recession
kkrisberg | September 2, 2014Yesterday, the nation celebrated its workers. However, new research finds that most workers face fewer and fewer reasons to rejoice.
Last week, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) released a new report finding that hourly wages fell in the first half of 2014 when compared to the first half of 2013. And those wages fell for nearly all groups of workers, including those with bachelor’s degrees and higher. This isn’t a new trend, just one that’s quickly heading toward crisis proportions. The report, “Why America’s Workers Need Faster Wage Growth — And What We Can Do About It,” states that…
kkrisberg | February 28, 2014It’s probably no surprise that people who experienced foreclosures during the Great Recession may have also experienced symptoms of depression. However, researchers have found that the mental health effects of foreclosure go beyond the individual to the community at-large.
“For the most part, discussion of foreclosure has focused on the individual experience, the people who are in this circumstance, who are at risk of losing their homes, of losing that nest egg,” said Kathleen Cagney, a professor within the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. “But we wanted to think about…
sastyk | January 23, 2012This is a revised version of a post that appeared three years ago, towards the start of the recession. It seems just as relevant, maybe more relevant, now.
A while back there was a study that suggested that it is more expensive to be poor in the US in some ways, than it is to be rich. And to anyone who has actually been poor, this probably made perfect sense. Among the ways that being poor cost you money:
1. Your infrastructure is limited, so you are limited to what fits in your infrastructure - for example, you don't have a car, so you can only shop at the convenience stores or those on…
sastyk | August 9, 2011We now all know the limitations of Standard and Poor, what they missed and what they didn't, why to blame Republicans, why to blame Obama, and that Austerity is the new watchword in the US, while rioting has taken everyone's imagination in the UK (wow, aren't we timely?) Most of us are worried that the US will slip back into a recession. You shouldn't be.
The reason you shouldn't be worried is that the good news is that the US was never *really* out of a recession. Sure, in economist terms, we technically had some quarters of growth and a nice extended stock market rally, but in the net,…
jstemwedel | January 25, 2010(As before, I'm still not sure whether, in the metaphor, the factory is building monkeys or staffed by monkeys. Perhaps, really, we're in the business of making educated monkeys, and the problem is that our administration views this as akin to making widgets. Anyway, the point is: Explosions! Chaos! Shrieking! Brachiating along the pieces of wreckage!)
We had our beginning-of-the-semester faculty meeting today, and I have to conclude that our department is in an abusive relationship with the university (and system) administration.
Why I'm convinced of this is the simple fact that we have…
razib | May 2, 2009Calculated Risk has a great chart showing GDP fluctuations which puts into perspective just how big a downtown the Great Depression represented, and how it compares to the current one. For the population ~30 and under the current downswing is already 3 times more extreme from the peak than any recession they have memory of. In fact, we're already approaching the biggest downswing since World War II and the recession will certainly be the longest as well. On the other hand, we're as far from the commonly accepted definition of a Depression of a 10% decline in GDP as the 1991 one recession was…
ddobbs | March 10, 2009Back in October a study found that high testosterone levels were associated with higher levels of financial risk-taking. Now comes the blowback, as Andrew Sullivan notes:
Tina Beatie attacks testosterone:
...it is interesting to note that Pope Benedict has recently suggested that there is a close connection between original sin and the greed that has created the current economic crisis. It is also notable that the credit crunch has been created by a profession that is almost exclusively male. In the line-up of failed bankers, not a single woman's name has appeared. Male greed has proven…
razib | March 5, 2009Awesome chart from Calculated Risk:
Blue = current Bear Market
Gray = Great Depression Bear Market
Check out Google Trends for "Great Recession."
esiegel | April 10, 2008In a comment on my last post, What is Dark Energy, Kendall asks the following, which is such a good one I think it deserves its own post:
I thought the expansion was accelerating? Aren’t you saying that it is on its way down to 85% of its current rate? Sounds like expansion is slowing, but still leaves us with an open universe…
People do say the expansion of the Universe is accelerating. But that doesn't mean that the expansion rate is accelerating. It means that if you take a look at any one galaxy that isn't gravitationally bound to us in the Local Group (that is, any big galaxy that isn't…