Working Life

   I’ve been watching this for sometime and it’s truly absurd–the Congress can’t get an extension of unemployment benefits passed because Republicans are standing in the door blocking it. The House a bill to extend unemployment benefits a month ago, but it is still stuck in the Senate. There was a story posted on CNN […]

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   I have made this point before–I know that it sounds counter-intuitive to say that a strong dollar is NOT a good thing but it isn’t–except maybe for Wal-Mart and American tourists. I certainly have sympathy for tourists, less so for Wal-Mart. I’m reminded of this because of this article in today’s Wall Street Journal: […]

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   If the criteria used for deciding whether the recession-depression is over is focused on bonuses for banks and Wall Street executives, then, hallelujah, the good times are rolling. But, if the criteria is people getting jobs, um, well, that isn’t happening (courtesy of The Wall Street Journal): Companies across the economy are holding off […]

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   I will continue to post and argue, until proven otherwise, that there is no recovery–that it is a myth. I am an optimist by nature but I also believe in dealing with actual reality (I know, that is so 1960s). Here is why I love Paul Krugman: But there’s an even bigger problem: while […]

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There is no recovery for Main Street, no matter how many people are on their knees looking for "green shoots". It is phony rhetoric–and even the left-wing Financial Times grasps the problem.   The paper’s front-page article today is headlined "Goldman and Citi highlight divide", with the article’s subhead reading, "Wall Street recovering faster than […]

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    If you are wondering whether the culture of greed on Wall Street–a culture that led to the cratering of the economy just a year ago and the loss of millions of jobs for regular Americans–I present to you news about Goldman Sachs, which will quickly remind us that very little is changing.   Things […]

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   I don’t have much to add on the extremely disappointing and inadequate health care bill that passed the Senate yesterday–it’s been said by others–so I turned my attention to a couple of international developments.    Every so often, when I discuss trade, here or in debates elsewhere, people say: well, we live in a […]

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   Readers here know that I have urged us, for a long time, to be quite careful about the talk of "recovery". I do not put much faith in a rising Dow since that is, in my opinion, mainly a game of a bunch of traders trying to jump in and out of short-term profit-taking. […]

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   The obsession with the value of the dollar is kind of goofy. More than three years ago, not for the first time, I suggested that it would actually be a good thing if the value of the dollar declined significantly, particularly as it relates to the trade relationship with China. People in political circles […]

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A controversy has erupted recently about whether Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is actually a Jew. Pundits and professors alike are divided over whether his original last name, which his family changed when he was 4, is exclusively Jewish. I attended Camp Havanagila, a Zionist summer camp in the Catskill Mountains, when I was young—and so, it […]

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