Charlie Rose

vongleichent  02/24/2012 03:59 PM Report

I certainly wouldn't leave my money at a bank account. Buy Gold and be certain that your money is still something worth.

BENEZRAA  08/30/2011 03:49 PM Report

"YOU JUST KEEP ME HANGING ON...." (The Vanilla Fudge; 1967)

REMant eloquently summed up the status of the economy and the reasons for. Gillian Tett and Greg Ip discussed -- as reports are intended to -- the framework of the current economy using the jargon of politics and hinting not so subtly at where things may go. As Gillian Tett summed up, "Oh, well, it's summer Charlie...." I see no profound contradictions between the analyses of Tett, Ip, and REMant.

It may be summer, but, summer is drawing to a close rather quickly, and all that money sitting in banks and in the laps of investors -- not so much, really, at today's counterfeit valuations -- has to go somewhere. "Somewhere! There's a place for us...." (West Side Story; Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim; 1957) Civil war is a more real possibility than most would like to admit; world war is already engaged, though there is an isolationist element that thinks the economy can be saved by withdrawing, and contracts for war and infrastructure are far more appealing to Big Money than to Average Joe. We will no more escape war in our time than our current prison system will maintain as de facto universities of organized crime, as the need for chain gangs will soon outweigh so-called humanist considerations.

I shall complete my "optimistic" commentary by echoing Gillian Tett in song... "Summer, and the living is easy...." (Porgy and Bess; Gershwin, Heyward, and Bernstein; 1935)(Janis Joplin and Big Brother & The Holding Company, 1968)

NeilMacCallister  08/10/2011 01:40 AM Report

Save your titillations, doodah..

Charlie has already cornered that market by getting Ms. Tett on camera here in a purple stretch-tee, Beach-Blanket hair, and pink lipstick, ..to explain to us all how President Obama's economy is "still in the growing-larger stage".

How much does Charlie make for his "informing" us so???

***

You know, I just can't get out of my head how truly "Historic" Barack Obama could have been, ..like Joe Louis, Paul Robeson, Mohammed Ali, Martin Luther King,.. ..if Barack had just come in and CRUSHED the competition! ..put in place that "Job Corps" he talked about on the campaign trail, for all our unemployed youth!

If he had come in and demanded and END to all Congressional lolly-gagging, "budget delays" and deficits..

If he had DEMANDED that America stand up and show its actual potential!!!

***

doodah? ...can you even imagine how heart-warmingly, and world-changingly "historic" that really would have been????

doodah  08/09/2011 08:04 AM Report

... how about a naked (in heat) 'Michelle Bachman' dressed in gypsy bells?

doodah  08/09/2011 06:57 AM Report

...tonight, the 'accomplished' 'Phil Gramm' will visit you in your deams, dressed as 'Merlin the Magician', he'll do a little song and dance for you, and then break into a little impromptu 'Richard Nixon', "I am not a Crook" impersonation; and then he'll drop down to one knee and do an 'Al Jolson', "this is you boy, Sammy, from Alabammy".

All that should get you motivated to street preach the evil Obama and the virtues of working for free. ;)

doodah  08/09/2011 06:32 AM Report

Neil neil neil, the economy was being raped by the "Financial-Services" Industry LONG before your boogie-man came onto the scene. You're just a manipulated subject to their (the Banking Lobby i.e. T-Party) propaganda. in other words, you've been brainwashed. They used LSD and a little Ronald Reagan voodoo doll to influence your synapses while you sleep at night. They want to create the first 'Republican Bum' to Preach the Repugnantcan Gospel to the NEW Poor.

NeilMacCallister  08/09/2011 12:28 AM Report

U.S. Economy .."Update"??????

Let me tell you, ..it sucks!!!!

When is that Obama employee Jack Lew going to appear here to explain this administration's rape of the economy????

I'm hurting, ..and I'm still waiting!!!!

doodah  08/08/2011 10:40 PM Report

real estate is still being propped up by government and the banks. It wants to fart, but the banking Lobby is holding it in. Be careful, the bankers aren't finished sh*tting on us. (pardon the reality)

SharkswithfrikingLazers  08/08/2011 10:23 PM Report

When will the Iraqi oil flow and bring gas prices down? This Arab Spring needs a shot of Iraqi oil.

(By the way, lack of confidence is on every corner for anyone who drives his own car and has to fill up his tank regularly.)

SharkswithfrikingLazers  08/08/2011 10:21 PM Report

All right we know where the money is--on the sidelines.

The question is how do we get it into the game? Tax it?

How can taxing it possibly slow the economy when cash already pays less than inflation--it is losing money just sitting on the sidelines. So tax it or be more genteel and give it an incentive to get into the game. That cash wants to play and win for America but it needs a Vince Lombardi pep talk and a place to play.

For my cash I need to actually find a game I want to play in now and it is NOT gold. It could be real estate but that game hasn't really been cleaned up yet. The S&P 500 lost a decade so this injury has not yet healed.

Has Thomas Friedman created his green bubble yet? Is there another game?

doodah  08/08/2011 11:35 AM Report

Everybody (the majority) under the age of 50 is Screwed. It's Over.

For God's Sakes, THE DEMAND IS NOT THERE!!! All these talking heads and politicians yapping their pie holes is not going to change anything!

Even if it was possible to do what both political parties preach, i.e. government pump money back into the people's pockets WHILE also balancing the budget and reducing the debt (Yes! Impossible! But this is a hypothetical) . Even if that could be done, how the hell will that reduce the supply of housing and/or increase the demand for it?!

They're trying to Build on Nothing.

The First thing we have to do is weed out the bad apples in the Financial Industry. It's Time for a Sacrifice! The Gods Demand It! And Slime in 'the Financial Industry', More than anybody else, DESERVE IT.

REMant  08/08/2011 11:18 AM Report

Unfortunately Mr Ip and Ms Tett, KEYNESIANS, have it EXACTLY BACKWARDS. The "aggressive" response of the central banks discouraged liquidation of bad investments, as well as, saving and investment for new ventures, and was, of course, responsible for putting us in the position we are in in the first place. Liquidation is not horrible, it just means losing unwarranted paper profits and disinflation to sustainable levels so ppl can get on with their lives. They were also the policies of the Depression, which long ago was shown to have led to the crash of 1937. We have never been in a recession, nor even a "great contraction;" it is a depression, by every reasonable measure, which, however, unfortunately we no longer honestly do, both by design and because of the flood of money being printed, and we have hardly begun to crawl out of it. Mr Ip doesn't even appear to understand what he means by "business cycle," and he might want to consult with Rogoff on the subject. Confidence, or as Summers blabs about, Keynes's notion of catastrophic collapse, has nothing to do with it. But I believe you will see the central banks printing more money soon, and if you think things are bad now, just wait until they start that again.

The problem the developed economies have is their adverse balance of trade with the developing world. There is no way this can be sustained without equilibration. The handwriting was on the wall beginning with the rise of Japan and Korea. The only thing their central banks have accomplished is to accelerate the process through depreciation rather than the transfer of assets as under the gold standard. It is, indeed, a continuation of interest rate adjustment. The lower our interest rates are artificially pushed, the less the dollar is worth. They don't want to believe this, but they have been running a Ponzi scheme, which the rest of the world had been forced to acquiesce in, but it has, nevertheless, collapsed. You can consider such actions refinancing, but as with Revolutionary and Civil War debt the question will be when or whether it can be redeemed, tho one thing is certain, it cannot be done without an increase in productivity. If it makes ppl feel better, it can be called a shock, but it is unavoidable if they want to continue to participate in any way in the world economy. That's real "democracy."

But, of course, Keynes abandoned the idea of equilibrium economics. Even when Keynesians like Stephen Pearlstein recognize that there's something wrong with the system, they fail to see the enemy is themselves. For a laughable example see his column in Friday's Wash Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/steven-pearlstein-the-global-economy-comes-to-the-end -of-its-string/2011/08/04/gIQAa2zEvI_story.html?hpid=z1) which starts out by saying we have overspent for decades, but that now we have to spend more and the Fed buy more bonds because we failed to achieve "escape velocity." Or to put it another way, we failed to find enough suckers to keep the con going. It's more like the Keynesians have run out of options than the govts or the bankers. They can, of course, like Thom Hartmann, Jeff Madrick, Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart, always blame someone else, for instance, the bondholders. Dean Baker, who appears to simply hate Wall St and opposed the bailout, tho like Ip another of PBS's "experts," offered the opinion that S&P must be nuts, because the Fed can always print more money.

The Chinese, however, had something pithy to say about that on Saturday. To quote the Post: "The economists also said the biggest fear here now was that the Federal Reserve might embark on a new round of quantitative easing, buying its own Treasury securities and driving up commodity prices. 'At this point, China is concerned about how the U.S. will draft its fiscal policy, whether the U.S. will continue quantitative easing and to what degree,' said Liu Yuanchun, vice president of the economics school at Renmin University, 'because it will put more pressure on the Chinese government to prevent the inflow of hot money and keep the economic bubble stable.'"

I think it ought to be clear there are two components to economic enthusiasm, one, which thinks all ventures worthy and so being able to borrow money is more important than the actual accumulation of it, and allied with it, that speculation is more important than ordinary investment. It has frequently been argued by such ppl that no saving is required at all, just the will to do something, which can pay for itself after the fact. But how they propose to feed themselves in the process is a perpetual mystery, and why they are so sure of success. When you get down to it, capital is learning, and it comes neither cheap nor easy. Nor certainly are we born with it. If you don't provide an incentive for it, you surely won't get ppl to do it.

I may as well mention, too, since most of the media have started playing politics with this as well, IMHO, as stated previously, the only ppl to blame for this turn of events are those ppl who believed in the tooth fairy in the first place, which unfortunately includes much of the American public and in both parties.

This weekend, responding to a flood of mail, and news of a substantial loss in Post Co earnings, that paper's ombudsman argued eloquently for more objectivity, noting that many other news outlets in Wash had increased staff, often at his newsroom's expense, while it remains mired in controversialist diatribes and biased reporting.

Incidentally, I would be quite happy to see neither of these two again.

Incidentally, the S&P AAA rating dates only from 1941. American credit had frequently been bad before that. And there is a war within the business community (if you want to call it that) just the same as in the govt between bubblenomics and valuenomics, so I'd pay attention to whom is saying what before drawing any conclusions. But IMHO the Dow, which consists largely of bank stocks was reacting more to the situation in Europe. Stocks also fell in the Middle East.