It’s the greatest eCONomy in all of human history!!!

Now give us a titanic bailout!!!

If you're such a smart economist (and writer) why have you been stuck languishing for a free local newspaper for the last twenty years?

I don't know, our household income has increased close to 50% in the past 3 years.

You all must be doing something wrong.

@4

Maybe because he is free to speak his thoughts in said paper in a community of some of the collectively wealthiest free thinkers from all over the world, as well as the working poor and strung out high and dry. And if you didn't think he had something interesting to say and thought he deserved higher acclaim, why have you been spending your precious time and attentions reading his writing and commenting on it, no less?

The truth is the aggregate of all honest perspectives, however myopic. That is why the media must never be conglomerated to a profit-based incentive with whatever clickbait sells over a journalists personal integrity. The central mean of truth requires a larger sample size, however spun.

This is the price of other states not maintaining net neutrality, and having the Murdoch and Sinclair Lügenpresse spoon-feed must runs on the Big Lie on local television, and setting up pay walls online for access to broader perspectives. If you were wondering how there could be such a division in vantage points, it's not to hard to see why and how under this administration this was achieved.

@3 **

@5 Don't quit your day job.

SBUX up 30% this year. Why isn't your money working for you?

@7

SBUX formed a conglomeration with Nestle (AKA Kesslee), so if some inflated stock options profit a few more billionaires with golden parachutes and enable Charles Schultz to run a self-deluded campaign for president with the fat on the brisket, then that's not good enough for me when California is half roasted and the Central Valley all the way up I-5 is desiccated and our air is unfit to breathe from smoke any given summer, to say nothing of the commodification of drinking water and selling of water rights that makes a complete mockery of the common good.

Money is one of a million resources, including people. If you can only procure goods and services from one backlogged font, you will always be for sale and never know true freedom and wealth.

@8 Well on the plus side: recessions are usually good for the environment.

@8 I guess selling Nepalese beads at the Fremont Market hasn’t worked out for you, eh?

@10

I'm the best there is at what I do.

What do you mean "another" recession? I didn't know the first one ever ended. I can barely make ends meet and have been in that position since, oh, the last 10 years or so.

But I'm also not a multinational bank so I guess I'm not surprised.

"I can barely make ends meet and have been in that position since, oh, the last 10 years or so."

Get more skillz, yo!

Seriously, maybe you're the problem. Probably a combination of lack of ambition and failure to learn new skills to increase your value.

Or do you think your "value" is simply having a pulse?

@13

“We all too often have socialism for the rich and rugged free market capitalism for the poor.”

Or were the Bushbama bailouts not enough evidence enough of that?

Chuck you may want to look up what constitutes a recession. There are a few things in recession, manufacturing, private domestic investment are two. Overall though GDP is still growing though much more slowly. Dropping rates two quarters in a row does not constitute a recession. That’s what you do to avoid one. It could be coming, we’ll see another at some point but as of right now there isn’t one.

“ were the Bushbama bailouts not enough evidence enough of that?”

You mean the TARP loans which were paid back with interest? Sorry dude, but if the banks collapse that’s everyone’s money. If you fail to pay your mortgage because you took a stupid gamble on home values, that’s your money.

But you’re right, banks should’ve never been allowed to loan money to people with shitty credit records. Luckily they’ve improved standards since 2008. Credit is a privilege not a right.

I still remember walking into Costco and seeing them handing out American Express applications and cards to anybody with a pulse. 30
years ago when I got my first American Express card, I had to be interviewed at a bank for an hour.

@16

You can pay back a loan all day, but you will never pay back the lost opportunity and cumulative potential and enterprise of an entire generation of unemployed and underemployed discouraged skilled workers. If only money could buy everything, as though as class action loan in exchange for the highest tax cuts yet and more of the same bubble investing could raise the impoverished dead.

@16 fitting that you would blame the victims of predatory lending instead of the vile viper creditors who sold them poison with two tongues, from the common sellsword to the highest credit ratings and banks in our nation, you know, the smart genius investors you so revere. And yet it's the blame of the people who bailed them out.

Go get an icepick sanitarium lobotomy post haste, preferably with unsterilized instruments.

@18 Hey, I told you I agreed with you on one thing, that credit is a privilege and not a right and banks should only loan to the credit worthy.

@18 Medieval Times is hiring btw.

“ blame the victims of predatory lending”

They forced me to get a liar loan! Home values only go up! Subprime loans look like a great idea!

Maybe people lied to themselves?

The next crisis will be student loans. Given to ignorant people but with zero risk to the banks (thanks gub’ment insurance!) for what is very often a shitty, over priced investment in a feminist dance theory degree from a college more than happy to take your risk-free money and spend it hiring more administrators to police Halloween costumes.

Maybe government should stop insuring loans to high risk people.

@20

Yeah, okay, so when all those people who graduated into the bailout recession 08-11 with bachelor's degrees and even graduate degrees could not find work in their fields, even Harvard law graduates out of work or cutting each others' throats for a 30k a year internship...

When there was such an oversupply of skilled workers and no competitive jobs in their fields, such that career professionals were getting laid off in droves and being forced to take jobs delivering pizza and spraying houses to keep up with their bills, when professional NASA engineers were on unemployment for years...

That is when the universities jacked up their tuition to obscene amounts, artificially, and they opened their doors to all the poor souls trying to remain relevant and competitive in a recession, as well as became the next host for the next predatory loan crisis. Boomers got to go to college on a part time job and could pay off their tuition in 385 hours. Suddenly, it took over 2,200 at minimum wage in the 2010s to achieve the same feat. These were not a bunch of underwater basket weavers, they were the common disenfranchised workers and students looking to survive the recession by treading water in borrowed time and income to invest in a lucrative and prosperous career in the long run. Knowing that they had created this crisis and artificially inflated the costs of tuition, they marketed themselves to these vulnerable people in such a way as to give them the illusion of this fair exchange.

Very few people could see through this (fortunately I was given warning by my Harvard friends not to go back to school), but there was enormous pressure on us and the alternative was to languish between unemployment and honest but low-paying jobs that were not taking full advantage of their skils.

I graduated in 2008 and was working at a very high prestige job, but only a summer later had to take any work I could to get by. Nobody knew how long the economy would stay in recession. I worked 40 jobs over the last decade, sometimes three at once and in multiple fields of knowledge and skill, before I came to Seattle and found a position in which I could apply the intersection of my skills and training and knowledge to finally know prosperity and stability. And I did not carry my peer's massive debt. I managed to succeed where others did not because I never gave up and got lucky, but it should not have been that hard! And it was because you refuse to hold the people who tanked the economy yet again responsible for their actions, while decidedly placing the onus of the blame on the victims. Your hamfisted concession does nothing to change your lobotomy candidacy, though perhaps you may have the privilege of sterilized. I am willing to acknowledge the lack of foresight and wisdom of those that signed the contract, but you give the devil his due. The onus is on holding the predator, the rapist, the userer accountable and protecting consumers from usury.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-screwed-millennial-generation-gets-smart

"Maybe government should stop insuring loans to high risk people."

When the government becomes for sale to the highest Tenryuubito bidder, all our rights and privileges and knowledge must be purchased. It is class oppression through money and occupation, by design, through access to the quality affordable education that would enable the critical thinking and wisdom to sidestep the traps you blame them for falling into, by design, unless by sheer luck or outstanding achievement they may selectively upwardly mobilize and still get waxed by a drunk cop in your own home by mistake. Whoopsie, hug.

Listen, there is a reason these herpes spammers keep it up with their false herbal snake oil. It is because vulnerable people with health issues and pain tend to lash out and make more impulsive choices in magical thinking that soothes their need for care. It is institutionalized abuse and quite a of pea soup morass to wade through if you have not been equipped to face it and its many evil eyes darting about for more more more for less less less, nothing! Take the money and run and be an asshole. That's the American way! Well fuck that shit.

Now imagine that the shitizens united government heads have herpes and they are spamming you each day with the foregoing screed, and like I said, the message was coming from the fucking credit agencies and prossionals and Scrooge McMadoff meatbags and you could not delete it from your forum?? That is a false choice. The goverment is supposed to serve and protect the people that consent to it, not to be drained and deceived to fatten the obese bouyant fat cats raising the water levels such that they will look no less silly or abused at having to face cold reality than Cinderblock herself. What does the end of Wall-E mean?

The four trigger counties that signal a recession in the US have all flipped.

You have about five months.

@13,

I've got an advanced degree in the sciences and I've taught myself several programming languages. I actually have a pretty decent data scientist job but even with my salary (which is nice but nowhere near that of the shareholders or c-suite executives at any company I've worked for) expenses wipe it out. I'm not living extravagantly either. I have a used chevy. I have a small house way outside the city. I have a shitty 3 year old phone and rarely go out to eat and don't go on vacations. Not a bad life at all, but certainly not extravagant, not even a little.

Still, student loans, healthcare, mortgage, taxes, and all other little cost of living expenses pretty much wipe out everything I make per month. I've seen all of that skyrocket since I first entered the job market. My salary, meanwhile, has been much slower in progressing upwards. Mostly by changing jobs (which also frequently means moving).

But yeah, maybe it's my lack of skills and not the fact that the middle class... even the middle class that's doing somewhat ok... is still on the fucking verge of collapse.

People struggling in the country... people living paycheck to paycheck... aren't just those you like to mock for making "poor life choices" that you yourself were a genius to avoid. They're also tons and tons of people who appear to be doing ok but are one setback away from catastrophe.

But whatever. You won't listen to any of this or believe any of it. Keep holding your incorrect assumptions and spouting off like an uniformed ass. I no longer care about people like you.

What concerns me most is the number of woefully ignorant MAGA idiots, a great deal of whom are poor working class joes and janes who blindly continue to cheer on Trumpty Dumpty's gross ineptitude---al because he's on the TeeVee. And what happens to the Richie Riches at the 1% when the stock market crashes?
Welcome to the Dead Don't Die: GOP Zombie Apocalypse, folks! Does anyone remember what happened to Greece, along with the downfall of the euro?
As Adam Driver said to Bill Murray, "This will not end well."