The U.S. Department of Justice has been investigating whether individuals and entities involved in toxic, collateralized mortgage-backed securities can be charged with crimes. But, as yet, there have been no criminal convictions of high-level corporate officials directly linked to the practice. Michael Greenberger, former director of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s Division of…
Tag: recession
The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era
The leading economic forecasters all believe that at its peak the stimulus added about 2-4% to GDP, the difference between contraction and growth, and saved or created about 2.5 million jobs. (“Saved or created” has become a punchline—Obama joked after his annual Thanksgiving pardon that he had just saved or created four turkeys—but it simply…
CBO: If nothing changes, we’re in for another recession
Usually the release of Congressional Budget Office economic and budget projections is as dull as that phrase makes it sound. But not these economic and budget projections, released today by the CBO. The main takeaway is that if we go over the fiscal cliff — that is, if we let the Bush tax cuts and…
CHART: How State And Local Budget Cuts Are Holding Back GDP Growth | ThinkProgress
As the Tax Policy Center noted, “in 2011, the state and local sector contracted 3.4 percent, the largest decline since World War II.” Budget cuts have actually knocked several tenths of a percentage point off of national GDP in each of the last two years and in the first half of 2012, as this chart…
40 Economists Say The GOP Has Abandoned Economic Reality
A survey of forty economists from across the ideological and partisan spectrum has concluded that on some of its most cherished issues, the Republican Party has simply taken leave of economic reality. For instance, economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers noted that one of the results from the survey — run by the University of…
Great Recession Doubled Wealth Gap Between Whites And African-Americans
The Great Recession took its toll on millions of Americans, but its effects hit minorities hardest. The housing crisis was especially brutal for minorities, many of whom were pushed into bad mortgages by the nation’s biggest banks. The loss of 600,000 public sector jobs also hit hard, since black and Latino workers are more likely…
Austerity Is Hammering State Economies
Public spending cuts, while on the rise worldwide, are bad for the U.S. economy. U.S. states provide a good illustration of this principle. Since the start of the Great Recession 20 states have cut public spending while 30 states expanded spending. Those that cut spending have fared worse economically than those that expanded spending. The…
The price of a do-nothing Congress
The latest employment data indicate that the U.S. job market is in a holding pattern — the price we pay for a do-nothing Congress focused more on austerity than job creation. Our economy added 69,000 new jobs in May, for an average of 96,000 over the past three months, with a downward revision of 49,000…
10 Reasons Why Public Policies Rescued the U.S. Economy
The Troubled Asset Relief Program in 2008, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, and the Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010 successively helped the U.S. economy turn itself around. These three measures came at crucial times when the economy was facing the prospect of experiencing serious damage unless…
America’s Future Under ‘Drill, Baby, Drill’
The promise of abundant oil jobs was dangled before us as an incentive—despite the fact that clean energy industries were some of the only sectors to show strong growth at the height of the Great Recession, and 3.1 million jobs in the United States were associated with the production of green goods and services in…
CHARTS: Austerity In Europe Hasn’t Worked
Indeed, the French vote, alongside elections in Greece in which voters abandoned pro-austerity parties in droves in favor of extremists, was a stark reminder that voters have no patience with forced economic sacrifice that isn’t paired with efforts to boost growth and create jobs. And here are three charts showing that the austerity policies adopted…
America’s Corporations Made A Record $824 Billion Last Year, As Conservatives Claim Obama Is Anti-Business
A favorite conservative attack on President Obama is that his policies — and even his personality — amount to an assault on American businesses. “President Obama himself is the most anti-business president in my lifetime. With rhetoric not befitting a president he has attacked oil companies, banks, airplane users, Wall Street and anyone who makes…
Job Openings Report Signals Pickup In Hiring
U.S. employers posted slightly more job openings in February, suggesting that modest hiring gains will continue in coming months. The Labor Department said Tuesday that employers advertised 3.5 million job openings in February. That was a slight increase from a revised 3.48 million in January but still below the three-year high of 3.54 million in…
Economic Snapshot for March 2012
The nation’s economy and labor market are gradually gaining strength. Job creation is up and the unemployment rate keeps falling. But American families need more months of much-stronger job creation to eliminate the massive economic pain that the crisis and its aftermath brought. Substantial trouble spots remain in the economy and in households’ economic security….
“It’s time to put delusional beliefs about the virtues of austerity in a depressed economy behind us”
Specifically, in early 2010 austerity economics — the insistence that governments should slash spending even in the face of high unemployment — became all the rage in European capitals. The doctrine asserted that the direct negative effects of spending cuts on employment would be offset by changes in “confidence,” that savage spending cuts would lead…
California’s Green Economy Doubled Performance of Total Economy
A new report from the non-partisan environmental think tank Next 10 shows that between 2009 and 2010, the “core green economy” in California — comprised of companies that provide products or services to cut natural resource use, re-purpose waste, and reduce global warming pollution — experienced half the number of job losses seen in the…
Thirty Years of Unleashed Greed and the Beginnings of Class Warfare
Between 1979 and 2007, as the Congressional Budget Office reported this week, the average real income of the top 1 percent grew by an astounding 275 percent. And that is after payment of the taxes that the superrich and their Republican apologists find so onerous. Those three decades of rampant upper-crust greed unleashed by the…
Study Shows Income Inequality Severely Hampers Economic Growth
Income inequality in the U.S. is higher than at any other time since the Great Depression, and the U.S. is currently more unequal than countries like the Ivory Coast, Ethiopia, and Pakistan. Though Republicans dismiss concerns over the gap as “class warfare,” the ever-increasing level of disparity has tangible consequences, leading to poor…
Regulations aren’t to blame for the ‘uncovery’
The Republican narrative on the economic recovery — or, as some are calling it, the “uncovery — is simple: It’s not Europe, or deleveraging, or lack of consumer demand. It’s government. Businesses, Speaker John Boehner has said, have been “slammed by uncertainty from the constant threat of new taxes, out-of-control spending and unnecessary regulation.” It…
The Great Recession in five charts
How brutal has the recession been to U.S. households? Americans are earning even less than they did 13 years ago. That’s according to new Census data released Tuesday, which found that real median income fell to $49,445 in 2010, the lowest number since 1997, and the largest decline in income in a single…