There are many more reasons for concern. The continuing inability of Europe to cope with the euro troubles, the political impasse over economic policy in the United States, and the deer-in-the-headlights immobility of Japan do not inspire confidence. The emerging economies ”” China, India, Turkey and Brazil ”” face increased difficulties of their own and will not pull the global economy out of the dumps. That large corporations are sitting on cash hoards or buying back stock rather than making new investments is bad news; that consumers are cutting down debt and doing what they can to increase their savings is good news for the long term, but bad news now. And it seems clear that two years of frantic efforts in Washington have failed to breathe new life into the nation’s housing market….

Global economic events are moving so rapidly that we have no way of foreseeing the economic environment for next year. It will probably not be very good, but how bad it will be and how it will look to voters cannot yet be foretold.

More to the point, we need policy discussions more than we need political ones. This is not just about how big the deficit should be; it is about whether the international financial system will survive the next six months in the form we now know it. It is about whether the foundations of the postwar order are cracking in Europe.

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“The storyline is that global growth is decelerating,” Mike Ryan, chief investment strategist at UBS Wealth Management Americas, told Bloomberg. “Financial stresses are rising and policymakers are finding few viable options to stabilize the real economy.”

That leaves [Ben] Bernanke and company in a bind.

“The Fed can only do so much,” Greg McBride of the financial website Bankrate.com, told NPR’s Scott Horsley. “Their most effective tools are things that they have used up already. At this point, they’ve got a few options left, but none of them is a surefire way to either jump-start the economy or get people to borrow or get banks to lend. There’s still a demand problem. And that is not something that the Fed alone can fix.”

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Cutting its global forecasts sharply, the world’s economic watchdog said the global economy had entered a “dangerous new phase” and urged policymakers to tread a careful line between aggressive deficit reduction and growth. Central banks should stand ready to restart the printing presses to aid the recovery, it added in its twice-yearly World Economic Outlook.

“The recovery has weakened considerably. Strong policies are needed to improve the outlook and reduce the risks,” Olivier Blanchard, the IMF’s chief economist, said. “Markets have clearly become more sceptical about the ability of many countries to stabilise their public debt. Fear of the unknown is high.”

Europe’s leaders came under scathing criticism over the escalating debt crisis.

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Americans’ pessimism about the economy and its future is deepening, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds, and they are increasingly willing to hold President Obama responsible for hard times.

Eight of 10 say the economy is in a recession, and nearly as many say it hasn’t improved over the past year. Even more ominous: Six in 10 predict the economy a year from now will be the same or worse than today, a downturn from the public’s views last year and the year before.

That gloomy outlook, economists say, can become a self-fulfilling prophesy.

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A sharply divided Federal Reserve is expected to take modest steps Wednesday to bolster stagnant growth and hiring amid European debt woes.

The efforts likely won’t have a dramatic impact, analysts say. But inflation concerns may preclude stronger medicine, and in any case prior doses of shock-and-awe easing didn’t result in a self-sustaining, robust recovery.

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But for the inflationary policies of the Fed and the ECB to stimulate pseudo “growth” over the past several decades, there would have been no financial bubble and no mountain of housing-related debt. Why do economists like Roubini and Krugman say we need more of this medicine? Such pathetic proposals for more-debt-driven government intervention are what pass for mainstream economic thinking today in the G-20 nations.

Keep in mind that there are still hundreds of billions in bad debts in the US and EU tied to real estate and other speculative endeavors ”” debt which must eventually default. Until the global financial system is cleansed of these bad debts, market volatility and uncertainty will remain high. Unless we bite the bullet and write down debts to levels that will allow private growth and employment, there will be no recovery.

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About one in five Americans combine a view of God as actively engaged in daily workings of the world with an economic conservative view that opposes government regulation and champions the free market as a matter of faith.

“They say the invisible hand of the free market is really God at work,” says sociologist Paul Froese, co-author of the Baylor Religion Survey, released today by Baylor University in Waco, Texas.

“They think the economy works because God wants it to work. It’s a new religious economic idealism,” with politicians “invoking God while chanting ‘less government,'” he says.

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“Productivity isn’t everything,” Paul Krugman once wrote in his New York Times column, “but in the long run it is almost everything.” Strange then, with Canada’s poor productivity and innovation performance compared with that of the U.S., that we remain complacent. Where’s our sense of urgency?

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Dana Samuel of North Charleston lost her retail job in June.

The 27-year-old single mother has applied to numerous places for a job.

“It’s hard,” she said. “They don’t call back. They don’t respond. You hear nothing. Some say I’m not qualified for the position. Others say I don’t have the experience.”

Samuel is trying to juggle raising two children, getting a degree in criminal justice from Trident Technical College and landing a job that pays more than the $91 in jobless benefits she receives each week.

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Retirement plans and living standards for nearly half a million South Carolinians are in the hands of state politicians.

On the line are cost-of-living increases, the number of years public employees must work before they earn retirement pay and future contribution rates, all of which stand to change as the state’s top elected officials try to figure out a way to deal with the retirement system’s $17 billion funding mess.

Risky investment strategies and too-generous retirement benefits over the years coupled with the recession have been blamed by fiscal watchdogs as the reason the state’s pension plan has long-term stability problems.

Read it all from the front page of the local paper.

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(Before you read the full article, guess the answer to this question: What percentage of public sector employees in Italy have lifetime tenure?).

With only 960 residents and a handful of roads, this tiny hilltop village in the arid, sulfurous hills of southern Sicily does not appear to have major traffic problems. But that does not prevent it from having one full-time traffic officer ”” and eight auxiliaries.

The auxiliaries, who earn a respectable 800 euros a month, or $1,100, to work 20 hours a week, are among about 64 Comitini residents employed by the town, the product of an entrenched jobs-for-votes system pervasive in Italian politics at all levels.

“Jobs like these have kept this city alive,” said Caterina Valenti, 41, an auxiliary in a neat blue uniform as she sat recently with two colleagues, all on duty, drinking coffee in the town’s bar on a hot afternoon. “You see, here we are at the bar, we support the economy this way.”

Read it all (including the answer to the question above).

[There are] 21 participants in the Mother-to-Mother program, an initiative made possible through a $70,000 grant from the Sisters of Charity Foundation of South Carolina. The 12-month project targets high- poverty, unemployed mothers who do not have a high school diploma and in many cases test below the eighth-grade level in reading or math.

The goal is for them to earn a GED and WorkKeys certificate, which is an assessment that measures real-world job skills.

“We want to move toward this program model for everything we do,” said Eileen Chepenik, the association’s executive director.

Read it all from the front page of yesterday’s local paper.

The dismal state of the economy is the main reason many companies are reluctant to hire workers, and few executives are saying that President Obama’s jobs plan ”” while welcome ”” will change their minds any time soon.

That sentiment was echoed across numerous industries by executives in companies big and small on Friday, underscoring the challenge for the Obama administration as it tries to encourage hiring and perk up the moribund economy.

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Please note that any comments not on the actual content of the speech will not be retained–thank you–KSH.

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To reduce unemployment, the economy must create enough new jobs to absorb entrants into the labor market and the existing out-of-work. [Heidi] Shierholz has calculated how many jobs would be needed to lower unemployment (9.1 percent in August) to 5 percent over five years. Her estimate: 16.9 million. That’s an average of 282,000 jobs a month. The trouble is that this rate of job creation far exceeds the present level (105,000 a month since early 2010) or even the level (240,000) achieved during the boom between 1993 and 2000.

You can tinker with Shierholz’s assumptions, but the main conclusion doesn’t change. Even with rapid job growth, unemployment will descend slowly. With sluggish growth — or another recession — it may remain high indefinitely. There are no quick fixes. Unemployment will increasingly define our economic prospects and politics.

It’s not only the jobless who will be affected. No one has yet repealed the law of supply and demand.

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The job market is even worse than the 9.1 percent unemployment rate suggests.

America’s 14 million unemployed aren’t competing just with each other. They must also contend with 8.8 million other people not counted as unemployed ”” part-timers who want full-time work.

When consumer demand picks up, companies will likely boost the hours of their part-timers before they add jobs, economists say. It means they have room to expand without hiring.

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Perhaps Secretary [Hilda] Solis, in her zeal to bolster U.S. manufacturing, could use her influence in high places to urge an NLRB retreat on this absurd action against Boeing — and on similarly misguided administration pandering to organized labor.

After all, as she writes in her column: “In the Charleston area alone, more than 900 manufacturing jobs have been added since July 2010 — an increase of 4.3 percent.”

In other words, President Obama’s labor secretary is bragging, in part, about jobs added in the Charleston area by Boeing, even as President Obama’s NLRB acting general counsel takes Boeing to court for adding those jobs.

And that, by any logical analysis, doesn’t add up.

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Almighty God, you have so linked our lives one with another that all we do affects, for good or ill, all other lives: So guide us in the work we do, that we may do it not for self alone, but for the common good; and, as we seek a proper return for our own labor, make us mindful of the rightful aspirations of other workers, and arouse our concern for those who are out of work; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

The percentage of working-age Californians with jobs has fallen to a record low, and employment may not return to pre-recession levels until the second half of the decade, according to a research group.

Just 55.4 percent of working-age Californians, defined as those 16 or older, had a job in July, down from 56.2 percent a year earlier and the lowest level since 1976, the Sacramento- based California Budget Project said in a report released late yesterday.

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Check it out carefully.

The nonfarm payrolls numbers were unchanged in August after a prolonged increase in economic anxiety that began with the brinksmanship in Washington’s debt-ceiling debate and was followed by the country’s loss of its triple-A credit rating, stock market whiplash and renewed concerns about Europe’s sovereign debt.

The jobs figure, a monthly statistical snapshot by the Department of Labor, may appear more negative because it does not include 45,000 Verizon workers who were on strike when the survey was taken.

Economists blamed both sluggish demand for goods and services and the heightened uncertainty over the economy’s direction for the slow pace of job creation, saying political deadlock was in effect creating economic paralysis.

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When President Obama unveils his jobs plan to Congress next week, he’ll have to balance his desire for spending on programs that might stimulate the economy against the nation’s current appetite for cost cutting. We examine the pros, cons and politics of six proposals that might make Obama’s list….

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The recession of 2007-2009 was by far the most savage economic decline over the time frame of these charts. Prior to the last recession, real GDP hit a new peak within a quarter or two of the official recession end. Per capita real GDP usually lagged a quarter before hitting its post-recession peak; the one exception was in 1990-1991, when the per capita variant required an extra three quarters to set a new peak. Employment has historically been slower to hit new highs following recessions.

The so-called double-dip recession of 1980-1982 had a non-recessionary interlude of four quarters. All three of our indicators hit new peaks within in the second quarter after the first of the double dips. Where are we today? We’re now in the ninth quarter after the last recession. Real GDP is within shouting distance (0.5%) of a new peak. But real GDP per capita is less than halfway from its trough to a new peak, and, twenty-six months after the recession ended, nonfarm employment is only a bit over 20% of the way from its trough to a new peak.

Check out the four charts carefully, especially the second one: Real Per Capita GDP as a Percentage of the Previous Peak.

[My 79-year-old mother] found more care amid the cauliflowers and cash registers of John Lewis than in the NHS hospital she was admitted to six months ago. Her calls for water and a commode were ignored; so, too, were her attempts at conversation. Worse still, at one point she found herself lying naked on the bed while the two nurses who were sponging her giggled and spoke in Tagalog.

At least she was spared the nurses who wear red tabards emblazoned with the warning “Do Not Disturb”. But thousands of patients in Kent, Derby and Middlesex are not so lucky. Their nurses are donning the “buzz off” tabards during drug rounds. The aim, according to the NHS Trusts that have introduced the uniform, is to prevent those pesky patients from interrupting nurse during her important tasks. She should not have to stop her form-filling and box-ticking to quench some old biddy’s thirst, for goodness’ sake.

This leaves the patient and their worried relatives wondering, whatever next?

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As President Barack Obama puts together a new jobs plan to be revealed shortly after Labor Day, he is up against a powerful force, long in the making, that has gone virtually unnoticed in the debate over how to put people back to work: Employers are increasingly giving up on the American man.

If that sounds bleak, it’s because it is. The portion of men who work and their median wages have been eroding since the early 1970s. For decades the impact of this fact was softened in many families by the increasing number of women who went to work and took up the slack. More recently, the housing bubble helped to mask it by boosting the male-dominated construction trades, which employed millions. When real estate ultimately crashed, so did the prospects for many men. The portion of men holding a job””any job, full- or part-time””fell to 63.5 percent in July””hovering stubbornly near the low point of 63.3 percent it reached in December 2009. These are the lowest numbers in statistics going back to 1948. Among the critical category of prime working-age men between 25 and 54, only 81.2 percent held jobs, a barely noticeable improvement from its low point last year””and still well below the depths of the 1982-83 recession, when employment among prime-age men never dropped below 85 percent. To put those numbers in perspective, consider that in 1969, 95 percent of men in their prime working years had a job.

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For the last three years we have been told repeatedly by government officials that funneling hundreds of billions of dollars to large and teetering banks during the credit crisis was necessary to save the financial system, and beneficial to Main Street.

But this has been a hard sell to an increasingly skeptical public. As Henry M. Paulson Jr., the former Treasury secretary, told the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission back in May 2010, “I was never able to explain to the American people in a way in which they understood it why these rescues were for them and for their benefit, not for Wall Street.”

The American people were right to question Mr. Paulson’s pitch, as it turns out. And that became clearer than ever last week when Bloomberg News published fresh and disturbing details about the crisis-era bailouts.

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… let me say that in English: the European Union is cracking up. The Arab world is cracking up. China’s growth model is under pressure and America’s credit-driven capitalist model has suffered a warning heart attack and needs a total rethink. Recasting any one of these alone would be huge. Doing all four at once ”” when the world has never been more interconnected ”” is mind-boggling. We are again “present at the creation” ”” but of what?….

As for America, we’ve thrived in recent decades with a credit-consumption-led economy, whereby we maintained a middle class by using more steroids (easy credit, subprime mortgages and construction work) and less muscle-building (education, skill-building and innovation). It’s put us in a deep hole, and the only way to dig out now is a new, hybrid politics that mixes spending cuts, tax increases, tax reform and investments in infrastructure, education, research and production. But that mix is not the agenda of either party. Either our two parties find a way to collaborate in the center around this new hybrid politics, or a third party is going to emerge ”” or we’re stuck and the pain will just get worse.

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See how many you can guess and then check out the slideshow.

Boeing’s aircraft assembly has long been done by its unionized labor force in Puget Sound, Wash. Most of the new Dreamliners will be built in Puget Sound as well. But with the plane so far behind schedule, Boeing decided to spend $750 million to open the South Carolina facility. Between the two plants, the company hopes to build 10 Dreamliners a month.

That’s the plan, at least. The Obama administration, however, has a different plan. In April, the National Labor Relations Board filed a complaint against Boeing, accusing it of opening the South Carolina plant to retaliate against the union, which has a history of striking at contract time. The N.L.R.B.’s proposed solution, believe it or not, is to move all the Dreamliner production back to Puget Sound, leaving those 5,000 workers in South Carolina twiddling their thumbs.

Seriously, when has a government agency ever tried to dictate where a company makes its products? I can’t ever remember it happening.

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