The number of children displaced has been climbing steadily in recent years, with nearly 40 percent of U.S. school districts surveyed citing foreclosure as the top reason for the surge in homeless students, according to a report this summer by First Focus and the National Association for the Education of Homeless Children and Youth.

Children who are forcibly uprooted from their homes and schools tend to suffer emotionally, socially and academically, studies preceding the mortgage meltdown show. Researchers suspect the same might be happening with children who have been dragged through foreclosure and are urgently exploring the consequences.

“This foreclosure crisis is the largest forced relocation event we’ve had in this country since the Great Depression. In the modern educational environment, we’ve never seen anything come close to this,” said Dan Immergluck, a housing policy professor at the Georgia Tech.

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Today’s public offering marks the moment when the Main Street and Wall Street bailouts meet. But the Wall Street firms haven’t been divvied up as G.M. has, in ways so visible to the eye. For General Motors, divided into its “Old” and “New” halves, there’s an inescapable paradox: the only possible route to future profitability is to create, through plant closings, monuments to past unprofitability. Old G.M. may have gone away for the purposes of the stock offering, but it didn’t go away in what might rightfully be called actuality.

Across the nation, as in Detroit, there is an economic disconnect, a split between what the economic numbers say and how things feel on the ground. The economy is growing, but the unemployment rate hasn’t budged. The recession officially ended in June 2009, but more jobs have been lost than have been added since that “ending.”

Handling this disconnect requires political acuity. It brings to mind something Philip Roth once said about those who have little feel for literature and the texture of lived experience it provides and so “theorize” it. Mr. Roth imagined a scene of a father giving his son this advice while attending a baseball game: “Now, what I want you to do is watch the scoreboard. Stop watching the field. Just watch what happens when the numbers change on the scoreboard. Isn’t that great?” Then Mr. Roth asks: “Is that politicizing the baseball game? Is that theorizing the baseball game? No, it’s having not the foggiest idea in the world what baseball is.”

It’ll be fun, for a day or two, to look at the scoreboard, and to see what G.M.’s shares are going for: $26? $29? $33? $35? The numbers on the exchange will change; it’ll be great, and a welcome, temporary relief from the numbers, still difficult to comprehend, of jobs lost and plants closed. Soon enough, though, we’ll have to go back to watching what’s actually happening on the field, where there’s still a blowout in progress, with the home team way behind, and no one, seemingly, with the foggiest idea what to do about it.

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British churches have criticized a government plan to remove unemployment benefits from people who refuse to accept jobs offered by labor officers.

“There is a serious danger that people living in poverty will be stigmatized by government announcements that they are lazy or work shy,” said the Rev. Alison Tomlin, president of the Methodist church in Scotland.

Iain Duncan Smith, the government minister for work and pensions, on Thursday (Nov. 11) laid out a new “contract” with unemployed people that would include removing benefits for up to three years from people who refuse to take work opportunities.

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In what labor officials and lawyers view as a ground-breaking case involving workers and social media, the National Labor Relations Board has accused a company of illegally firing an employee after she criticized her supervisor on her Facebook page.

This is the first case in which the labor board has stepped in to argue that workers’ criticisms of their bosses or companies on a social networking site are generally a protected activity and that employers would be violating the law by punishing workers for such statements.

The labor relations board announced last week that it had filed a complaint against an ambulance service, American Medical Response of Connecticut, that fired an emergency medical technician, accusing her, among other things, of violating a policy that bars employees from depicting the company “in any way” on Facebook or other social media sites in which they post pictures of themselves.

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Last week we talked about the first stage of the U.S. fiscal crisis: the slow erosion of long-term growth because of mounting government debt. This phenomenon arises from a straightforward application of conventional supply-side economics. Government borrowing absorbs private saving that would otherwise be used for capital formation. The diminished capital stock reduces productivity, growth, and competitiveness.

This week we look at stage two: a rapid economic meltdown precipitated by an untamable accumulation of government debt. Stage two is much more difficult to understand than stage one. Government debt in distress is not something that gets much attention from economists who study developed countries. It’s not something they were taught when they went to economics school. So as the possibility of a crisis has become more real, they are trying out a lot of new ideas.

One nice thing about this otherwise gloomy state of affairs is that politics has not yet infected the economics. The research that you see is not by economists who are pushing a partisan agenda, but by people who are genuinely concerned that the economy may be running itself off a cliff.

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It is undeniable that we are on the path to fiscal collapse. This decline will occur in two stages. First there is the decay as the swelling national debt wears away the economy’s foundations and commits more and more future income to foreign creditors. We are already in stage one.

In stage two a lethal combination of phenomena arises in quick succession: greater default risk, looming inflation, higher interest rates, declining growth, financial market instability, and an acceleration of government borrowing. They feed on each other. The economy heads on a downward spiral. Between stage one and stage two there is a tipping point. Experts know it will come, but nobody wants to predict when. (See below.) This article is about the slow economic decline of stage one. Next week part 2 will describe the hell of a full-blown fiscal collapse.

There is no question economics has failed us. The old paradigms have been made obsolete by the hard reality of the 2007-2009 financial crisis and soaring government debt. But some ideas can be salvaged from the wreckage.

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Church Publishing Inc. (CPI) plans to reduce its workforce by 40 percent and close its Denver, Colorado, office, beginning Dec. 31.

CPI is an affiliate company of the Church Pension Group (CPG), which manages the Episcopal Church Pension Fund for lay and clergy employees, among other operations. The Nov. 3 announcement was made in a letter to all CPG employees, said Dennis Sullivan, CPG president, in a Nov. 5 telephone interview with ENS.

In the letter, Sullivan said that the changes to CPI are in response to the economics of the publishing industry and do not reflect the financial strength of CPG, nor the fund, “both of which remain in solid financial condition.”

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….why is the Fed going to such an extreme when the economy might be improving? The answer is the US housing market. Mortgage rates have fallen further than treasury yields, making houses more affordable than ever, but house sales remain depressed. If housing stays moribund, this will have two serious negative effects.

First, there will be more defaults, and thus more damage to banks’ balance sheets. Note that the Fed is buying shorter-dated bonds, which helps banks, whose business is to borrow in the short term and lend in the long term.

Second, people will continue not to be ”“ or feel ”“ rich, and hence will not spend much….

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A huge number of American households are still relying on government assistance to buy food as the recession continues to batter families.

Food stamp recipients ticked up in August, children consumed millions of free lunches and nearly five million low-income mothers tapped into a government nutrition program for women and young children.

Some 42,389,619 Americans received food stamps in August, a 17% rise from the same time a year ago, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which tracks the data. That number is up 58.5% from August 2007, before the recession began.

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The United States economy added 151,000 jobs in October, a welcome change after four months of job losses but still not enough to make a dent in unemployment.

Private companies have been slowly growing their payrolls throughout 2010, according to a Labor Department report released Friday. This private job growth had been overwhelmed by the elimination of temporary Census Bureau jobs and layoffs by state and local governments during the summer and early fall, until October.

Private companies added 159,000 jobs in October, while governments cut 8,000 jobs in the month. The month was much stronger than expected ”” most forecasts were for a gain of 60,000 jobs, 80,000 of which were from private employers. The reportalso sharply revised the numbers for August and September. The August data was revised to reflect a loss of 1,000 jobs instead of 57,000, and September was revised to 41,000 losses instead of 95,000.

Sure is nice to read some better news! Read it all.

People who are unable to work need to be cared for properly and not be accused of being work-shy, the Archbishop of Wales said last night.

Dr Barry Morgan said the mark of a civilised society was the way it cared for its worst off members.

He was speaking at a service to mark the 100th anniversary of the Tonypandy Riots.

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Like the Francones, four and a half million Americans have taken hardship withdrawals from their 401(k)s. With savings gone, unemployment checks exhausted, many are coming to charities including the CALL Primrose Center, a pantry of free food.

Mary Watts has run CALL Primrose for 11 years.

“Before the Great Recession began, you were sending out how many bags of groceries in a year? Pelley asked.

“When I started in ’99 it was 4,000 bags a year,” she replied. “It’s going to be 32, to 35,000 bags this year.”

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…when I travel from America to India these days, as I did recently, it’s as if the world has been turned upside down. Indians are brimming with hope and faith in the future. After centuries of stagnation, their economy is on the move, fueling animal spirits and ambition. The whole country feels as if it has been unlocked. Meanwhile, in the U.S., the mood is sour. Americans are glum, dispirited and angry. The middle class, in particular, feels under assault. In a Newsweek poll in September, 63% of Americans said they did not think they would be able to maintain their current standard of living. Perhaps most troubling, Americans are strikingly fatalistic about their prospects. The can-do country is convinced that it can’t.

Americans have good reasons to worry. We have just gone through the worst recession since the Great Depression. The light at the end of the tunnel is dim at best. Sixteen months into the recovery, the unemployment rate is higher than it was in the depths of all but one of the postwar recessions. And as government spending is being pared back, the economy is showing new signs of weakness.

Some experts say that in every recession Americans get gloomy and then recover with the economy. This slump is worse than most; so is the mood. Once demand returns, they say, jobs will come back and, with them, optimism. But Americans are far more apprehensive than usual, and their worries seem to go beyond the short-term debate over stimulus vs. deficit reduction. They fear that we are in the midst of not a cyclical downturn but a structural shift, one that poses huge new challenges to the average American job, pressures the average American wage and endangers the average American Dream. The middle class, many Americans have come to believe, is being hollowed out. I think they are right.

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The Federal Reserve’s push toward easier monetary policy is the “wrong way” to stimulate growth and may amount to a manipulation of the dollar, German Economy Minister Rainer Bruederle said.

Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke yesterday gave Group of 20 finance ministers and central bankers meeting in Gyeongju, South Korea an overview of the U.S. central bank’s efforts to jumpstart the world’s largest economy. His strategy, which investors expect will soon include greater asset purchases, drew criticism at the talks, said Bruederle.

“It’s the wrong way to try to prevent or solve problems by adding more liquidity,” Bruederle told reporters yesterday, saying that emerging-market officials were among the critics. Bruederle, a member of the Free Democratic Party, the junior partner in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government, stepped in for hospitalized Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble at the meeting.

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In September, Nevada’s unemployment rate held at 14.4 percent, again the highest among the states. The states with the next highest rates were Michigan, 13.0 percent, and California, 12.4 percent. North Dakota continued to register the lowest jobless rate, 3.7 percent, followed by South Dakota and Nebraska, at 4.4 and 4.6 percent, respectively. In total, 26 states posted jobless rates significantly lower than the U.S. figure of 9.6 percent, 7 states recorded measurably higher rates, and 17 states and the District of Columbia had rates that were not appreciably different from that of the nation.

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A string of Federal Reserve officials on Tuesday indicated the central bank will soon offer further monetary stimulus to the economy, with one saying $100 billion a month in bond buys may be appropriate.

While internal differences on the unconventional policy are still evident, the consensus view at the Fed appears to be that the economy is weak enough to warrant further support, most likely through increased purchases of Treasury debt.

The U.S. economy is expected to have grown just 1.9 percent in the third quarter, a level considered too low to bring down unemployment. The debt purchases would help lower long-term interest rates in the hope of boosting demand.

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Nearly 17% of U.S. medical costs can be blamed on obesity, according to new research that suggests the nation’s weight problem may be having close to twice the impact on medical spending as previously estimated.
One expert acknowledged that past estimates likely underestimated the costs and said the new study ”” which places obesity-related medical costs at around $168 billion ”” probably is closer to the truth.

“I think these are the most recent and perhaps statistically sound estimates that have come out to date,” said Kenneth Thorpe, a health policy researcher at Emory University who has focused on the cost of health care.

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Police and youth have clashed in a dozen cities reports the Independent, and the country has been forced to tap its crisis fuel supply says the New York Post.

Yet what’s most shocking about the strikes is the modest pension reform they are opposed to. The French government is merely increasing the age of retirement to 62 from 60, by 2018, which is nothing compared to the far harsher austerity measures people are protesting in places such as Greece and Spain.

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O Lord, renew our spirits and draw our hearts to thyself, that our work may not be to us a burden but a delight; and give us such a mighty love to thee, who thyself didst work as a craftsman in wood, as may sweeten all our obedience. O let us not serve thee in a spirit of bondage, as slaves, but with cheerfulness and willingness, cooperating with thee in thy work of creation; for the glory of thy holy name.

–William Jenks

In recent times economics has been a religion ”“ and a remarkably silly one ”“ rather than a type of intellectual inquiry, and now that this cheap little creed has been exposed by events it is worth asking what genuine faiths can do to increase our understanding of economic life. In one form or another, this is the question addressed by all the contributors to this timely volume.

Larry Elliott introduces Crisis and Recovery with a wide-ranging analysis of the historical context of the crash, making it clear that: “There is no more chance of ‘business as usual’ than there was of the war that started in August 1914 being all over by Christmas.” The long Edwardian summer of the 1990s and early 2000s, which passed in the shade of the crumbling edifice of American power, is definitely over. History is on the move, and the crude beliefs about how human beings think and act that prevailed in recent times are no longer viable.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, makes the point that the contribution of theology to the debate is not just to add another dimension to the world of fact ”“ rather, it is to expose the assumptions that are hidden underneath our existing understandings. Simple-minded conceptions of rational choice are pretty useless in most areas of life, so why should anyone think these crude notions could enable us to understand markets? The answer is that human agency has been reduced to a process of calculation, leading to an ethically impoverished and deeply unrealistic view of society.

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Americans say they have weathered the worst of the longest recession in seven decades, even as they are pessimistic about prospects for their retirement years, according to a Bloomberg National Poll.

Three in five respondents to the Oct. 7-10 poll say their economic condition has improved recently or they are confident it will get better. One in three say things have gotten worse or aren’t likely to improve anytime soon.

“I see some hope, but not a lot,” says poll respondent Brian Ridlon, 34, an out-of-work resident of Green Mountain, Arkansas, who wants to learn how to become a barber. “There are some avenues to improve yourself, but we need more.”

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In an effort to rush through thousands of home foreclosures since 2007, financial institutions and their mortgage-servicing departments hired hair stylists, Wal-Mart floor workers and people who had worked on assembly lines and installed them in “foreclosure expert” jobs with no formal training, a Florida lawyer says.

Ugh–read it all.

This is not what a recovery is supposed to look like.

In Atlanta, the Bank of America tower, the tallest in the Southeast, is nearly a fifth vacant, and bank officials just wrestled a rent cut from the developer. In Cherry Hill, N.J., 10 percent of the houses on the market are so-called short sales, in which sellers ask for less than they owe lenders. And in Arizona, in sun-blasted desert subdivisions, owners speak of hours cut, jobs lost and meals at soup kitchens.

Less than a month before November elections, the United States is mired in a grim New Normal that could last for years. That has policy makers, particularly the Federal Reserve, considering a range of ever more extreme measures, as noted in the minutes of its last meeting, released Tuesday. Call it recession or recovery, for tens of millions of Americans, there’s little difference.

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“The immaculate lawns and beautiful homes are a sort of facade that covers a growing loss of certainty in the future….”

–Robin Boyle, a professor of urban planning at Wayne State University, speaking to Time Magazine about the real situation in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit for a cover story in September entitled “Real Moms of Grosse Pointe”

A 2007 GAO study looked at the Postal Service’s use of facilities, and concluded that, “A 2005 contractor assessment of 651 randomly selected postal facilities revealed that two- thirds of these facilities were in less than “acceptable” condition, including 22 percent that were rated “poor.” Inspection of one facility in Dallas led the inspector to recommend that the building be immediately evacuated.

The decaying buildings provide a handy visual clue to the quality of service. Unfortunately, we don’t know how bad the service is, because the Postal Service collects data on its own service quality, but it refuses to make the data public. Isn’t it nice that your tax dollars pay for data that you’re not allowed to see?

The Postal Service’s ability to lose mail is, of course, legendary. Here is an example of how bad it has become: last week the American Postal Workers Union had to postpone their national election of officers because so many of the ballots were lost in the mail.

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Top state business leaders, lawmakers and small-business owners from a hodgepodge of industries are fuming over the S.C. Department of Revenue’s efforts to charge a tax on services.

A report in Saturday’s Post and Courier of a North Charleston business that waters plants and now faces a hefty tax bill for its services raised concern among other small business owners who service and repair items — heating and air-conditioning systems, computers, cars — prompting them to call on state lawmakers and trade associations for help.

“We’re just flabbergasted,” said S.C. Small Business Chamber of Commerce President Frank Knapp. “I didn’t know this existed.”

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In some cases business leaders say they have been more ignored than harmed. IBM said it would analyze health-care spending, at no cost to the government, to hunt out fraud, Sam Palmisano, the company’s CEO, said at a conference in New York on Sept. 14. The White House wouldn’t sign on to the plan.

“We offered to do it for free to prove a point, and they turned us down,” Palmisano said. “Our recommendations weren’t aligned with the priorities of the administration. Their priority was not to reduce fraud and improve productivity. It was to increase coverage.”

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A trio of economics scholars, including an MIT professor whose nomination to the Federal Reserve board has been held up in the Senate, won the Nobel Prize in economics on Monday for their studies of markets and how mismatches between buyers and sellers can contribute to such problems as high unemployment.

Peter A. Diamond of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and fellow American Dale T. Mortensen, a professor at Northwestern University, will share the $1.5 million award with Christopher A. Pissarides, a British and Cypriot citizen who teaches at the London School of Economics.

The three men pioneered and developed models that help explain, among other things, why there are so many jobless people even as there are a large number of job openings ”” a problem that is particularly relevant today as the United States and other developed countries grapple with stubbornly high unemployment.

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The U.S. economy continued to lose jobs last month as small gains in the private sector failed to offset big cuts in government workers, pointing to a still sluggish recovery.

Private-sector employers added only 64,000 jobs in September, the Labor Department said Friday. Overall, nonfarm payrolls fell by 95,000 as temporary census workers were let go and state and local governments also cut employment.

he U.S. labor market remains in the doldrums 15 months after the recession ended. That could hurt Democrats in mid-term elections Nov. 2 and is likely to lead the Federal Reserve to take new steps to jump-start the economy at its next meeting Nov. 2-3. The September data was the last jobs report before these two key events.

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Unemployment, as measured by Gallup without seasonal adjustment, increased to 10.1% in September — up sharply from 9.3% in August and 8.9% in July. Much of this increase came during the second half of the month — the unemployment rate was 9.4% in mid-September — and therefore is unlikely to be picked up in the government’s unemployment report… [due out later this morning].

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