Renaming A.I.G.: Putting Lipstick on a Pig?

We all recall the tremendous amount of noise that was made about the-then-Senator Obama’s claim that McCain/Palin do not represent change by saying: “you can put a lipstick on a pig, it is still a pig.” Well, I think, now we have the most apt opportunity to apply that expression. It turns out that A.I.G. [...]

The Credit Card Crisis

The destabilizing influence of indebtedness on the part of financial institutions and corporate giants has already been brought to bear. The “too big to fail” institutions, which took unsustainable risks in the interest of short term gaming of financial markets, have left us with a tattered economy and ill to many. Now, the advent of [...]

Job Losses Continue: Unemployment Rate Reaches a 25-year High

Here is another graph, via a reporting from The Boston Globe,  to make sense of the dramatic worsening of the economic climate in the U.S. It shows the month-over-month net change in non-farm jobs, which culminated in the rise of the unemployment rate to a 25-year high of 8.1 percent in February.

How the Stimulus Plan Will Help Your State

Have you ever wondered about what the estimated job creation rate at different states will be as a result of the stimulus plan that was just passed? Here is a graphic that will answer your questions. Texas, California, New York,  and Florida appear to get the most job creation. However, per capita, it turns out [...]

The Recession County By County

The recession as seen county by county, via NY Times. The highest unemployment level is found at Imperial County, California (22.6 %)

Government Intervention in Perspective

Among the best summations I have seen, via Center for American Progress, of what the Federal government has done and continues to do in an attempt to rein over the economic crisis sweeping through the nation and the world at large.

The Green and Red States

Gone are the days when the states are divided between blue and red states. When it comes to what really matters in the lives of millions of citizens, the right distinction to be made is between the red and green states -  those that are financially solvent (green) and those that are not (red) in [...]

The Formula That Killed Wall Street

Via Wired, an interesting look into the mathematical formulation that was ubiquitously used for assessing risk, which it turns out may have been responsible for the financial debacle that swept through wall street and the economy at large.

A year a go, t was hardly unthinkable that a math wizard like David X. Li might [...]

Perspective on the Stock Market Decline

A piece of information in isolation without a context to provide the necessary perspective is likely to be interpreted wrongly. In a comparative chart of declines in the stock market “value,” the big picture blog provides a perspective on the longevity of the down turn in market confidence. If the great depression is of any [...]

The Clinton Rising Tide: Annual Change in Real Net Income

Frequenters of these pages know that I have an appreciation for synthesizing information in a relevant and communicable manner. Graphs, when they are properly crafted, are good conduits of such synthesis.  Nate Silver, the wizard of numbers and trend analysis, has a graph derived from Census data, which compares annual change in real net income [...]

Inside the Meltdown

Frontline has, yet again, an expansive and illuminating program exploring the genesis of the financial crisis, which has catapulted the world economy into a downward spiral. Below is a preview of the program:

Personal Savings Rate

From Krugman’s latest column: The personal savings rate for the U.S. was
9% in the 1980s
5% in the 1990s
0.6% from 2005 to 2007

The Job Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan

Via Ezra’s blog, the following is a graph showing the projected job impact of The American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan, which is outlined in this report by Christina Romer, the Chair-designate of the Council of Economic Advisers, and Jared Bernstein, from the Office of the Vice President-elect. It is certain that with or without the [...]

The Eight Who Saw It Coming

Thankfully, for sanity’s and humanity’s sake, not everyone was asleep and completely blind-sighted by the recent downturn in global economy. Below are the eight people who saw it coming long before, according to CNN Money /Fortune. They call them The Ratings Gadfly, The Economist, The Analyst, The Investor, The Regulator, The Politician, and The Short-Sellers.

[...]

Concrete Wealth

I failed utterly in my attempt to locate it now. It is hidden in the vast confines of the Null Information. It was an advertisement for the city of Chicago. The narrator in the ad says something to the effect of: most cities like to measure growth in charts and graphs. We like to use [...]

Bush On Jobs: The Worst Track Record On Record

In a comparative analysis of the job creation rate during the time presidents reside in office, The Wall Street Journal provides an insightful statistics about how Bush’s record during the two terms compares with that of other presidents. They conclude:
The Bush administration created about three million jobs (net) over its eight years, a fraction of [...]

A Robot Invasion

Below is a chart from IEEE Spectrum showing where the 1 million industrial robots that are believed to exist around the world currently reside. The numbers indicate the total number of robots per 10,000 manufacturing workers.

Clearly, Japan is by far the most susceptible to a robot invasion. Europe is not that far behind Asia either. [...]

“The Younger Man Appeared to Have the Calmer Head in a Crisis”

A brief summary of the historic presidential election that culminated in the election of Barack Obama to become the 44th president of the United States can be found here. An excerpt from this article, entitle “America’s historic election year,” is shown below:
…As the Republican ticket drew level, then briefly overtook him in the opinion polls, [...]

The Big Debacle

The drastic losses incurred in the financial markets is one of the prime examples of a major collective human experience during the past year. This particular decline in the stock market value amounting to $7,000,000,000,000, which I would call the big debacle, is discussed in a NY Times article. Excerpt from the article:
…In a mere [...]

GDP, Consumption, and Govenment Expenditure

Via Euromonitor International, below are graphs which, I think, help make sense of the changes in GDP, private consumption, government receipt and expenditure, and net surplus/deficit that have been accumulating in recent past.