Tell It To Al

Here’s what Time magazine calls “The Most Important Chart In American Politics.”

Robert Shapiro, former Under Secretary of Commerce for Economic Affairs under President Clinton, says it means “The American Dream is in Big Trouble.”

Productivity is way up. The nation’s gross domestic product is up, too. Guess what’s not up? Household incomes.

The economy is producing more, but most American’s are earning less. The gap between rich and poor keeps widening.

Mr. Shapiro says the incomes of working Americans rose, on average, 5.3% during the 1983-1991 business cycle, and grew by 14.2%in the 1992-2001 cycle. But in the 2002-2007 expansion, and the recession that followed, incomes shrank by 3.4%.

It’s good to see the numbers, but the sad truth is that too many Americans do not need to look at this chart to be familiar with this economic trend.

Some day, instead of pass the ketchup, we may say pass the Buffett.

Last week, Warren Buffett, one of the world’s smartest investors bought about $28 billion worth of ketchup with his acquisition of H.J. Heinz Co.

It was one of the safest bets he could make in a dicey global economy.

Click here to read my column in The Sunday Wall Street Journal. And click here to watch me talk about the deal and other business topics with 9News anchor Will Ripley.

You can’t make this stuff up: We are going to take a top executive from a too-big-to-fail bank and make him Treasury Secretary.

Confirming Jack Lew for this position enshrines the doctrine of too-big-to-fail for posterity.

This is a guy who got a bonus for being part of the leadership team that ran Citigroup into the ground and then ran to Washington for billions in bailouts. He didn’t have very good answers for it, either, as he took questions from the Senate Finance Committee last week. But apparently there is no longer any shame in this.

Click here to read my column on MarketWatch.

Oh, how far we have not come since the start of the Great Recession.

The Economic Policy Institute lays it all out in a new report it released today: “From free-fall to stagnation: Five years after the start of the Great Recession, extraordinary policy measures are still needed, but are not forthcoming.”

Ongoing weakness in the economy boils down almost entirely to a lack of demand, the report says.

Some other key findings from the report:

* As of December 2012, 9.1 million jobs needed to be created to get back to where we were before the recession.

* National output was roughly $1 trillion below what it could have been if the economy were at full employment

* The big jump in federal budget deficits beginning in 2008 is a symptom of the weak economy, and has supported a return to economic growth.

* Too many near- and medium-term economic forecasts assume a return to full employment relatively quickly.

* The U.S. economy is projected to remain depressed, with GDP between $941 billion and over $1.0 trillion below full employment output at the end of 2013.

* Five years after the Great Recession began, “full economic recovery still remains years and years away.”

Click here to read EPI’s full report.

I’ve long thought the biggest problem at the Securities and Exchange Commission, or just about any other government regulator,  is the number of staffers looking for their next job.

The SEC is the agency that’s supposed to keep businesses from cheating each other and the investing public. Bbut how can we trust it with so many people swinging through it’s revolving door from public regulator to private corporation?

A new report from the Project on Government Oversight examines this question.

“Former employees of the SEC routinely help corporations try to influence SEC rulemaking, counter the agency’s investigations of suspected wrongdoing, soften the blow of SEC enforcement actions, block shareholder proposals, and win exemptions from federal law,” writes Michael Smallberg, an investigator for the watchdog group.

Click here to read my column on MarketWatch. And click here to read Mr. Smallberg’s report, Dangerous Liaisons: Revolving Door at SEC Creates Risk of Regulatory Caputure.

Would you miss the mailman if he didn’t come on Saturdays?

How about if he or she came only three days a week?

With email, online bill-paying and everything else we do on the Internet the post office is going the way of the phone book and the daily newspaper, I’m afraid. The postmaster general now wants to cut Saturday deliveries to save $2 billion a year.

Click here to read my column in The Sunday Wall Street Journal. And click here to watch me talk about it with Will Ripley of Denver’s NBC affiliate, 9News.

Usually, it’s pretty funny when people take popular songs and write their own lyrics to them, satirizing events in the news.

But a song by an analyst at Standard & Poor’s – revealed in court documents in the government’s lawsuit against the ratings agency- isn’t funny at all.

It makes it look like the analysts who mis-rated mortgage backed securities  did bad securities analysis, wrote bad songs about it, and fiddled while an economy burned.

Click here to read my column on MarketWatch. And click here to watch me talk about with Will Ripley of Denver’s NBC affiliate 9News.

The next 20 years are going to be nothing like the last 20 years.

That, says Chris Martenson, is pretty much guaranteed.

Mr. Martenson is a neurotoxicologist who has put the global economy under the microscope and what he’s found isn’t pretty. The economy will either bump along for years on end, as it is doing now, or it may just collapse, he says.

Mr. Martenson believes a collapse is more likely. He said he quit his job helping big companies make the same mistakes they always make and founded a website, PeakProsperity.com, to help people learn how to thrive in the face of a looming global economic crash.

It’s worth the time to take his “crash course,” explaining in compelling, easy-to-understand detail why the global economy, as it’s structured today, is simply not sustainable. Click here for the course.

Click here to read my column on Mr. Martenson on MarketWatch.

This video has been around for a while, but it’s worth watching. It’s scary to think the man who is still printing trillions of dollars to prevent a Great Depression was this wrong about the housing bubble. He didn’t see it coming, so how’s he going to see it go?

The average U.S. household spent $2,912 on gasoline last year, or about 4% of household income before taxes, according to the U.S. Energy Institute.

This is at the highest level in three decades, except for 2008 when we had a really big spike in oil prices.

There’s no getting around it. High energy prices are a constraint on growth and it’s one reason why our economy isn’t really going anywhere.

Click here to see the report.