"Last year I worked undercover at a temp agency in Los Angeles. While I took the assignment for an article I was working on, I’d also been unemployed for over a year. It seemed I was in that middling space of over-qualified for entry-level jobs, under-qualified for the jobs I most desired, and aged out or irrelevant as a labor union organizer, where I’d gained the bulk of my work experience."
"One altered resume later I joined a temp agency and became the biggest ghost of them all, a member of America’s invisible workforce: people who ship goods for big box stores like Wal-Mart or Marshalls, sort recyclables for Waste Management, fulfill online orders for Nike, bottle rum for Bacardi. I’d found my squad, a cadre of screw-ups, felons, floozies, single moms, the differently abled, students, immigrants, the homeless and hungry, the overqualified and under-qualified, all of us ghosted by the traditional marketplace."
"The inverse correlation between inflation and unemployment should be intuitively easy to grasp. Based on the fundamental principles of supply and demand, inflation ought to be low when unemployment is high, and vice versa."e
"However, this relationship is more complicated than it appears at first glance, and has broken down on a number of occasions over the past 45 years. As inflation and (un)employment are two of the most important economic variables that affect us in our daily lives, it is important to gain an understanding of their association."
"Corporate debt is at its highest level relative to U.S. GDP since the financial crisis , and while not now a concern, that mountain of corporate IOUs could quickly turn into a heap of worry under the right circumstances."
"Fueled by low interest rates and strong investor appetite, debt of nonfinancial companies has increased at a rapid clip, to $8.7 trillion, and is equal to more than 45 percent of GDP, according to David Ader, chief macro strategist at Informa Financial Intelligence."
"According to the Federal Reserve, nonfinancial corporate debt outstanding has grown by $1 trillion in two years."
"Everything is fine until it isn't," Ader said. "We don't need to worry about that until we're in a slowdown and profit declines."
"Low rates have encouraged companies to borrow, but instead of using the money to expand, they have used it to boost their share prices, he said."
"Traditionally, conservatives favor a government of limited size and advocate for reductions in taxes and government spending, while liberals favor a larger, more active government. A larger government requires a higher level of public spending, which necessitates higher revenue to avoid increasing the deficit. Hence, it is reasonable to expect that largely conservative states collect less revenue and spend less than largely liberal states. Could a long-standing conservative (liberal) state effectively implement its political agenda and reduce (increase) the size of the government? We examine whether the political leaning in each state influences its state and local government revenues and expenditures."
The federal reserve is a private association of banks and financial institutions. As it's actions have significant economic implications, the federal reserve does have an appointed head by the president but all other bank governors are selected by the banks who are members of the federal reserve.
It exists primarily to prevent bank panics by requiring banks hold a percentage of their reserves in cash and be a lender of last resort to banks who face demands for cash that they don't have in their own vaults and other banks are unwilling to lend to them.
The federal reserve occasionally changes the reserve rate for banks and often changes the discount rate, the rate they charge to banks at last resort that need a loan that no private bank will give them. Changing the discount rate influences the rate banks charge on loans. In times of extreme recession, the fed will do quanative easing aka open market operations which means that they either force banks to buy government bonds so that they have more cash to loan out or force them to pay back the bonds to take money out of the market.
The rational for doing this is publicly stated by the fed. The reserve rate, discount rate, and total open market amounts are released. Internal deliberations and individual transactions with banks are kept private to avoid market speculation. While the federal reserve sounds scary and has a massive impact on the economy, it generally does a good job at moderating inflation and recessions. Obviously people can and do disagree whether more or less unemployment or inflation is better.
"When Republicans began assembling their tax overhaul proposals they were aiming to make them revenue neutral; the tax cuts could not lead to increased deficits. Holding the line on deficits has long been the goal of Republican deficit hawks."
"But that goal is now just a memory. Both the House and Senate proposals provide overall tax cuts in the $1.5 trillion range over the next decade. But there's no plan to offset them with cuts in government spending or new revenues. So over the next 10 years, the tax cuts are likely to add about $1.5 trillion to the national debt, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office."
"Put simply: Money laundering turns "dirty" money "clean" — making proceeds from criminal activity usable without drawing the attention of law enforcement. John Cassara, a money laundering expert who worked for the State Department and the Department of Treasury for more than 25 years, says money launderers work through a three-step system."