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Revolt, it worked in France until Napoleon took over. Also the Bolsheviks weren't bad for Russia. Lenin's Soviet Russia was nowhere as bad as as it was under Stalin or Khrushchev.
Good thing the 2nd Amendment allows us to have all those guns with which to resist tyranny, eh?
Sorry, I'm having trouble locating a reliable source for GDP numbers. BEA website sucks.
Click on: National - GDP
Click on: Interactive Tables
Click on: The blue bar marked "Begin Using the Data"
Click on: Section 1 to expand it
Click on: Table 1.1.1 or other desired data
Quote:
Originally Posted by chuckmann
I do know that the real estate market slowed significantly mid 2006 and was essentially dead 2007-2008. Was not aware of recession til Q4 2008 but I'll take your word for it.
Home prices peaked in the Spring of 2006 then slowly began slipping back. This added an increasing inabiltiy to refinance to the woes of those hit by interest rate triggers. Recession dates are meanwhile defined by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Boomers were entering retirement age 2009-2010 and applications for disability were hopping in 2009-2010.
The oldest boomer was born in 1946. He or she would have been eligible for reduced SS benefits in 2008 and full benefits in 2012. Many had no practical choice but to take the penalty. Meanwhile, "Hire the Handicapped" was no longer seen as a good idea. Such people were among the first to be dumped without recourse.
Quote:
Originally Posted by chuckmann
Yes, Obama is looking better because more people are dropping out of the labor force for whatever reason, from retirement to disability to maybe even working the underground economy., about which there is not a lot of reliable information.
Hmmm. The labor force has increased in six of the ten months so far this year. It ended October at an all-time high. The unemployment rate is meanwhile 5.8%. Just what it was in March of 2004.
Recent one was worse because it involved a financial meltdown. Last time we had that was the Great Depression. New monetary policies kept the economy from slipping that far.
I guess you never heard about the S&L bailout. Nothing has changed. The 1980 recession and the 2007 recession were virtually identical. Housing prices crashed, millions of people lost their jobs, rich people, including Jeb Bush, walked away with federal money, and nobody went to jail. The recovery took almost a decade. I bought 5 acres and a house in 1986 for 60% of the 1978 sale price. Even in the early '90s interest rates were over 8% and housing prices were still depressed.
I guess you never heard about the S&L bailout. Nothing has changed. The 1980 recession and the 2007 recession were virtually identical. Housing prices crashed, millions of people lost their jobs, rich people, including Jeb Bush, walked away with federal money, and nobody went to jail. The recovery took almost a decade. I bought 5 acres and a house in 1986 for 60% of the 1978 sale price. Even in the early '90s interest rates were over 8% and housing prices were still depressed.
The S&L crisis was in the LATE 1980's and early 1990's. While Reagan's 1986 tax bill was also a major contributor, the crisis was most directly caused by negative interest rate spreads, meaning that S&L's had to pay higher rates to depositors than what they were able to earn on their loan portfolios. It was Neil Bush, not Jeb, who was a Board member of the Silverado S&L that failed in 1988, costing FSLIC some $1.3 billion. Bush was cited, but never indicted, for his unethical activity.
People have such vastly different financial experiences in a huge economy like ours and that accounts for the mass of views with regard to how an economy spreads it's overall benefit. I got out of school in the early sixties, not a great time to look for work, but I did OK with what was out there because I had a trade. In 1970 the NW economy, and the US economy in general fell apart with Boeing leading the way here with over fifty thousand layoffs. On to the eighties with the usual acrobatics of US finance bringing down a multitude of our citizens, while many were doing just fine.
The point of the chronology is that every economic downturn has different effects depending on your overall financial strength and what sector of the economy you worked in. No recession-depression has a unified effect on the nations populace, and that speaks volumes about our vast stratification of well being. I, like so many others finally found decent work and benefits that have allowed me a modicum of peace and security, my daughter however is not so fortunate and a lot of my savings have gone to shore up her less than desirable financial situation.
On another note, the thread on Boomer hating looks a lot like anger over what many today perceive to be a conspiracy by my generation to destroy America and in that process, our children. This is a sad commentary on what bad economic times brings to us when the truth of all things economic hasn't been all that easy to understand by those who haven't gained from America's prosperity. Worse? Better? It's all in how a person experiences these economic upheavals.
On another note, the thread on Boomer hating looks a lot like anger over what many today perceive to be a conspiracy by my generation to destroy America and in that process,
No conspiracy. Just double standards in general by the boomers. They wanted radial change to make a fair society and one for the good, and when in power did nothing much at all.
No conspiracy. Just double standards in general by the boomers. They wanted radial change to make a fair society and one for the good, and when in power did nothing much at all.
"They", the insanity of this inclusive roundup of an entire generation reeks of the stuff that serves to allow for a kind of deserving deafness to your statement. "And when in power" another stab at nonsensical gibberish with a generational indictment in mind. Please, get over your inability to differentiate between the actions of those born into a certain generation and the actions of those who really do hold and wield the power in our country, now give me your age so I can reciprocate by blaming YOU and your buds for all the current ills perpetrated by those of your age...........
"They", the insanity of this inclusive roundup of an entire generation reeks of the stuff that serves to allow for a kind of deserving deafness to your statement. "And when in power" another stab at nonsensical gibberish with a generational indictment in mind. Please, get over your inability to differentiate between the actions of those born into a certain generation and the actions of those who really do hold and wield the power in our country, now give me your age so I can reciprocate by blaming YOU and your buds for all the current ills perpetrated by those of your age...........
The boomers are now in positions of power and influence. There is no gibberish in that.
Unemployment (which has been defined the same way for decades) was above 10% for ten straight months in the 1980's versus one month in 2007-09. Each event at the time was the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. The 1980's disaster caused the northeast manufacturing corridor to crumble and erode away into what became known as the Rust Belt. Quite costly. And that before even considering the staggering human toll -- millions of proud, hard-working Americans left without a job, an income, or a pension. Certainly, Reagan didn't lift a finger to help them.
But the problems of that era were the result of almost garden variety economic mismanagement. The more recent collapse had its roots in the same sort of soil of ineptitude of course, but what flowered from economic incompetence this time was a credit-driven, self-reinforcing downward spiral. No one had even seen such a thing before, so no one really knew what to do about it.
FDR had confronted that same lack of obvious answers in 1933, so he tried almost any hare-brained idea at all and then followed up on the ones that seemed to be working. Obama was able to be a bit more precise than that, but there was still plenty of trial-and-hope involved for him as well. Too rarely mentioned in recountings I think is the success that he and Geithner had in getting virtual unanimity out of the Finance Ministers and G-20 meetings in the Spring of 2009. With virtually the entire globe on the same page going forward and stimulus being poured in by economies large and small, a bulwark against the worst of the worst was built, meaning that economies would one by one have the chance to wink back on. Germany and China of course cheated, but at that point, any sort of success was welcome news.
All in all, recovery from 2007-09 was slower than in the early 1980's and slower than it might have been at the time. This was mainly because expansionary fiscal measures were abandoned in 2011, leaving the Fed to make a go of it alone with quantitative easing. QE is not a powerful tool.. They could have used some help from the other end of town.
Bottom line: the 1980's were unnecessary and very bad, but there was never a larger long-term threat involved. The 2000's were also unnecessary and very bad, but the real threat of a much larger and more pervasive crisis made it stand out.
Now that you mention The Rust Belt, I remember that. I especially remember the steel mill workers and all the problems they faced.
And, now that mention it, I do remember how difficult it was for people to acquire credit during and preceding that period, which was a good thing. If you had a major credit card, it was a big deal - they didn't give them out freely as they do now. And home loans required 20% down.
I lived in two places at the time, Silicon Valley and Oregon. Oregon had a regional devastation that hit especially hard. But the whole country suffered considerably. I remember it being every bit as bad as the most recent one. I think the media has affected the perception of it as the news was only shown once or twice a day back then, and there was no internet with bloggers abounding everywhere. I remember political tension between the two major parties, but nothing like we have now.
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