U.S. Bank Lending Falls at Fastest Rate in History

This article is from a journalist named Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the UK Telegraph, whose articles, I am seeing, are well worth reading. His stories contradict the "economic recovery" BS that is coming out of American mainstream media. This article covers how bank lending is contracting at the fastest rate in recorded history. I am continously fascinated at the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis that is continuing to makes its ramficiations felt for all, despite freely admitting that I am far from an economist and at times can't totally follow what I am reading.

The comments are well worth reading, too. While the common perception among many people is that the banks do not want to lend, and that is at least partly true, I also think that it's due to people lacking the desire and the will to take out more loans (also known as "debt"). As our current and future generations see what happened to those who took on too much debt and later losing the means to pay that debt back, we are becoming more prudent and careful on where we make our long-term investments. The Federal Reserve probably withdrew the stimulus because no one wanted to borrow it. What's left of the middle class is resigned to the fact that the credit bubble can't re-inflate itself in a stable, constructive way.

The First American Suicide Bomber

This just happened today. It's bad enough when taken on its own, but read the letter that this guy left. This is a coherent letter, in which his frustrations were comprehensive and specifically targeted. This letter shares a lot of similarities with stuff that I read on doomer sites every day. What the letter comes down to is, that the guy isn't crazy. His manifesto actually makes sense, and I think that's what makes it so dangerous.

Sorry to be alarmist, although this looks like it had a very low body count, this could have a significant impact considering that this guy came off as an average Joe who was pissed off at his country in the manifesto.

China Selling Off Record Amounts of Our Debt

Japan has re-taken its place as the top foreign holder of U.S. debt, as China sold off a record amount of their U.S. Treasury holdings in December. This could have a lot of implications (without a creditor continously buying our debt and lending us new capital, that brings on hyperinflation), but it could also be China just talking smack (as the latter part of the article explains, pushing too hard and bringing us down will just bring China down too).

In any event, I thought this would be a much bigger story, at least in the business papers. But I guess they're concerned with other things, like the Winter Olympics or how Ellen is doing on American Idol.

How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America

This is a good, but very long, article from The Atlantic Weekly on what is probably the issue of these times: the scarcity of jobs and where future employment is coming from, or whether it's coming at all. The entire article is worth reading, but the 2nd page of the article is what caught my eye most of all, as it dealt with America's youth and the job market. I have been unemployed a few times in my working life, but it was usually of my choosing and I always had enough to get by. I also had the help of family.

I am working at the moment, in a job that I usually enjoy, and that is relatively stable compared to most other jobs out there, but it is one that I cannot look to as a career. Since I have a college degree and a certification in another field, I am hoping to get something a bit more fulfilling and with a much larger income. But those jobs are not within reach at the moment, nor do I think they will be. My feelings on this has largely to do with our economic future and our scarcity of resources that are required to ensure continued economic growth (as I have discussed previously on the blog). I am very skeptical when the issue of job growth is discussed by anyone, whether by our president or people on the television news shows. The one question they can't seem to give any sort of an answer to is, "where are these jobs coming from?" Imagine that you're a multinational corporation, with the ability to assign tasks to any group of workers in the world. Why would you choose to lay down a base of operations here, when you can get the work done for much cheaper anywhere in the world? And, when those people demand better wages and protections, why, you can just stop operations and set up shop at another place on the map where people are willing to do the work for next to nothing. I think the simple reality, and the one not being discussed by those who matter, is that the American worker has priced himself out of work.

Most Americans still look at a job as a comfortable position in a cubicle where the starting salary is $50,000 a year. Those kinds of jobs simply don't exist for most people anymore, no matter our credientials or how many pieces of paper we have framed on our walls. According to one portion in the article, "networking happy hours" that are being held to match employers with jobseekers for unpaid internships are being swamped, and people with professional degrees and lengthy job experience are taking them. I sent an application for one of these internships to the county district attorney last summer, and got a letter back, stating that "due to the unusually large number of resumes sent", mine couldn't be looked at.

Ensuring that my resume isn't dominated by white space, I am trying things. I am going to put my very modest current job on future resumes, as that is better than "unemployed". I also will volunteer for Red Cross courses in disaster relief, if this horrible weather stops forcing me to postpone going to them. Any unpaid internship position I would take, would be on the position that a profit isn't being made from my work, and that seems difficult, especially in the legal industry. I am planning to contact my local Legal Aid office; do any readers have any other ideas?

Big Government Republicans

This is a good article from Whiskey and Gunpowder about how Republicans have been using Democrats as straw men (to admittedly great effect, after that Senate election in MA last week) who initiate "big government" policies, while "forgetting" their recent past, in which they advocated very similar policies that also involved "big government". I am so tired of the bait-and-switches both of the major parties pull. The bottom line, our government is flat broke, cannot afford any of this shit (be it wars, the corporate swindle known as health care reform, or stimulus packages), and virtually everyone seems to have at least a faint understanding of that except for these assclowns in Washington.

Granted, Obama (or OBanker as I now call him) is at fault for his share. He was voted in, in my opinion, to fix the economy and try to find a way out of the wars that our forces are embroiled in. He has only further damaged our economy while giving Wall Street more money, and has escalated the wars, particularly Afghanistan. But the hypocrisy of the Repubs concerning small government is laughable.

Recommendation of Several Podcasts

I wanted to take a different tack today and recommend several podcasts that I listen to a lot. For the uninitiated, a podcast is basically a series of digital media files that you download and can listen to on the computer or your MP3 player. There are many different kinds of podcasts. I basically find many of them to be like radio shows, but only much more varied and eclectic. You can find podcasts dealing with just about anything. I never really knew how great they were until I got an iPod.

Anyway, there are several podcasts that I listen to, but a few really stand out. One is the Kunstlercast, which is a weekly program featuring James Howard Kunstler, author of "The Long Emergency" (which introduced me to peak oil, as I had just blogged yesterday and many other times). He and the host, Duncan Crary, talk every week about suburban sprawl and its many harmful effects on America, only one of which is the tremendous amounts of energy that are necessary to keep this system going. Some of the topics discussed can be dry (to me, anyway, like the history of urban design and architecture), but it's often very eye-opening. If you are going to listen to one program, make it "The Demise of Happy Motoring", which is only a month or so old.

Another guy, by the name of Dan Carlin, does two podcasts that I really enjoy: Common Sense and Hardcore History. The former is a talk show largely dealing with politics, but in a refreshingly independent format. It seems that so many of the talk shows in the mainstream media are fronted by what basically amount to cartoon characters, in that you have the "right guy" (like Hannity or Limbaugh) or the "left guy" (like Keith Olbermann) who do not deviate from the right or left position on any issue. Carlin points out these things in a brash but informed way, while subjecting all sides to pointed criticism, most of all the two-party system that dominates our politics. His other show (the more popular of the two) is Hardcore History, in which he takes a major historical event or a period of history that was monumental and discusses it in depth. It's very interesting though, it's like listening to a really informed and exciting college professor (actually, a few of them were the ones who made me interested in history to begin with). I really, really recommend a series of Hardcore History shows he recently produced called "Ghosts of the Ostfront", about the Eastern Front in World War II. Unlike most of the history shows and books out there that document the history of WWII from the U.S. Side, this was truly a battle of "evil vs. evil", as Carlin states on the show. It's in four parts (around 90 minutes each), so you should really listen to it while you're driving or on a rainy afternoon.

The message boards for these podcasts are very active, so I highly recommend those as well.

An Uneasy Feeling

This is a very significant column from Bob Herbert of the New York Times. I have read things like this, countless times, but what I find noteworthy is the venue. For the first time I can remember in this current crisis, someone from the mainstream media is admitting that "this society is in deep, deep trouble". Herbert outlines that this past decade's economy was a "phantom economy" (my term), in which no new jobs were actually created. In fact, there has been no net job creation in ten years. Middle-class families also actually earned less than they did ten years ago.

I do concur with Herbert that some deep outside-the-box thinking is necessary to bring jobs back. I am just not sure what that outside-the-box thinking would consist of, and do disagree with Herbert on his thinking on where the next wave of jobs ought to come from. I do think the "green economy" is a lot of hot air (oh, jobs are being created, as promised by Obama, just not in America. A project to build a wind turbine farm in Texas has the wind turbines coming from China, with only temporary construction jobs for the local labor force), and we are a day late and a dollar short in pursuing an economy based on developing alternative fuels (due to global problems in oil production and a lack of capital to fund such projects). While Herbert concedes that it will be tough to "rebuild our manufacturing mojo", I find it a feat close to impossibility, as one of the fundamental mandates of business is to save on labor costs. As I've written in the past, it's my belief that only oil prices approaching the stratosphere can result in a resurgence in domestic manufacturing, and by then, the economy can well be on a collision course anyway.

Anyway, to continue with the review/summary, Herbert is dead on with the health care bill. So much time has been spent on this, and what has come out has amounted to a giveaway to the HMOs. Other than his thinking on where our jobs are coming from, I pretty much agree with him on everything. I'm just startled to see a column like this in "the paper of record". It's also a pretty effective indictment of the Obama administration, which continues to disappoint. I really am beginning to see him as the next Carter (although I don't see him staying on the scene, doing good works as Carter has), with a resurgence of the Right in 2012 (with a candidate like Palin, heaven help us).