Tag: Wall Street

Lawmakers Want Answers After Revision to Job Numbers

The Center Square
People Working

Lawmakers are launching an inquiry into the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics after it significantly overestimated the number of jobs created last year, creating a far rosier picture of the U.S. economy than was actually the case.

The federal government announced earlier this year that its previous jobs data had far overestimated how many jobs the U.S. economy created last year. In fact, the federal data was revised down by a third, or roughly 800,000 jobs, the largest revision since 2009.

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Commentary: The Big Divide

South Carolina Sun Staff
Man looking out window

Whether the economy is currently bubbling along or facing a slowdown, a slow-motion disaster is about to create a real crisis for the government, our future politics, and the shrinking middle class. Half of households have no retirement savings.

This is just one of many shifts in the economy that reflect the declining fortunes of the middle class. Wages have remained mostly flat for most workers—particularly those without a college degree—since the early 1970s. Recent high rates of inflation further cut into the ability of the self-identified middle class to make ends meet. But the biggest change has been the abolition of employer-provided pensions and their replacement with rickety and self-managed 401k savings plans.

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Google Threatens to Demonetize Wall Street Watchdog as GOP Targets Ad Collusion

Just the News
Wall Street Bull

Google’s artificial intelligence isn’t particularly bright when it comes to evaluating publishers’ compliance with its advertising policies, if the experience of a heterodox economics blog with outsized influence is any indication.

With a megaphone from Twitter Files journalist Matt Taibbi, both darlings of progressives in the “Occupy Wall Street” era, Naked Capitalism accused Google of making “flagrant errors” in its threats to demonetize the 18-year-old site for verboten content.

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Commentary: The Financialization of Nature

South Carolina Sun Staff
Power Plant Money

Financialization: “A pattern of accumulation in which profit making occurs increasingly through financial channels rather than through trade and commodity production.”
– Greta Krippner, Economic Sociologist, University of Michigan

There are plenty of examples of how America’s economy shifted from a production-based economy to a financially-based economy over the past forty years. Starting around 1980, with the economies of post-World War II Europe and Japan fully rebuilt and roaring, and emerging Asian economies turning into powerhouses of manufacturing as well, America chose financialization as an alternative to rising up to meet the competition.

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