poor canucks aboot to get the sharp short end of the stick...,

zerohedge |  It was just yesterday when we documented the continuing slide in the loonie, which is suffering mightily in the face of oil’s inexorable decline.

As regular readers are no doubt acutely aware, Canada is struggling through a dramatic economic adjustment, especially in Alberta, the heart of the country’s oil patch. Amid the ongoing crude carnage the province has seen soaring property crime, rising food bank usage and, sadly, elevated suicide rates, as Albertans struggle to comprehend how things up north could have gone south (so to speak) so quickly.

The plunging loonie “can only serve to worsen the death of the 'Canadian Dream'" we said on Tuesday.

As it turns out, we were right.

The currency's decline is having a pronounced effect on Canadians' grocery bills.

 As Bloomberg reminds us, Canada imports around 80% of its fresh fruits and vegetables. When the loonie slides, prices for those goods soar. "With lower-income households tending to spend a larger portion of income on food, this side effect of a soft currency brings them the most acute stress" Bloomberg continues.

oil and u.s. share prices tumble, even yeezus have to slash prices...,

guardian |  US stocks fell heavily on Wednesday, with the Standard & Poor’s 500 falling 2.5% to take the index below 1,900 points for the first time since September, due to growing concerns about the falling oil price, which dipped below $30 a barrel for the first time in nearly 12 years.

The S&P 500, which closed at 1,890 points, suffered its worst day since September and has fallen by 10% since its November peak taking it into “correction” territory, something that has not happened since August 2014.

The Dow Jones industrial average dropped by 364 points, or 2.2%, to 16,151, and the Nasdaq composite dropped 159 points, or 3.4%, to 4,526. This deepened the New York stock exchange’s already worst start to a year on record.

Wednesday’s stock market declines were triggered by new figures showing US gasoline stockpiles had increased to record high, which caused Brent crude prices to fall as low as $29.96, their lowest level since April 2004, before settling at $30.31, a 1.8% fall. The oil price has fallen by 73% since a peak of $115 reached in the summer of 2014.

Industry data showed that US gasoline inventories soared by 8.4m barrels and stocks of diesel and heating oil increased by more than 6m barrels – confirming the forecasts of many analysts that a huge oversupply of oil could keep prices low during most of 2016.

Analysts said that growing fears of a weakening outlook for the global economy, made worse by falling oil prices, was behind the steep falls. Some oil analysts this week predicted that the price could fall as low as $10.

In recent days several analysts have warned that the global economy could suffer a repeat of the 2008 crash if the knock-on effects of a contraction in Chinese output pushes down commodity prices further and sparks panic selling on stock and bond markets.

armor, ammunition, and drones easier to implement than jobs and education...,

zerohedge |  For over 3 years we have pointed out that the surging youth unemployment was Europe's (if not the world's) scariest chart, because the last thing Europe needs is a discontented, disenfranchised, and devoid of hope youth roving the streets with nothing to do, easily susceptible to extremist and xenophobic tendencies: after all, it must be "someone's" fault that there are no job opportunities for anyone. Well,as Bloomberg reports,The World Bank has an unsettling message for young people around the globe: unless we create 5 million jobs a month, the situation is going to get worse.

As The World Bank notes,Unemployment in any form is a drag on an economy and society.

It undercuts productivity, spending, and investment, stunting national growth. Itcontributes to inequality and spurs social tension. Joblessness and inactivity and the failure to tap into the economic aspirations and resources of young people carry an even higher price.

As prospects dwindle, many face social exclusion, or see their emotional, mental, or physical health deteriorate.

...

Young people account for roughly 40 percent of the world’s unemployed and are up to four times more likely to be unemployed than adults.

...

When young people are not fully participating in the labor force or are NEETs, governments forgo tax revenue and incur the cost of social safety nets, unemployment benefits and insurances, and lost  roductivity. Businesses risk losing a generation of consumers.Social costs are ever mounting as well. The Arab Spring and subsequent youth-led uprisings in many countries, along with the rise of economic insurgency and youth extremism,demand that we explore the links between economic participation, inequality, and community security, crime, and national fragility through a lens focused on youth. What we see is a generation in economic crisis.

Over the next decade, a billion more young people will enter the job market—and only 40 percent are expected to be able to enter jobs that currently exist. The global economy will need to create 600 million jobs over the next 10 years: that’s 5 million jobs each month simply to keep employment rates constant.

In other words, even with that 'growth' we are going nowhere!!

chiraq 311 callers will get used to new delhi english with a hindi accent...,

theatlantic |  Cash-strapped cities have long looked at privatizing services or selling off assets as a way to save money, but Chicago in particular has a spotty record with the practice. In a move orchestrated by Emanuel’s predecessor, Richard Daley, the city sold off its parking meters to a private firm, allowing the company to reap the revenues in exchange for a one-time, upfront payment. But the deal has been widely criticized as a loser for the Windy City. The firm has already made well over half as much revenue as the $1.2 billion lump sum it paid to Chicago, and it will continue to  earn 100 percent of the revenue for nearly seven more decades under the agreement. Selling off the parking meters and privatizing services is  like “burning your furniture to heat your house,” said Anders Lindall, a spokesman for the AFSCME Council 31, the union that represents city employees.

Emanuel, a Democrat, ran for office criticizing the parking-meter deal, and in his budget speech last week he specifically pledged not to sell off city assets. That sale, and the political blowback it generated, is now cited as a cautionary tale for mayors nationwide and has slowed the move to privatization that began more than a decade ago.

“I think since then the enthusiasm for privatization has tempered somewhat,” said Ron Littlefield, the former mayor of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Littlefield, who left office two years ago, told me that when they looked at privatizing services, they focused on those “that don’t touch citizens directly.”

In some ways, the 311 hotlines have become a victim of their own success. The more calls come in, the more people you need to answer the phone. The system had grown so popular in Chattanooga, a city of 170,000, that the call center frequently ran behind, Littlefield said, “because you just cant get people to keep up with the calls.” But rather than outsource its operations, the former mayor said that, like other cities, Chattanooga focused on encouraging residents to contact 311 through its mobile app when possible. Reporting a pot hole, for example, is now as easy as sending a photo with embedded GPS coordinates—no phone call and no operator needed.

kansas city becomes 6th regional fed survey flashing red

regional Fed survey collapse goes on... Dallas, Richmond, New York, Philly, Chicago, and now Kansas City...

jobs lost in the u.s. since 2007

zerohedge |  Who says America has a jobs problem? As the chart below shows, the "New Economy" may pay abysmally, but at least it promises a little to everyone (or to paraphrase a famous phrase "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need"). Nowhere is that more obvious than in the chart showing the monthly change in waiter and bartender jobs.

Here is the bottom line: in the past 65 months, or nearly five and a half years starting with March 2010, or when the jobs "recovery" really kicked in, jobs for waiters and bartenders (aka food service and drinking places) have declined just once.

This is a statistically abnormal hit rate of nearly 99%, and one which we assume has everything to do with the BLS' charge of not so much reporting reality as finding loopholes in the goalseeked model to report that the US keeps adding over 200,000 jobs every month or bust.

Putting this number in context, the US has allegedly added 376K bartenders in the past year, and 3 million since March 2010.

roughly 60% of the civilian work force is fully employed and 40% are marginally employed or unemployed

zerohedge |  Officially, the unemployment rate in the U.S. is 5.6%, meaning 5.6% of the work force is temporarily out of a job and actively seeking another one. This low number reflects nearly full employment, as 3% to 4% of the work force is typically in the process of quitting/being laid off and finding another job.

Typically, periods of nearly full employment are economically good times, as household income is bolstered and employers have to pay a bit more to hire workers when the labor market is tight.

But these do not feel like good times for most households, despite the low unemployment rate. Earnings are stagnant for 90% of the work force, and employers are only paying a competitive premium for workers in very select fields (programmers adept at Python and mobile user interfaces, etc.)

This creates a cognitive dissonance between the low official unemployment rate and the real economy, which is behaving like an economy with much higher rates of unemployment, i.e. sluggish hiring, stagnant wages, difficulty in finding jobs, and very little pressure on employers to pay more for typical jobs.

Let's start by trying to calculate the work force--the number of people who could get a job if they wanted to. This isn't quite as straightforward as we might imagine, because the two primary agencies that compile these statistics use slightly different categories.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) calculates the civilian noninstitutional population as everyone 16 and older who is not in active-duty military service or in prison. The BLS reckons this to be about 250 million people, out of a total population of about 317 million residents: Household Data (BLS)

The BLS subtracts 93 million people who are not in the labor force, leaving about 157 million people in the civilian work force--roughly half the nation's population.

Of these, 148.8 million have a job of some sort and 8.6 million are unemployed.

The Census Bureau calculates the civilian noninstitutional population as everyone who is not in active-duty military service or in prison. (You can download various data on the U.S. population on this Census Bureau website: Age and Sex Composition in the United States: 2012. I am using Table 1 data.)

The Census Bureau places the civilian noninstitutional population at 308.8 million in 2012. Since roughly 4 million people are born and 2.6 million die in the U.S. each year, we can adjust this upward by roughly 3.5 million to bring it up to date (mid-2015) to 312 million.

no sex and status-seeking at the root of ______________?

japantimes |  After years of paying limited attention to academic and media warnings about the declining birthrate, aging population and complaints from the rest of the country about the overconcentration of people and resources in Tokyo, political and corporate leaders in Japan were jolted by the conclusions of a 2014 book by Hiroya Masuda, a former Iwate prefectural governor and head of a government committee on local revitalization.

“Local Extinctions,” Masuda’s detailed report of population changes, used the latest official figures from the government’s National Institution of Population and Social Security Research to show that 896 cities, towns and villages throughout Japan were facing extinction by 2040. At first glance, the book simply repeated what earlier reports had concluded. However, it also included the percentages by which child-bearing women between the ages of 20 and 40 were expected to decline in each and every city, town and village.

The latter figures, in particular, caught the eye of a large number of people, especially politicians, bureaucrats and corporate leaders who were, predominately, elderly men already worried about the declining birthrate. The grim predictions forced everyone, though, to ask old questions with new urgency: As the population shrinks, who will give birth to the next generation of voters? Without new mothers, where will the next generation of taxpayers, business leaders and customers come from? And if too many localities become extinct, what will happen to all of those Tokyo-based firms that rely on the rest of the nation to stay in business?

“Local Extinctions” became a best-seller, and spawned a number of books and magazines on the same issue. All raised fundamental, and yet very practical, questions about the country’s political and social future. Before looking at some of those questions, though, let’s take a look at the position Japan is to be in a quarter century from today, using both Masuda’s book and official government data.

In 2014, the population of Japan was just under 127 million. By 2040, it’s expected to drop to about 107 million and, by 2050, it will be around 97 million.

bad sex and ego at the root of austerity?

telesurtv | Speaking at the largest anti-austerity rally since the Conservatives won the election Brand questioned their ability to rule the country.

Comedian Russell Brand told anti-government protesters in London Saturday that Britain’s problems were caused by megalomaniacal leaders and members of parliaments with poor sex lives.

Speaking at the largest anti-austerity rally since the Conservatives won the election with a majority 44 days ago, attended by between 70,000 and 150,000 people, Brand talked about the “crushing disappointment” many people felt at the result.

He criticized the policies made by establishment figures and questioned their ability to rule the country.

“What I feel like we’ve done is created a culture around the worst aspects of our nature. I have selfishness in me, I have greed in me, I have the megalomaniacal tendencies of Boris Johnsonn, or Rupert Murdoch, or David Cameron, but I don’t turn them into policies. I go to 12-step meetings and psychiatrists to try and deal with that shit,” he told the cheering crowd outside the houses of parliament in Westminster.

“I’m assuming that the vast majority or those (in the houses of parliament), Jeremy (Corbyn) and Caroline (Lucas) aside, are not having very successful sex lives … Something is wrong,” he added

The demonstration comes in response to the recent announcement by Britain's Conservative government that it plans to adopt new measures to reduce the national deficit, including further welfare cuts, cuts to social services, departmental spending cuts and boosting revenue through a crackdown on tax avoidance. The Conservative financial minister, George Osborne, is expected to announce a further £12bn cuts to spending on benefits, according to Sky News.

“We’re here to say austerity isn’t working,” said Caroline Lucas, the Green Party representative in parliament. “We’re here to say that it wasn’t people on jobseekers’ allowance that brought down the banks.

“It wasn’t nurses and teachers and firefighters who were recklessly gambling on international markets. And so we should stop the policies that are making them pay for a crisis that wasn’t of their making.”

what electricity consumption tells us about the state of the u.s. economy...,

zerohedge |  A year ago we wrote about how electricity consumption could provide clues to the performance of the US economy, which generated a lot of interest and comments.

A relationship between the two variables makes sense, but needs to be framed in the proper context. Genuine economic (and population) growth should translate into more electricity consumption, as we have more activity and transactions taking place throughout the economy.

However, factors such as energy efficiency and the weather can muddle this relationship:

• An increase in efficiency means that the same output can be obtained with less inputs. Therefore, a small-ish reduction in electricity consumption versus a prior period may not necessarily be indicative of a sluggish economy over that time. And we know that this efficiency has been on the rise in recent years (just look at the power rating of your new appliances).
• Likewise, a warmer winter versus the prior year may also cause a drop in electricity consumption, simply due to home heaters not being used as hard, not necessarily because the economy is doing badly.

So can we adjust electricity consumption to take these factors into consideration and get a better measure of its relationship with economic growth?

We developed an indicator to do just that together with DegreeDays.net, an energy systems data company. We provide a brief technical explanation of our proposed methodology below (for a much better overview please visit this supporting article). Bear with us, the analysis is quite interesting!

needs a payday loan and a tattoo parlor....,

26 waiters and bartenders for every manufacturing job added...,

zerohedge |  Several years ago (and then subsequently renewed almost every year) Barack Obama unviled a manufacturing initative during one of his countless teleprompted appearances before the nation, in which he promised to do everything in his power to boost the US manufacturing sector. It should therefore come as no surprise that in the month of April America's attempts to rekindle a manufacturing renaissance have fizzled once again, with a tiny 1,000 manufacturing jobs added, following zero manufacturing jobs added the month before.

Putting this in perspective, for every manufacturing job added in April there were 26 new waiters and bartenders confirming the "robustness" of America's jobs recovery. The chart below shows the progression of how America is slowly but surely transforming from a manufacturing society to one of waiters and bartenders.

read this and reflect on our own political situation...,

economic-undertow |  Many of the places that are suffering unrest and war were components of- or client states of the USSR during its heyday: Libya (client), Egypt (a Soviet client before becoming an American client), Somalia (client), Eritrea (client), Afghanistan (client) Yemen (client), Syria (long-term client), Iraq (client); Armenia, Azerbaijan, Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine, Dagestan, Nagorno-Karabakh (all components of USSR); also Vietnam, Laos, Angola and North Korea (all Soviet clients but wars have ended in these countries) … also Russia itself. Seen from a long-term perspective, the end of the Soviet Union government turns out not to be the bloodless event as was advertised, the rotting empire still has some collapse left in it. 

One of the duties of the Economic Undertow is to turn conventional historic narratives on their heads, to where they begin make sense. What Americans have been fed about the demise of the Soviet Union is a self-serving, political/ideological fairy tale: that the United States under the direction of Ronald Reagan’s brilliant conservative leadership outspent the USSR in an arms race that eventually — along with collapsing oil prices caused by new oil on the markets from Prudhoe Bay and the North Sea — bankrupted the Communist government. Once the economic and ideological fault lines were revealed, the various client/satellite states that made up the Soviet empire peaceably went their own way without interference from Moscow. All of this ‘revealing’ and ‘peaceable-ness’ took place over a remarkably short period of time in the early 1990s: here today, gone the next. 

The more realistic narrative has Soviet intelligence agencies — perhaps collaborating with those of the West along with Western interests (banks) — gaining control over Russian assets, shifting them to well-connected insiders, with the decrepit- and ossified Communist government powerless to do anything about it. This process began before- or during the Brezhnev period with matters well underway by the time of Gorbachev … Perestroika being a (feeble) attempt on the part of the Communist establishment to regain both credibility and some measure of control. What happened in Russia was not reform and the end of communism was an accident: what actually took place was the greatest crime of the modern era, the theft of an empire by the country’s intelligence services and criminal associates.

This outcome was a natural consequence of the Soviet Union as a regimented national security state with outsized spy agencies … as well as the slow commercial opening with the West beginning during the Khrushchev era. Within the immense ganglia of the Soviet intelligence- and internal security apparatus there was a kind of singularity or dawning self-awareness … the managers grasped in an instant they had access to the levers of control outside the reach of the Party, the Politburo and the Red Army. The rise of the agencies’ power was a consequence of Stalin’s paranoia; the Stalinist Russia was built on a foundation of intrusive spying and control/liquidation of potential internal enemies. Stalin held the agencies in check by way of periodic purges, no group of operatives could become too comfortable or entrenched, they had to constantly look over their own shoulders. Once ‘Uncle Joe’ was gone there were no further checks on spy agency power, they could act with impunity and did: what occurred was a silent coup d’etat with the KGB state first emerging publicly under Yuri Andropov. Once the looting and undermining was well-established in the center it spread out and took hold among the clients with consequences that can be seen clearly today. 

At the same time, contact with the West, as tentative as it was, informed the Russian intelligence elite what was possible … that the Western standards for wealth and success were both qualitatively- and qualitatively superior to what was available under egalitarian communism. In 1975, to be wealthy and successful as a Swiss or Londoner far exceeded what was possible in Leningrad or Kiev.

Under this scenario, ‘Nemtsov the reformer’ was either a co-conspirator — or, more likely a tool of intelligence services and/or Western business interests; an operative within the looting scheme along with Gaidar, Chubais and others. Instead of being the heir to Stalin’s strongman legacy, Putin recedes to become the technocratic figurehead who serves to distract public attention as the Russian Mario Monti or Antonis Samaras … meanwhile, the stealing takes place in the background.

Technological progress in a market economy is therefore self-terminating, and ends in collapse

The Archdruid Report | Now of course there are plenty of arguments that could be deployed against this modest proposal. For example, it could be argued that progress doesn't have to generate a rising tide of externalities. The difficulty with this argument is that externalization of costs isn't an accidental side effect of technology but an essential aspect—it’s not a bug, it’s a feature. Every technology is a means of externalizing some cost that would otherwise be borne by a human body. Even something as simple as a hammer takes the wear and tear that would otherwise affect the heel of your hand, let’s say, and transfers it to something else: directly, to the hammer; indirectly, to the biosphere, by way of the trees that had to be cut down to make the charcoal to smelt the iron, the plants that were shoveled aside to get the ore, and so on.

For reasons that are ultimately thermodynamic in nature, the more complex a technology becomes, the more costs it generates. In order to outcompete a simpler technology, each more complex technology has to externalize a significant proportion of its additional costs, in order to compete against the simpler technology. In the case of such contemporary hypercomplex technosystems as the internet, the process of externalizing costs has gone so far, through so many tangled interrelationships, that it’s remarkably difficult to figure out exactly who’s paying for how much of the gargantuan inputs needed to keep the thing running. This lack of transparency feeds the illusion that large systems are cheaper than small ones, by making externalities of scale look like economies of scale.

It might be argued instead that a sufficiently stringent regulatory environment, forcing economic actors to absorb all the costs of their activities instead of externalizing them onto others, would be able to stop the degradation of whole systems while still allowing technological progress to continue. The difficulty here is that increased externalization of costs is what makes progress profitable. As just noted, all other things being equal, a complex technology will on average be more expensive in real terms than a simpler technology, for the simple fact that each additional increment of complexity has to be paid for by an investment of energy and other forms of real capital.

Strip complex technologies of the subsidies that transfer some of their costs to the government, the perverse regulations that transfer some of their costs to the rest of the economy, the bad habits of environmental abuse and neglect that transfer some of their costs to the biosphere, and so on, and pretty soon you’re looking at hard economic limits to technological complexity, as people forced to pay the full sticker price for complex technologies maximize their benefits by choosing simpler, more affordable options instead. A regulatory environment sufficiently strict to keep technology from accelerating to collapse would thus bring technological progress to a halt by making it unprofitable.

a new theory of energy and the economy

ourfiniteworld |  How does the economy really work? In my view, there are many erroneous theories in published literature. I have been investigating this topic and have come to the conclusion that both energy and debt play an extremely important role in an economic system. Once energy supply and other aspects of the economy start hitting diminishing returns, there is a serious chance that a debt implosion will bring the whole system down.

In this post, I will look at the first piece of this story, relating to how the economy is tied to energy, and how the leveraging impact of cheap energy creates economic growth. In order for economic growth to occur, the wages of workers need to go farther and farther in buying goods and services. Low-priced energy products are far more effective in producing this situation than high-priced energy products. Substituting high-priced energy products for low-priced energy products can be expected to lead to lower economic growth.

Trying to tackle this topic is a daunting task. The subject crosses many fields of study, including anthropology, ecology, systems analysis, economics, and physics of a thermodynamically open system. It also involves reaching limits in a finite world. Most researchers have tackled the subject without understanding the many issues involved. I hope my analysis can shed some light on the subject.

Part 2. Here.

baltic dry index at its lowest level ever...,

zerohedge |  Having fallen for 47 of the last 51 days, The Baltic Dry Index (tracking the cost of shipping dry bulk from iron ore to grains) has been collapsing in a well-documented manner by Zero Hedge (though not the mainstream media). With Cramer having told investors of its importance previously, it will be hard to ignore the fact that, as of this morning, the index of global shipping costs has never (ever) been lower at 554. We leave it to readers to decide what they think this means (but we already know what it means for shippers and ship-building companies).

2015 already looking to be an exciting year

IEEE Spectrum | Project Chrome, a massive layoff that IBM is pretending is not a massive layoff, is underway. First reported by Robert X. Cringely (a pen name) inForbes, about 26 percent of the company’s global workforce is being shown the door. At more than 100,000 people, that makes it the largest mass layoffat any U.S. corporation in at least 20 years. Cringely wrote that notices have started going out, and most of the hundred-thousand-plus will likely be gone by the end of February.

IBM immediately denied Cringely’s report, indicating that a planned $600 million “workforce rebalancing” was going to involve layoffs (or what the company calls “Resource Actions”) of just thousands of people. But Cringely responded that he never said that the workforce reductions would be all called layoffs—instead, multiple tactics are being used, including pushing employees out through low ratings (more on that in a moment). And some managers are indeed admitting to employees that their job has been eliminated as part of Project Chrome, leading employees to coin a new catchphrase: “Getting Chromed.” 

does couch potato 2.0 see these interwebs as "zillion channel" teevee?

guardian |  Earlier this year engineer Dr Craig Labovitz testified before the US House of Representatives judiciary subcommittee on regulatory reform, commercial and antitrust law. Labovitz is co-founder and chief executive of Deepfield, an outfit that sells software to enable companies to compile detailed analytics on traffic within their computer networks. The hearing was on the proposed merger of Comcast and Time Warner Cable and the impact it was likely to have on competition in the video and broadband market. In the landscape of dysfunctional, viciously partisan US politics, this hearing was the equivalent of rustling in the undergrowth, and yet in the course of his testimony Labovitz said something that laid bare the new realities of our networked world.

“Whereas internet traffic was once broadly distributed across thousands of companies,” he told the subcommittee, “we found that by 2009 half of all internet traffic originated in less than 150 large content and content-distribution companies. By May of 2014, this number had dropped by a factor of five. Today, just 30 companies, including Netflix and Google, contribute on average more than one half of all internet traffic in the United States during prime-time hours.”

To those of us who were accustomed to thinking of the internet as a glorious, distributed, anarchic, many-to-many communication network in which anyone could become a global publisher, corporate gatekeepers had lost their power and peer-to-peer sharing was becoming the liberating norm, Labovitz’s brusque summary comes as a rude shock. Why? Because what he was really saying is that the internet is well on its way to being captured by giant corporations – just as the Columbia law professor Tim Wu speculated it might be in The Master Switch, his magisterial history of 20th-century communications technologies.

In that book, Wu recounted the history of telephone, movie, radio and TV technologies in the US. All of them had started out as creative, anarchic, open and innovative technologies but over time each had been captured by corporate interests. In some cases (eg the telephone) this happened with the co-operation of the state, but in most cases it happened because visionary entrepreneurs offered consumers propositions that they found irresistible. But the result was always the same: corporate capture of the technology and the medium. And the most insidious thing, Wu wrote, was that this process of closure doesn’t involve any kind of authoritarian takeover. It comes, not as a bitter pill, but as a “sweet pill, as a tabloid, easy to swallow”. Most of the corporate masters of 20th-century media delivered a consumer product that was better than what went before – which is what consumers went for and what led these industries towards closure.

At the end of his book, Wu posed the 64-trillion-dollar question: would the internet also fall victim to this cycle? For years, many of us thought that it wouldn’t: it was too decentralised, too empowering of ordinary people, too anarchic and creative to succumb to that kind of control.

Labovitz’s testimony suggests that we were wrong.

clubs, commons, or just no banksters? privatized indiana toll road going bankrupt due to contraction?

kingworld |  “There are news reports today that the Indiana Toll-Road Co. is filing for bankruptcy.  It operates the motorway that runs across northern Indiana, between Illinois and Ohio, that is part of the U.S. Interstate Highway System.  At first glance this news may seem not worth mentioning, but some important observations need to be drawn.  The professed reason for the bankruptcy is the company’s debt, but there is more to this story....

“The key point is why it is unable to service this debt, which is declining traffic.

The Financial Times put it this way:  “The fall in traffic volumes on U.S. roads since 2004 has undercut the financial assumptions behind a series of deals devised in the middle of last decade during an infrastructure investment boom.”  Note that the FT mentions “U.S. roads” in the plural because what is happening in Indiana is not unique.  It is happening across the United States.

The bankruptcy of this Indiana company confirms what a seven-year decline in gasoline sales is illustrating:  People are driving less.

The key to interpreting what is happening with this road in Indiana is understanding the bigger picture.  So is this decline, as the Financial Times says, because “economic and lifestyle changes have prompted people to use cars less”?  Or is it just another clear indicator of a declining workforce driving fewer miles in a weak economy, which has also stretched consumer budgets so they are driving less?

I think the latter, particularly when considering the growth in population.  The decline in gas sales no doubt reflects, in part, increased fuel efficiency.  But if gas sales per person were illustrated when looking at the total population, the decline would be even more dramatic.

There is no doubt about it -- Americans are driving less.  This has reduced the country’s demand for gasoline.  It has also reduced what governments take in each year from the gas tax.  This is also an important point.  The federal gas tax has not been raised since 1993.  So declining fuel sales have brought the Highway Trust Fund -- yet another government fund -- to insolvency.

unemployment problem is bigger than nyc and la combined...,

cnnmoney | Forget the unemployment rate. The employment rate -- the percentage of adult Americans who hold a job -- has barely budged in the past three years. It's hovering near its lowest level in three decades, and it's unlikely to improve when the Labor Department releases its May jobs report on Friday. 

About 58.6% of the civilian population over age 16 had a job as of April, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. This rate -- officially called the "employment-population ratio" -- has been stuck in that range for several years. The last time it was this low was in 1983.

Looking at the job market using that measure paints a stark picture. Sure, companies have been hiring, but they've been creating jobs at a pace that merely keeps up with recent population growth. It's not enough to also make up for the jobs lost in the crisis.

That's why the needle simply hasn't moved.

Related: Unemployment problem is bigger than NYC and LA combined

Contrast that with the tale told by the unemployment rate, which fell from 10% in October 2009 to 7.5% in April. The unemployment rate only includes jobless people who have searched for work in the last four weeks. It skips over those who left the labor force entirely because they retired, went back to school, or simply gave up on finding a job.

"The unemployment rate is really not that helpful right now in understanding trends in job opportunities because we've had so many dropouts," said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research group.

The employment-population ratio isn't perfect either.

Over time, it's expected to decline as the U.S. population ages. Eventually, a wave of Baby Boomer retirements will leave a smaller proportion of the U.S. population participating in the workforce.