Home » 2013 (Page 10)
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.
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.
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.
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
The stock market has been up so far in September, a somewhat unusual event for the weakest month in stocks. The optimism is propelled largely by decent news on jobs, with weekly initial unemployment claims dropping to their lowest level since 2008 at 323k. But the big news was the ADP Employment Report, which came in at 176k jobs gained in August. Investors are still watching for the official Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report on Friday – but they don’t need to.
What is this ADP Employment Report, and what does it mean? It’s actually the best barometer of where we are, if not the official one, and it comes with a lot of useful information that can’t be found anywhere else. Since we’ve dissected the official BLS report it’s time to take a good look at the ADP numbers – and why they are in many ways much more interesting.
Barataria - The work of Erik Hare 