SmartRemarks

My 20th college reunion was last weekend. I was a bit taken aback by this because, first of all, it’s simply impossible:  I certainly haven’t been out of college for two decades. My infallibly accurate internal calendar tells me it’s more like six years, seven max. But twenty? That’s absolutely ridiculous.

Nonetheless, they insisted on holding the event, and I attended. I’ve always had a soft spot for reunions, not least because I’ve never really been the best at keeping in touch with people as time goes by (although Facebook does make that a lot easier these days), and organized reunions provide a great opportunity to “catch up.” 

I hung out with a lot of old friends, new acquaintances, and a few professors, and generally had a terrific time. (The Saturday afternoon wine tasting, ironically one of the least expensive events, was particularly enjoyable.) Still, there was something of a wistful feeling to the whole endeavor that it wasn’t quite possible to shake.

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Tags: Chicago, college, Shoreland, unemployment, University of Chicago

Personal anecdote time here. Unemployment is much in the news these days. And as I’ve mentioned once or twice, I’ve been on the job market for a while now, looking for full-time work in the nonprofit sector. I try not to dwell on it. I did a little tallying-up today, though, and determined that since last Labor Day—not quite eight months, just before I started this blog and (coincidentally) the economic meltdown began in earnest—I have applied for 78 different jobs. Out of that, I’ve had a grand total of seven interviews. And no offers.

Anyone who’s lucky enough not to have been on the market recently simply has no idea how competitive it is out there. Not long ago I interviewed for a management position at a prison reform organization. The Board members I spoke with were effusive about what a great candidate I was—both before and after they rejected me. I lost out on that one to a Pulitzer-winning former editor from a major Chicago newspaper, someone who had led investigative series covering the prison system… but who had recently been laid off, and was accepting a substantial salary decrease to work at this nonprofit organization.

That’s what it’s like these days.

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Tags: Depression, economy, Republicans, unemployment

It’s been far longer than I intended since my last post. Sometimes time just runs away from you. So let me just toss off a few ideas that have crossed my mind in recent days, and get caught up…

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First off:  the wrangling in Washington over the new “economic stimulus package” has been interesting to watch. Obama has gone out of his way to be as “post-partisan” as promised, extending an olive branch to Republicans the likes of which Dems never saw under eight years of Bush, wining and dining them, inviting input… and in response they basically gave him the finger. (Although, anxious not to alienate a public who likes him, they tried to shift their ire toward the Democratic leadership.) And the usual suspects in the punditocracy backed them up.

Basically, the GOP’s goal right now seems to be to shrink the stimulus bill down to something so small and weak that it won’t be effective… and then to blame their opponents for its ineffectiveness. All while the country at large continues to suffer, of course.

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Tags: Battlestar Galactica, Congress, Dan DiDio, DC Comics, economy, Final Crisis, House of Representatives, Illinois, Legion, Obama, Republicans, Senate, super-heroes, television, Tom Geoghegan, unemployment

Sorry I haven’t posted for a few days. But the holiday interregnum is now well and truly over, and the ordinary part of winter has commenced. Kids are back in school, the full staff is back in the office, and as of today the new Congress has been sworn in.

(Of course, that last part took place absent the junior Senators from Minnesota—although Franken’s win in the long, long recount, finally certified yesterday, is heartening, Norm Coleman’s legal challenge will delay things further despite being almost certainly doomed to fail—or Illinois—one can’t help but feel a little bit sympathetic to Roland Burris, but rejecting him as a symbol of Blago’s hubris is the sensible thing to do, and Burris certainly knew what a minefield he was stepping into. From Delaware Joe Biden is actually still there, until his successor is formally appointed on January 20; and likewise New York and Colorado will need new appointees Very Soon Now too, when Hillary Clinton and Ken Salazar move on to the cabinet.)

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Tags: Al Franken, Apple, blogging, Congress, economy, Gaza, Illinois, Israel, Obama, resolutions, Senate, transition, unemployment

As I write this, the U.S. stock market has plunged downward for seven straight days. Just two days after dropping below 10,000 for the first time in four years, the Dow dropped below 9,000 for the first time in five years. That’s a 39% slide from its historic high of 14,000, set only a year ago… and there’s no clear bottom in sight.

Meanwhile, the bailout plan passed by Congress is so far failing to have any calming effect whatsoever, as the solvency crisis spreads around the world. Paulson is now talking about immediate capital injections, as I wrote earlier that most economists had been advising all along, and commentators are grateful that Congress (quietly) slipped authorization for that into the bill.

In a nutshell, people are in a panic. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Chris Miller, economy, financial crisis, inflation, unemployment

From Salon’s Andrew Leonard:

There could be no better testament to the historic ineptitude and failure of the Bush administration than that two-thirds of the members of the president’s own party rejected his administration’s plan to deal with the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. …

One way to look at the “stabilization” of these institutions, wrote [Time's Justin] Fox, is as the culling of the weak from the herd.

More culling is to come. In the natural world, that wouldn’t be such a bad thing. The herd grows stronger as the weak die off and the strong breed. But the global financial system does not appear to be an exquisitely balanced ecology. It seems much more comparable to a house of cards where you take out one support pillar, and it all comes crashing down.

From Princeton economist Alan Krueger, writing in the New York Times:

…this financial crisis is likely to threaten middle- and upper-income jobs to a greater extent than has been the case in past recessions. …

Historically, most downturns have hit the least-skilled the hardest, as employers hold on to workers with unique skills who would be expensive to replace. This downturn, however, is likely to be more democratic than the norm because of the severity of the credit crunch. Research indicates that employers hire relatively more skilled workers when they invest in new plant and equipment, especially high-tech information and computing equipment (the so-called “capital-skill complementarity” hypothesis). If funds for investment are not available because of the financial crisis, however, companies will hire fewer skilled workers.

Consistent with this prediction, initial signs indicate that the employment shock has been felt more by college graduates than by those with a high school degree or less.

Some interesting thoughts from across the pond:

Will these [bailouts] and private-sector fixes work? No, because a) they are not system-wide fixes and b) they are based on the same flawed economic policies that spurred this crisis in the first place.

Some of these policies, attributable to Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, are already discredited. Contempt for government is no longer acceptable. …

But there are other orthodox economic policies that remain intact and are as yet unchallenged by any political party. The most damaging is orthodox monetary policy. …

Flawed monetary policies are turning a crisis into a catastrophe. They must be challenged. Keynes’s cool, rational voice on monetary theory and monetary policy must once again be heeded. Central banks must once again take control over all rates – short and long, safe and risky.

But a system-wide fix would go further. It would challenge the orthodoxy that unemployment helps keep wages low and is a good thing; and that wage rises are always inflationary. It is this orthodoxy that has caused wages and other forms of compensation to fall as a share of GDP in all OECD countries over the past three decades. This fall in compensation has forced people to supplement incomes by borrowing more.

Creating jobs and raising incomes as a share of GDP is vital if we want people to repay debts, salvage banks and return to the high street.

And a book recommendation:

The Trillion Dollar Meltdown by Charles R. Morris

Now we all hold our breaths to see what happens next…

Tags: economy, financial crisis, unemployment

And how did it get that way?

To my surprise and amusement, out of the reams of commentary produced over the last year or two, one of the best summaries I’ve seen showed up attached to the Semiannual Report from the mutual fund company behind some funds I own. In a “Message from the President” attached to the report, MainStay Investments president Stephen Fisher, attempting to explain why customers shouldn’t panic just because every sector of the market is tanking at once, offered a impressively succinct and logical account of just what chain of events and combination of factors created this mess. Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: economy, Election 2008, financial crisis, housing, inflation, investing, unemployment