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Monthly Archives: September 2013

Poverty Persists

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How good are things getting?  It depends a lot on where you are in the economy.  At the top end life is definitely improving – but at the bottom end it’s just endless misery. That’s the only conclusion that can be reached after two reports released this week.

The first was an analysis by the Associated Press that showed that underemployment is much worse for those at the low end of the economic scale, which in technical terms is hardly surprising.  But what they found is that 20% of those at jobs worth $20k per year don’t have enough hours, versus 7.2% of those who would normally qualify for jobs over $150k.  The second piece release was by the Census Bureau showing that 15% of Americans, 46.5M people, are stuck in poverty as they have been for 4 years.

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5 years After Lehman

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Five years ago, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and it looked for a while like everything was going to collapse.  No one knew exactly what was next as the financial system was imploding all around us.

Today, we’re still struggling to regain what we lost in the aftermath of this panic, although there is some reason to hope that we’re beginning to turn the corner.  What has happened in the wake of it all?  It’s worth taking stock and seeing where we stand.

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How Good Will It Be?

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The economy is indeed getting stronger – and is probably setting itself up for the best holiday season since the big downturn in six years.  That’s a strong statement to make five years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 which set off the worst recession and second slowest recovery since the Great Depression.  But there is every reason to believe that 2013 is indeed going to be the year that everything turned around – and by mid 2014 we will have recovered all the jobs lost since the downturn started.

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Syria Breaks?

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Should the US take military action against the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria?  It’s become the one important question in the US since President Obama announced that the dictatorship had indeed used chemical weapons against its own people.  After a year of ducking the question, a brutal attack on August 21 with multiple rockets full of nerve agents into the suburbs of Damascus has made the situation intolerable.

It’s best to never react to the news as it is coming in because everything is fluid. We last wrote about Syria 18 months ago and it was not clear that the horror has lessened.  But today it seems as though there has been a breakthrough and the threat of US force, wielded without flinching, works well in the hands of an administration that would rather not have to do it at all.

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Containerized Cargo

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Stop for a moment and look around you.  In front of your nose might be the aroma of coffee from Sumatra steaming inside a mug made in China.  The table  you are sitting at may be from South America or Canada.  Your clothes could be made of Egyptian cotton.  What do all of these things have in common, other than your life?  Nearly all of them spent some time in a metal box, 20 feet by 8 feet by 9 and a half feet tall – a Twenty foot Equivalent Unit (TEU).

Containerized cargo has changed the world more than any other technology over the last 30 years, maybe or maybe not excluding the internet.  Yet few people stop to consider this phenom and what it means

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