The Independent reports: Fruit-pickers, who typically earn about $200 (£100) a week, are part of an unregulated system designed to keep food prices low and the plates of America’s overweight families piled high. The migrants, largely Hispanic and with many of them from Mexico, are the last wretched link in a long chain of exploitation […]

Ben Bernanke comments on the credit woes of the world. He is a master to calm the troubled waters of liquidity. In recent years, mortgage markets have seen a remarkable wave of financial innovation. The advent of large secondary markets and the use of automated underwriting, for instance, have brought more capital into the system […]

As noted in my last post, I have been playing with income data. I believe that for us to be able to properly understand just where we have been and where we are going, we need to look further back than say the 50’s through Reagan’s time. That is, if the data is around. I […]

A few days ago I commented on an article about how Wal-Mart provides emergency supplies to disaster areas at their regular everyday low prices. I pointed out that libertarians like those at Café Hayek should note these developments and see that some guy in the back of a pick-up truck selling supplies at high prices […]

Who’s gambling with our markets now? In contrast to my own somewhat more gloomy views of our financial future, we have a different framing of the financial credit problem and the banking situation. A new report by Stratfor’s George Friedman called ”China and the Arabian Peninsula as Market Stabilizers” takes a different slant on global […]

Jarad Berstein athttp://www.tpmcafe.com/blog/coffeehouse/2007/dec/13/boy_have_we_got_an_inequality_problem just reported that the The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) just updated their invaluable data series on income inequality. In looking at them I came up with a couple of very interesting charts. In recent years there has been one big factor in this redistribution of income thathas not been discussed much. That […]

We are currently experiencing our first snow, possibly to 10 inches. Usually this is taken in stride, but because it started about 1:00 PM and was to include ice conditions and to peak during rush hour, schools let out early, which is very unusual. For some reason the ‘Storm Watch Emergency’ people suggested to businesses […]

Bush replaces neo-con shill Karen Hughes with Jim “Dow 36,000” Glassman at State Department.”Dear Mr. President, Nice hand parrot you’ve named there in Mr. Glassman! Maybe he’ll do better as chief salesman for the State Department in the Middle East. Better than the hard bitten thug in a skirt-Karen Hughes, to whom nobody listened. Having […]

The November retail sales data clearly do no support a recession scenario. Nov(3) Oct sept total 385,753 381,088 380,231 grocery 43,417 43,003 42,805 gas 39,438 36,919 35,806 Nonstore retailers…………………………. 25,611 25,127 25,016 REMAINDER 277,287 276,039 276,604 About half of the nonstore retailers is fuel oil deliveries. So if you take out the price drivenlarge increases […]

The NYT has an opinion on the current energy bill. The centerpiece of the bill is the first meaningful increase in fuel efficiency standards in three decades — from today’s fleetwide average of 25 miles per gallon to 35 m.p.g. by 2020. To win necessary Republican votes, the Senate leadership agreed to drop one valuable […]