Posted on May 12, 2010 by Doug Henwood
Truther follow-up Before commenting on the economic news, a brief follow-up to last week’s comments about the 9/11 Truthers. It provoked, if not a flood, more than a trickle of emails and bloggy complaints, about evenly divided between the patronizing and the hostile. Perhaps my favorite was an email from someone signing him or herself a variant on Sky, who counseled me to learn patience, and disclosing that 9/11 is a spiritual matter. Nothing makes me want to scream more than being told to be patient; I hate it, for example, when… Read More
Posted on April 5, 2010 by Doug Henwood
March employment First, a few words on the U.S. employment report for March, released on Friday morning. While the headline job gain of 162,000 looked pretty decent, especially after the huge declines of 2008 and early 2009, 30% of the gain came from temporary workers hired to conduct the Census, and another 25% came from temp firms in the private sector. So more than half the gain was in jobs designed not to last. There were a few bright spots. Manufacturing added 17,000 workers, its third consecutive monthly gain—a sterling performance for… Read More
Posted on March 8, 2010 by Doug Henwood
[Sorry for the delay. Better late than never, I hope.] suburban poverty In our national imaginary, suburbs are places of affluence, and even a complacent isolation from social problems. As is often the case with received wisdom, this one’s in need of a fact-check. In a new paper, Elizabeth Kneebone and Emily Garr of the Brookings Institution find that suburbs are home to the largest and fastest-growing population of poor people in the U.S. Before continuing, I should note, as I always do when I talk about our official poverty line, that… Read More
Posted on December 4, 2009 by Doug Henwood
[Not retrieved from the future. Most of this was delivered on WBAI last night, but the bits about the employment report and liberal disillusionment were written for tomorrow morning’s KPFA version.] Things today… Two stories on the front of Thursday’s Financial Times tell you a lot about life in today’s USA. Above the fold—a phrase that probably doesn’t mean that much to anyone under the age of 35—the lead story tells us that the Bank of America is about to pay back the $45 billion the U.S. government lent to it when… Read More
Posted on November 29, 2009 by Doug Henwood
Dubai melts Iceland, only about 80 degrees warmer? The latest sovereign financial crisis is Dubai, whose national holding company declared on Thursday that it needed to stop servicing its debts for a few months. (Wouldn’t it be nice if all of us could do that?) Dubai is a small country, less than 1600 square miles, on the Persian Gulf. It is one of the seven members of the United Arab Emirates. Its population is only about a million and a half, three-quarters of them male, and less than a fifth are citizens…. Read More
Posted on November 15, 2009 by Doug Henwood
[WBAI spent most of October and the beginning of November fundraising, and my show was pre-empted much of the time. I’d been doing mostly re-runs for the KPFA version. The November 6 show was a re-run—or an “encore presentation” as they say in TV—but had this bit of fresh commentary prepended.] Friday morning brought the release of the U.S. employment report for October. Once again, less bad is what passes for good these days. The headline job loss was the best—meaning smallest loss—we’ve gotten in more than a year. But below the… Read More
Posted on October 9, 2009 by Doug Henwood
Job market somewhat less miserable In U.S. economic news, the slow improvement of the U.S. labor market continues, emphasis on “slow,” of course, and the baseline of general awfulness on which this improvement is founded. First-time applications for unemployment insurance fell by 33,000 last week to the lowest level since last November, just as the economy was beginning its fall from a cliff. The four-week moving average of initial claims, which is a better way of looking at these volatile figures, fell by 9,000, to its lowest level since last December. The… Read More
Posted on October 2, 2009 by Doug Henwood
[No, not time travel—this is the version that will be delivered on the KPFA version of the show on Saturday morning. Much of it was on Thursday’s WBAI show, except for the bit about the September employment report, which was added for the KPFA and podcast audiences. Oh, and Chicago didn’t get the Olympics, but the analysis of the politics behind Obama’s huckstering is still relevant.] Breaking news from the change we can believe in front! The Obama administration is opposing Congressional legislation to protect reporters from being jailed for refusing to… Read More
Posted on August 7, 2009 by Doug Henwood
[WBAI is fundraising this week and next. My fundraiser is next week—be sure to pledge during my slot, details to follow!—and I was pre-empted on August 6. My KPFA show for August 8 is mostly a rerun, but it did contain this fresh commentary.] If you’re an American taxpayer, you’re an owner of AIG, the failed insurance company. According to a piece in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal (which did the research itself—God, I’m going to miss newspapers), AIG and the Federal Reserve, a branch of the U.S. government, will be paying Wall Street… Read More
Posted on July 3, 2009 by Doug Henwood
Gotta keep these opening comments short, since there’s a lot of interview material ahead. Because Friday is a holiday, we got the June employment report a day earlier than usual, and the news wasn’t very good. So much for last month’s hint of an improving trend. There’s almost nothing encouraging buried in the innards of this month’s report. June’s headline job loss of 467,000 looks “good” only in comparison to the awful numbers we saw earlier this year and late last. But it’s still quite bad. Losses were widespread through the major… Read More
Posted on May 8, 2009 by Doug Henwood
[This isn’t a typical radio commentary post. The broadcast version included material on the UAW’s role in the Chrysler deal drawn from earlier posts on this site. And the bits about the April employment report were written just for LBO News, since it came out about 15 hours after the show aired. The show itself was a fundraiser with no original content, so it won’t be posted to the radio archives. But please do contribute to WBAI if you can (specifying “Behind the News” as your favorite show!). The station is in desperate straits,… Read More
Posted on May 1, 2009 by Doug Henwood
A review of some of the headlines before hitting some big-picture stuff. unemployment claims: easing a tad More tentative signs of some slight gloom-lifting in the job market. First-time claims for unemployment insurance filed by people who’ve just lost their jobs fell by 14,000 last week, and the four-week average is now about 20,000 below its high, set last March. As I’ve noted here before, the yearly percentage change in these weekly initial claims figures has proven a pretty reliable early warning sign that a recession is drawing to a close, and that… Read More
Posted on April 3, 2009 by Doug Henwood
more signs of stabilization… Again, more signs that the rate of decline is slowing, though hardly yet turning around. On Thursday morning, we learned that new orders for manufactured goods rose almost 2% in February, the first increase in six months. Orders for what are known as nondefense capital goods ex-aircraft, meaning the sort of gadgetry that is at the core of business investment, and a key to long-term economic growth, rose by over 7%, a very strong performance. Obviously one month’s positive numbers can easily turn into next month’s negative numbers, but… Read More
Posted on March 24, 2009 by Doug Henwood
Several new bits of economic news, most of them a little better than the recent run has been. First-time claims for unemployment insurance filed by people who’ve just lost their jobs fell by 12,000 last week. The four-week moving average, which smooths out this volatile series, rose slightly to make a new high for this recession. But it’s possible that the rate of deterioration is now slowing. In other words, the job market is terrible, but at least it’s not getting rapidly worse. At least over the last few weeks. The big surprise… Read More
Posted on February 9, 2009 by Doug Henwood
[As the introductory sentence says, these comments were the opening to a special fundraising edition of Behind the News in its KPFA avatar. No audio is available because the show consisted mainly of excerpts from David Harvey’s lectures on Capital and pleas for support. If you like reading these commentaries and listening to the audio archives, you can help assure them a future by pledging to support KPFA. You can do that online here: Donate to KPFA. The lectures by Harvey are listed in the right column, “$101 and Up” – search for… Read More
LBO News from Doug Henwood
Posted on May 12, 2010 by Doug Henwood
Radio commentary, May 8, 2010
Truther follow-up Before commenting on the economic news, a brief follow-up to last week’s comments about the 9/11 Truthers. It provoked, if not a flood, more than a trickle of emails and bloggy complaints, about evenly divided between the patronizing and the hostile. Perhaps my favorite was an email from someone signing him or herself a variant on Sky, who counseled me to learn patience, and disclosing that 9/11 is a spiritual matter. Nothing makes me want to scream more than being told to be patient; I hate it, for example, when… Read More
Posted on April 5, 2010 by Doug Henwood
Radio commentary, April 1, 2010
March employment First, a few words on the U.S. employment report for March, released on Friday morning. While the headline job gain of 162,000 looked pretty decent, especially after the huge declines of 2008 and early 2009, 30% of the gain came from temporary workers hired to conduct the Census, and another 25% came from temp firms in the private sector. So more than half the gain was in jobs designed not to last. There were a few bright spots. Manufacturing added 17,000 workers, its third consecutive monthly gain—a sterling performance for… Read More
Posted on March 8, 2010 by Doug Henwood
Radio commentary, Feburary 6, 2010
[Sorry for the delay. Better late than never, I hope.] suburban poverty In our national imaginary, suburbs are places of affluence, and even a complacent isolation from social problems. As is often the case with received wisdom, this one’s in need of a fact-check. In a new paper, Elizabeth Kneebone and Emily Garr of the Brookings Institution find that suburbs are home to the largest and fastest-growing population of poor people in the U.S. Before continuing, I should note, as I always do when I talk about our official poverty line, that… Read More
Posted on December 4, 2009 by Doug Henwood
Radio commentary, December 5, 2009
[Not retrieved from the future. Most of this was delivered on WBAI last night, but the bits about the employment report and liberal disillusionment were written for tomorrow morning’s KPFA version.] Things today… Two stories on the front of Thursday’s Financial Times tell you a lot about life in today’s USA. Above the fold—a phrase that probably doesn’t mean that much to anyone under the age of 35—the lead story tells us that the Bank of America is about to pay back the $45 billion the U.S. government lent to it when… Read More
Posted on November 29, 2009 by Doug Henwood
Radio commentary, November 28, 2009
Dubai melts Iceland, only about 80 degrees warmer? The latest sovereign financial crisis is Dubai, whose national holding company declared on Thursday that it needed to stop servicing its debts for a few months. (Wouldn’t it be nice if all of us could do that?) Dubai is a small country, less than 1600 square miles, on the Persian Gulf. It is one of the seven members of the United Arab Emirates. Its population is only about a million and a half, three-quarters of them male, and less than a fifth are citizens…. Read More
Posted on November 15, 2009 by Doug Henwood
Radio commentary, November 6, 2009
[WBAI spent most of October and the beginning of November fundraising, and my show was pre-empted much of the time. I’d been doing mostly re-runs for the KPFA version. The November 6 show was a re-run—or an “encore presentation” as they say in TV—but had this bit of fresh commentary prepended.] Friday morning brought the release of the U.S. employment report for October. Once again, less bad is what passes for good these days. The headline job loss was the best—meaning smallest loss—we’ve gotten in more than a year. But below the… Read More
Posted on October 9, 2009 by Doug Henwood
Radio commentary, October 9, 2009
Job market somewhat less miserable In U.S. economic news, the slow improvement of the U.S. labor market continues, emphasis on “slow,” of course, and the baseline of general awfulness on which this improvement is founded. First-time applications for unemployment insurance fell by 33,000 last week to the lowest level since last November, just as the economy was beginning its fall from a cliff. The four-week moving average of initial claims, which is a better way of looking at these volatile figures, fell by 9,000, to its lowest level since last December. The… Read More
Posted on October 2, 2009 by Doug Henwood
Radio commentary, October 3, 2009
[No, not time travel—this is the version that will be delivered on the KPFA version of the show on Saturday morning. Much of it was on Thursday’s WBAI show, except for the bit about the September employment report, which was added for the KPFA and podcast audiences. Oh, and Chicago didn’t get the Olympics, but the analysis of the politics behind Obama’s huckstering is still relevant.] Breaking news from the change we can believe in front! The Obama administration is opposing Congressional legislation to protect reporters from being jailed for refusing to… Read More
Posted on August 7, 2009 by Doug Henwood
Radio commentary, August 8, 2009
[WBAI is fundraising this week and next. My fundraiser is next week—be sure to pledge during my slot, details to follow!—and I was pre-empted on August 6. My KPFA show for August 8 is mostly a rerun, but it did contain this fresh commentary.] If you’re an American taxpayer, you’re an owner of AIG, the failed insurance company. According to a piece in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal (which did the research itself—God, I’m going to miss newspapers), AIG and the Federal Reserve, a branch of the U.S. government, will be paying Wall Street… Read More
Posted on July 3, 2009 by Doug Henwood
Radio commentary, July 2, 2009
Gotta keep these opening comments short, since there’s a lot of interview material ahead. Because Friday is a holiday, we got the June employment report a day earlier than usual, and the news wasn’t very good. So much for last month’s hint of an improving trend. There’s almost nothing encouraging buried in the innards of this month’s report. June’s headline job loss of 467,000 looks “good” only in comparison to the awful numbers we saw earlier this year and late last. But it’s still quite bad. Losses were widespread through the major… Read More
Posted on May 8, 2009 by Doug Henwood
Radio commentary, plus and minus, May 7, 2009
[This isn’t a typical radio commentary post. The broadcast version included material on the UAW’s role in the Chrysler deal drawn from earlier posts on this site. And the bits about the April employment report were written just for LBO News, since it came out about 15 hours after the show aired. The show itself was a fundraiser with no original content, so it won’t be posted to the radio archives. But please do contribute to WBAI if you can (specifying “Behind the News” as your favorite show!). The station is in desperate straits,… Read More
Posted on May 1, 2009 by Doug Henwood
Radio commentary, April 30, 2009
A review of some of the headlines before hitting some big-picture stuff. unemployment claims: easing a tad More tentative signs of some slight gloom-lifting in the job market. First-time claims for unemployment insurance filed by people who’ve just lost their jobs fell by 14,000 last week, and the four-week average is now about 20,000 below its high, set last March. As I’ve noted here before, the yearly percentage change in these weekly initial claims figures has proven a pretty reliable early warning sign that a recession is drawing to a close, and that… Read More
Posted on April 3, 2009 by Doug Henwood
Radio commentary, April 4, 2009
more signs of stabilization… Again, more signs that the rate of decline is slowing, though hardly yet turning around. On Thursday morning, we learned that new orders for manufactured goods rose almost 2% in February, the first increase in six months. Orders for what are known as nondefense capital goods ex-aircraft, meaning the sort of gadgetry that is at the core of business investment, and a key to long-term economic growth, rose by over 7%, a very strong performance. Obviously one month’s positive numbers can easily turn into next month’s negative numbers, but… Read More
Posted on March 24, 2009 by Doug Henwood
Radio commentary, March 19, 2009
Several new bits of economic news, most of them a little better than the recent run has been. First-time claims for unemployment insurance filed by people who’ve just lost their jobs fell by 12,000 last week. The four-week moving average, which smooths out this volatile series, rose slightly to make a new high for this recession. But it’s possible that the rate of deterioration is now slowing. In other words, the job market is terrible, but at least it’s not getting rapidly worse. At least over the last few weeks. The big surprise… Read More
Posted on February 9, 2009 by Doug Henwood
Radio commentary, February 7, 2009
[As the introductory sentence says, these comments were the opening to a special fundraising edition of Behind the News in its KPFA avatar. No audio is available because the show consisted mainly of excerpts from David Harvey’s lectures on Capital and pleas for support. If you like reading these commentaries and listening to the audio archives, you can help assure them a future by pledging to support KPFA. You can do that online here: Donate to KPFA. The lectures by Harvey are listed in the right column, “$101 and Up” – search for… Read More
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