"As US economy hums, some see peril overseas" by Bernard Condon | Associated Press July 23, 2014
NEW YORK — Just as the US economy is strengthening, other countries are threatening to drag it down.
Employers in the United States are creating jobs at the fastest pace since the late 1990s and the economy finally looks ready to expand at a healthy rate. But sluggish growth in France, Italy, Russia, Brazil, and China suggests that the old truism, ‘‘When the US sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold,’’ may need to be flipped.
That’s the view of David Levy, who oversees the Levy Forecast, a newsletter analyzing the economy that his family started in 1949 and that has an enviable record. Nearly a decade ago, the now 59-year-old economist warned that US housing was a bubble set to burst and that the damage would push the country into a recession so severe the Federal Reserve would have no choice but to slash short-term borrowing rates to their lowest levels ever to stimulate the economy. That’s exactly what happened. Now, Levy says the United States is likely to fall into a recession next year triggered by downturns in other countries, for the first time in modern history.
First of all, the "recession" never ended for 99% of us and thus it has become the Grand Depression. Secondly, this attempt to blame everything but the problem, the Federal Reserve $y$tem itself, has gotten tiresome. And thirdly, do I real have to type it?
‘‘The recession for the rest of the world . . . will be worse than the last one,’’ says Levy, whose grandfather called the 1929 stock crash and whose father won praise over decades for anticipating turns in the business cycle, often against conventional wisdom.
Levy’s forecast for a global recession is an extreme one but worth considering given so much is riding on the dominant view that economies are healing.
That sentence there means one is coming and the $tring-pullers at the paper know it. You have been warned.
Investors have pushed US stocks to record highs, and Fed estimates have the United States growing at an annual pace of at least 3 percent for the rest of the year and all of 2015. Investors have also poured hundreds of millions of dollars into emerging market stock funds recently on hopes economic growth in those countries will pick up, not stall.
Stock markets at record highs, unemployment at epidemic levels. What is wrong with this picture?
Worrisome signs are already out there. Unlike their US counterparts, European banks are still stuck with too many bad loans from the financial crisis. Household and business debt there is too high. And confidence is fleeting, as investors saw earlier this month when stocks sold off on worries over the stability of Portugal’s largest bank.
After I have been told for months recovery, recovery, recovery.
See: In Portugal, Ex-Chief of Bank Is Arrested
Related: Portuguese bank fears rekindle euro market tension
In China and other emerging markets, the old problem of relying on indebted Americans to buy more of their goods each year and not selling enough to their own people means a glut of underused factories.
Sorry, but we no longer have the money. It's all been taken from us and sucked upward. Same folk moved all the factories over there, too.
‘‘The world hopes to ride on the coattails of the US consumer,’’ says Eswar Prasad, an economist at Cornell University, ‘‘but the US consumer isn’t in a position to take on the burden.’’
Those days are gone, and that's bull$hit. Bu$ine$$ follows the money, and that is Russia and China now. AmeriKa is a bankrupt and declining empire, and nothing in this universe or beyond can stop or save it.
Emerging markets bounced back faster from the financial crisis than did rich countries, but Levy thinks a big reason for that has made things worse. Overseas companies plowed money into factories, machines, and buildings used to make products on the assumption that exports, after snapping back from recession lows, would continue to grow at their previous pace. They have not, a big problem since companies had been investing too much to expand production before the crisis, too.
Compared to such fragile economies, Levy says the United States is in decent shape. Like most economists, he’s not worried about the nation’s 2.9 percent drop in economic output in the first quarter, attributing it to harsh winter weather. He expects growth to return, but not for long, as a recession in either Europe or emerging markets spreads.
I don't mean to start huffing and puffing, but.... !!!
Levy says the United States is more vulnerable to troubles abroad than people realize....
Yeah, blame it all on some foreign "enemy." We know where this is going.
Levy predicts a US recession will throw its housing recovery in reverse and push home prices below the low in the last recession. He says panicked investors are likely to dump stocks and flood into US Treasuries, a haven in troubled times, like never before. And he says the yield on the 10-year Treasury note, which moves opposite to its price, is likely to fall from 2.5 percent to less than 1 percent — an unprecedented low....
Yeah, the U.S. taxpayer can always be counted on to fork over more money. Never mind that nations around the world are dumping Treasuries and not buying them now. The only one buying them has been the Fed with its fresh of the press dough. That is what has kept stocks high.
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Time to get a different vantage point:
"Hopkins to pay $190m in gynecology settlement" by Juliet Linderman | Associated Press July 22, 2014
BALTIMORE — A gynecologist who used tiny cameras to secretly record videos and photos of his patients has forced one of the world’s top medical centers to pay $190 million to 8,000 women and girls, lawyers said Monday.
Dr. Nikita Levy was fired after 25 years with the Johns Hopkins Health System in Baltimore in February 2013 after a female co-worker spotted the pen-like camera he wore around his neck and alerted authorities.
Levy committed suicide days later, as a federal investigation led to roughly 1,200 videos and 140 images stored on computers in his home.
(Applause goes up, if he in fact did and is not hiding out and living somewhere else in the world)
‘‘All of these women were brutalized by this,’’ said their lead lawyer, Jonathan Schochor. ‘‘Some of these women needed counseling, they were sleepless, they were dysfunctional in the workplace, they were dysfunctional at home, they were dysfunctional with their mates. This breach of trust, this betrayal — this is how they felt.’’
The preliminary settlement approved by a judge Monday is one of the largest on record in the United States involving sexual misconduct by a physician. It all but closes a case that never produced criminal charges but threatened Hopkins’s reputation.
Lawyers said thousands of women were traumatized, even though their faces were not visible in the images and it could not be established with certainty which patients were recorded or how many.
Schochor said it would be impossible and only cause more distress to ‘‘sit around a table and try to identify sexual organs without pictures of faces.’’
Plaintiffs’ attorney Howard Janet said 62 girls were among the victims and Levy violated hospital protocol by sending chaperones out of the exam room.
Hopkins said insurance will cover the settlement, which ‘‘properly balances the concerns of thousands of plaintiffs with obligations the Health System has to provide ongoing and superior care to the community.’’
‘‘It is our hope that this settlement —and findings by law enforcement that images were not shared — helps those affected achieve a measure of closure,’’ the hospital statement said, adding that ‘‘one individual does not define Johns Hopkins.’’
But when it comes to Arabs and Muslims, well.... Jewish War Daily feels a lot different.
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