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The Expectations Game

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Investment is a tricky thing. You put up a lot of money in the expectation that you’ll have a small return year over year. Currently, the expected rate of return is historically small in the developed world, on the order of a few percent. It has to be weighed against the risk that the initial investment will never be paid back, winding up in default.

The slowdown in the global economy is not actually a decline in output all over the world, but a pause in the rate of growth. It wasn’t expected, either, which is the real problem. The developed world is largely stagnant, save some hope in the US for better times ahead. The developing world need to catch up, but appears to be taking a breather after a tremendous run.

As we consider the next few years and the potential for a genuine boom ahead, it is becoming clearer that we aren’t ready for anything more than muddling through until there is a reckoning and a realization of how the next economy will work – for everyone. That will take some patience and public investment all over the world.

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Job Loss Hits a Milestone

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Of all the various measures of the economy we have at our disposal, one of the most consistent and real-time is the Unemployment Initial Claims, which comes out weekly. It’s nothing more than a measure of how many people filed for unemployment insurance in the previous week, so it’s a solid number that doesn’t come from a survey or other statistical measure.

It still has its problems, however. It’s noisy, bouncing up and down a bit each week – a problem taken care of by looking at a 4-week moving average. Initial Claims numbers also don’t tell us a thing about hiring, but rather how many lost their jobs.

It hasn’t been useful for at least two years as attention turned away from job loss to job creation that would absorb the surplus workers looking for employment. But it’s worth checking in with this handy number one more time because it has hit an important milestone – and may be as low as it will ever go.

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Jobs: Back to Even!

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According to ADP, the largest payroll processer in the US, the total number of private sector jobs made up the net loss in the last official recession last month. In January 2008 the total number of jobs stood at 116.0 million in January 2008, falling to 107.2 million by February 2010. The net loss of 8.8 million jobs was finally regained in March 2014 when we hit 116.1 million total. That includes 491 thousand gained so far in 2014.

If that’s not a good reason for a party, what is?

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Triple Threat

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What’s the right thing to do to help the economy?  Clearly, Congress has no idea, making bizzy with games designed to impress their constituents.  Major economists don’t agree, either, with at least three different views on what is going on and the appropriate remedies. How can it be so chaotic and disorganized?

It’s always been Barataria’s creed that if you complain about how things are you have to stick your neck out and offer a better solution.  Our answer has always been that there is a totally new economy forming around us as we work through the Managed Depression, and that there is a dire need for public and private leadership to help us create that new world dynamically.  That’s a bit too hard to define , but we can offer is a different way of looking at the situation we’re in.  It doesn’t directly point to courses of action, but it suggests things that should be tried.

Here is a description of the Triple Threat to the US Economy – Business Cycles, Globalism, and Demographics – and how they are working together to make this a once in a lifetime change.

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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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