An overwhelming majority of Greeks believe new austerity measures the government has promised its international lenders in exchange for more financial aid are unfair and hurt the poorest sections of society, a poll showed on Saturday.
Near-bankrupt Greece needs the European Union and International Monetary Fund’s blessing on measures worth nearly 12 billion euros ($16 billion) to unlock its next tranche of aid, without which it faces default and a potential exit from the euro zone.
Cash-strapped officials in Europe are looking for a way to ease their financial burden by upending centuries of tradition and seeking to tap one of the last untouched sources of wealth: the Catholic Church.
Thousands of public officials who have seen the financial crisis hit their budgets are chipping away at the various tax breaks and privileges the church has enjoyed for centuries.
Here we are, smack dab in the middle of convention season. Cue the balloons. The Republicans had their turn last week, the Democrats come next. And there are plenty of personal finance issues being aired by the two guys who want to be president. But what are the issues voters are most interested in?
Marketplace’s David Gura recently traveled through both states hosting this year’s conventions as part of our coverage of the how all the tub-thumping plays out where it really matters: the economy.
Gura started down the I-4 corridor, which cuts through Daytona Beach, Orlando and site of the Republican Convention, Tampa. That highway has a high concentration of undecided voters. Some view it as the line between the more conservative north and more liberal south.
The Fed chairman said the central bank intends to be “forceful .”‰.”‰. in supporting a sustainable recovery.” With Europe’s financial crisis and the United States’ looming budget cuts and tax hikes posing major risks for the recovery, he said, economic growth is “far from satisfactory,” and he pledged the Fed will take additional steps to help the economy as needed.
As is common of Fed pronouncements, Bernanke hinted but offered no certainty of action to come. Still, the urgent tone of his remarks will leave investors disappointed if the Fed does not launch new stimulus at its Sept. 12-13 policymaking meeting. Investors seemed hopeful, with stocks trending up by about 1 percent in the early afternoon.
“We must not lose sight of the daunting economic challenges that confront our nation,” Bernanke said. “The stagnation of the labor market in particular is a grave concern, not only because of the enormous suffering and waste of human talent it entails, but also because persistently high levels of unemployment will wreak structural damage on our economy that could last for many years.”
What’s the fiercest rivalry in American politics today? There’s Obama-Romney, of course, but try O’Malley-McDonnell””neighboring governors battling across the Potomac River over how best to resuscitate a moribund economy.
Martin O’Malley, Maryland’s liberal Democratic governor, is competing for jobs, businesses and tax dollars with Bob McDonnell, Virginia’s conservative Republican chief executive. Both are rising stars considered potential presidential hopefuls in 2016. Both are Irish Catholics””Mr. McDonnell playfully calls Mr. O’Malley “the big Irishman to our north”””and each leads his party’s association of governors. The two regularly spar on the Sunday talk shows, on the pages of Washington-area newspapers, and over the radio.
Each man seems obsessed with proving that his economic model has outperformed the other’s….
The Bishop of the Connecticut Episcopal Diocese said Tuesday he would meet with area clergy next week to discuss the future of the Bishop Seabury Church in Groton.
The building has functioned as a church since it as built more than 30 years ago, and was the subject of a lengthy court battle.
The congregation of 750 members, called Bishop Seabury Anglican Church, split with the Episcopal Church in 2007, then wound up in court over whether it could continue to use the building.
The middle class is receiving less of America’s total income, declining to its smallest share in decades as median wages stagnate in the economic doldrums and wealth concentrates at the top.
A study released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center highlights diminished hopes, too, for the roughly 50 percent of adults defined as middle class, with household incomes ranging from $39,000 to $118,000. The report describes this mid-tier group as suffering its “worst decade in modern history,” having fallen backward in income for the first time since the end of World War II.
Three years after the recession technically ended, middle class Americans are still feeling the economic pinch, with most saying they have been forced to reduce spending in the past year. And fewer now believe that hard work will allow them to get ahead in life. Families are now more likely to say their children’s economic future will be the same or worse than their own.
Federal Reserve officials in their last meeting discussed a “number of policy tools” that the central bank might use to further stimulate the economy in the face of the weakening recovery, an official account released on Wednesday said, but they remained in wait-and-see mode.
“Many members judged that additional monetary accommodation would likely be warranted fairly soon unless incoming information pointed to a substantial and sustainable strengthening in the pace of the economic recovery,” the account of the meeting that ended Aug. 1 said.
With few signs of a substantial and sustainable strengthening evident this summer, the report will likely solidify investors’ expectations that the bank will take new measures this fall.
The Well By the Sea in Myrtle Beach, the Diocese’s newest congregation, signed a contract and purchased the former Genesis Christian Missionary Alliance Church located at 211 Forestbrook Road in Myrtle Beach on Thursday, August 16, 2012.
The Well, which began holding services in 2009 and was recognized by Bishop Lawrence as a mission church during the 2012 Diocesan Convention, had previously met in two storefronts in the Market Common section of Myrtle Beach and an elementary school. Currently, The Well meets in a strip-mall in Myrtle Beach….
The Koforidua Diocese of the Anglican Church has called on the government to partner the private sector to solve the housing shortage facing the country….
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….
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.
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….
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).
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.”
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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….
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.
Roy Johnson fell so far behind on his $1,000-per-month mortgage payments that last year he allowed the redbrick, three-bedroom ranch he had owned since 1963 to lapse into foreclosure.
“I couldn’t pay it any longer,” he said. “One day, I woke up and said, ”˜Hell, I’m through with it. I’m walking away from the house.’ ”
That decision swept Mr. Johnson, 79, into a rapidly expanding demographic: older Americans who have lost their homes in the Great Recession. As he hauled his belongings by pickup truck from this Atlanta suburb and moved into his daughter’s basement, Mr. Johnson became one of the one and a half million Americans over the age of 50 who lost their houses to foreclosure between 2007 and 2011. Of those, the highest foreclosure rate was for homeowners over 75.
“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.
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.
Friction over shares of a shrinking financial pie has animated the opening days of the 77th General Convention meeting 5-12 July 2012 in Indianapolis. The House of Deputies has called for the sale of the church’s national headquarters at 815 Second Avenue in New York, while deputies have protested proposed cuts in funding for favored projects.
While the Church’s Joint Standing Committee on Program, Budget and Finance (PB&F) has yet to submit a final budget to convention for approval, competing interest groups have sought to preserve their share of the church pie.
Friction over shares of a shrinking financial pie has animated the opening days of the 77th General Convention meeting 5-12 July 2012 in Indianapolis. The Standing Committee on Structure has called for the sale of the church’s national headquarters at 815 Second Avenue in New York, while deputies have protested proposed cuts in funding for favored projects.
The text of the original resolution D016 [amendment(s) are currently being attempted] is as follows:
Resolved, the House of _______ concurring, That it is the will of this Convention to move the Church Center headquarters away from the Church Center building at 815 2nd Avenue, New York City, as soon as it is economically feasible; and be it further Resolved, That Executive Council is directed to appoint a Task Force on Real Property including knowledgeable real estate and finance professionals, to explore alternatives and make recommendations for the most effective economic way of a sale, lease, or other disposition of the Church Center building; and be it further Resolved, That the Task Force on Real Property is to make its report to Executive Council by February 2013; and be it further Resolved, That Executive Council will proceed with all appropriate speed to implement the Task Force Recommendations, including (if so recommended) placing the Church Center building on the market for sale, lease, or other disposition, as soon as it makes economic sense to do so; and be it further Resolved, That Executive Council is directed to appoint a separate Task Force on Church Center Location to identify other suitable alternatives for locating the
Church Center, giving special attention to available properties owned by Episcopal-affiliated entities, locations close to large airports, ease of travel, cost of living for Church Center employees, and cost of acquiring or leasing the properties; and be it further
Resolved, That the Task Force on Church Center Location will make its report to Executive Council by June, 2013; and be it further Resolved, That Executive Council will be prepared to relocate the Church Center headquarters to the new location or locations as soon as it is economically feasible; and be it further Resolved, That the General Convention request the Joint Standing Committee on Program Budget and Finance to consider a budget allocation of $20,000 in the 2013-2015 triennium budget to pay for expenses associated with the work described in this Resolution.
Update: The amended resolution as worded and passed is now here.
Announcements of a housing recovery have become a wrongheaded rite of summer, but after several years of false hopes, evidence is accumulating that the optimists may finally be right.
The housing market is starting to recover. Prices are rising. Sales are increasing. Home builders are clearing lots and raising frames.
Joe Niece, a real estate agent in the Minneapolis suburb of Eden Prairie, said he recently concluded a streak of 13 consecutive bidding wars over homes that his clients wanted to buy. Each sold above the asking price.
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.
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.