Free Republic

<p>As Wilbur Ross so eloquently noted, for Puerto Rico "it's the end of the beginning... and the beginning of the end," as he explained "Puerto Rico is the US version of Greece." However, as JPMorgan explains, for some states the pain is really just beginning as Municipal bond risk will only become more important over time, as assets of some severely underfunded plans are gradually depleted.</p>

The number of Americans filing for US unemployment insurance benefits jumped to a nearly six-month high last week during the Christmas holiday season, the Labor Department reported Thursday. Initial jobless claims rose by 20,000 to 287,000 in the week ending December 26. That marked the highest level of new claims, a sign of the pace of layoffs, since the first week of July. ...

link only - Bloomberg

Lower Jobless Claims Don’t Point to Robust Labor Market ERIC MORATH Dec. 24. The fewest Americans since 1973 will seek new unemployment benefits this year, but that doesn’t mean the labor market is back to full health. In total, less than 15 million American will make first-time requests for government assistance this year—about half as many claims as were made in 2009—and far fewer than the number filed during the 1980s and 90s when the economy was expanding at a stronger clip. But “the labor market is certainly not the healthiest it’s been since 1973,” said Goldman Sachs economist Zach...

Theory du jour: the new Star Wars movie is sucking in whatever meager disposable lucre remains among the economically-flayed mid-to-lower orders of America. In fact, I propose a new index showing an inverse relationship between Star Wars box office receipts and soundness of the financial commonweal. In other words, Star Wars is all that remains of the US economy outside of the obscure workings of Wall Street — and that heretofore magical realm is not looking too rosy either in this season of the Great Rate Hike after puking up 623 points of the DJIA last Thursday and Friday. Here...

Nothing is more bungled in Washington than the role of money in our economy- and that's saying a lot. Almost no one understands how our dollar policy works, and those that say they do are the ones who screwed things all up. The Fed has today bid farewell to seven years of its zero interest rate policy. Hooray. Wall Street is petrified because investors have become hyper-dependent on this zero rate scheme and the floods of dollars injected into the economy just as an addict craves crack cocaine. But the high from easy money, just as with any hallucinogenic drug,...

The math is pretty simple: A lack of purchasing power for consumers has led to a lack of pricing power for companies. When it comes to the U.S. economy big-picture outlook, the ramifications are more complicated, and not particularly pleasant. Wednesday's producer price index reading, showing a monthly decline of 0.5 percent, demonstrates a larger problem: At a time when policymakers are hoping to generate the kind of inflation that would indicate strong growth, the reality is that deflation is looming as the larger threat. Declining prices often would be treated as a net positive by consumers, but income weakness...

RUSH: Los Angeles. This is the LA Times: "LA to Declare 'State of Emergency' on Homelessness, Commit $100 Million -- Los Angeles elected leaders," as opposed to the unelected leaders, "announced yesterday that they would declare a 'state of emergency' and devote up to $100 million" toward housing and other services for homeless people. I know. I mean, there's all kinds of lines here just waiting. Why don't they disguise themselves as immigrants? Why don't they go pitch their tent or their shopping cart, whatever, near the border like they're immigrants. "The proposal, which was presented at the City Hall...

Employers are leaving a bigger chunk of the bill for care to workers who use their health insurance, and benefits experts see few signs of this trend slowing. Most companies now offer health coverage that requires employees to pay an annual deductible before insurance kicks in, and the size of that deductible has soared in the past decade, according to a survey released Tuesday by the Kaiser Family Foundation and Health Research & Educational Trust. The average general deductible for workers with single coverage totaled $1,077 this year, compared to only $303 in 2006. That deductible has climbed nearly seven...

FRED = Federal Reserve Economic Data This is the perfect handout for just about discussion of the Democrats' libtard agenda!

The August jobs report was hardly reassuring.  On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported net job creation of 173,000, far below estimates.  There's no way to sugar-coat it, though White House officials attempted to do just that.  They pointed out that the unemployment rate had fallen to 5.1%.  But that was because another 200,000 workers had simply given up trying to find a good job. Good jobs are not being created because economic expansion has stalled.  And expansion has stalled because Obama has presided over the greatest assault on free enterprise in our nation's history.   It didn't...

698K Native-Born Americans Lost Their Job In August: Why This Suddenly Is The Most Important Jobs Chart After the Fed admitted over a year ago that the US unemployment rate (which in 2012 was supposed to be a rate hike "threshold" once it hit 6.5% and is now at 5.1%) has become irrelevant in a country where a record 94 million people have left the labor force, and with the Fed poised to hike rates even though US hourly wages have not only not increased for the past 7 years, but for the vast majority of the labor force continue...

<p>As a patriotic and proud citizen of the United States, I have a story to share that has not only impacted my family, hundreds of colleagues, but also current and future United States workers.</p> <p>As I watched the grim faced Disney Executive, it was obvious that bad news was going to be delivered. The dead silence was broken when the Disney Executive made a harsh announcement. All of you in this room will be losing your jobs in the next 90 days. Your last day of employment for this company will be January 30, 2015. Your jobs have been given over to a foreign workforce. In the meantime you will be training your replacements until your jobs are 100 percent transferred over to them and if you don’t cooperate you will not receive any severance pay. Also, if we don’t feel confident that we have captured everything that you do we can, at our discretion, keep you longer than the 90 days until we have captured everything that you do with this job. Don’t discuss this meeting with anybody else in the company. Everybody in the room was appalled at the message. I was completely silent thinking how this was going to affect my coworkers and how I was going to break the news to my wife and children back at home as I was the only person in my home with a steady job. How would I pay for all the expenses that go along with a home, a wife, and children?</p>

Pittsburgh (CNN)Vice President Joe Biden warned on Monday that "something is wrong" with the American economy as he launched a Labor Day march here with speculation swirling that he may run for President. In a highly populist speech that could foreshadow the themes he would highlight on the campaign trail, Biden said workers have been "clobbered" in the modern economy. "It used to be when productivity went up in America, everybody got to share. The people who caused the productivity increase, they got to share. They got a piece of the action," Biden said before leading a march of an...

On Monday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted 588 points. It was the 8th worst single day stock market crash in U.S. history, and it was the first time that the Dow has ever fallen by more than 500 points on two consecutive days. But the amazing thing is that the Dow actually performed better than almost every other major global stock market on Monday. In the U.S., the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq both did worse than the Dow. In Europe, almost every major index performed significantly worse than the Dow. Over in Asia, Japanese stocks were down...

The public has been seemingly desperate for the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates. "Savers are getting creamed here," has been a common refrain. "Banks are getting crushed." "Zero percent sends a bad message, it undermines confidence." Even the experts seem upset by the inertia: "It's simply time," has become another popular phrase. Imagine what would happen, then, if the Fed raised rates—and they dropped even lower, instead. That's effectively what's happening today. Even if the Fed hasn't raised interest rates, it has stopped lowering them, and it has stopped the balance-sheet expansion that replaced rate cuts once its target...

The U.S. manufacturing sector is once again under pressure as it continues to hover just above contraction level, according to the latest flash Purchasing Managers Index data. Friday, private research firm Markit said its August PMI estimate fell to a level of 52.9, compared to July’s final reading of 53.8. According to consensus reports, economists were expecting to see a reading at 53.9. According to the report, this is the lowest manufacturing reading since October 2013. ““With the headline PMI swiftly losing ground after a modest rebound during July, the latest figure now points to the weakest overall pace of...

Credit rating agency Standard & Poor's on Friday downgraded the credit rating of the United States, stripping the world's largest economy of its prized AAA status. In July, S&P placed the United States' rating on "CreditWatch with negative implications" as the debt ceiling debate devolved into partisan bickering. To avoid a downgrade, S&P said the United States needed to not only raise the debt ceiling, but also develop a "credible" plan to tackle the nation's long-term debt.

The Institute for Supply Management said its national factory activity index fell to 52.7 last month from a reading of 53.5 in June. A reading above 50 indicates expansion in the manufacturing sector. A gauge of new orders received by factories rose to a seven-month high, while inventories continued to decline. There was growth in 11 of the 18 manufacturing industries, including furniture, fabricated metal products, electrical equipment, appliances and components, and transportation equipment. Five industries including machinery reported that production had contracted in July. Manufacturing has been hobbled by a strong dollar, which has pressured the profits of multinational...

It began quietly enough. A talking head on television would say it’s unfair to expect the robust economic boom of the 90s again; we had the “peace dividend” to thank for it, and it’s not like the Soviet Union is going to fall again. Or a columnist reminds us of the invention of the modern computer in the early 80s, and then the arrival of the internet age in the 90s; such technological breakthroughs were a once-in-history occurrence; they’re responsible for the booms we remember, nothing else. Or some caller on the radio, aged and experienced, with opinions fortified by...