Janesdiggo's List: Economy

• Germans, most of whose salaries and standard of living have not improved as the economy has strengthened, are more disenchanted than ever with the financial demands of the European Union.

• The number of people on the welfare program known as Hartz IV has remained stubbornly stuck at around 6.7 million people out of a population of 82 million. New jobs are lower paying and less secure. A study released in July found that the number of low-wage workers in Germany rose consistently from 1998 to 2008, to 6.6 million from 4.3 million. The number of temporary workers, just over 100,000 at the beginning of 1990, peaked at over 800,000 before the financial crisis.
• German taxpayers already had to bear the burden of reunification, with the country spending by some estimates $2 trillion to rebuild East Germany. The fruits of that nation-building at home are increasingly visible, not just in the renovated splendors of historic cities like Leipzig and Dresden, but in the long moribund job market. From a high of 20.8 percent in February 2005, unemployment in the former East Germany fell to 11.5 percent by August 2010.

• The pay range in Germany increasingly fraying to bottom: A rising share of low-wage workers earned less than 50% of the median wage, while such low wages are suppressed in many other countries, statutory minimum wages.
    Neither the Sittenwidrigkeitsgrenze still sectoral minimum wages, the differentiation of the wage spectrum, limiting effective. Therefore, a statutory minimum wage in Germany essential.

• • If one were based on the relative level of statutory minimum wages in other European countries, Germany would have a statutory minimum wage between € 5.93 and € 9.18 per hour will be introduced.

• National surveys back that up – six in 10 Canadian workers are surviving from paycheque to paycheque
• Credit Counselling Society in the Vancouver suburb of New Westminster, with six other offices in Western Canada.
• In 2008, the service had about 7,000 new clients, which spiked roughly 50 per cent to 10,000 in 2009. This year, it is up another 5 per cent – and the pace of increase is rising, with 11 per cent more clients last month compared with August, 2009.
• For credit cards alone, the average client arrives with $35,000 in debt on six different cards.
• Middle-class incomes haven’t kept up with the cost of living in the past few decades, and in the past year, much of the job growth has been in part-time positions.

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• peak oil isn’t a problem if the economy it powers is shrinking. For the first time since 1983, world oil demand fell last year, bringing oil prices tumbling down. But recessions, even the deepest, only last so long.
• The first thing you notice about a recovering economy is that it starts burning more fuel. The second is that oil prices are suddenly rising again.

• Median household income last year was $50,221, down more than $1,500 from the median income of $51,726 that the Census Bureau reported for 2008.
• almost one in four families earned less than $25,000, an increase of one percentage point.

• There are two kinds of property. Firstly, natural property, or that which comes to us from the Creator of the universe -- such as the earth,air, water. Secondly, artificial or acquired property -- the invention of men.
• Every individual in the world is born therein with legitimate claims on a certain kind of property, or its equivalent.
• t is wrong to say God made rich and poor; He made only male and female, and He gave them the earth for their inheritance.
• Practical religion consists in doing good: and the only way of serving God is that of endeavoring to make His creation happy. All preaching that has not this, for its object is nonsense and hypocrisy.
• Poverty, therefore, is a thing created by that which is called civilized life. It exists not in the natural state.
• has operated two ways: to make one part of society more affluent, and the other more wretched, than would have been the lot of either in a natural state.
• Civilization,
• the idea of landed property commenced with cultivation,
• Cultivation is at least one of the greatest natural improvements ever made by human invention. It has given to created earth a tenfold value. But the landed monopoly that began with it has produced the greatest evil. It has dispossessed more than half the inhabitants of every nation of their natural inheritance, without providing for them, as ought to have been done, an indemnification for that loss, and has thereby created a species of poverty and wretchedness that did not exist before.
• In advocating the case of the persons thus dispossessed, it is a right, and not a charity, that I am pleading for.
• To create a national fund, out of which there shall be paid to every person, when arrived at the age of twenty-one years, the sum of fifteen pounds sterling, as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property:
• And also, the sum of ten pounds per annum, during life, to every person now living, of the age of fifty years, and to all others as they shall arrive at that age.
• the earth, in its natural uncultivated state was, and ever would have continued to be, the common property of the human race;
• the system of landed property, by its inseparable connection with cultivation, and with what is called civilized life, has absorbed the property of all those whom it dispossessed, without providing, as ought to have been done, an indemnification for that loss.
• The fault, however, is not in the present possessors. No complaint is tended, or ought to be alleged against them, unless they adopt the crime by opposing justice
• The fault is in the system
• t is proposed that the payments, as already stated, be made to every person, rich or poor. It is best to make it so, to prevent invidious distinctions
• It is not charity but a right, not bounty but justice, that I am pleading for. The present state of civilization is as odious as it is unjust.*
• The contrast of affluence and wretchedness continually meeting and offending the eye, is like dead and living bodies chained together.
• I care not how affluent some may be, provided that none be miserable in consequence of it.
• • One of the best quotes I'v read
• There are, in every country, some magnificent charities established by individuals.
• He may satisfy his conscience, but not his heart. He may give all that he has, and that all will relieve but little.
• It is only by organizing civilization upon such principles as to act like a system of pulleys, that the whole weight of misery can be removed.
• To the numerous class dispossessed of their natural inheritance by the system of landed property it will be an act of national justice.
• Personal property is the effect of society; and it is as impossible for an individual to acquire personal property without the aid of society
• Separate an individual from society, and give him an island or a continent to possess, and he cannot acquire personal property
• All accumulation, therefore, of personal property, beyond what a man's own hands produce, is derived to him by living in society; and he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came.
• it will be found that the accumulation of personal property is, in many instances, the effect of paying too little for the labor that produced it; the consequence of which is that the working hand perishes in old age, and the employer abounds in affluence.
• it is no reason that, because he might not make a good use of it for himself, another should take it.

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• Blomquist futilely tried to dissuade clients and friends from putting their life savings into pricey homes. He wrote letters warning federal regulators and members of Congress that mortgage fraud was creating "a perfect storm" in the housing industry.
• Blomquist said, the median price of a modest home more than doubled, to $900,000. The most prevalent loans in the county, he said, were option adjustable-rate mortgages, in which borrowers could pick their initial monthly payments for five years.
• Most of them chose the lowest payments, but that increased their loan balances and all but assured huge monthly payment hikes when their interest rates jumped.
• When the market crashed in 2008, the county's average median home price plunged from $869,000 to $450,000 "in about six months," he said.
• What we saw was a huge increase in the amount of stated income [loans], or otherwise known as liar loans.
• those had been set up just for self-employed borrowers, with 20 percent down payment, excellent credit, six months of stated income in reserves, many other qualifications where, if there were losses incurred, they would be on the borrower versus the banks or society at whole
• as securitizations became more popular, these guidelines were tossed out the window
• I started to notice that prices were directly correlated to this fraud that was happening and with the stated income, the proliferation of stated income loans.
• I was forced to close down my business. As the broker, I was contractually obligated to repurchase any loans that were fraudulently originated, but yet that became the industry standard

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• It turns out that banks in that state are so confident of their above the law status that they've also taken to casually changing the locks on and entering homes they don't own, meaning haven't foreclosed upon. This has become sufficiently common that the local press has taken notice."
• The only problem behind this flim-flam was that this practice violated the law in at least 23 states leading to big banks imposing long overdue foreclosure moratoriums, not to safeguard human rights but to protect their property rights. The banks fear massive and very costly lawsuits
• There is has been a chain of criminality behind what the FBI has been calling a 'mortgage fraud epidemic" that has not really been in the news.
• The press has avoided showing how three industries, real estate, finance and insurance worked together to rip off the American people.
• This second-generation Tea Party came into being a month after Barack Obama moved into the Oval Office, when CNBC windbag Rick Santelli went on the air to denounce one of Obama's bailout programs and called for "tea parties" to protest
• The impetus for Santelli's rant wasn't the billions in taxpayer money being spent to prop up the bad mortgage debts and unsecured derivatives losses of irresponsible investors like Goldman Sachs and AIG - massive government bailouts supported,... "No, what had Santelli all worked up was Obama's "Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan," a $75 billion program less than a hundredth the size of all the bank bailouts. This was one of the few bailout programs designed to directly benefit individual victims of the financial crisis.
• Inside Job,
• it reveals how former politicians turned academics are serving and servicing the right-wing elite with arguments that conceal their interests and agendas while drawing huge fees for their intellectual subservience/whoredom

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• • This is unbelievable ... close as quickly as possible? Millions of Americans are losing their homes at an unprecedented rate and gov't wants to speed it up!
• Regulators said that lenders should continue with foreclosures as quickly as possible if no problems are found.

• About 11.5 percent of borrowers are in default today, up from 5.7 percent from two years earlier.
• A mortgage generates an annual fee equal to only about 0.25 percent of the loan’s total value, or about $500 a year on a typical $200,000 mortgage. That revenue evaporates once a loan becomes delinquent, while the cost of a foreclosure can easily reach $2,500 and devour the meager profits generated from handling healthy loans.
• “Investment in people, training, and technology — all that costs them a lot of money, and they have no incentive to staff up,”

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• The Institute of International Finance, which lobbies for big banks, estimates that $825 billion will flow into developing countries this year, 42 percent more than in 2009. Investments in debt of emerging economies alone is expected to triple, to $272 billion.
• While developing countries often benefit from foreign investments, huge inflows of capital complicate their macroeconomic management. They push up the value of their currency, boosting imports and slowing exports, and they promote fast credit expansion — which can cause inflation, inflate asset bubbles and usually leave a pile of bad loans. This money turns tail at the first sign of trouble, tipping countries into crisis.
• Those are the dynamics behind Mexico’s 1994 “tequila crisis,” the 1997 Asian crisis, the 1998 Russian catastrophe, the 1999 Brazilian debacle and the 2002 Argentine collapse. The housing bubble that burst here in 2008 was painfully similar, with irrational investments and then a sudden flight.
• Even the International Monetary Fund — long a foe of anything that got in the way of money — acknowledged this year that controls should be part of the toolkit.

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• Most troubling, all significant income growth has been concentrated at the top of the scale.
• the top 1 percent of earners, which stood at 8.9 percent in 1976, rose to 23.5 percent by 2007, but during the same period, the average inflation-adjusted hourly wage declined by more than 7 percent.
• Economics, after all, was founded by moral philosophers,
• Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, was a professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow.
• Rising inequality has thus spawned a multitude of “expenditure cascades,” whose first step is increased spending by top earners.
• The rich have been spending more simply because they have so much extra money.
• These cascades have made it substantially more expensive for middle-class families to achieve basic financial goals.
• the counties where income inequality grew fastest also showed the biggest increases in symptoms of financial distress.
• The counties with the biggest increases in inequality also reported the largest increases in divorce rates.
• The counties where long commute times had grown the most were again those with the largest increases in inequality.
• There is no persuasive evidence that greater inequality bolsters economic growth or enhances anyone’s well-being.

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• Over the last two years, they have become poorer. And many may not return to their old levels of wealth and income anytime soon.
• whether harder times for the rich will ultimately benefit the middle class and the poor, given that the huge recent increase in top incomes coincided with slow income growth for almost every other group.

• More than 15 million Americans are unemployed, homelessness has increased by 50 percent in some cities, and 38 million people are receiving food stamps
• The poverty rate will hit 15 percent — up from 13.2 percent in 2008. The current formula for setting the federal poverty line — unchanged since 1963