The economic situation looks very confused to me.
No money seems to have been passed to Greece.
There is no agreement in the Greek government as to how the austerity conditions will be met.
The Spanish are balking at the conditions attached to rescue funds.
Italy seems to be joining the bank trot.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/16/greece-finance-minister-progress
"After years of putting austerity policies first – measures that in Greece's case have seen the economy contract by nearly 20% over the last three years amid soaring unemployment and poverty rates – EU governments are tilting increasingly towards favouring growth over belt-tightening, a shift inaugurated with the June election of socialist president François Hollande in France.
Their latest concession comes despite Stournaras's inability to present counterparts with a breakdown of the cuts – demanded in return for aid by creditors – following infighting in the three-party alliance over the measures.
But hardening his anti-bailout stance, Greece's main opposition leader, Alexis Tsipras, said the government was "dangerously deluded" if it believed the extension would offer relief to the country. The head of the radical left Syriza party vowed on Sunday to step up opposition to cuts, which he said would once again fall on society's most vulnerable. Calling for the international rescue package to be immediately annulled Tsipras said: "The slippery road towards catastrophe must be stopped now."
"Our first concern is that society puts up a fight so that measures worth €11.6bn are neither passed nor implemented," he told reporters in Thessaloniki, where Greece's annual international trade fair is taking place.
Tsipras argued that the three-month coalition should step down for failing to live up to pre-election pledges to abolish the loss of further benefits, pay and pension cuts – instead insisting on an "absurd fiscal policy" that relied on foreign aid injections to keep the economy afloat."
- 16 Sep 2012: Yannis Stournaras hails trust between Greece and partners over €31.5bn aid instalment
- 16 Sep 2012: Germany finds itself wielding unprecedented influence in the postwar era. Launching a week-long series on the accidental empire at a key point in Europe's history, we assess why the country appears so reluctant to save the continent 10 comments
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16 Sep 2012: Former Labour minister says Merkel acting in overbearing manner and politicians risk alienating public 63 comments - 16 Sep 2012: Will Hutton: The Eurosceptics are just like the Tea Party, living in their own parallel universe and making up the facts to fit their story 436 comments
- 16 Sep 2012: The booming, oil-rich African country of Angola has become a refuge for Portugal's jobless, while Luanda's elite take advantage of EU troubles to buy up property in Lisbon 63 comments
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16 Sep 2012: As Greece's government wrestles with the prospect of more austerity, anger and fear are darkening the streets 54 comments - 14 Sep 2012: She's is an economist who has ambitions to be chancellor. She's also the ex-wife of Lib Dem MP Chris Huhne – and their very acrimonious split has landed them both in court. Simon Hattenstone meets Vicky Pryce
Real incomes set to jump in 2013, says think-tank
16 Sep 2012
| 4 Comments Spain shuns further cuts as unrest grows
16 Sep 2012
| 48 Comments More QE must be in the context of today’s problems, not those of 2009
16 Sep 2012
| 21 Comments Europe at loggerheads over banking union
15 Sep 2012
| 329 Commentshttp://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/17/opinion/krugman-hating-on-ben-bernanke.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
Last week Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, announced a change in his institution’s recession-fighting strategies. In so doing he seemed to be responding to the arguments of critics who have said the Fed can and should be doing more. And Republicans went wild. Now, many people on the right have long been obsessed with the notion that we’ll be facing runaway inflation any day now. The surprise was how readily Mitt Romney joined in the craziness.
So what did Mr. Bernanke announce, and why?
The Fed normally responds to a weak economy by buying short-term U.S. government debt from banks. This adds to bank reserves; the banks go out and lend more; and the economy perks up.
Unfortunately, the scale of the financial crisis, which left behind a huge overhang of consumer debt, depressed the economy so severely that the usual channels of monetary policy don’t work. The Fed can bulk up bank reserves, but the banks have little incentive to lend the money out, because short-term interest rates are near zero. So the reserves just sit there.
The Fed’s response to this problem has been “quantitative easing,” a confusing term for buying assets other than Treasury bills, such as long-term U.S. debt. The hope has been that such purchases will drive down the cost of borrowing, and boost the economy even though conventional monetary policy has reached its limit.
Sure enough, last week’s Fed announcement included another round of quantitative easing, this time involving mortgage-backed securities. The big news, however, was the Fed’s declaration that “a highly accommodative stance of monetary policy will remain appropriate for a considerable time after the economic recovery strengthens.” In plain English, the Fed is more or less promising that it won’t start raising interest rates as soon as the economy looks better, that it will hold off until the economy is actually booming and (perhaps) until inflation has gone significantly higher.
The idea here is that by indicating its willingness to let the economy rip for a while, the Fed can encourage more private-sector spending right away. Potential home buyers will be encouraged by the prospect of moderately higher inflation that will make their debt easier to repay; corporations will be encouraged by the prospect of higher future sales; stocks will rise, increasing wealth, and the dollar will fall, making U.S. exports more competitive.
This is very much the kind of action Fed critics have advocated — and that Mr. Bernanke himself used to advocate before he became Fed chairman. True, it’s a lot less explicit than the critics would have liked. But it’s still a welcome move, although far from being a panacea for the economy’s troubles (a point Mr. Bernanke himself emphasized).
And Republicans, as I said, have gone wild, with Mr. Romney joining in the craziness. His campaign issued a news release denouncing the Fed’s move as giving the economy an “artificial” boost — he later described it as a “sugar high” — and declaring that “we should be creating wealth, not printing dollars.”
Mr. Romney’s language echoed that of the “liquidationists” of the 1930s, who argued against doing anything to mitigate the Great Depression. Until recently, the verdict on liquidationism seemed clear: it has been rejected and ridiculed not just by liberals and Keynesians but by conservatives too, including none other than Milton Friedman. “Aggressive monetary policy can reduce the depth of a recession,” declared the George W. Bush administration in its 2004 Economic Report of the President. And the author of that report, Harvard’s N. Gregory Mankiw, has actually advocated a much more aggressive Fed policy than the one announced last week.
Now Mr. Mankiw is allegedly a Romney adviser — but the candidate’s position on economic policy is evidently being dictated by extremists who warn that any effort to fight this slump will turn us into Zimbabwe, Zimbabwe I tell you.
Oh, and what about Mr. Romney’s ideas for “creating wealth”? The Romney economic “plan” offers no specifics about what he would actually do. The thrust of it, however, is that what America needs is less environmental protection and lower taxes on the wealthy. Surprise!
Indeed, as Mike Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute points out, the Romney plan of 2012 is almost identical — and with the same turns of phrase — to John McCain’s plan in 2008, not to mention the plans laid out by George W. Bush in 2004 and 2006. The situation changes, but the song remains the same.
So last week we learned that Ben Bernanke is willing to listen to sensible critics and change course. But we also learned that on economic policy, as on foreign policy, Mitt Romney has abandoned any pose of moderation and taken up residence in the right’s intellectual fever swamps."
http://robertreich.org/post/31668931701
Why Romney and Ryan are Going Down
Sunday, September 16, 2012
Unemployment is still above 8 percent, job gains aren’t even keeping up with population growth, the economy is barely moving forward. And yet, according to most polls, the Romney-Ryan ticket is falling further and further behind. How can this be?
Because Republicans are failing the central test of electability. Instead of putting together the largest possible coalition of voters, they’re relying largely on one slice of America — middle-aged white men — and alienating just about everyone else.
Start with Hispanics, whose electoral heft keeps growing as they become an ever-larger portion of the electorate. Hispanics now favor President Obama over Romney-Ryan by a larger margin than they did six months ago.
Why? In last February’s Republican primary debate Romney dubbed Arizona’s controversial immigration policy – that authorized police to demand proof of citizenship from anyone looking Hispanic — a “model law” for the rest of the nation.
Romney then attacked GOP rival Texas Governor Rick Perry for supporting in-state tuition at the University of Texas for children of undocumented immigrants. And Romney advocates what he calls “self-deportation” – making life so difficult for undocumented immigrants and their families that they choose to leave.
As if all this weren’t enough, the GOP has been pushing voter ID laws all over America, whose obvious aim is to intimidate Hispanic voters so they won’t come to the polls. But they may be having the opposite effect – emboldening the vast majority of ethnic Hispanics, who are American citizens, to vote in even greater numbers and lend even more support to Obama and other Democrats.
Or consider women – whose political and economic impact in America continues to grow (women are fast becoming better educated than men and the major breadwinners in American homes). According to polls, the political gender gap is widening.
Why? It’s not just GOP senatorial candidate Todd Akin’s call to ban all abortions even in the case of “legitimate rape” (because he believes women’s bodies somehow reject violent sperm). The GOP platform itself seeks to bar all abortions, with no exception for rape or incest. And on several occasions Paul Ryan has voted in favor of exactly such legislation.
Meanwhile, Republican legislators in Virginia, Pennsylvania, Idaho, and Alabama have pushed bills requiring women seeking abortions to undergo invasive vaginal ultrasound tests. All told, over 400 Republican bills are pending in state legislatures, attacking womens’ reproductive rights.
Republicans have repeatedly voted against legislation giving women equal pay for the same work as men. Republicans in Wisconsin have even repealed a law designed to prevent employers from discriminating against women.
Or consider students – a significant and growing electoral force, who voted overwhelmingly for Obama in 2008. What are Republicans doing to woo them back?
Paul Ryan’s budget plan – approved by almost every House Republican and enthusiastically endorsed by Mitt Romney – would have allowed rates on student loans to double, adding an average of $1,000 a year to student debt loads. (Under mounting political pressure, House Republicans came up with just enough money to keep the loan program going safely past Election Day by raiding a fund established for preventive care in the new health-care act.)
Now Romney wants to hand the federal student loan program over to the banks, which will charge even more. Earlier this year he argued subsidized student loans were bad because they encouraged colleges to raise their tuition, and suggested students ask their families for money.
Republicans have even managed to antagonize seniors by seeking to turn Medicare into vouchers whose value won’t keep up with rising healthcare costs, and cutting $800 billion out of Medicaid (which many seniors rely on for nursing home care).
And, of course, they’ve come out against equal marriage rights for gay couples.
Romney, Ryan, and the GOP don’t seem to know how to satisfy their middle-aged white male base without at the same time turning off everyone who’s not white, male, straight, or middle-aged. Unfortunately for Romney and Ryan, the people they’re turning off are the majority."
Lasik seems a bad idea to me.
My glasses have protected my eyes on many occasions.
My eyes are still changing. The surgery is a one shot deal.
My sister is not very happy with her result.
I might be able to learn some of a language in ten days.
It would not be enough to be useful or polite.
A grant would be nice but it is not necessary.
I will study the problem when I know more.
Most grants come with restrictive conditions.
Our nation is in trouble.
The fixes required are largely known.
They do not include revolution.
They do include changes that will be hated by powerful people.
Few new inventions are needed.
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