economy
grrlscientist | April 24, 2009tags: Bronx Zoo, Wildlife Conservation Society, NYC Life, economic hardships
Asia Entrance to the Bronx Zoo.
Image: Stavenn/Wikipedia.
New York City's Bronx Zoo, the largest metropolitan wildlife preserve in the United States, is being hit hard by the economy. To prevent a $15 million budget shortfall, zoo officials are closing four exhibits and evicting all their occupants, estimated to number in the hundreds of animals.
Zoo officials admitted in a New York City Cultural Affairs Committee meeting today that they are forced to relocate the suddenly homeless deer, bats, foxes, antelopes…
grrlscientist | March 30, 2009tags: politics, good citizenship, humor, America, streaming video
This streaming video provides essential educational advice to Americans on how to be good citizens -- I was especially impressed with Mary's frugal meals, but seriously, she'd spend le$$ if she stopped eating meat altogether! [10:39]
Hattip: Travelgirl.
revere | March 28, 2009When my mother died last year at the age of 103 it ended a life that went from the Wright Brothers first flight through to the internet. That's a lot of change to accommodate, but she did it pretty well, although there were things she could not get used to. One of the things that was hardest for her to get used to was the prices of particular things, of which long distance telephone calls was an example. Long past the time when such calls had become ridiculously cheap, she was always nervous about talking "long distance." I'll grant you it's sometimes hard to adjust, always comparing things…
sheril | March 2, 2009
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Stocks tumbled Monday, with the Dow and S&P 500 falling to 12-year lows after insurance company American International Group's huge quarterly loss added to worries about the financial sector and the economy.
The Dow Jones industrial average (INDU) lost almost 300 points, or 4.2% to end at 6763.29, its lowest point since April 25, 1997.
While I hoped this email from last September was hyperbole, today I'm less certain. The world has changed, but I remain hopeful that with the right direction, we may yet recover.
j7uy5 | February 26, 2009Psychiatrists of old, never gave advice. But here's some advice:
And never trust with your money anyone making a potential
bonus.
From
href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/fa89be08-02aa-11de-b58b-000077b07658.html">Nassim
Nicholas Taleb, author of Black Swan; HT:
href="http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/2009/02/february-25-2009-put-it-all-on-red.html">Automatic
Earth.
How bank bonuses let us all down
By Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Published: February 24 2009 19:53
One of the arguments one hears in the compensation debate
is that the bonus system used by Wall Street - as John Thain,…
revere | February 18, 2009While I like Obama I'm none too fond of some of the people he has around him, especially in the economic area. Larry Summers and his pals (Rubin, Geithner, etc.) helped bring us the current crisis, although it took GWB and the Republican Congress to turn a bad situation into a catastrophe. We threw the Republicans out, and good riddance. But why let the others back in? These remarks are occasioned by a commitment I've made to do a "work in progress" seminar tomorrow morning. My scientific work is progressing nicely but one of the things that isn't yet in progress is preparing for the seminar…
j7uy5 | February 10, 2009Wouldn't you know it? Right after I post a compilation of
graphical representations of the
href="http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/washingtondc/la-naw-obama10-2009feb10,0,7686262.story">winter
of our hardship, out come some more (HT:
href="http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/02/why-we-need-a-big-fiscal-boost-program.html">DeLong,
href="http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2009/02/job-losses-during-recessons.html">CR).
The first shows the absolute number of job losses in this recession,
compared to all other post-WWII recessions. It looks bad.
But, to put this in…
j7uy5 | February 9, 2009Just like I was saying. HT:
href="http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2009/02/financial-times-martin-wolf-team-obama.html">Naked
Capitalism. With videos.
This is not from some marignalized doomer. It is from the
Financial Times.
j7uy5 | February 9, 2009This chart shows what the stock market had been doing since the summer
of 2007, when the effects of the economic crisis were openly recognized
by the Administration. You can see that that various
interventions have resulted in brief improvements, but nothing
sustained. The overall trend clearly is downward.
Unfortunately, I can't recall where I got the graph (I saved it a
few days ago, decided to not write about it, then changed my mind).
style="display: inline;">
Now, let's compare that to the historical record. What happened
after 1929? The chart below compares the Dow during the…
j7uy5 | January 19, 2009If the only thing Obama does, is to not do the bad things that Bush did,
then he will be a success. A disappointment, yes, but also a
success.
Above is a clip of Olbermann, summarizing in about 9 minutes the worst
of the past eight years. Below the fold is one of the consequences. It is a
chart depicting the KBW Bank Index
performance over the past four years. The Index is a weighted
index comprised of the 24 largest national and regional banks. It
is now at a 13-year low -- and that is AFTER a gazillion dollars (actually $2.8 trillion) in bailouts.
The prospects are not good. …
amillikan | December 21, 2008A group of economists and scientists are pointing to science to fix the "broken" American economy, positing that the crisis was caused by shortcomings in economic theory that scientific methods could potentially fix. But ScienceBlogger Jake Young is skeptical that this "Economic Manhattan Project" would be anything more than disastrous. "Why do we assume that scientists riding in like the cavalry will save the day?" he asks on Pure Pedantry.
revere | December 10, 2008I'm sitting here reading Tuesday's Wall Street Journal -- what? Revere subscribes to the WSJ? No, but for reasons known only to Darwin, every couple of days a copy is delivered to my door, each with someone else's address on it, and never the same someone else two times in a row -- so, anyway, I'm reading the WSJ about the auto industry bailout goings on, and there's an article about how auto parts suppliers are going under, many whether there's a bailout or not, apparently because demand is so soft and credit so tight and margins so small that they can't make it (I'm reading in dead tree…
revere | December 5, 2008Given the size of the kinds of Federal bail-outs being discussed these days, Harvard University's endowment, almost $37 billion, by far the largest of any university in the world, sounds like chump change. But it is a staggeringly large endowment for a university and the interest alone accounted for 35% of the Harvard's annual operating budget. The previous statement is not quite accurate, we find out now. The endowment stood at $36.9 billion four months ago, the biggest decline in modern history of the institution. In the time since it has lost at least 22% of its value ($8 billion). The…
grrlscientist | November 28, 2008Well, that's it. I am in deep trouble now. The one employment opportunity in the world that I thought I could rely on as a "fall back" to pay my rent when all else fails -- such as working as a research scientist or as a pet care provider -- is now also experiencing a hiring freeze combined with a dramatic wage slump. What job is this? Prostitution.
Yes, my friends, it appears that the average American male is now so broke that he cannot afford a whore any longer. Horrors! What is the world coming to (no pun intended)? Do you suppose more (gasp) real relationships might develop as a result?…
revere | November 23, 2008Not quite 29 years ago the Chrysler Corporation asked the US Government for $1.5 billion in loan guarantees. $1.5 billion sounds like chump change now, but it was a pretty big deal in 1979:
The United States Congress reluctantly passed the "Chrysler Corporation Loan Guarantee Act of 1979" (Public Law 96-185) on December 20, 1979 (signed into law by President Jimmy Carter on January 7, 1980), prodded by Chrysler workers and dealers in every congressional district who feared the loss of their livelihoods. The military then bought thousands of Dodge pickup trucks which entered military service…
revere | November 21, 2008John Dingell (D-MI), longtime Chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, has done some good things in his time, but overall he's been a net minus. When Henry Waxman (D-CA) toppled him from his perch today my feeling was an uncharitable, Good Riddance. The vote in the Democratic Party caucus was close but not very close: 137 - 122. Dingell has not been representing the people of his District as much as he has been representing the US Automakers. He he got the sobriquet Dirty Air Dingell the old fashioned way: he earned it:
The Energy and Commerce panel is one of the most important House…
revere | November 16, 2008World leaders confront global crisis
Economic summit in Washington is likely only a first step
to new rules to prevent financial meltdown and market mayhem.
In 1955 the late economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote a classic book about the stock market crash of 1929 (The Great Crash 1929). It hasn't gone out of print since, thanks, Galbraith observed in a later introduction added in the 1990s, to the penchant of the US economy to have periodic recessions. It is again prominently displayed in bookstores. That's where I noticed it last month and bought a copy. It's a frightening read. All you…
revere | November 5, 2008The US election is over. Now comes the battle over what it means. The right wing of the Democratic Party aside, it seems pretty clear this was one of the periodic "realignment" elections that are of historic significance. Obama's base, overwhelmingly the progressive heart of the Democratic Party, is a powerful coalition of the younger generation, racial and ethnic "minorities" (each probably constituting larger voting blocks than the right wing linchpin of white evangelicals), GLBT groups, women, young professionals, those deeply concerned about the environment, traditional Democratic…
revere | October 15, 2008I am not in the habit of reading classic horror stories but this weekend I picked up John Kenneth Galbraith's 1955 book, The Great Crash: 1929. Unfortunately it is non-fiction. And even more unfortunately it is selling well in the university bookstore. Galbraith is gone but his book lives on. In a new Foreword written in the 1990s he noted that it has never gone out of print since its publication more than 50 years ago, mainly because every decade or two we have a new stock market crisis to renew interest. Since 1929 these crises have all been harbingers of recession, not depression. It isn't…
j7uy5 | October 13, 2008
href="http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/13/paul-krugman-wins-economics-nobel/?hp">Paul
Krugman
href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/6c61ac54-9922-11dd-9d48-000077b07658.html?nclick_check=1">was
awarded the
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sveriges_Riksbank_Prize_in_Economic_Sciences_in_Memory_of_Alfred_Nobel">Sveriges
Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred
Nobel.
“It’s been an extremely weird
day, but weird in a positive way,” Mr. Krugman said in an
interview on his way to a Washington meeting for the Group of Thirty,
an international body from the…