By saving and creating jobs, that's how. Just about two percentage points was shaved off the unemploymnet rate at the end of 2010 according to the analysis of virtually every public and private sector shop that was following the matter.
The REAL unemployment numbers have never included people who have made no efffort to look for work. What you want to talk about is something called an alternative measure of labor underutilization. You don't really want to talk about unemployment at all.
No, those are the numbers for all people unemployed per the monthly CPS surveys that form the basis of the unemployment data. Jobs data come from the concurrent CES surveys. One surveys households and the other surveys workplaces. Once again, initial claims for UI benefits don't enter into the picture anywhere.
The "big story" is that Republicans caused an absolutely devastating economic collapse and now act as if they and their inane policies had nothing to do with it. In some other countries, they would all have been shot.
No, they show the number of first time claims for UI benefits. That's why they call it that. If you want data for the number oif people unemployed, we have that as well, but it's quite a different number. As of June 2012, there were 12,794K people unemployed, but only 5,594K of them were receiving UI benefits. Half the battle is knowing where to look.
If all you want to do is gawk and rubber-neck over things that make matters worse, focus only on the mass layoff numbers. Those can be really depressing. You can google them and find all those heart-wrenching, pop-media sob story articles about them too. Meanwhile, with language, cultural, and other obstacles, the numbers who fail to claim benefits that they would be entitled to is far more signficant than you think.
Paul Harvey is dead, and he wasn't of much use while he was alive. More use than George W Bush, though. At least Harvey didn't break so many things. As for the stimulus bill, it was passed in spite of Republican efforts to delay and water it down in February 2009. The recession that had begun in December 2007 hit bottom and ended in June 2009. Job losses that had been 800,000 in January 2009 were turned into job gains by November 2009. GDP growth went from -8.9% in 2008-Q4 to +4.0% in 2009-Q4. Along with the various financial facilities invented on the fly at the Fed and Treasury and the brilliant coordination of international efforts achieved by Geithner and Obama at the Spring 2009 G20 meetings, ARRA was a very important part of ending and recovering from the worst economic calamity since the Great Depression.
The rest of the story is that all of these data are available in seasonally adjusted and unadjusted formats. Sometimes one is more appropriate and sometimes the other. The notion that the data can be somehow thrown out of whack by kindergarten examples of seasonality is another one of those simply absurd things.
This is an example of how to make yourself look stupid. Here is some history for you.
The deficit for FY2012 will be a hair above $1.1 trillion. You are meanwhile complaining that the fire department had to use a lot of water once it arrived at the scene of the conflagration. The deficits as they emerged beginning in FY 2009 (already $1.2 trillion when Obama was sworn in) were 40-45% lost revenues from the collapse in economic activity brought on by the Great Bush Recession, 40-45% increases in automatic stabilizers and other emergency support programs and payments made necessary by the Great Bush Recession, and 10-15% the underlying budget position. Obama would like now to trim an average of some $80 billion per year off the deficit through modest tax increases on wealthy people. Republicans are opposed. They want more tax cuts for the rich and mega-corporations. Of course, that's all they ever want. The debt is meanwhile sitting at just about 100% of GDP, or about half the level of Japan and about 20% less than what the US saw at the end of WWII. Ten-year Treasuries meanwhile closed yesterday at a yield of 1.65%. People are lined up around the block to lend us money. The debt is a phony issue.
Neither GLB nor the CFMA caused the collapse. Neither was a very good idea, but the collapse grew up between 2002 and 2006 from seeds all its own that were planted and nourished by the wanton greed of cowboy capitalism and the abominable fiscal, monetary, and regulatory policies of the Bush administration.
To more briefly and accurately restate your response...yes...the senate is blocking all legislation, no there has been no budgets passed, and yes...you are blindly partisan. Got it.
Wow...bringing up the heavy artillery now, aren't we. Sorry to have to show you up so thoroughly, but that's just part of the price you have to pay. If you don't educate yourself, someone else is likely to come along and do it for you.
:lamo yeah...THATS what you did....
No, you can't, unless you want to believe that paving downtown streets makes bank robberies more likely since getaway cars will have an easier time in fleeing the scene. If analysis is instead constrained to things that played actual, positive, and proximate roles in the evolution of the collapse, then it starts with tax cuts for the rich not working, the Fed's promise to keep interest rates ultra-low until the missing economic activity eventually showed up, and the willingness of ambitious but hardly scrupulous private brokers to dive into the breach, writing any sort of instrument into any sort of market, then joining up with Wall Street to strip off the profit and sell off the risk. All of that happened on the watch of Bush-43, much of it with his active encouragement.
The largest pressure from accumulating cash was coming from Asia in general and China in particular. Profits were up and the Asian and Russian crises of the late 1990's had let a lot of dollars out of what had been their typical coops. The Bush Tax Cuts were gasoline on the fire as they moved money up the income scale here creating even more large pools of surplus cash.
Securitization occurs as an intermediary -- traditionally Fannie or Freddie -- purchases mortgages from first-line lenders. It is by selling at least a portion of their originations that first-line lenders are able to recapitilalize and lend again. The GSE's will meanwhile sell the bulk of their holdings into secondary markets on the other side of which are institutional investors. Sales on a one-mortgage-at-a-time basis were time-consuming and inefficient. Securitization arose so that bundles of mortgages could be created and sold one hundred at a time instead of one at a time. Neither the mortgages themselves nor the secondary market buyers were changed as the result of this.
This caused a serious problem. When the Fed froze interest rates at such low levels, the number of institutional investors clamoring for the suddenly attractive yields of traditionally boring mortgage-backed securities suddenly spiked. Wall Street saw a profit opportuinity. They quickly ginned up private-label securitization shops that did NOT enforce the conventional minimums that the GSE's did, and they then teamed up with private brokers to write mortgages into expanding credit markets and then bundle and sell it all into secondary markets after slicing and dicing it all up into the usual profit-making derivatives. That worked well for a while, but as the supply of actually creditworthy borrowers began to dry up, underwriting standards had to be ignored to a greater and greater degree if volume and profits were to be protected. Paper was soon being written to very questionable borrowers at high-cost terms that couldn't possibly be met if interest rates were to rise. In other words, brokers were deliberately writing paper they knew would fail, then selling it off as AAA to somebody else. When the garbage paper began to fail at rates higher than what system tolerances could handle, you got huge mark-to-market losses and thanks to the opacity of spiderwebbed systemic risk, soon a credit system that was locked up. As that problem bled into the broader economy, lines of credit were not renewed, shops were closed, jobs were lost, demand plummeted, real estate and equity markets collapsed, a new wave of mortgage defaults came along and there you go.
At the core of it all was greed, ambition, and very poor public policy. Moral hazard is just a term used in an attempt to make all that sound nicer somehow.
