MetaFilter posts tagged with Economy

The Economist: The World in 2010

goodnewsfortheinsane — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 17:09:43 -0800

In 2010, Obama will have a miserable year, NATO may lose in Afghanistan, the UK gets a regime change, China needs to chill, India's factories will overtake its farms, Europe risks becoming an irrelevant museum, the stimulus will need an exit strategy, the G20 will see a challenge from the "G2", African football will unite Korea, conflict over natural resources will grow, Sarkozy will be unloved and unrivalled, the kids will come together to solve the world's problems (because their elders are unable), technology will grow ever more ubiquitous, we'll all charge our phones via USB, MBAs will be uncool, the Space Shuttle will be put to rest, and Somalia will be the worst country in the world. And so the Tens begin.

The Economist: The World in 2010. Previously: 2009, 2008, 2007. How did we do last time around? Guest contributions: President of the European Commission José Manuel Barroso lines up Europe's priorities President of Russia Dmitry Medvedev argues for dialogue and cooperation President of the Maldives Mohamed Nasheed wants his island nation to remain above water President of Indonesia Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono would like for Islam and the West to live in harmony President of South Africa Jacob Zuma says Africa should rise to the occasion Director-General of the World Health Organisation Margaret Chan predicts the development of the flu pandemic Managing director of the International Monetary Fund Dominique Strauss-Kahn explains how to prevent another crisis CEO of Yahoo! Carol Bartz believes business leaders should tap into the information flood Chairman of HSBC Stephen Green argues that the financial sector should welcome emerging economies CEO of Fiat Group and Chrysler Group Sergio Marchionne thinks greener cars require bolder action CEO/CTO of SpaceX Elon Musk says the private sector should handle space travel

The new faces of day labor

Joe Beese — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 14:34:52 -0800

It sounds like a George Lopez joke. “Times are so bad that I saw an Anglo day laborer standing outside Home Depot the other day.” Except it’s true.

The jobless rate for people like you

Afroblanco — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 18:33:26 -0800

The jobless rate for people like you.

They're paying attention

peachfuzz — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:52:11 -0800

Raquel Rolnik is the U.N.'s new Special Rappoteur on the Right to Adequate Housing. So far, she has investigated forced evictions in Phnom Penh and housing destroyed by rising sea levels in the Maldives. This week, she's investigating whether limited access to affordable housing is a human rights violation in the U.S. In the first ever fact-finding mission in the U.S., Rolnik has interviewed survivors of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, talked to those pushed out of public housing in New York, and visited a reservation in Pine Ridge, South Dakota. Today, she is taking a look at foreclosures in Los Angeles, with visits to Chicago and Washington, DC left to go. Follow her travels here.

That's one sad kitchen

mathowie — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:57:05 -0800

The Last Days of Gourmet Some photos of the last few days of clean-up from the inside of Gourmet Magazine's offices.

The Latvian Crisis

HP LaserJet P10006 — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 11:07:15 -0800

Latvia's Tiger Economy Loses Its Bite: Less than a year after Latvia joined the E.U. in 2004, its growth rate topped all of Europe. As global stock markets overheated and competition for investment opportunities intensified, Scandinavian banks showered Latvia with cheap credit. Now, with the highest unemployment in Europe, and propped up by $10 billion in IMF loans, Latvia's economy struggles to stay afloat.

Economic mess gets messier?

GreyFoxVT — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 05:33:27 -0800

Looks like Paul Volker is attempting to bring some sanity back to the U.S. banking industry, as adviser to the Obama administration. But is anybody listening?

The Fate of Derivatives Regulation

HP LaserJet P10006 — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 13:48:25 -0800

Last week the House Committee on Financial Services approved legislation to regulate derivatives. Some critics contend that the legislation does not go far enough, and there is fear that there are too many exemptions to the rules: reforming the $42 trillion market for credit swaps is crucial if taxpayers are to be protected from future rescues of institutions deemed not only too big but also too interconnected to fail. Derivatives have been called the crystal meth of our financial sector, and the "financial weapons of mass destruction" that were the single greatest cause of the economic meltdown. Calls for their regulation have been growing since the financial crisis began last year. Recently, amid the continued outcry and criticism about the handling of the financial crisis, a team of computer scientists has concluded that: ...derivatives may be computationally intractable to price even when buyers know almost all of the relevant information, and furthermore this is true even in very simple models of asset yields... [.pdf link to their findings.]

Detroit and the Economy

HP LaserJet P10006 — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 15:50:12 -0800

Last week in Detroit, where unemployment is close to 30%, one third of all households are in poverty, and whole neighborhoods have been abandoned, chaos ensued as an estimated 15,000 to 30,000 people lined up in the hopes of getting federal aid. 65,000 applications were taken for a new program that will fund only 3,500 people (via).

Wall Street's Near Death Experience

SeizeTheDay — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 17:21:32 -0800

Wall Street's Near Death Experience

Separate and Expensive

Blazecock Pileon — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 15:21:07 -0800

Being a same-sex, taxpaying couple is more expensive, overall, than being a straight, taxpaying couple, for the same services and benefits, when available.

In Debt We Trust

HP LaserJet P10006 — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 23:30:11 -0800

A government stimulus can overwhelm the impact of a credit crunch, and the innate dynamic of a productive economy can re-assert itself after such a crisis, leading to renewed growth. But this not merely a crisis of liquidity. It is one of excessive private debt, on a scale that is also unprecedented. Economist Steve Keen on the global debt bubble. Keen has long been concerned about the rise of household debt in the global economy, but he is not alone: although American consumers are now saving as never before, and in a way that worries some economists (see for instance the issue of "debt overhang"), personal debt remains historically high by almost any measure: Collectively, U.S. household debt rose to a high of 133% of after-tax income in 2007, double the percentage of the mid-1980s, according to Federal Reserve data.(LA Times, 9-21-09)

The Ghost Fleet of the Recession

vorfeed — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 13:29:37 -0800

A gigantic fleet of semi-abandoned cargo and container ships has been photographed east of Singapore. Meanwhile, the ship-breaking yards at Alang are booming, and the shipping industry is looking for ways to weather the storm. As the recession slashes demand, it seems the shipping industry may be heading for dry dock...

"...for the scientific community, the most critical organ of the incentive system is the cycle of credit."

iamkimiam — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 23:11:04 -0800

Just how credible is Wikipedia? While some have tested this empirically, others have chosen more dubious methodology. For a site that gives no credit to its post authors, one wonders, why even bother?

Cemented

plexi — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 16:22:50 -0800

This fall, law students are competing for half as many openings at big firms as they were last year in what is shaping up to be the most wrenching job search season in over 50 years.

“Had I seen where the market was going, I would’ve gone to a lower-ranked but less expensive public school,” [a second year law student at Penn] said. “I’m questioning whether law school was the right choice at all."

Recession over in France and Germany

malapropist — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 08:18:13 -0800

The economy is abjectly terrible, right? It's so bad that nowadays, a picture is only worth 200 words. On the other hand, the recession is over in Germany and France, and in the United States, the unemployment rate dropped just a smidgen last month. To be fair, the recession wasn't as severe in France and Germany, and didn't start so early. Still, this seems a far cry from talk of a second depression.

Consider the Source

Miko — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 12:49:25 -0800

"It's a different way of thinking about 'local' that's not quite as literal," says a consumer research consultant in an article running this week in alternative newspapers nationwide. The piece (by Stacy Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance) describes the response of global and national companies to the reality that consumers are moving more of their dollars into purchasing at locally owned businesses, representing both a threat, and an opportunity for companies that can successfully rebrand themselves as 'local'. As with greenwashing before it, 'localwashing' seeks to lure customers based on perception of values alone, resulting in such phenomena as Frito-Lay highlighting farmers from 27 states as the "local" growers for its potato chips and Hellman's Mayonnaise piloting a campaign in Canada to present its product as 'local' because most of the ingredients are from North America.

"We wanted to believe"

Bora Horza Gobuchul — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 11:27:24 -0800

For a time the Internet's own poster-child for irrational exuberance and underwater mortgages, Casey Serin (previously discussed on Metafilter), the blogger behind iaminforeclosure.com and millionairebychristmas.com, is interviewed by WalletPop about his future plans... which include living in a van and panning for gold. The real-estate market in the US continues to present post-apocalyptic stories.

How green was my valley

KokuRyu — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 20:51:06 -0800

How green was my valley: California's economic meltdown The fields of wheat, cotton and cantaloupe that sustained his family for three generations are gone. The land is a mess of fallow fields, cracked earth and swirling dust. (PDF - By some estimates, 12.8% of the United States' agricultural production (as measured by dollar value) comes from California, and the majority of that is in the Central Valley). However, his particular scene of devastation, Mr. Allen argues, has nothing to do with the credit crisis, the housing crash or the downturn that has California in a vice grip. It has to do with a seven-centimetre-long, semi-translucent, steel blue fish known as the Delta smelt. This is not a story about fish. Rather, it is a story about how efforts to save the fish through a court-ordered water shortage have pushed a region already brought to the brink by recession over the edge... "In the Central Valley regional area, we've got 40,000 unemployed people. General Motors had 30,000 and got a government bailout. We're getting nothing." See also: California v Texas

Many Left Uncounted in Nation's Official Jobless Rate

gman — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 19:03:35 -0800

Paul Solman examines how the number of jobless people who fall outside of official unemployment counts (video) offer a different picture of the nation's economic recovery. Transcript here. "Who here thinks it's higher than 12 percent, 15 percent, 20 percent? How many people think it's 20 percent? And 20 percent may not be far-fetched, it turns out, because of two other groups never counted as unemployed. One is those on government disability: 7.5 million Americans, like 57-year-old Bob Zawacki, a Chicago carpenter."

The Death of Macho

waitangi — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:20:14 -0800

The Death of Macho - "The axis of global conflict in this century will not be warring ideologies, or competing geopolitics, or clashing civilizations. It won’t be race or ethnicity. It will be gender. We have no precedent for a world after the death of macho. But we can expect the transition to be wrenching, uneven, and possibly very violent."

Back to the future of food

sararah — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 13:49:12 -0800

Canning makes a comeback. Is it just another foodie trend? Or is canning back for good? Eating locally has been the trend for a while now, but in-home food preservation is starting to make a comeback. And with more people gardening, it's time to learn how to preserve those delicious delights of summer. Everyone's saying it's yet another indicator of a more frugal America. How to get started? Well, here are some neat blogs: Food in Jars, Doris and Jilly, Bumblebee Blog And lots of references: National Center for Home Food Preservation, Ball Book of Home Preserving, Canning USA This year Ball has everything you need to get started, but really all you need are some jars and some other stuff you may already own.

My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends.

l33tpolicywonk — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 10:48:08 -0800

Douglas Rushkoff was mugged on Christmas Eve. After posting about the incident on a neighborhood message board, the response was not concern about crime or his safety but about the negative effect this might have on property values. Rushkoff writes in a new book (and discusses on BloggingHeads) the corporatization of our culture and the need to deal in currencies which are local and carry innate value. Previously.

You Get the Bill When My Luck Goes Stale

telstar — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 00:07:57 -0800

The Austin Lounge Lizards are Too Big To Fail. (SLYT)

Susan Hires A Boss

ShawnStruck — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 11:30:51 -0800

Susan is currently looking for work. But in this case, instead of asking someone to hire her, Susan is looking to hire a boss. If you're a boss interested in this opportunity, you can apply here.