Posts tagged economics
Will Greece Get a Bailout?
Feb 10th
From Matthew Yglesias » Will Greece Get a Bailout?:
If the Greece moral hazard play winds up not working, then investors will start demanding higher interest payments from Ireland. And if they go down, you could have the equivalent of a bank runs start to endanger medium-sized countries like Spain and Italy. At that point, everyone’s screwed. So, yes, it would be crazy for Germans to let some kind of spiteful attitude toward fun-loving and overly-indebted southern Europeans allow an economic catastrophe to sweep across the continent.
Unemployment — not if you caused the crisis!
Jan 4th
So if you lost your firm billions of dollars, laid off tens of thousands and indirectly caused millions to lose their jobs and drove the unemployment rate to 10.3% well, the good news is it didn’t cost you your job! 92% of management in TARP funds recipients still have their jobs!
From A Fair Deal for Taxpayer Investments:
The executive leadership of the financial sector remain largely unchanged—92 percent of the management and directors of the top 17 recipients of TARP funds are still in office.
What’s a Bailed-Out Banker Really Worth?
Jan 3rd
Fascinating article on what’s happened with the bankers bailout. One intriguing quote compares executive compensation to the average employee::
Over the last 50 years, the ratio of top pay to average pay at public companies has multiplied roughly 11 times (24:1 to 275:1). That’s more pay in one workday for the chief executive than his average employee makes in a year.
Unemployment rate
Nov 18th
Pick your favorite, worst recession and compare with how we are doing now. There are even predictions that unemployment may reach 12%.
Unemployment is always a relative thing but this chart looks at employment as a percentage of the total work force. From Brad DeLong:
Unemployment post-recession
Jul 15th
This graph has been making the rounds (I got it from Barry Ritholtz’s). It shows the percentage change in unemployment (Y-axis) and the months since the official start of the recession.
What’s particularly dramatic about this is employment continues to worsen and over a much longer period of time than past recessions. E.g. this recession is going to be deeper and longer than past ones.
What I don’t like about this chart is that it is the percentage change in a rate. For example, the unemployment in 1960 was ~6%. A 50% increase brings it up to 9%. In 2007, unemployment was 4.5%. A 100% increase brings it up to 9%, too.