Financial Crisis

The second season of The Walking Dead premiered last week to ratings high enough to raise William Seabrook—the journalist who imported zombies to the United States with the 1929 novel

Occupy Wall Street is a carnival. Both detractors and supporters say so. The most amusing part of the show is watching the rush to join it. When Deepak Chopra and Suze Orman endorse the cause, you have to wonder about its revolutionary bona fides. Democrats have also flung themselves in the direction of Zuccotti Park—but in their pursuit of the movement they may damage themselves and hinder the protests’ potential to do tangible good.

Notwithstanding repeated attempts at monetary and fiscal stimulus since 2009, the United States remains mired in what is by far its worst economic slump since that of the 1930s.¹  More than 25 million working-age Americans remain unemployed or underemployed, the employment-to-population ratio lingers at an historic low of 58.3 percent,² business investment continues at historically weak levels, and consumption expenditure remains weighed down by massive private sector debt overhang left by the bursting of the housing and credit bubble a bit over three years ago.

Those were the topics on tap at yesterday's Senate Banking Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Protection hearing. As I mentioned yesterday, our own Ray Boshara (well, he's not all ours anymore) was on a crowded but extremely informative panel alongside Ida Rademacher from CFED.

As I mentioned yesterday, Ray Boshara testified at the Senate Banking Committee Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Protection hearing On "Consumer Protection and Middle Class Wealth Building in an age of Growing Household Debt."

I'll post some of the key takeaways from the hearing later, but I wanted to post Ray's excellent testimony in full first (and attach it as well).

-- This is a guest post by Jay Pelosky, Principal, J2Z Advisory, LLC.  It was originally posted on the Huffington Post. --

While much has transpired in financial markets over the past quarter, much remains unclear about the road ahead. Bond yield melt down, equity trap door decline, financial repression, sovereign debt infection, all have become front-page news. Does this mean all is in the price and one can go bargain hunting? Not so fast remains the counsel, not so fast.

My German 3 summer school instructor at Berkeley once pulled me aside after class to accuse me of having a deep-seated hatred toward all things German. Irritated, I told her, “Yeah, that’s why I’m spending my summer learning your damn language.”

More than 20 years later, my German-language skills are just as lacking as before, but my relationship to the Fatherland is as complicated as ever. I don’t hate Germany. But, apart from being fond of Berlin (whose openly gay mayor calls it “poor but sexy”), I don’t exactly love Germany either.

For many people, the wild fluctuations of global markets over the past few weeks were simply bad luck or a sign of the looming and dreaded double-dip recession. But for a large number of Americans, apparently, they were a sign from God. A recent survey by Baylor University shows that around 20 percent of Americans see God's hand at work in the economy -- even if they also strongly support a market free of all non-divine influence. "They think the economy works because God wants it to work.

This is the second column in a series by Bruce Jentleson, Professor at Duke University, and Jay Pelosky, Principal of J2Z Advisory. It originally appeared on the Huffington Post.

Is the American Dream of opportunity and increasing prosperity out of reach for the average American worker? What is happening to the American middle class? If the labor market ‘polarizes’ into low- and high-income jobs, what does this mean for continuing inequality in America? What does it mean for the American social contract, and the American Dream?