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Greenspan: Economic ‘Uncertainty’ Greatest I Have Known

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Photo Credit: Reuters/Landov

Photo Credit: Reuters/Landov

Uncertainty now represents the biggest problem plaguing the economy, says former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan.

While the Fed’s massive easing program has stabilized much of the economy, “the issue goes beyond that, because, even though we have very major expansion of the balance sheets, it has not essentially spilled over in lending by commercial banks into the usual pattern that one sees when reserves go up,” he told CNN’s “GPS” program.

So why aren’t banks lending more?

“The first and most important issue to recognize in the United States — and it’s a problem to an extent in other countries as well — is that the level of uncertainty about the very long-term future is far greater than at any time I particularly remember,” Greenspan said.

And one political argument is that “the extent of government intervention has been so horrendous that businesses cannot basically decide what to do about the future,” Greenspan said.

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How Washington is Killing the Economy

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Photo Credit: APThe latest round of fiscal drama has sputtered to a temporary close, but the routine crises have one clear victim: the U.S. economy, which is once again losing altitude. And for the third year in a row, Washington gets much of the blame.

There’s not much hope for a quick turnaround.

The most recent slowdown — highlighted by poor job growth, softening corporate earnings and decimated confidence — comes just as Republicans and Democrats prepare to square off in a fresh fight over the federal budget with another potential shutdown looming in January and a renewed debt ceiling crisis possible in February.

Washington’s drag on the economy now springs from a multiplying array of sources, including the constant threat of devastating fiscal crisis, the blunt nature of the sequester spending cuts, the troubled roll-out of Obamacare and the now deeply strained relations with key economic allies over clandestine surveillance allegations.

Taken together, Washington’s toxic politics and poorly executed policies have all but ensured that fourth quarter growth comes in soft after forecasters initially predicted a strong close to the year. And they mean that 2014, which initially looked like a possible breakout year for the U.S. economy, now seems like it will be a dreary rerun of 2013 featuring sluggish growth, modest job creation and stagnant wages.

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The Cold Hard Facts of Obama’s Economy

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Photo Credit: APThere’s an old adage, “Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.”

That could be the battle cry within the Obama administration when it comes to Obama’s work on the economy through his five plus years as president. But a close and objective look at the facts shows that the Obama-led and Obama-owned economy tells one and only one story — FAILURE.

Let’s begin on the labor front, where the numbers are atrocious. While the monthly unemployment rate is the headline-grabbing number so many flock to, it is far from the best gauge of labor market strength.

The unemployment rate currently stands at 7.3%. Obama backers will point to the fact… again let’s look at the facts, and rightfully say that the unemployment rate has steadily fallen from its peak of 10% in October 2009 and has remained below 8% since August 2012. These are indeed facts, but they mask the underlying and quite troubling data.

Understand that the unemployment rate is a rather simplistic calculation. The numerator is composed of the number of people unemployed and who have looked for work in the past four weeks. That number is then divided by the total number of individuals in the labor force.

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Is Pornography Killing the Economy?

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The adult film industry appears to have made a disappointing August jobs report look even worse.

The report shows carnage in the movie business. It lost 22,000 jobs on the month, or nearly 6 percent of its total jobs:

Photo Credit: Bureau of Labor Statistics

Photo Credit: Bureau of Labor Statistics

That’s a huge drop. It’s probably enough to change how analysts see this jobs report, from kinda gloomy to really gloomy. But what’s behind it?

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Russian Economy Becomes Biggest in Europe

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Photo Credit: Reuters

Photo Credit: Reuters

According to data published by the World Bank in July, Russia is fighting the global economic crisis much more successfully than most developed countries. Based on GDP adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP), Russia jumped ahead of all the EU nations in 2012, including Germany, which is number six in the world.

Ahead of Russia in the top five were the United States, China, India and Japan. The World Bank data substantiated the IMF rankings published in late 2012, even though the IMF rankings put Russia in sixth place, slightly behind Germany.

July’s World Bank rankings of GDP adjusted for PPP further confirm the noteworthy level of the Russian economy, experts say. According to IMF data on nominal GDP, Russia rose from ninth to eighth place.

In addition, in early July, the World Bank shifted Russia to the group of countries with high national income per capita; for the last decade, Russia was in the category of upper middle income.

The ascent in the rankings will become a significant advantage for Russia’s accession to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which is planned for 2015. To raise per capita GDP, OECD experts recommend increasing labor productivity, stimulating innovation, and implementing financial and tax regulation.

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71 Percent Say Obama’s Offering Nothing New on Economy

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Photo Credit: APPresident Obama has launched a series of speeches seen as a pivot back to the economy, but voters aren’t impressed. A just-released Fox News poll finds they think the president isn’t offering any new economic ideas, and he would help the country more by staying in the nation’s capital and working with Republicans.

In addition, 52 percent of voters disapprove of the job Obama is doing — matching his previous record high disapproval in September 2010. His approval rating also takes a hit this week: 42 percent approve, down from 46 percent at the end of last month (July 21-23, 2013).

Approval of Obama’s job performance has been below 50 percent since October 2012, when 51 percent approved and 46 percent disapproved.

The new poll finds 71 percent of voters say Obama’s recent economic speeches are full of the same things he’s been talking about for the last few years. That’s three and a half times the number who think he’s putting forward new ideas to boost the economy (20 percent).

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Can You Have Economic Prosperity and a Presidential “War” on Carbon Energy?

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Photo Credit: Irish CentralI have been writing on the need for America to take advantage of the vast energy resources it has below the surface in order to become completely energy independent. Not only will this make our economy leap forward, it will vastly improve our national security by not having us dependent on foreign sources.

I invited Dick Storm to give us his perspective from an energy producers standpoint on the state of America’s quest to become energy independent. Web: Citizens for Common Sense Policies.

Dick is an expert in power generation. He started out as a results engineer with Babcock and Wilcox (USA). Over the next 30 years, he held several positions in the energy industry including Senior Service Engineer with Riley Stoker Corp., Principal Engineer-start-up and testing at Carolina Power and Light, and department head of Technical Services at Flame Refractories, Inc.,

In 1992 Dick founded Storm Technologies, Inc., a well established company of Engineers and Combustion Specialists that has worked around the world:

Beneath the average American Citizen’s radar are the ever increasing regulations that cause irreparable harm. For those of us productively employed in the energy industries, we know first-hand how President Obama and the Senate Democrats through federal agencies and their regulations, cripple America’s productive capacity.

According to the Competitive Enterprise Institute the total costs for Americans to comply with federal regulations reached $1.806 trillion in 2012. For the first time, this amounts to more than half of total federal spending. It is more than the GDPs of Canada or Mexico.

Then there are the obvious assaults on our domestic energy supply such as the Keystone Pipeline, the ban on offshore oil production, the sealing off of federal lands for energy production and the “War on Coal.”

Since President Obama has been in office, over 100 coal plants planned to power America in 2008, have been canceled or delayed. These would have provided millions of jobs, not only in the construction of them but in the support and manufacturing sectors as well

In a classic example of how he ignores economic realities, President Obama during his recent trip to Africa, lectured Africans to not make our mistakes in using carbon based fuels. Even though America has done pretty well using carbon based fuels, being the most advanced society in the world.

Today traditional Fossil fuels plus nuclear provide over 90% of America’s total energy. A clear example of Obama’s fecklessness on energy is to stand in front of a group and discuss the benefits of “Green Energy” when America and his administration depend so much on traditional fossil fuels.

The job killing poisons that are harming American public health are not the exhaust gases of power plants; it is the regulations that are spewing from Washington. One of the greatest threats to the American lifestyle that we all came to enjoy is the Obama Administration and their “War on Carbon.”

Our challenge is to educate the general public, to make them aware of how Obama, aided and abetted by the Democrat’s in the Senate and Environmental Extremists, are weakening America.

Much of this will not be understood until it is too late. Once manufacturing capability and infrastructure is killed, it is very difficult to rebuild.

One energy equipment manufacturing example is the American Nuclear Industry. Once thriving and employing hundreds of thousands of highly skilled factory workers, engineers, technicians and administrative people. Now the nuclear industry in America is a bare skeleton of what it once was.

The great Westinghouse Nuclear division was sold off years ago to Toshiba. Now, if a new nuclear power plant is built, most of the components will be “Globally Sourced”. That is code for, “Not Made in America.”

Take mining say for rare earth materials or copper, such as the Alaskan Pebble Mine. Yes, the EPA is against these too. Did you ever hear of the UN Agenda 21? Well if weakening America and spreading your wealth to the rest of the world is the goal of Agenda 21, which just may be at the heart of the Obama agenda. It certainly is not the best interests for America.

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Ed Farnan is the conservative columnist at IrishCentral, where he has been writing on the need for energy independence, strong self defense, secure borders, 2nd amendment, smaller government and many other issues. His articles appear in many publications throughout the USA and world. He has been a guest on Fox News and a regular guest on radio stations in the US and Europe.

Study: Record 21 Million Young Adults Living With Parents

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Photo Credit: Moyan_BrennA record number of young adults are living with their parents.

A new study from Pew Research finds that 36 percent of Millennials – young adults ages 18 to 31 – are living at their parents’ homes, the highest number in four decades. A record 21.6 million young adults were still living at home last year.

“Most of my friends that have graduated end up living back home because even if they have a job they can’t afford to pay rent and pay back their loans at the same time,” Stephanie Levonne, a 20-year-old college student living at home, told CBS News. “I know a lot of people that took out almost half or more of their tuition in loans which is $50,000 so it’s impossible to pay rent and live in New York City while paying off your loan.”

The number rose from 32 percent at the beginning of the Great Recession in 2007 and 34 percent in 2009.

Read more from this story HERE.

About 80% of Americans will Experience Poverty; Whites Especially Pessimistic About Future

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Photo Credit: APFour out of 5 U.S. adults struggle with joblessness, near-poverty or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream.

Survey data exclusive to The Associated Press points to an increasingly globalized U.S. economy, the widening gap between rich and poor, and the loss of good-paying manufacturing jobs as reasons for the trend….

Hardship is particularly growing among whites, based on several measures. Pessimism among that racial group about their families’ economic futures has climbed to the highest point since at least 1987. In the most recent AP-GfK poll, 63 percent of whites called the economy “poor”…

Although they are a shrinking group, working-class whites – defined as those lacking a college degree – remain the biggest demographic bloc of the working-age population. In 2012, Election Day exit polls conducted for the AP and the television networks showed working-class whites made up 36 percent of the electorate, even with a notable drop in white voter turnout.

Last November, Obama won the votes of just 36 percent of those noncollege whites, the worst performance of any Democratic nominee among that group since Republican Ronald Reagan’s 1984 landslide victory over Walter Mondale.

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College Enrollment Falls as Economy Recovers

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Photo Credit: William Widmer The long enrollment boom that swelled American colleges — and helped drive up their prices — is over, with grim implications for many schools.

College enrollment fell 2 percent in 2012-13, the first significant decline since the 1990s, but nearly all of that drop hit for-profit and community colleges; now, signs point to 2013-14 being the year when traditional four-year, nonprofit colleges begin a contraction that will last for several years. The college-age population is dropping after more than a decade of sharp growth, and many adults who opted out of a forbidding job market and went back to school during the recession have been drawn back to work by the economic recovery.

Hardest hit are likely to be colleges that do not rank among the wealthiest or most prestigious, and are heavily dependent on tuition revenue, raising questions about their financial health — even their survival.

“There are many institutions that are on the margin, economically, and are very concerned about keeping their doors open if they can’t hit their enrollment numbers,” said David A. Hawkins, the director of public policy and research at the National Association for College Admission Counseling, which has more than 1,000 member colleges.

The most competitive colleges remain unaffected, but gaining admission to middle-tier institutions will most likely get easier.

Read more from this story HERE.