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By Aatish Taseer
$16.00
By Bill Boyarsky
$23.10
$19
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Wikimedia Commons/Revisorweb
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America’s spend-a-thon has brought some inevitable consequences, not the least being that we now are looking at a federal budget deficit of more than $1 trillion for the first time ever, and that number is projected to nearly double by October.
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By Marie Cocco — There’s a lot of argument in Washington about the economy, but if anyone’s looking for some clear voices, there are 650,000 of them just waiting to be heard. That is roughly the number of long-term unemployed who will begin losing their jobless benefits in September.
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Flickr / aflcio2008
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Unemployment rose to 9.5 percent last month, the highest level in 26 years. Meanwhile, Wall Street payouts are not dropping. Goldman Sachs will be shelling out a whopping $20 billion to its employees this year. As we enter the 20th month of this recession, unemployment is becoming a way of life for many, and the very same people who created this mess are still reaping the profits.
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AP photo / Kiichiro Sato
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While the unemployment rate climbed to 8.9% in April, the number of job losses was down to 539,000, a sign that the recession may be slowing and recovery is on its way. Meanwhile, President Obama proposes an ambitious reform on education for the unemployed while Paul Krugman reminds us of the dangers of keeping banks unchecked.
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AP photo / Susan Walsh
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The good news: Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke believes the U.S. economy may show signs of bouncing back before 2010—yay! The bad news: Bernanke also believes that aftershocks from the recession may continue to wreak havoc for a good while to come—sigh.
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AP photo / Yves Logghe
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Well, it’s official: The European economy is in gloomier territory than previously believed. EU Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner Joaquin Almunia announced Monday that member economies will shrink by 4% this year, likely taking a further plunge of 0.1% in 2010.
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imf.org
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A shrinking global economy has many at the International Monetary Fund worried, as economists project that 2009 will see a decline of 1.3 percent in world economic output—the first global recession since World War II.
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What’s with all these fancy economic algorithms that supposedly explain what goes down (or up) on Wall Street but are unintelligible to the average American? Why not make a new model that everyone can understand—and that’s always on the up-and-up?
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cafepress.com
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Both the Democratic and Republican parties are experiencing a unique form of financial comeuppance, as the economic recession they were in charge of preventing—that has now caused a 8.4 percent national unemployment rate—is causing a dramatic drop in the level of political party donations.
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By David Sirota — Most newspaper postmortems insist that decreased ad revenues brought on by the Internet and the recession caused journalism’s problems, but a look at the vapid celebrity-obsessed pages of the nation’s ever-thinner rags tells a different story.
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In a bid to interact more directly with the public at large, the Obama administration once again turned to the Web, inviting Americans to submit questions for Thursday’s online “town hall” meeting. Here President Obama sets the stage with his opening remarks, discusses helping homeowners and considers whether marijuana should be legalized.
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bloggernews.net
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Not many big hitters from the financial sector have managed to stay afloat, let alone turn a profit, since the economic crisis kicked in, but George Soros has done quite well for himself. Soros made $1.1 billion last year, and he’s not even at the top of the list of hedge fund managers who beat the odds in 2008.
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By Joe Conason — Listening to the president’s critics, it would be easy to believe that Obama is responsible for the deficits, bailouts, bonuses, nationalized institutions and careening markets. It would be easy to believe but it’s entirely false.
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Wikimedia Commons / John Regas
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Sen. Arlen Specter gave the proposed Employee Free Choice Act the shaft Tuesday, severely wounding legislation that would make forming unions significantly easier. Labor leaders were depending on support from moderates such as Specter, but, facing a primary challenge, the Pennsylvania Republican chickened out.
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Flickr / billjacobus1
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Black and Latino communities have long suffered significantly higher unemployment rates than those of whites, but the economic collapse is taking labor inequity to new and alarming places. Jobs data shows that blacks and Latinos aren’t just more unemployed overall, but they’re losing jobs faster than their white colleagues.
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mariopiperni.com / Mario Piperni
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The current year’s federal budget deficit, according to congressional economists, will top $1.8 trillion, the biggest ever by far. And their projection for the fiscal 2010 budget shortfall is tickling $1.4 trillion, putting both estimates much higher than they were in forecasts back in January.
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By David Sirota — In the 21st century Gilded Age, the blue-collar shower-after-work crowd is given the tough, while the white-collar shower-before-work gang gets the love, and never before this week was that doctrine made so clear.
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AP photo / Gerald Herbert
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We’ve seen a lot of Timothy Geithner lately in the news—usually looking concerned yet purposeful as he stands behind the president in photos and press conferences—but we haven’t heard a great deal straight from the source. On Thursday, CNN’s Ali Velshi managed to get the treasury secretary talking, but what Geithner had to say is distinctly underwhelming.
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Wikimedia Commons/Prolineserver
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The American economy is certainly a cause for concern at the moment, but Paul Krugman is more troubled by issues abroad, declaring in his New York Times column on Monday that “the situation in Europe worries me even more than the situation in America.” Uh-oh.
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In a rare interview with Ben Bernanke broadcast Sunday on “60 Minutes,” the Federal Reserve chairman allowed himself to sound slightly more optimistic, although ever so cautiously so, about the possibility that the American economy will pull out of recession soon—perhaps, he said, by the end of this year.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — The House this week is expected to vote to expand civilian service, and the Senate will soon take up a similar bill. This issue holds the promise of producing that much prized but elusive Washington commodity: a large bipartisan majority.
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comedycentral.com
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CNBC and sister cabler MSNBC promoted Jim Cramer’s appearance on “The Daily Show” last week, but that was before he was soundly trounced by Jon Stewart. After the fact, CNBC and its affiliate networks haven’t exactly been playing highlight clips in heavy rotation, and some industry types believe that damage may have been done to the financial network’s reputation.
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By Joe Conason — Things are bad, and very likely to get worse—but the Republicans seem determined to plunge us into a real depression, gambling that catastrophe would return them to power.
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Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation / Prashant Panjiar
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Bill Gates is once again the world’s richest man, though he rules over a ravaged kingdom of billionaires. Forbes’ annual list has shriveled by nearly a third and $2 trillion in net worth. Those poor billionaires.
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By Marie Cocco — No Wall Street rally can obscure the scary historical prospect that most Americans now working can expect to have less income security in retirement than their parents had.
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flickr/specialkrb
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As the national economy continues to wreak havoc on many Americans’ lives, even those who remain relatively unscathed by the recession are feeling the need, whether for appearances’ sake or otherwise, to reconsider their spending habits—but will it last?
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Rob Young
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Despite the apparent reality that it’s not possible to precisely quantify everything under the sun, particularly when it comes to human behavior, the worrisome trend of “quants”—experts from physics and other scientific fields—infiltrating Wall Street firms to apply their skills to the stock market is still in effect.
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Wikimedia Commons / Paul Sparkes
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The Dow Jones industrial average fell to 6763.29 Monday. In less than a year and a half, the market has lost more than half of its value. More bad news from the financial sector has some analysts worried that rock bottom is still a long way away.
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In his weekly address, President Barack Obama makes the case for his proposed budget scheme, arguing that while it might rankle the likes of Washington lobbyists, it will deliver on the promises he made during his campaign.
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Even though this CBS report seems to want to make a feel-good story out of this one, it’s more the stuff of nightmares, despite 90-year-old Ian Thiermann’s good-natured take on his fate. After being retired for 30 years, Thiermann discovered that he’d lost his entire retirement fund due to Bernie Madoff’s shenanigans, and now Thiermann is working for $10 an hour in a California supermarket.
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AP photo / Lefteris Pitarakis
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The troubles of alleged rip-off artist Sir R. Allen Stanford are piling up in a big way: Not only does he stand accused of defrauding some 50,000 customers via his Stanford Financial enterprise, but now it seems that authorities are able to account for only $250 million of the $8.2 billion in assets that Stanford’s bank said it had.
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blogspot.com
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Either the U.S. economy was in the pool during the last three months of 2008 or the economic crisis is worse than expected. The nation’s GDP shrank 6.25 percent in the fourth quarter of last year, almost doubling the preceding quarter’s contraction rate of 3.8 percent.
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By David Sirota — Only months after the 2008 primaries, most Americans probably don’t remember Mike Huckabee or Ron Paul. But that doesn’t mean the conservative populism they championed during their campaigns is as fleeting as their dark-horse candidacies.
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White House
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In his first speech to a joint session of Congress, President Obama acknowledged the dire state of the economy, but struck a hopeful tone as he expanded on his vision for recovery. Investments in energy, education and health care will be key, he said, as will an expanded bailout of the financial sector. (Summary, video and full text after the jump)
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Flickr/dsb nola
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Perhaps keeping an eye on the 2012 election, Louisiana’s Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal has gone public with his critique of President Barack Obama’s proposed solutions to the country’s economic woes. ThreatDown!
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topnews.in
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While he was able to give the banking business a little lift on Tuesday, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke also delivered the sobering news that the economy as a whole isn’t likely to make big gains in terms of recovery before 2010 or later.
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AP photo / Richard Drew
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This just in: Not everything is completely awful in the financial arena. Rejoice—stocks went up a little bit! Even if it’s just because Fed Chair Ben Bernanke assured Wall Street that our nation’s banks won’t be nationalized soon, and even if the 2 percent rise happened a day after the Dow dipped to 12-year lows.
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collage: Flickr (epicharmus) / Google
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The Dow hasn’t been this low since “Titanic” won Best Picture, appropriately enough. Investors, apparently convinced the worst is yet to come, sent stocks tumbling to a 12-year low on Monday. The Dow sank to a depth of 7114.78.
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In his weekly address, President Barack Obama hailed the stimulus bill he recently signed, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, as “the most sweeping economic recovery plan in history.” Here’s what he had to say to back up this big claim.
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AP photo / M. Spencer Green
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By Bill Boyarsky — The national health care crisis, intensified by the recession, is so bad that nothing can be permitted to stop reform of the system, not even the implosion of the president’s health czar.
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AP photo / Petros Giannakouris
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By Chris Hedges — It turns out that Wall Street, rather than Islamic jihad, has produced our most dangerous terrorists. Just ask the new director of national intelligence, who warned that the deepening economic crisis could trigger a return to the “violent extremism” of the 1920s and 1930s.
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By Ellen Goodman — What wasn’t predicted was that women might finally reach the goal of equality less because they scaled the heights than because men slipped downward. But here we are.
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AP photo / Ron Edmonds
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He has his opponents in Congress, but President Barack Obama is stressing the need to settle the stimulus issue—and fast. On Monday, in his first major news conference since assuming office, Obama warned of economic troubles ahead and presented the stimulus package as a possible way out.
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bloomberg.com
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Note to all the senators who trotted out their best horse-trading tactics to create the latest, pared-down version of the stimulus bill: Paul Krugman does not approve of your centrist ways.
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nytimes.com
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With little surprise but incredible effect, the U.S. unemployment rate rose to 7.6 percent in January, hitting its highest level since 1992. President Obama used the report to prod Congress to pass his economic stimulus package.
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AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite
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At long last, it looks like something resembling an agreement might happen soon among members of the Senate who had been previously having trouble finding any middle ground when it came to the proposed stimulus plan.
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tumblr.com
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The world economy this year is likely to grow at a rate of only 0.5 percent, according to the International Monetary Fund, which re-evaluated its figures after the U.K. officially entered into recession last week. The growth rate, as projected, is the lowest in more than 60 years.
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0-60mag.com
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So, the government forks over a ton of money to flailing banks and, naturally, their customers (i.e., taxpayers) might expect to gain something from this helpful transaction as well, right? Guess again, customers.
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By Eugene Robinson — Our nation’s capital will survive the financial meltdown, the deepening recession and the plethora of foreign crises from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. Whether Washington will survive Tuesday’s inauguration, however, is an open question.
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