre Trudeau: The Poor Man’s Friend.” That has always struck me as a great way to be remembered. By your own people, and by history. Known as someone who was a friend to the poor. Someone who cared...

If you drive a car in virtually any city or town in this country you probably think the parking ticket situation couldn’t be worse. Silly you. It’s actually much worse in other parts of the world, and nowhere worse than in the U.K. There are so many god-awful parking tales coming out of the U.K. these days they appear in its media almost as often as local weather reports. Perhaps the worst abuses don’t even involve on-street ticketing by local government minions. They occur off-street...

Gold rose into record territory today. Parsing the reasons it did so could lead one into rather uncomfortable speculations about future inflation, the strength of the U.S. dollar, and even whether the dollar will long remain the world’s leading currency. But Gold’s current surge also tells another story. A tale of utterly stupid government policy in response to an utterly stupid theory of a single private analyst. In this case, the sucker was the British government. This analyst peddled...

For months the stock market has resembled a smoker who knows it’s time to quit but can’t give up the weed just yet. For this smoker there’s always some occasion that seems to require one more butt. A stress situation that can only be met with a smoke. That cup of morning coffee, or the after dinner nicotine closer. Or being with someone else doing the drag you can’t watch without bumming one for yourself. That’s the recent stock market, one in which virtually everyone...

Just when you think you couldn’t get angrier about the utter stupidity of our military engagement in Iraq, another news item comes along to extend and enlarge the rage. This was a tidbit I ran across this morning in the English version of today’s Tehran Times. It reports that the speaker of Iraq’s parliament is in Iran now to discuss security cooperation between the two countries with an an eye toward checking any future incursions in the region by external forces. Like ours, for...

When engaged in an argument, it’s always wise to understand the other party’s point of view. Not to agree with this view, of course, but as a means to possibly resolve the disagreement in a way that benefits everyone. With this in mind, here’s some reasons why Iran might think it is both justified and necessary to develop the nuclear weapons that pretty much all objective observers today believe they are actively working to develop, their statements to the contrary not withstanding....

I thought I knew the history of the Great Depression in this country. I thought it lasted the entire decade of the 1930s. Maybe you thought so, too. And maybe we were both wrong. Such a mistake seems obvious when listening to present pronouncements from our economic masters about our own Great Recession that started at the end of 2007. I’ve been thinking we were still in this Great Recession, but lately the wise ones have informed us a recovery has begun. And if this is, in fact, true, then...

The Supreme Court is now cogitating over a case involving corporations and free speech that many people worry could lead to a dramatic change in our political system. Specifically, that so much corporate money might soon flow into elections that it will have a disastrous effect on who gets elected and whose interests elected officials will really represent. I think such worries may be exaggerated. In fact, the basis of these worries may well be misguided. Let em explain. Corporations already have...

O.K. I’ll admit it. I thought the stock market couldn’t get any crazier. I was wrong. Forget massively skewed valuations. Forget companies like AIG whose stock has been soaring for no discernible reason. Forget all those terrible earnings reports greeted with joy by traders because they beat analyst expectations, and because of the rosy predictions about the future from the CEOs who brought in these awful results. For a true measure of current market craziness, look to the boom in day...

Around the country they’re debating the “moral right” of doctors to refuse certain kinds of care, and the same right of pharmacists to do the same thing when it comes to filling prescriptions. But the whole question here strikes me as kind of silly. I mean, if you’re a pacifist, it’s obvious you shouldn’t join the Armed Forces where you might be called upon to kill somone. If you’ve set your heart on being a trapeze artist, it’s equally clear you shouldn’t...

The techniques that economists use to understand their specialized studies, and to decree the nostrums the rest of us must now follow, are so exotic, so elaborate, so far beyond the ken of ordinary mortals, they must be greatly simplified when transmitted to lesser minds. Thus, describing the future before us is today often reduced to single letters — V, U, W or L. In a V economic future, after things slide way down, they turn on a dime and soar way back up. In a U future, after things slide way...

For a long time I’ve been confused about what passes for economic reporting these days. The reports of late have all been saying the recession has ended. Yet they all invariably add that most Americans (sometimes referred to collectively as “Main Street”) will not see any personal improvement for many months or even years. Indeed, it seems to most on Main Street that things are actually getting worse because of more job losses, more foreclosures than new home sales, higher poverty...

When I tell friends that the next major tax debate should focus on parking tickets, the response is almost always the same. They tell me about how they were recently screwed by an overly aggressive ticket-slinger, then relate tales of similar abuse experienced by other people they know.  Sure, they finally acknowledge, parking metering and ticketing is a stealth tax. A curb tax. But a major taxing issue? Nah. This is just a nickel and dime rip-off.  Alas, they’re wrong. The curb tax isn’t...