"Fear of economic blow as births drop around world" by Bernard Condon | Associated Press May 08, 2014
NEW YORK — Nancy Strumwasser, a high school teacher from Mountain Lakes, N.J., always thought she’d have two children. But the layoffs that swept over the US economy around the time her son was born six years ago helped change her mind. Though she and her husband, a market researcher, managed to keep their jobs, she fears they won’t be so fortunate next time.
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The 2008 financial crisis did more than wipe out billions in wealth and millions of jobs. It also sent birth rates tumbling around the world as couples found themselves too short of money or too fearful about their finances to have children. Six years later, birth rates haven’t bounced back.
For those who fear an overcrowded planet, this is good news. For the economy, it’s not so good.
We tend to think economic growth comes from working harder and smarter. But economists attribute up to a third of it to more people joining the workforce each year than leaving it. The result is more producing, earning, and spending.
Now this secret fuel of the economy, rarely missing and little noticed, is running out.
(Blog editor is apoplectic at this log being rolled out to account for the inevitable crash that is coming)
‘‘For the first time since World War II, we’re no longer getting a tailwind,’’ said Russ Koesterich, chief investment strategist at BlackRock, the world’s largest money manager. ‘‘You’re going to create fewer jobs. . . . All else equal, wage growth will be slower.’’
Well, all else is not equal. Everything is headed up to the 1%.
Births are falling in China, Japan, the United States, Germany, Italy, and nearly all other European countries. Studies have shown that births drop when unemployment rises. Birth rates have fallen the most in some regions that were hardest hit by the financial crisis.
Explain Africa, Asia, and Central America, areas booming with babies and poverty.
Folks, it really reaches a point where you feel rage at this rank rot elitist garbage called AmeriKan journalism.
In the United States, the trend emerges as a gauge of future economic health — the growth in the pool of potential workers, ages 20 to 64 — is signaling trouble ahead. This labor pool had expanded for decades, thanks to the vast generation of baby boomers. Now the boomers are retiring, and there are barely enough new workers to replace them.
????
See: Jobs Report a Joke
Does it look like I'm f***ing laughing!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Yeah, something is missing!
Growth in the working-age population has halted in developed countries overall. Even in France and the United Kingdom, with relatively healthy birth rates, growth in the labor pool has slowed dramatically. In Japan, Germany, and Italy, the labor pool is shrinking.
I guess they will have to visa more cheap foreign imports then.
The f***ing agenda-pushing whoreporate Shit never stops!
‘‘It’s like health — you only realize it exists until you don’t have it,’’ says Alejandro Macarron Larumbe of Demographic Renaissance, a think tank in Madrid.
Related: Making You Think
What I thought was I never saw anything regarding the influence of groups like WINEP and AIPAC.
Related:
Six Zionist Companies Own 96% of the World's Media
Declassified: Massive Israeli manipulation of US media exposed
Operation Mockingbird
Why Am I No Longer Reading the Newspaper?
Oh.
The drop in birth rates is rooted in the 1960s, when many women entered the workforce for the first time and couples decided to have smaller families. Births did begin rising in many countries in the new millennium. But then the financial crisis struck. Stocks and home values plummeted, blowing a hole in household finances, and tens of millions of people lost jobs.
Related(?): US childbirth is uniquely expensive, study says
Couldn't be.
Doesn't Obummercare cover that?
****************
The effects on economies, personal wealth, and living standards are far reaching:
■ A return to ‘‘normal’’ growth is unlikely:
Meaning the GRAND DEPRESSION and ACCUMULATION of WEALTH at the TOP will CONTINUE as it ACCELERATES!
The main reason: Not enough new workers.
(Blog editor just shaking his head at that pile of crap being placed out there when over 800,000 people were just dropped of the count)
Related: Applications for US unemployment aid fall to 319K
Makes it sound like it is a good thing that 319,000 more people were put out of work following layoffs after Easter(?).
■ Reduced pay and lifestyles: Slower economic growth will limit wage gains and make it difficult for middle-class families to raise their living standards, and for those in poverty to escape it.
What middle class?
■ A drag on household wealth: Slower economic growth means companies will generate lower profits, thereby weighing down stock prices.
The stock market is setting records thanks to the Fed printing pre$$, so WTF are you talking about?
And the share of people in the population at the age when they tend to invest in stocks and homes is set to fall, too. All else equal, that implies stagnant or lower values.
Not equal. Most Americans are now out of the stock market anyway. We were cleaned out after the last crisis.
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If homes are so important why all the fraudulent foreclosures?
Related: Mass. foreclosures petitions spike in March
But I was told the state economy is going like gangbusters!!
"Homes topping $100 million smash price records" by Prashant Gopal | Bloomberg News May 08, 2014
NEW YORK — The US trophy-home market is shattering price records this year.
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Barry Rosenstein, founder of hedge fund Jana Partners, has purchased an 18-acre beachfront property in East Hampton, N.Y., for $147 million, according to the New York Post. That would break the US single-family price record of $120 million set last month with the sale of a Greenwich, Conn., waterfront estate on 51 acres.
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The world’s richest people are moving cash to real estate as they seek havens for their wealth. In the United States, an improving economy and stocks at a record are bolstering confidence among the affluent. Home purchases of $2 million or more jumped 33 percent in January and February from a year earlier to the highest level for the two-month period in data going back to 1988, according to an analysis by DataQuick.
Hey, at least someone is happy and making money.
‘‘Last year the stock market broke all kinds of records, and when that happens, you’re going to see art and resort real estate break all kinds of records,’’ said Judi Desiderio, chief executive of Town & Country Real Estate in East Hampton.
Now I understand the Globe's interest in art. The paper is being written of and for the elite of Bo$ton, not you or me.
Rosenstein bought the estate on Further Lane in East Hampton, near the mansions of Jerry Seinfeld and Steven Cohen, without the help of a broker, she said.
He of SAC fame?
Related: Jason Alexander opens Pops season with tongue-in-cheek
It was a show I used to like; now I realize it was nothing lore than a protocol to mainstream Jewish neuroticism and subtly inculcate Americans in Zionist values without them ever realizing it.
Did you see Seinfeld last night?
The property, with formal gardens and a pond, was previously owned by the late value investor Christopher Browne and his partner, Andrew Gordon, the New York Post reported on May 3.
‘‘It’s sitting on a little stretch of land in East Hampton that has had the who’s who from the beginning of time,’’ Desiderio said. ‘‘You would recognize every name of the oceanfront owners. They are all Googleable.’’
******************
The Greenwich property, known as Copper Beech Farm, was originally listed for $190 million. It has a 12-bedroom main house built in 1898, almost a mile of shorefront, two islands, a 75-foot pool with a spa, grass tennis court, stone carriage house, and an 1,800-foot driveway. Its buyer hasn’t been disclosed.
Kurt Rappaport, who represented owner Suzanne Saperstein in the $102 million sale of the five-acre Fleur de Lys mansion in the Holmby Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles, said that property sold to a European billionaire who beat out two other bidders.
Rappaport, cofounder of Westside Estate Agency, said he is negotiating for a seller of another Beverly Hills property that will probably sell for more than $100 million.
‘‘The next benchmark will be $200 million,’’ Rappaport said. ‘‘This is a very small segment of the market that very few can afford but they rarely change hands, and when they do, it’s an opportunity.’’
Last month, a Beverly Hills compound once owned by William Randolph Hearst went on the market for $135 million, making it the highest-priced residence for sale in California, according to listing broker Hilton & Hyland.
The boom in high-end real estate coincides with the slowdown in the broader housing market as tight credit, slow wage growth, and higher prices and borrowing costs put home ownership out of reach for many Americans.
Purchases costing $1 million or more, representing 2 percent of sales, rose 7.8 percent in March from a year earlier, according to the National Association of Realtors. Transactions for $250,000 or less, which represent almost two-thirds of the market, plunged 12 percent in the period as house hunters found few available homes in that price range.
Sales of more than $100 million, while rare, underscore the growing gap between the rich and poor, said Jonathan Miller, president of New York-based appraiser Miller Samuel Inc.
I was told it was because there are not enough workers.
‘‘The average citizens in the US are looking at this stuff like it’s happening on another planet,’’ Miller said. ‘‘It’s not a proxy for the remainder of the market, it’s a phenomenon happening to a tiny fraction of the top 1 percent. It’s a few dozen people paying these kinds of numbers.’’
And that just for whom the Boston Globe is being written. This article makes it obvious.
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Or you can put the home on wheels in retirement (something none of us will be doing):
"Supersize motor homes are a great life for some retirees" by Peter T. Kilborn | New York Times May 10, 2014
NAPLES, Fla. — Suzi and Edmund Kuehn parked their 41-foot motor home in Flint, Mich., on a Saturday night four years ago. The next morning, Kuehn’s former husband called from Dallas and told her their 31-year-old son, Leslie, who had been fighting plasma cell leukemia, had died.
“We left within 45 minutes,” said Suzi Kuehn, now 64. She and Edmund Kuehn, 60, who were retired, picked up her mother in Galesburg, Ill., and her daughter Lisa in Quincy, Ill. They called Suzi’s other daughter, Amy, and two children in Cape Coral, Fla., to fly to Texas. On Tuesday morning, the Kuehns pulled into a campground in Dallas.
They drove the 1,300 miles to Dallas from Flint with comfort and clockwork that would be inconceivable with airplanes and cars. Their motor home has its own plumbing, water, generator for heat and electricity, and full-size refrigerator. Everyone can ride in the same cabin.
The big motor homes like the Kuehns’ start at 35 feet. Called motor coaches, they go up to 45 feet and weigh up to 25 tons — 14 times the weight of the average car. Most have two, three, or four slide-outs — wall sections that are pushed out once the vehicle is parked, nearly doubling the living space. New, these big rigs sell for $200,000 to $2 million.
Motor coaches are expanding the horizons of how adventurous retirees can travel and live. Built on the chassis of buses, which are intended to last 1 million miles, they have caught the wave of baby boomers, now 50 to 68, who look forward to a 10- to 20-year stretch of able-bodied retirement.
Driving these vehicles, they head for scores of luxurious new motor coach resorts that mimic the gated “active adult” subdivisions of the South and Southwest. Some retirees have begun buying parking pads like condos where they spend a winter or summer and then ride off to another resort.
Living in East Hartford, Conn., in 2010, Edmund Kuehn lost his job as an electrical contractor when his company closed. So he and Suzi Kuehn bought a motor coach. They had to find a place to park where they could hook up to utilities, so they bought a lot at the Naples Motorcoach Resort, a short drive from Naples’s Fifth Avenue shops.
The resort’s first such investors, they paid $90,000 for a lushly landscaped site with a concrete pad for the Monaco Dynasty they had bought used for $180,000. With their feet affixed to their wheels, the Kuehns have blown past the pasture that some pensioners go out to.
Sitting on a lounge chair outside their coach, Edmund Kuehn said, “We own the lot. That’s it. We have a lack of direction. We don’t know where we’re going next. In five years, we’ve done 50,000, 60,000 miles.”
What are the carbon emissions and footprint on all that?
Suzi Kuehn cradled her 7-month-old great-grandson, who was visiting from Cape Coral, about an hour away. “We have a nest egg for a house sometime,” she said. “In 10 years, maybe.”
These resorts are awash with activity, with people playing tennis and shuffleboard, rushing off to parties and hitting the pool. They live outdoors.
“Here, when the last drop of rain falls,’’ said Deb Rohrbauch of the Riverbend resort in LaBelle, an hour inland from Naples, “it’s like ants coming out.”
Enthusiasm for sports, parties, boating, and bingo override old career coups and august credentials.
“A few people want you to know how successful they were,” said Rick Piper, 70, a former purchasing director at Western Michigan University and a resident of the Silver Palms resort in Okeechobee, an hour west of Palm Beach. “We don’t care. We thank you for being here.”
The resorts have restaurants, bars, pools, and fitness centers. They provide water and sewer services, Wi-Fi and cable, and hookups for the 50 amps or more of electricity that motor coaches need for their appliances, heating, and air-conditioning. Each lot has a bed of brick paving stones or glossy concrete for the coach, the car it tows, and a golf cart.
Lots at the big resorts average 3,500 square feet. This provides room for the coaches’ slide-outs, as well as other amenities that owners may install, like outdoor kitchens, hot tubs, walls of trees and shrubbery, little thatch-roofed huts with bars, and patios where residents watch television on the large screens built into their fuselage walls.
The economics of the life can be frightening. A motor coach’s value plunges like a Yugo’s.
In February, Terry Anderson, 63, a full-time worker based in Silver Palms, and his wife, Donna, 61, both formerly of New Hartford, Conn., paid $205,000 for a new Holiday Rambler. “In the first year,” he said, “it will lose 30 or 40 percent. It’s not for the faint of heart.”
Coach owners also incur expenses like $56 for 14 gallons of gas to drive only 100 miles, $80 to $100 to have the coaches washed, $200 a year for a mail service, and $100 a year for a service to rescue stranded coaches. But they don’t pay expenses like lawn care or replacing a roof.
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Oh, yeah, about that economy:
"Economy ‘paused’ before rebound, Yellen says" by Binyamin Appelbaum | New York Times May 08, 2014
WASHINGTON — Janet L. Yellen, the Federal Reserve chairwoman, told Congress on Wednesday the economy is growing at a decent rate and the Fed intends to continue the stimulus campaign that it considers at least partly responsible.
Central bankers are paid to worry, and Yellen also delivered a laundry list of things that could go wrong: The housing recovery has stalled, geopolitical tensions are rising, some asset prices are perhaps a little too high.
The Globe is nothing but a banker's mouthpiece, apologist, and defender, as well as a vehicle for eliti$t in$ult and Jewish supremacism, and I'm not being critical I'm just pointing it out. The Globe is being written of and for the elite, and I suppose this article and others like it, in fact the whole damn paper, reflects it's reader$hip and their interests, the corporate liberali$m notwithstanding.
But the overall tenor of her testimony was upbeat. The economy, she said, is shaking off a grim winter. The labor market is slowly improving.
Please stop blaming the winter for a bad economy when the government is hollering global warming cash grab.
**************
The Fed is steadily cutting its monthly purchases of Treasury and mortgage-backed securities, now at $45 billion a month, and Yellen affirmed that it plans to end those purchases in the fall. The bank must then decide when to start raising short-term interest rates, but Yellen, who suggested at a March news conference that the Fed might start raising rates about six months after it ended bond purchases, carefully avoided affirming those comments Wednesday....
They aren't going to end bond purchases. If they don't buy them, no one else will and then the U.S. government will collapse.
Yellen said only that the timing would be determined by the progress of the economic recovery, and she made clear that even after the Fed begins raising borrowing costs, the central bank does not plan to return interest rates to normal levels, which she defined as around 4 percent, until it is sure the recovery is complete.
The hearing reflected the complexity of partisan divisions over the economy. Democrats generally praised the progress of the recovery while pressing for new actions to address unemployment and inequality. Republicans, conversely, highlighted the weakness of recent growth while pressing for the Fed to curtail its efforts and questioning whether the Fed was flirting with inflation.
Related:
"Generally, Democrats are the ones who fret about unemployment and the weak economy, while Republicans question whether the Fed will lose control of inflation or destabilize financial markets. With midterm elections approaching, however, Democrats are increasingly eager to claim credit for an economic recovery, while Republicans emphasize it remains weak. “We’ve got fewer people working today than there were in 2007, and the population has increased by 15 million,” said Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama. “So how is this progress? Please tell me.” Yellen said things were getting better, but were still not good; Sessions said the Fed should not overstate the improvement. “Whatever we’re doing, we need to get better at it,” he said."
Yeah, Democrats are more in bed with bankers than Republicans. That is so depre$$ing, and why I am nominally a Republican, albeit an unwelcome one on the fringe.
Representative Kevin Brady, a Texas Republican and chairman of the committee, said the Fed’s enormous stimulus campaign could lead to higher inflation. He pressed Yellen repeatedly to set a timetable for raising interest rates.
“When do you expect that to begin?” he asked....
You know what that means, kids?
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Thank God there is a Fed:
"Ben Bernanke says bold action key in Fed’s 100 years" by Martin Crutsinger | Associated Press December 17, 2013
WASHINGTON —Ben Bernanke told the audience gathered in the Fed’s massive board room,‘‘One value that strikes me as having been at least as important as any other has been the Federal Reserve’s willingness, during its finest hours, to stand up to political pressure and make tough but necessary choices.’’
Bernanke spoke at a ceremony marking the Fed’s 100 years. He was joined by former chairmen Volcker and Alan Greenspan.
During his tenure, Volcker drove interest rates to levels not seen since the Civil War. He did so to combat a prolonged bout of high inflation.
Volcker said no one could claim that the Fed has always gotten economic policy exactly right. But he said the central bank has served the country well by acting in the public interest.
I suppose money-junkie monsters have to tell themselves that so they can look in the mirror.
Greenspan, who was chairman from 1987 to early 2006, called the days following the October 1987 stock market crash ‘‘truly frightening.’’ But because of quick actions taken by the Fed, he said, the impact on the overall economy was minimal.
Bernanke said while economists have well-known difficulties making accurate forecasts even a few quarters into the future, he had one advantage in trying to predict the Fed’s next 100 years: ‘‘I won’t be around to explain why the forecast went wrong.’’
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.... ha, ha.
Good riddance, a$$hole.
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Related: Boston Fed to cut 160 jobs
How deliciou$ly ironic.
Thank God there is a Fed:
"Ben Bernanke says bold action key in Fed’s 100 years" by Martin Crutsinger | Associated Press December 17, 2013
WASHINGTON —Ben Bernanke told the audience gathered in the Fed’s massive board room,‘‘One value that strikes me as having been at least as important as any other has been the Federal Reserve’s willingness, during its finest hours, to stand up to political pressure and make tough but necessary choices.’’
Bernanke spoke at a ceremony marking the Fed’s 100 years. He was joined by former chairmen Volcker and Alan Greenspan.
During his tenure, Volcker drove interest rates to levels not seen since the Civil War. He did so to combat a prolonged bout of high inflation.
Volcker said no one could claim that the Fed has always gotten economic policy exactly right. But he said the central bank has served the country well by acting in the public interest.
I suppose money-junkie monsters have to tell themselves that so they can look in the mirror.
Greenspan, who was chairman from 1987 to early 2006, called the days following the October 1987 stock market crash ‘‘truly frightening.’’ But because of quick actions taken by the Fed, he said, the impact on the overall economy was minimal.
Bernanke said while economists have well-known difficulties making accurate forecasts even a few quarters into the future, he had one advantage in trying to predict the Fed’s next 100 years: ‘‘I won’t be around to explain why the forecast went wrong.’’
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.... ha, ha.
Good riddance, a$$hole.
--more--"
Related: Boston Fed to cut 160 jobs
How deliciou$ly ironic.
