ploughman.

Your post hits the nail in the head.

If we look at the salaries in the USA in the last decade, it becomes apparent that we are in a road to nowhere. Salaries have been stagnant for more than 10 years. Now we need to add up hughe unemployments, and the downward prsssure that gives salaries way into the future... And we get the idea as to why consumers are up to their neck in debt.

In the 50's one salary was enough for a Middle Class family , by the 70's two salaries became necessary in order for the Middle Class family to make it, by the 90's all the way to 2008, a Middle class family needed two salaries + easy , and extensibe credit to continue to maintain their status .

2009 will go down in history as the year America's Middle Class ran out of tricks in the hat.

"Where is our Ferdinand Pecora?" http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/06/opinion/06chernow.html

More on Ferdinand Pecora's take-down of Wall Street: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04242009/watch.html

The stock market is doing very well ? Two years ago the DOW was floating around 14,000 points. In January 08, it was down to about 12,000 points. The media started telling me that the economy was in trouble. In June 08 the DOW was still floating around 12,000 points. With the election campaigning going on, we were told that the economy was in dire straits. In September 08, the DOW slipped to about 11, 400 points. We were told that the economy was a disaster. Today the DOW closed at 9772 and Newsweek informs me that the stock market is doing very well. Is this bias or stupidity ? Go to Google Finance and look at historical data for the DOW..

Why would it be a mystery that the stock market is up 53% when the stock market fell so deep that earnings multiples is still nowhere where it was in the market peak when Dow was at 14,000? Therefore, stocks are still relatively cheap and stock prices have upward potential.

Daniel Gross is right. American companies are getting bigger proportion of their earnings from their operations abroad. Brazil, China, the Philippines, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam did not suffer an economic recession. We are the only country, together with Europe, that adopted deregulated the financial market. And we are responsible for the economic disaster for electing such incompetent economic managers like Bush and Cheney.

Well, you keep interest rates near 0% so anyone with money will take it out of CDs or MMA and invest it in the stock market. Then you steal it. Alan Greenspan is a lying bastard who knew exactly what he was doing and I am certain he benefitted monetarily from this event. In fact, it is continuing to happen. Why are stocks up? Well, Einstein, that is the TARP money.

Here is the real "why" the stock market is up when it should be down. Recent years piled up large amounts of money in some hands while many more hands than those have become empty and unemployed. Call it "unemployed money looking for a home". The unemployed money is not going into new businesses looking for people to work in them, but is instead going into a casino disguised as a stock market. The casino is broke, but it still sells the chips for the game in large numbers. The players are not part of the outside and unemployed world but they are standing around the table gleaming at each other as if there were real businesses making real profit in the game. The recent bubble included a system where loads of people were employed. This bubble around the casino table is growing very large but doesn't involve employed people in the casino's chips. This bubble will burst when it is discovered that there is no money behind the chips. No production. No vastly employed people holding it together. We will give it a new name not yet heard in our history. It is neither a depression, a recession, nor a banana. It's consequences in our republic will give it its name. This is America. This is what we do every once in a while. Enjoy it.

The stock market has nothing or VERY little to do with the daily lives of the average working American. The ???green shoot??? data we see labeled as recovery is window dressing. What FOOL bases his/her household budget on what today???s stock market does. Retirements lost? That was yesterday???s money. Get over it. GM isn???t paying ???US??? back so the gains they exclaim as success; oh pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeez. SOS going on. And BO is back on the campaign trail. Gvillagran 3; settle down little throbber. :O) You get so wound up at my posts and it???s a bit early to have you freak out over your Cheerios.

Still Free in the USA.

"The stock market has nothing or VERY little to do with the daily lives of Americans".

There you go again, running your mouth before your brain has a time to catch up. My friend we just went to a multi-trillion Dollar bail out of Wall Street paid for by tax payers, so how do you call that? Because back on planet earth we call it Main Street bailing out Wall Street , so what went on in Wall Street (and still is going on) put us in the fast track for the poor house . Or to put it in other words pal, what goes on in Wall Street has one hell of a lot to do with was goes on in Main Street.

We are the worst recession in our history because of Wall Street.... But in your "considered" view, main street has nothing to do with Wall Street !!!!!

Still Free -

Are you nuts? Wall Street affects everyone unless you live under the rock and does not have money in real estate or stocks.

Under the "sleeping-on-the-wheel" mismanaged economy and lax-regulating Wall Street conspiring Bush administration, middle class American lost $8.3 trillion in wealth invested in homes and 401K due to this Great Recession. Not to mention the 8.9 miilion Americans who lost their employment.

Challenge posed: Describe how Bush undid regulations that had any impact on the recession.

I've posed this challenge before, without ever receiving an answer. Usually it just gets me attacked as a Bush-lover.

You are right, he was technically "asleep at the wheel", but lets look further. It's not that he didn't notice the problems; he did, and he made some efforts to address them, but the filibuster monster known as congress wasn't going to have anything to do with it and he knew it. After 2002, when nobody saw this coming (the housing bubble really hadn't started yet, nor had derivatives gone truly haywire), Bush never had nearly the majority that Obama does. If Obama the charismatic demigod can't get 60 votes when 58+2 are Democrats, how was Bush supposed to do it? Let's face it, no appreciable piece of Bush's domestic agenda ever got enacted, and nothing would have no matter what he did. The only fiscal "damage" one can legitimately attribute to Bush is the spend of $1 trillion on a war of questionable value, but that's just deficit money that we're not paying for, and hasn't begun to affect the economy.

Fault lies in the previous century, and failure to deal with it lies in congressional gridlock, not anything either president has done.

On a separate note - can one "lose" $8 trillion if it was bubble money in the first place? The value of housing grew significantly from 2000-2009, it's just that that growth hasn't been linear. It went up a lot, then came down, but is still higher than when it started.

That's a lie. The definition of a middle class lifestyle has improved so much that it's not apples-to-apples to talk about how hard it is to sustain "middle class" today. The labor market has changed too.

In the 50s, a manufacturing job was "skilled labor" - the equivalent of a today's white-collar. With it, a man earned enough for his 900 square foot house (average at the time), his single 1950s-era car, a land line phone, a radio, and maybe a single cheap TV. He rarely ate out.

Today, we can still live on a single skilled labor job (making $50-60k), but we have houses over $2000 sqft with multiple cars, TVs, cell phones, and entertainment expenditures. One can also live a lifestyle that beats the 1950s quality on under $30/year, but we don't call that "middle class" anymore.

Unfortunately, we have stopped trending upward and may start trending downward because we are losing our global leadership role and have mortgaged our future by trying to live above our means. The definition of "middle class" grew too fast. There is valid reason for concern, but the current "suffering" is overstated.

I guess the fact that the actual tax amounts paid by the richest increased significantly after Reagan's reform in 1986 is lost on you, huh? There are far more variables in play than nominal rates. Shrewd politicians use the nominal rates to hide what's really going on and deceive the public. For example, the nominal rates tell you that everyone pays some income tax, but 40% of Americans don't because of all the deductions.

I'm not so sure it was incompetence. Their friends in the defense and oil industries did quite well, thank you very much. They have realized Newt Gingrich's dream of "starving the beast". Next up: slash social programs.

In the Bush admn basic laws went unenforced. Even Madoff says he was astounded by the lack of interest/incompetence in investigating him. The SEC allowed leveraging to explode from a 12 to 1 ratio to
30 & 40 to 1, and sometimes even higher.