The New York Times’ [February 2012]… story that more than half of births to American women under age 30 now occur outside of marriage, and the conversation spurred by Charles Murray’s new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960 ”“ 2010, have shifted public gaze to a population largely ignored in the scholarly literature of the past few decades: the 58 percent of Americans with a high school diploma but no college degree””what some might call “working class.”

Nonmarital births have been common among Americans without a high school diploma for at least thirty years: as the 2010 State of Our Unions reports, in 1982 33 percent of births to women without a high school diploma occurred outside of marriage, compared to 13 percent of births to high-school educated women. But in the past thirty years, nonmarital births to high-school educated women surged: in the late 2000s’, 44 percent of births to high-school educated women occurred outside of marriage. (By comparison, only 6 percent of births to college-educated women were outside of marriage.) It is the behavioral changes of this “moderately educated middle”””the 58 percent of high-school educated Americans””that put the “normal” into “the new normal” that the Times describes.

Furthermore, the “new normal” is not driven primarily by an increase in single mothers, but in the number of cohabiting couples….

Read it all.

Fiscal woes that have caused high-profile bankruptcies in California are surfacing across the country as municipalities struggle with uneven growth and escalating health and pension costs following the worst recession since the 1930s.

Budget crunches already have prompted Michigan lawmakers to authorize emergency fiscal managers, and led the mayor of Scranton, Pa., to temporarily cut the pay of all city workers to the minimum wage.

In a majority of the nation’s 19,000 municipalities””urban and rural, big and small””stagnant property tax revenues, less aid from states and rising costs are forcing less dramatic but still difficult steps.

Read it all.

Here in the cradle of the Taliban movement, Faizulhaq Mushkani sold his land for $600,000 last year to buy equipment to open a packaging factory in a booming industrial park.

The industrial park””powered by military-run electrical generators””is a pillar of the U.S. strategy against the Afghan insurgency. The arrival of reliable electricity in late 2010 revitalized Kandahar. More than 100 new factories have sprouted.

These days, however, Mr. Mushkani and fellow entrepreneurs are grappling with a fatal flaw in their business plans: They expected the Americans to stick around longer. But, now, with U.S. forces preparing to depart Kandahar next year, the American electricity will disappear, too.

Read it all.

With their finances strained, some higher-earning parents are making their children pick up more of the tab. Among families earning $100,000 or more, students paid 23% of their college costs in 2012 through loans, income and savings, according to Sallie Mae, up from 14% in 2009; the share covered by parents fell to 52% from 61%.

“The boomers are the first generation shifting the cost of college to their kids,” both through increased student borrowing and reduced taxpayer support for higher education, says Susan Dynarski, a professor of education and public policy at the University of Michigan.

Read it all.

The most eye-opening and persuasive parts of the book explore the revenue and benefits to be had from cannabis without a single joint’s being lighted. Throughout human history, cultures from Mongolia to Peru have used the non-psychoactive cannabis plant for food, shelter, clothing and medicine. Early drafts of the Declaration of Independence were written on hemp paper, and the covered pioneer wagons that took America westward were made of cannabis fiber. In 1942, cannabis prohibition was suspended because of a shortage in industrial supply during the war, and the government actually encouraged farmers to grow it, using a propaganda film, “Hemp for Victory.”

The place industrial cannabis is not found yet, Fine points out, is in the above­ground American economy, thanks to its listing as a Schedule I narcotic. The Drug Enforcement Administration’s official stance is that it has no medical value at all: “Smoked marijuana has not withstood the rigors of science ”” it is not medicine, and it is not safe.” O.K., Fine seems to say, but tell that to the doctors with evidence of its ability to shrink tumors and ease the effects of chemotherapy; or to the seniors of Orange County who depend on medical marijuana to treat their arthritis, and the doctor who uses it to treat his glaucoma; or to the 30-year-old Iraq war veteran with the shrapnel injuries who thanks God every day for this drug. It is prescription drugs that are now the leading cause of fatal drug overdoses ”” more than 26,000 each year. Also each year, over 23,000 Americans die of alcohol-related causes. None have died from cannabis alone.

As I said, the issue is loaded. And yet the side that has all the load never seems to win in America….

Read it all.

Over at Capital Economics they’re spotlighting Aug. 9, 2007 as the “the unofficial onset of the global credit crunch” making tomorrow the fifth anniversary of, well, the beginning of the end of the uber-loose financial conditions that begat the U.S. housing boom, bust, financial crisis, bailout-a-palooza, deep recession and ”” if you believe Reinhart and Rogoff ”” the economic sluggishness we’re still contending with.

Of course, it’s a little bit squishy declaring any one moment the “start” of something. Some would argue that the birth of the securitization market way back in the 1980s might have been the true start of what eventually became the U.S. housing morass. Still, it’s instructive to remember what was going on in early August 2007, which was when the cracks in the foundation of global finance really started to get noticeable and the themes that have come to define the market for the last half-decade started to emerge.

Read it all.

The greatest economic catastrophe of the postwar world began five years ago today. Its consequences are still with us.

On this day in 2007 BNP Paribas, the French bank, halted withdrawals from three investment funds linked to the US subprime mortgage market. Risky financial products had spread a contagion of bad debts through the banking system. The interbank lending market froze because banks feared that they would not get their money back. The consequences included the first run on a British bank in more than a century (Northern Rock), the biggest corporate failure in American history (Lehman Brothers), and a huge recession.

With hindsight, this was not merely a crisis but a catastrophe that still overshadows the global economy. The crash was a far-reaching problem of solvency. It was not simply a banking crisis, but a debt crisis. It has not simply sunk financial institutions, but submerged governments too. Five years on, there are three questions. How did it happen? When will it end? What, if anything, can we do about it?

Read it all (requires subscription).

Make no mistake, there is no shortage of [smaller donors such as] Susan Daoles this year: Roughly 2.5 million people have kicked in $200 or less to the various committees helping their candidate win the White House.
But those 2.5 million people account for less than 18 percent of the total money haul.

By contrast, 2,100 donors giving $50,000 or more have contributed about $200 million to the Obama and Romney campaign committees, victory funds and their supportive super PACs. That’s far more than the $148 million all those 2.5 million small donors contributed through the end of June, according to an analysis of Federal Election Commission data by POLITICO and the Campaign Finance Institute.

In other words: In an election purportedly being driven by the economic concerns of the middle class, the top 0.07 percent of donors are more valuable than the bottom 86 percent.

Read it all.

Fort Mill, South Carolina–The bocce ball court is busy. The swimming pool is crowded. Golf carts whiz down well-manicured trails. Couples walk briskly through sprawling neighborhoods of charming one-story houses.

“I’m very happy that we’re here,” says Dorothy “Dottie” Serran, 69, of the Carolina Lakes Sun City community she and husband Ralph, 70, moved to after retirement. “It’s very nice. ”¦ You can do as much as you want or as little as you want.”

Life is good for most of the nation’s seniors, according to a recent poll of 2,250 older adults. Whether they move to “active adult” communities such as Sun City or grow old in the homes where they raised their children, they say they are pretty darn content.

Read it all.

Quick Stats[:]

As of 2012-06 the civilian labor force was 155,163,000
As of 2012-06 there were 111,145,000 in the private workforce
As of 2012-06 there were 56,174,538 collecting some form of SS or disability benefit
Ratio of SS beneficiaries to private employment just passed the 50% mark (50.54%)

….As of May 2012, the outlays are $756.9 billion annualized. Fewer worker relatively speaking, support more and more recipients with exponentially growing payments. This is supposed to work?

Read it all from Mish’s economics blog (another from the long queue of should-have-already-been-posted material).

The day Michael Anselmo signed a lease on his first apartment in New York City, he lost his job at Buck Consultants LLC. He spent about 10 months struggling to pay rent with unemployment benefits. Two years later he’s still hesitant to buy a home or even a road bike.

“Every decision that I have made since I lost my job has been colored by that insecurity I feel about the future,” said Anselmo, 28, who now rents an apartment in Austin, Texas, and works as a consultant for UnitedHealth Group Inc. “Buying a house is just further out on the timeline for me than it used to be.”

Anselmo and many of his peers are wary about making large purchases after entering adulthood in the deepest recession and weakest recovery since World War II. Confronting a jobless rate above 8 percent since 2009 and student-loan debt hitting about $1 trillion, 20-to-34-year-olds are renting apartments, cars and even clothing to save money and stay flexible.

Read it all.

U.S. small business owners’ optimism declined in July, with the Wells Fargo/Gallup Small Business Index at 17, down from April’s four-year high of 23, but similar to the 15 of January. A year ago, the index was at zero, meaning owners were essentially neutral — neither optimistic nor pessimistic — about the present and future small-business operating environment.

Read it all.

he Church Commissioners and the Church of England Pensions Board have today announced the sale of their shares in News Corporation on the advice of the Church’s Ethical Investment Advisory Group (EIAG). The total shareholding sold was worth £1.9 million. As a result, none of the three national investing bodies of the Church of England hold shares in the company.

The Church of England first raised concerns with the Board of News Corporation in the aftermath of the phone hacking allegations that surfaced in July 2011. After a year of dialogue between the company and the EIAG, the Church of England was not satisfied that News Corporation had shown, or is likely in the immediate future to show, a commitment to implement necessary corporate governance reform.

Read it all.

Update: One blogger was surprised:

Talking of which, I realised today that I am too much of an idealist. I’m afraid I found myself genuinely shocked by reports that the Church of England is selling its £1.9m stake in News Corp, as a protest against its lack of contrition over phone-hacking. The Church? Shares? In News Corp? A helpful man on Twitter called Paul Harrison furnished me with the info that the Church of England costs £1bn per annum to run, of which three quarters is covered by fundraising and donations, with the shortfall plugged by the stock market. This still shocks me a bit. I must have really thought that churches were funded via the collection plate. What a quaint, unspoiled, John Major-like picture of England I must cling to!

The UK’s biggest book retailer Amazon now sells more ebooks than hardbacks and paperbacks combined, the company has said.

For every 100 print books sold through the site, Amazon said it sold 114 titles for its Kindle e-reader device.

It added that the average Kindle owner bought up to four times more books than they did before owning the device.

Read it all.

Nigel Warburton: So, if we bring psychology back into economics with the current crisis, what particular light would psychology shed on that? I mean you talked about people’s optimism is it that there’s a kind of herd mentality and the markets mirror that? Or is something else going on?

Robert Shiller: There’s a lot going on. It turns out that the human mind is very complicated. Economic theory likes to reduce human behaviour to a canonical form, the structure has been, ever since Samuelson wrote this a half century ago, that people want to maximise their consumption. All they want to do is consume goods; they don’t care about anyone else. There’s neither benevolence nor malevolence. All they care about is eating or getting goods and they want to smooth it, they described it in terms of so-called utility functions through their lifetime and that’s it. That is such an elegant simple model, but it’s too simple and if you look at what psychology shows, the mind is the product of human evolution and it has lots of different patterns of behaviour. The discoveries that psychologists make to economics are manifold.

Read it all.

I worry about the future ”” not mine but that of my three children, all in their 20s. It is an axiom of American folklore that every generation should live better than its predecessors. But this is not a constitutional right or even an entitlement, and I am skeptical that today’s young will do so. Nor am I alone. A recent USA Today/Gallup poll finds that nearly 60 percent of Americans are also doubters. I meet many parents who fear the future that awaits their children.

The young (and I draw the line at 40 and under) face two threats to their living standards. The first is the adverse effect of the Great Recession on jobs and wages. Even if this fades with time, there’s the second threat: the costs of an aging America. It’s not just Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid ”” huge transfers from the young to the old ”” but also deferred maintenance on roads, bridges, water systems and power grids. Newsweek calls the young “generation screwed”; I prefer the milder “generation squeezed….”

Read it all.

Run by the Rohr Jewish Learning Institute, which is affiliated with the Chabad-Lubavitch movement of Orthodox Jewry, “Money Matters” is offered at more than 350 locations in 22 countries this year, and is proving to be one of the most popular courses JLI has ever offered, said Rabbi Efraim Mintz, JLI’s executive director.

“When students first come to the course, they may respect the Torah (the Hebrew Bible) and the Talmud (a 2,000 year-old compendium of Jewish oral law and biblical commentary), but few see it as something relevant to the here and now,” Mintz said.

“But soon, they are mesmerized and surprised by its applicability to the business issues of the day.”

Read it all.

With a box of Bibles as cargo, John Bird steered his Chevy Suburban off a two-lane road in the oil patch of East Texas and pulled up to the isolated derrick of Energy Drilling Company Rig 9. He was delivering the holy books to a man named Robert Bailey, the site superintendent, known in industry jargon as a tool pusher.

The two men had never met, and Rig 9 was a modest destination, a cluster of turbines and trailers around a steel tower, all of it surrounded on three sides by a cattle ranch. On a brilliant autumn Saturday, the kind normally reserved for the Texan religion of football, Mr. Bird had driven there, 140 miles from his home outside Houston, on behalf of the Oilfield Christian Fellowship.

He had helped found the lay ministry 20 years earlier with the aim of evangelizing among the itinerants and tough guys and hard livers who populate the rigs. That effort took the textual form of a Bible interspersed with testimonies from oil workers, sized to fit in the back pocket of overalls and titled “God’s Word for the Oil Patch: Fuel for the Soul.”

Read it all.

The US has confirmed it would resist efforts to put the internet under the control of the United Nations.

At present several non-profit US bodies oversee the net’s technical specifications and domain name system.

They operate at arms-length from the US government but officially under the remit of its Department of Commerce….

Read it all.

When computerized stock trading runs amok, as it did this week on Wall Street, the firm responsible typically can jump in and hit a kill switch.

But as a torrent of faulty trades spewed Wednesday morning from a Knight Capital Group trading program, no one at the firm managed to stop it for more than a half-hour….

Several market insiders said that they were bewildered, because in a market where trading losses can pile up in seconds, executives typically have a simple command that can immediately halt trading.

Read it all.

If our behaviour patterns have shaped our consciousness towards money-domination, it is new behaviour patterns that will be the form of our resistance. Naming the idol and its power is a start. Insisting that our congregations see money as a spiritual issue, to be struggled with in Lent, for instance, is another step forward. Joining the Christian Council for Monetary Justice (www.ccmj.org) or other campaigns that help us to rehearse for a different world is next. Supporting actions that will rein in the debt explosion and restore to the people and their representatives control over the instruments of exchange is the aim.

When, last autumn, St Paul’s Institute published “Value and Values”, its survey of the ­attitudes of finance-sector ­professionals, one aspect was enormously striking. While the majority of those surveyed thought they were overpaid, they also admitted that it was the money that kept them in the work. And while they thought deregulation was vital, they also thought it lowered ethical standards. It is this sense of lived contradiction that tells us that we need to stop shouting “greed” and work with the professionals to understand this trap. After all, bankers reflect our values too.

Our slavery to the principalities and powers represented by what money has been allowed to become has to be broken. Among the blandishments of choice that money seems to offer, one choice is often hidden: “You cannot be slave to God and Mammon.”

Read it all.

Most of the world was pessimistic about the job market last year, according to Gallup surveys conducted in 146 countries in 2011. Fifty-seven percent of adults worldwide, on average, said it was a bad time to find a job in their local communities, while 33% said it was a good time. Europeans were the most pessimistic, with 72% saying it was a bad time. Optimism was highest in the Americas, where a still dismal 38% said it was a good time.

Read it all.

Wondering just who everyone is on Facebook? Well, wonder about 83 million fewer of them. Via Mashable, Facebook revealed in their 10-Q that 4.8 percent of the site’s worldwide monthly active user accounts are “duplicate,” meaning “an account that a user maintains in addition to his or her principal account.” The rest are deemed “false” and fall under two headings ”” 1.5 percent are “undesirable,” used for terms of service violating activities like spamming, and 2.4 percent are “user-misclassified” meaning an account wherein “users have created personal profiles for a business, organization, or non-human entity such as a pet.” No matter how cute it is, little Fido’s profile might be deceiving people! So all told, 8.7 percent of Facebook’s users do not correspond to actual people. But considering it has 955 million users, that adds up fast.

Read it all.

The report provides the latest evidence that the economy lacks the momentum to make a dent in the unemployment rate. It takes roughly 100,000 to 120,000 new jobs a month just to keep unemployment from rising, which the economy failed to do in July. That is because despite July’s impressive gains the U.S. economy has added an average of only 105,000 jobs a month over the past three months.

“We’re treading water,” said Stephen Stanley, chief economist at Pierpont Securities. “We’re not falling down, but we’re also not making up any ground. We’re not getting any closer to a normal type of employment reading.”

Read it all, and make sure to focus on the rate that matters, which is U-6 as we have discussed many times before, it ticked up to 15% this month; in March it was 14.5%–KSH.

The agitators chose a most improbable villain. Dan Cathy is the son of the 91-year-old founder of the company, S. Truett Cathy. Truett is an entrepreneur and philanthropist who is also a committed Christian. His fast-food chain is famous not only for tasty chicken sandwiches but also for being closed on Sundays. The Cathys don’t think of their company as a “Christian company,” but they have sought to run their business on “biblical principles.” This gives them a special interest in families.

“We are very much supportive of the family””the biblical definition of the family unit,” Mr. Cathy explained recently in an interview with the Baptist Press. “We are a family-owned business, a family-led business, and we are married to our first wives. We give God thanks for that.”

In virtually every culture, marriage is an institution involving a public commitment between a man and a woman. The complementary nature of men and women points to the unique purpose of marriage: to bear and raise children. One can recognize this fact and so conclude that “same-sex marriage” is an oxymoron””without being “anti-gay.”

Read it all.

Madrid–The newest Apple store in Spain, like its counterparts in other parts of the world, is designed to draw you in. Stone floors, glass doors, and rows of blond wood tables stocked with scores of gleaming iPhones, iPads and MacBooks as far as the eye can see.

On a recent weekday afternoon, the cavernous showroom was missing only one thing: customers.

Read it all.

San Bernardino, California, filed for municipal bankruptcy after disclosing a $46 million shortfall in the city’s budget, the third California city to seek court protection from creditors since June 28.

California cities from the Mexican border to San Francisco Bay are confronting rising pension costs as they contend with growing unemployment and declining property- and sales-tax revenue. The costs stem from decisions made when stock markets were soaring and retirement funds were running surpluses.

Read it all.

Cash-hungry states have long tried to poach business from one another. Now many are stepping up their efforts to lure gamblers from their neighbors to their growing ranks of slot machines, leaving states like Delaware, which embraced gambling early, struggling to keep up in what has become a feverish one-armed-bandit arms race.

Gambling revenue accounts for more than 7 percent of Delaware’s general fund budget, making it the state’s fourth biggest revenue stream, ahead of its corporate income tax and gross receipts tax. But when new casinos in Maryland and Pennsylvania began to attract the gamblers who once fed quarters into Delaware’s machines, the state acted. First it legalized a form of sports betting. Then it allowed table games including blackjack, craps and roulette. But its gambling revenues have continued to fall.

So at the end of June, Gov. Jack Markell, a Democrat, signed a law that could make Delaware the first state to offer Internet gambling ”” giving its residents the chance to bet on video lottery games and online versions of games like poker, blackjack and roulette without leaving their homes.

Read it all.

The Federal Reserve is heading toward launching a new round of stimulus to buck up the weak economy, but stopped short of doing so right away.

The decision to make what amounted to a conditional promise of action came Wednesday at the end of the central bank’s two-day policy meeting. In an uncharacteristically strong statement, the Fed said it will “closely monitor” the economy and “will provide additional accommodation as needed to promote a stronger economic recovery and sustained improvement in labor market conditions.” Translation: The Fed will move if growth and employment don’t pick up soon on their own.

Read it all.

A trading glitch Wednesday morning led to some puzzling stock movements on Wall Street, prompting reviews by the New York Stock Exchange and securities regulators.

“Irregular trading” in 148 stocks led the exchange to review activity after the opening bell, the exchange’s operator, NYSE Euronext, said in a statement….

The issues appear to stem from a “technology issue” at Knight Capital Group, a major Wall Street brokerage firm based in Jersey City, N.J.

Read it all.