Home » Money (Page 54)

Category Archives: Money

Economics and commerce, all built from scratch.

Greed Beats Fear – For Now

Posted on by | 2 Comments

The the sun beats out beads of sweat and the kids laze at home without school to worry about. It’s summer, the season of loafing. Typically this is the time of year when there’s work to be done and jobs are plentiful but the stock market takes a gentle pause.

Not last year, and not this year. The stock market is hitting new highs as investors find US securities the safest and most promising investment on the planet. But just like last year, the pace of job growth is still not accelerating beyond the roughly 190k jobs created every month. It’s a decent pace, but not what we need to claw out way out of the six year hole and bring back the boom. Barataria called that one completely wrong.

It’s past time to get serious about income inequality – or really the lack of opportunity for those who don’t have money to invest.

Continue reading →

The Big Story

Posted on by | 11 Comments

There is a rhythm to economic reporting. More than just the seasonal adjustment that makes up most of the fudge in the economic reports, each story has a progress on its way to becoming something suitable for the mainstream media. The biggest stories often take a full year, passing several well defined milestones.

This delay has to do with several factors.  Conventional wisdom seems to rule, which is to say that old news affects the narrative long after it is not exactly true. But the cycles themselves suggest that the real problem is that many reporters really don’t understand what markets and market movers are telling them.

Continue reading →

Oil Patch(work)

Posted on by | 15 Comments

On Monday, 12 May, the first comprehensive energy bill in seven years died in the US Senate. It was an amazing bill full of small energy saving provisions that had nearly universal, bipartisan backing. What killed it was an amendment that would attempt to force President Obama to make a decision on the Keystone XL Pipeline – though how effective even that would be is far from clear.

This was a moment rich in irony because this pipeline has long stood in the way of a comprehensive energy policy. Now, it has killed the most simple and obvious conservation measures. Not long ago Barataria backed the continuous delay of this pipeline because better and more inclusive ideas seemed to be bubbling up the longer it was stalled. This piece is a continuation of that one.

There is no substitute for a real energy policy, something that every developed nation except the US already has. In place of that we have a patchwork of projects here and there and very little real control over the situation to protect the environment, conservation, and even basic safety.  That has to change.

Continue reading →

Pick a Number, Any Number

Posted on by | 6 Comments

With so much economic data showered on us every month, about the last thing anyone needs is another number. It’s hard enough to keep track of what’s going on as it is, so more measures of the economy are not helpful. That is, they aren’t helpful unless they give us a particular insight that can’t be gained anywhere else.

This is probably why the more comprehensive U6 unemployment hasn’t caught on against the headline U3 unemployment figure, despite the latter’s obvious deficiencies. Two numbers causes confusion, one gives us clarity. Still, with the changes that are taking place in the economy and the slowness of the recovery, it’s worth taking at least a passing glance at anything that might help us understand where things are going in the future. More to the point, with wonderful tools provided by the St Louis Federal Reserve we can run a lot of custom charts to see what makes sense.

Let’s give it a go.

Continue reading →