Yes, Not Again – Again

Posted on 5 April 2013 by Erik Hare | 14 Comments

Ahead of both the 6th Anniversary of Barataria and my preparations for a book on the economy today, I have been re-reading old posts. This one is from 26 March 2008, before the collapse of Lehman and before many people worried about the economy. It’s important to revisit this point because it explains why many of us were worried back about the last time the DJIA was up where it is now.

This goes to the heart of what makes this a Depression, and why the effects are very long term and big. I hope you enjoy this little trip through history. Thanks for reading!

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Revisiting Job Dynamics

Posted on 3 April 2013 by Erik Hare | 6 Comments

While waiting for new information, it’s always good to go over the old stuff and see how we’ve done so far. Barataria used to use the weekly unemployment initial claims as an instant guide to how the Depression has been running, but stopped a year ago. The rationale at the time was that we were close to equilibrium at about 360k jobs lost every week. There wasn’t much reason to expect a change.

How did that assumption fare? And was this really proof, along with job growth leading GDP growth, that we are in an unusual economic event? Let’s go back over some old ground and see how the old predictions went. Some of this went well and some not so well.

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The Cyprus Disaster

Posted on 1 April 2013 by Erik Hare | 14 Comments

I have been slow to write about the Eurozone crisis of the moment, Cyprus, for one important reason – I didn’t understand it. I read about how the big banks became under-capitalized and as the central government contemplated default like so many other European nations and thought it was about the same as we’ve seen repeated in far too many nations. Then, it got weird. What was so hard to understand? It was the way the European Central Bank (ECB) put the hammer down that pretty much forced a run on Cypriot banks and guaranteed a major depression. Was there something in this that I missed? Or was the ECB really that unbelievably stupid?

After looking this over for a while, I have come to a very frightening conclusion – the ECB really was that stupid, and more. This isn’t about Cyprus anymore, it’s about how the ECB is unworthy of any faith at all. If that scares the Hell out of you, welcome to the club. I certainly didn’t want to come to this conclusion, but here it is. It all starts, like everything Euro, with Greece …

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