Free Republic

Last week the Bureau of Labor Statistics released a report that said that the labor force participation rate (LFPR) dropped to 63.6%, the lowest rate since Jimmy Carter was in office. Essentially that means that of the population of 16 year and older, 37.4% of them decided not to work or not to seek work. That’s 88.8 million people! To put that in perspective, when George Bush took office the LFPR was 67.2% and eight years later it was 1.5% lower at 65.7%. It has dropped 2.1% in Barack Obama’s first four years, the most precipitous drop in workforce participation...

HARARE (AFP) After paying public workers’ salaries last week, the balance in cash-strapped Zimbabwe’s government public account stood at just $217, Finance Minister Tendai Biti said Tuesday. “Last week when we paid civil servants there was $217 (left) in government coffers,” Biti told journalists in the capital Harare, claiming some of them had healthier bank balances than the state. “The government finances are in paralysis state at the present moment. We are failing to meet our targets.” Zimbabwe’s economy went into free-fall at the turn of the millennium, after President Robert Mugabe began seizing white-owned farms. The move demolished investor...

Gary Shilling Expects Great Disconnect to Cause Stock Market Crash 2013 Stock-Markets / Financial CrashJanuary 28, 2013 - 06:20 PM By: DailyWealth Steve Sjuggerud writes: Gary Shilling might have the best track record of any investor over the last 30 years... If you had invested $100,000 in Shilling's "big idea" 30 years ago, it would be worth over $6 million today. While most investors didn't pay attention to his big idea, Shilling was right. And he never gave up on his big idea. Here in 2013, Shilling has some new big ideas... and some bold predictions... particularly about what he...

You might have to read this post twice to make sure your eyes didn’t deceive you. This article is actually completely different from my recent pieces on stealth inflation, but is even more infuriating. In this case, a grocery store called Fresh Markets decided to sell milk at a bargain basement price as part of a promotion, yet the state has deemed the price “too low.” As a result, the chain is being forced to raise the price. Yep, at a time when millions are struggling every day to make ends meet, this is what the state of Louisiana has...

HUNGRY parents in North Korea have been caught eating their CHILDREN to avoid starvation, according to reports. One father is said to have been executed by firing squad for killing his two kids for food. And it has sparked fears there could be further cases of cannibalism in the country. The Sunday Times told how undercover reporters recorded several horror stories from inside the poverty-stricken nation. They included one man who dug up his grandchild's corpse to eat and another who boiled his child and ate the flesh. Thousands of North Koreans are feared to be starving to death...

How the Republican candidate lost the presidential election. < snip > ..... [Republicans] are concocting explanations and excuses for what they see as Mitt Romney's snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. They should realize that it was economics that sank Romney. His crucial problem was his campaign's failure to make a sufficiently convincing case on the money issues. Most postmortems have focused on the demographics of the defeat. ..... < snip > But none of Romney's demographic defeats are as significant as the electoral potential Romney missed on money issues. Election Day exit polling by Edison Media Research/Mitofsky International...

IT'S OFFICIAL: The World's Elites Declares The Global Economic Crisis To Be Over Joe WeisenthalJanuary 27, 2013We've been saying for awhile that the age of crisis was coming to an end, but the world's elites have finally made it official. The economic crisis is over. From Peter Coy and BusinessWeek: The hive mind of Davos has concluded that the financial crisis is done, finished. The new worry: a bubble in the credit markets. There is no official declaration, or even a formal survey. But the chatter at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, is about the end of the...

Denial, Panic And Doubt In DavosThe GuardianJanuary 27, 2013 First there was denial, then panic, then hope – now there is nagging concern this downturn simply won't come to an end.The World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos. Photograph: Laurent Gillieron/EPA Davos has been through some violent mood swings these past five years. First there was denial. Then there was panic. Then there was hope that the worst was over. Now there is nagging concern that this downturn simply won't come to an end. Each year the consultancy firm PwC conducts a survey of the great and good of the...

The mainstream media covered the inauguration of Barack Obama with breathless anticipation on Monday, but should we really be celebrating another four years of Obama? The truth is that the first four years of Obama were an absolute train wreck for the U.S. economy. Over the past four years, the percentage of working age Americans with a job has fallen, median household income has declined by more than $4000, poverty in the U.S. has absolutely exploded and our national debt has ballooned to ridiculous proportions. Of course all of the blame for the nightmarish performance of the economy should...

You never forget your first drone. When the Phantom first takes off, it sounds like a swarm of bees. But when it rockets 200 feet into the air at 25 miles per hour, you can’t hear it at all. It’s just a small dot with blinking lights, waiting where you tell it to wait, taking pictures with its camera until you ask it to come back home. When the chief executive of DJI’s American subsidiary, Colin Guinn, came to Los Angeles to sell film studios on his company’s professional-grade unmanned aerial vehicles, he also let Quartz test-drive the company’s newest...

The Biggest Losers Of The Past 5 Years Joe WeisenthalJanuary 26, 2013, 9:42 AMYou could argue that economic policy makers have done a disappointing job over the past five years, trying to get advanced economies back on their feet. Growth is still slow in the US, and job creation is subpar. But in a sense, the past five years have been a huge vindication for mainstream economic approaches, as these huge experiments in recovery have not had the nasty effects that so many people would have predicted. Consider all of the people who have spent the last few years talking...

My Prediction For 2013…And Beyond By Chris Mayer 01/25/13 An old bit of advice says, “Never eat at a place called Mom’s or play poker with a man named Doc.” That’s a joke, but this isn’t: Never fall for an argument that says we’ll run out of some natural resource or bet on the “end” of cheap anything. Such views will cost you money in the long run. Let’s look at potash, a rock mined and processed to make fertilizers. This is a commodity that got exciting in 2008 and 2009 as the price ran from under $200 to $1,000...

U.S. stocks have reached new highs, but most Americans probably don't feel any wealthier. That's because the prices of our homes have a bigger influence over how rich we feel and, therefore, how much we're willing to spend, suggests a recent study by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The findings clarify the big drivers of what economists call "the wealth effect," the idea that people spend more when they have more. This sounds pretty obvious, but the real barometer of wealth hasn't been as clear. In the past, as the Federal Reserve moved to buy up billions of dollars...

Is Your Stocks Portfolio Ready for What’s Going to Happen? Stock-Markets / Stock Markets 2013Jan 25, 2013 - 09:13 AM By: InvestmentContrarian Sasha Cekerevac writes: As corporate earnings season continues for S&P 500 companies, it is becoming quite evident that revenue growth is lacking across many sectors of the economy. However, we are continuing to see growth in corporate earnings per share. How is this possible? One method is through share buybacks. S&P 500 corporations, which are generating very high levels of cash, are buying back shares and reducing the number outstanding, which increases the corporate earnings-per-share level. From April...

As President Barack Obama begins his second term, democratically returned to office by a majority of Americans who seem to buy what he is selling, it would profit us to pause a moment and examine the discrepancies between the vision he expounded in his inaugural address and the economic reality that surrounds us. This leads to a pivotal question: What, exactly, is the underlying purpose of Obamanomics, and how would we know? Logic offers two choices. We can take the president at his word, and then ask why the promised economic recovery, growth, prosperity, and equality, haven’t arrived yet. Or...

FORMER GOLDMAN BANKER: I Miss The Great Recession Already Michael, Bankers AnonymousJanuary 24, 2013 I’m just going to come out and say it, ok? I miss the Great Recession already. I miss it for two reasons: first as an investor and second as a human. The Investment Side of the Great Recession As an investor, the Great Recession represented the good times, now past.[1] Recessions – or at least their financial unfolding via changes in asset prices – cause not only wealth destruction, but also wealth creation. For investors[2] in particular, a recession is often necessary in order to deploy...

Truckers Knew We Were In A Once-In-A-Generation Recession Before Anyone Else Rob WileJanuary 18, 2013, 11:29 AMYoutube If you ever wondered what industry is the American' economy's most accurate bellwether, here's some pretty good evidence that it might be trucking. In the just-released minutes of the Federal Open Market Committee's December 11, 2007 meeting, then-St. Louis Fed Governor William Poole recounted what he was hearing from his nonfinancial business contacts about orders and sales. Most reported softening activity, but nothing dire. But not Poole's trucker. From the December 2007 transcript: UPS is expecting a peak season that is milder than...

A centerpiece of President Obama's second inaugural address was a call for greater economic equality, with the president saying that "our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it." But that's precisely what's happened over the past four years, as Obama's economic policies left the majority of Americans falling behind while the wealthy few got further ahead. Evidence of this is everywhere you look.

Hoping to take the commercialization of space to a higher level, a second company has jumped into what the founders hope will be a lucrative emerging market, prospecting for raw materials among near-Earth asteroids using fleets of low-cost robotic spacecraft, senior executives said Tuesday. The long-range goal is to develop an in situ manufacturing capability, harvesting raw materials and building components in space using high-tech mini foundries built around sophisticated 3D printers. "This is about the future. This is about making something happen," company chairman Rick Tumlinson told reporters during a news conference in Santa Monica, Calif. "Deep Space Industries...

A new study out by the Huntington Bank finds that nearly 60 percent of consumers in shale gas exploration regions are confident the industry will provide opportunity in their area. The Midwest Economic Index surveyed across Huntington Bank's service area – from West Virginia through Michigan. The new survey is the first of its kind conducted by Huntington. "Huntington commissioned the survey by an independent research firm because we are committed to helping our customers understand the economy in our markets," said Steve Steinour, chairman, president and CEO of Huntington Bank. "While many inside and outside of the energy industry...