Egypt’s new Islamist president, Mohammed Morsi, has made sweeping promises to the Egyptian people, saying he’ll improve the quality of their lives during his first 100 days in office.

Morsi has been busy on several fronts, but he has only a few weeks left to fulfill those big pledges.

His promises have come in nightly radio broadcasts during the holy month of Ramadan. A decent loaf of bread is a demand for us all, he declared in one of those broadcasts, saying subsidized bread will be more widely available and of better quality.

But in Sayed Abdel Moneim’s ramshackle, one-room home in Cairo’s working-class district of Shubra el Kheima, bread, he says, is just one small issue.

Read (or better listen to) it all.

Unemployment rates rose in 44 U.S. states in July, the most states to show a monthly increase in more than three years and a reflection of weak hiring nationwide.

The Labor Department said Friday that unemployment rates fell in only two states and were unchanged in four.

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Like so many South Africans, I have been watching with growing alarm the escalating violence at Lonmin’s Marikana Mine over the last week, and am now stunned and appalled by yesterday’s events which left so many more dead or injured. It is a terrible, heart-breaking, tragedy, for the individuals concerned and for our nation. Our fervent prayers are with all the bereaved, and the hurt and wounded.

Whatever the merits of the various disputes ”“ whether between employees and employers, between unions, between workers and union leaders, between miners and police ”“ whatever the legality of the strikes or the responses to them, this death toll is unacceptable. Even one death is one too many, and there must be an end to this senseless loss of life.

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California added jobs faster than the rest of the nation over the past year. Tech firms are showering riches on Silicon Valley, and home prices are soaring in places like Palo Alto. The Golden State is rebounding, but for a broad swath of residents, it is a lot less golden and is likely to stay that way.

Even in Silicon Valley, many aren’t joining the revival. Tech companies are thriving, but only after shifting much work elsewhere. Internet-software experts are in demand; middle-aged semiconductor executives aren’t.

Among the thriving are people like Pete Curley, who, in six years in Silicon Valley, has twice sold social-networking applications for healthy sums. The recently married 27-year-old is considering buying a home in the region’s pricey market. By contrast, Pat Fasang, who says that he is older than 50, was laid off from a six-figure marketing post at a semiconductor firm last year and says that the Internet firms hiring today have no interest in him. In more than 20 years in Silicon Valley, he has never been out of work this long. “I’m beginning to feel hungry,” he says.

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Officially over 12 million workers are looking for work but cannot find a job and millions more have actually given up seeking employment. Millions more are underemployed; they are willing and able to work full time, but there are not enough jobs available. Over ten million families are “working poor”–they work hard, but their jobs do not pay enough to meet their basic needs. The sad fact is that over 46 million people live in poverty and, most disturbingly, over 16 million children grow up poor in our nation. The link between joblessness and poverty is undeniable, as Pope Benedict points out:

In many cases, poverty results from a violation of the dignity of human work, either because work opportunities are limited (through unemployment or underemployment), or “because a low value is put on work and the rights that flow from it, especially the right to a just wage and to the personal security of the worker and his or her family” (Caritas in Veritate, no. 63).

Public officials rightfully debate the need to reduce unsustainable federal deficits and debt. In the current political campaigns, we hear much about the economy, but almost nothing about the moral imperative to overcome pervasive poverty ina nation still blessed with substantial economic resources and power.

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Americans especially like to focus on the total fertility rate, or TFR, the average number of children a woman can expect to have during her lifetime. For years, America was unusual among rich countries in having a relatively high TFR of around 2.1, the so-called “replacement rate”, at which a population stabilises over the long term. European countries were typically below that rate, sometimes far below it.

So it comes as something of a shock to discover that in 2011 America’s fertility rate was below replacement level and below that of some large European countries. The American rate is now 1.9 and falling. France’s is 2.0 and stable. The rate in England is 2.0 and rising slightly.

American fertility reached its recent peak in 2007; its fall has coincided with the economic crisis that began at the end of that year….

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Disney officials say they presented “multiple options” to accommodate the religious beliefs of a Muslim woman who is now suing the entertainment giant and claims she unfairly lost her job at a Disneyland Resort café after refusing to remove her head scarf at work.

Imane Boudlal, 28, filed a federal lawsuit against Walt Disney Corp. on Monday, saying she was also discriminated against and harassed for her religious beliefs.

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Economists often assert that we are in the worst recovery since the Great Depression. Are we?

Not technically, but it’s still unusually bad.

Certainly the economy is in an abysmal state, and we still have about five million fewer jobs than we had when the recession began in December 2007. But the level of economic activity is so low chiefly because the recession itself was so severe; indeed, on many economic indicators, the Great Recession was the deepest (and longest) downturn since the Great Depression.

Read it all and examine the graphic.

Silicon Valley, the epicentre of the global technology industry, is ruled by rationality and science. Data drives decisions, computer code solves problems. And yet there is a strong current of faith that permeates everything ”“ an extreme idealism that motivates entrepreneurs, a staunch belief among engineers that technology can cure the world’s ills and contribute to the progress of humanity.

Sometimes that belief is drawn directly from a Christian teaching. But rarely are such values expressed in the boardroom or on the demo stage. Getting the job done is paramount in Silicon Valley, so religious believers often keep quiet about their faith in public forums, for fear of alienating co-workers or customers, says Jan English-Lueck, a professor of anthropology at San José State University. “Dogmatic faith would get in the way of good work relationships,” she says, “and that is the true sin in Silicon Valley.”

But within Christian circles, a shared faith can also turn into a powerful business alliance. Christians find each other at informal prayer groups at Google and Facebook, and at fellowship gatherings for entrepreneurs, forming social bonds that segue back to the office.

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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….

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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).

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).

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.”

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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Americans – whose purchases account for 70 percent of U.S. economic activity – are spending carefully, and they don’t expect to improve their income or job prospects any time soon.

“Going forward, there seems to be a lot of uncertainty,” said Joe Flannery, president of Weaver’s Inc., a 155-year-old department store in Lawrence, Kan.

He, like other retailers, is watching for a ripple effect on general merchandise sales if food prices rise because of the drought later this year and into 2013.

“I think there is uncertainty about the second half of the year,” Flannery said. “I think there is some trepidation.”

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Twenty-somethings who postponed having babies because of the poor economy are still hesitant to jump in to parenthood ”” an unexpected consequence that has dropped the USA’s birthrate to its lowest point in 25 years.

The fertility rate is not expected to rebound for at least two years and could affect birthrates for years to come, according to Demographic Intelligence, a Charlottesville, Va., company that produces quarterly birth forecasts for consumer products and pharmaceutical giants such as Pfizer and Procter & Gamble.

Marketers track fertility trends closely because they affect sales of thousands of products from diapers, cribs and minivans to baby bottles, toys and children’s pain relievers.

Read it all.

The economic storms of recent years have raised concerns about growing inequality and questions about a core national faith, that even Americans of humble backgrounds have a good chance of getting ahead. Most of the discussion has focused on labor market forces like falling blue-collar wages and lavish Wall Street pay.

But striking changes in family structure have also broadened income gaps and posed new barriers to upward mobility. College-educated Americans like the Faulkners are increasingly likely to marry one another, compounding their growing advantages in pay. Less-educated women like Ms. Schairer, who left college without finishing her degree, are growing less likely to marry at all, raising children on pinched paychecks that come in ones, not twos.

Estimates vary widely, but scholars have said that changes in marriage patterns ”” as opposed to changes in individual earnings ”” may account for as much as 40 percent of the growth in certain measures of inequality. Long a nation of economic extremes, the United States is also becoming a society of family haves and family have-nots, with marriage and its rewards evermore confined to the fortunate classes.

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One bad jobs report is a blip. Three’s a trend. And the United States has now seen three weak jobs reports in a row. Through the first quarter of 2012, the U.S. economy was creating an average of 226,000 jobs per month. In the second quarter? Just 75,000 jobs per month.

So what can be done about the sputtering economy? Congress could try to pass more stimulus. But Congress is deadlocked ”” Republicans are opposed to further action. That puts the spotlight on the Federal Reserve and Ben Bernanke. Right now, unemployment is falling more slowly than the Fed expected when it issued its forecasts back in April. Here’s the chart, courtesy of the Council on Foreign Relations….

Read it all.

Spain is heading for a general bailout. It may not happen immediately, but that is what the figures suggest – that sometime in the autumn, maybe sooner, the country will need a full-blown rescue.

It is fiercely denied, of course. The Spanish Economy Minister, Luis de Guindos, said “Spain is a solvent country, there will be no bailout… I believe that Spain is a competitive country. We have a trade surplus with the eurozone, we have a very competitive tourism sector”.

Then there are the facts on the ground. The bailout of the Spanish banks – sealed last Friday – lacks conviction. House prices are still falling. Indeed in the second quarter they were declining at the fastest rate since the start of the crisis. The real estate bubble, stoked by the eurozone’s low interest rates, continues to take its toll.

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“The ability of the states to meet their obligations to public employees, to creditors and most critically to the education and well-being of their citizens is threatened,” warned the chairmen of the task force, Richard Ravitch, a former lieutenant governor of New York, and Paul A. Volcker, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve.

The report added a strong dose of fiscal pessimism just as many states have seen their immediate budget pressures begin to ease. And it called into question how states will restore the services they have cut during the downturn, saying that the loss of jobs in prisons, hospitals, courts and agencies have been more severe than in any of the past nine recessions.

“This is a fundamental shift in the way governments have responded to recessions and appears to signal a willingness to ”˜unbuild’ state government in a way that has not been done before,” it said, noting that court systems had cut their hours in many states, delaying actions including divorce settlements and criminal trials.

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Facing the same financial stressors that pushed San Bernardino toward bankruptcy, cities across California are slashing day-to-day services and taking other drastic actions to skirt a similar fiscal collapse.

For some, it may not be enough.

San Bernardino on Tuesday became the third California city to seek bankruptcy protection in the last month and, while no one expects the state to be consumed by municipal insolvencies, other cities teeter on the abyss.

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U.S. job growth barely picked up in June, the latest sign that economic growth has slowed.

Nonfarm payrolls grew by 80,000 last month, the Labor Department said Friday. The politically important unemployment rate, obtained by a separate survey of U.S. households, was unchanged at 8.2%.

Economists surveyed by Dow Jones Newswires had forecast a gain of 100,000 in payrolls and the steady June jobless rate.

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Important update: EconomicPicdata notes–“When looking at the household survey, we see that the headline measure of unemployment doesn’t account for the fact that teen employment (likely low pay part-time workers on summer break) accounted for more than 100% of all new jobs. Excluding teens (the second bracket from the left in the chart below), we can see that negative employment number. In addition, individuals over 20 continue to flee the workforce (more than 150,000 more 20+ year olds were classified as “not in the labor force”).” Read it all.

Stockton, California–This Gold Rush-era port city, an epicenter of California’s agricultural exports, will become the nation’s largest city to seek protection under the U.S. bankruptcy code after its City Council on Tuesday stopped bond payments, slashed employee health and retirement benefits and adopted a day-to-day survival budget.

City Manager Bob Deis likened the process to cutting off an arm to save the body. He is expected to file bankruptcy papers immediately…..

Stockton..[had] been in negotiations with its creditors since late March under AB 506, a new California law requiring mediation before a municipality can file for reorganization of debt. It was the first use of the law, and policy analysts who watched its torturous and tedious progress have titled their report on it “Death by a Thousand Meetings.” Mediations ended Monday at midnight.

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Nearly four years after a borrowing binge gave way to financial crisis, have households slashed enough debt to take on new credit and start spending again?

Yes, says a growing chorus of economists, with some evidence to back them up. The Federal Reserve’s ratio of debt service payments to disposable income is at its lowest level since 1994.

But that traditional measure is a poor guide today, as credit-hungry adults under 45 bear the brunt of the jobs, housing and student loan crises.

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Definitions of class are hard to come by ”” so much so that the U.S. Department of Commerce, on behalf of Vice President Joe Biden’s White House Task Force on the Middle Class, emphasized descriptive language rather than statistics, finding that “middle-class families are defined by their aspirations more than their income. [We assume] that middle-class families aspire to homeownership, a car, college education for their children, health and retirement security and occasional family vacations.”

The government’s verdict: “It is more difficult now than in the past for many people to achieve middle-class status because prices for certain key goods ”” health care, college and housing ”” have gone up faster than income.”
Median household income has also remained stagnant for more than a decade; when the figures are adjusted for inflation, Americans are making less now than they were when Bill Clinton was in the White House.

There, in brief, is the crisis of our time. The American Dream may be slipping away. We have overcome such challenges before. To recover the Dream requires knowing where it came from, how it lasted so long and why it matters so much.

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By this point in his life, Keith Daniel thought he would be saving for retirement, helping his daughter through college and slugging his way to glory in his local softball league.

Instead, the 52-year-old is burning through his savings and working odd jobs to make ends meet. He hasn’t held a full-time job in over three years.

Read it all.