America’s lost generation The world has seen a number of lost generations in the past century. Gertrude Stein first coined the term in 1920s in reference to the Europeans who grew up during World War I, but it’s most recently referred to Japanese youth who grew up during that country’s recession in the 1990s. In [...]
The Great Recession
How the Great Reset has already changed America
From Richard Florida in The Atlantic As many of our cities and older inner-ring suburbs are being renovated and revitalized, the great challenge of our time — far bigger than urban renewal was in decades past — is to remake our many shoddily-built, far-off exurbs into denser, more- connected, more livable communities. Some of them [...]
The People vs. Goldman Sachs
You may not want to read this if you have heart or problems with high blood pressure Levin couldn’t believe what he was hearing. "Heck, yes, I was offended," he says. "Goldman’s CEO claimed the firm ‘didn’t have a massive short,’ when the opposite was true." First of all, in Goldman’s own internal memoranda, the [...]
There was no stimulus
i was just looking at Paul Krugman’s blog and points out that the stimulus never really happened. What’s extraordinary about all this is that stimulus can’t have failed, because it never happened. Once you take state and local cutbacks into account, there was no surge of government spending. Here’s total (all levels) government spending over [...]
How the Recession Has Changed Poverty in Canada
From the Canadian Centre for Alternative Policy Options Every recession ushers in a rising tide of poverty. As jobless and underemployed people struggle to make ends meet, the nouveau poor swell the ranks of the déjà poor. The most recent statistical update on incomes in Canada was released in June, telling us that in 2008, [...]
England of 2011 will like like England of 1931
Stinging critique of David Cameron’s deficit fighting by Paul Krugman Both the new British budget announced on Wednesday and the rhetoric that accompanied the announcement might have come straight from the desk of Andrew Mellon, the Treasury secretary who told President Herbert Hoover to fight the Depression by liquidating the farmers, liquidating the workers, and [...]
So much for the Chretien way in the United Kingdom
I know Canada had a slightly smaller deficit than the United Kingdom’s – It was 9.1% or 39bn Canadian dollars versus a U.K. deficit of 11.5% or £156bn but these cuts proposed by David Cameron are mind boggling. Look at these numbers During his address to MPs, it was clear that few government departments have [...]
Unemployed: The New Normal?
Disturbing article in the New York Times today about long term employment prospects in the United States. The “new normal,” as it has come to be called on Wall Street, academia and CNBC, envisions an economy in which growth is too slow to bring down the unemployment rate, while the government is forced to intervene [...]
The death of a dream?
We are seeing the end of middle class America. The slow economic strangulation of the Freemans and millions of other middle-class Americans started long before the Great Recession, which merely exacerbated the “personal recession” that ordinary Americans had been suffering for years. Dubbed “median wage stagnation” by economists, the annual incomes of the bottom 90 [...]
The Great Recession’s Impact
Robert J. Samuelson in today’s Washington Post on how The Great Recession has a stranglehold on us all. One paradox identified by Pew is that some groups that "have been hardest hit by this recession (including blacks, young adults and Democrats) are significantly more upbeat than their more sheltered counterparts (including whites, older adults and [...]
How did economists miss the 2008 recession?
Paul Krugman asks what went wrong. In recent, rueful economics discussions, an all-purpose punch line has become “nobody could have predicted. . . .” It’s what you say with regard to disasters that could have been predicted, should have been predicted and actually were predicted by a few economists who were scoffed at for their [...]
Where have I seen this photo before the Toronto Star used it tonight?
I was on David Olive’s excellent blog tonight, the Great Recession and I was reading that Saskatchewan was celebrating our entry into Confederation today. We joined it back in 1905 and have won three Grey Cups in our time as a province. I was noticing the great looking photo of the Saskatchewan Legislative Building. You [...]
