Still Too Big to Fail?
More than 8.5 million jobs disappeared from the economy during the Great Recession. In order to stop the economy from plummeting deeper into an abyss in 2008, the U.S. government bailed out banks and major businesses, and passedlegislation – the Dodd-Frank Act – to try to keep a similar crisis from reoccurring.
Despite this legislation, the stability of the financial sector remains all too precarious, argued Neel Kashkari, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis in a February speech at the Brooking Institution. “I believe the biggest banks are still too big to fail and continue to pose a significant, ongoing risk to our economy,” he said.
Kashkari’s assessment of the threat that big banks pose to the wider society is largely influenced by his experience working in senior positions at the U.S. Department of Treasury during the 2008 crisis. Not only did the downturn in home mortgages affect the banks that relied on mortgage payments as a stream of revenue, other industries endured crisis as well. Construction workers were hit particularly hard, as demand for new homes decreased. Additionally, because banks were in financial straits and less willing to lend to one another and to other businesses, companies were not able to undertake new projects. In turn, companies laid off employees, continuing the spiral into an economic crisis. Ultimately, in order to limit the damage from the crisis, Congress authorized the U.S. Department of Treasury to loan up to $700 billion to large banks and to other companies severely impacted by the economic downturn.
One of the motivating factors for the project came from a careful reading of Keynes’ book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, which many revere as an economic bible. The book is eloquent, witty, insightful, but unscientific and contains mathematical and logical errors. Unlike other rhetorical critiques, an early post on this blog shows from empirical data collected over recent decades that Keynesian policy has been harmful to the US economy and could lead to a Keynesian economic collapse.
Among scientists, however, there is agreement. Two Harvard economists, after trawling through voluminous, authoritative research, said last year that the odds of an utterly catastrophic finale to humanity’s atmospheric experiment is about 10 percent. That’s a conclusion that can focus minds pretty quickly—and perhaps turn the expenditure of trillions of dollars over three decades into only a tough, but manageable, problem.
Through a combination of low prices and moderate wage gains, 2015 may have been a great year for median household incomes.
Since the early 1980s Hayes has written “The Classroom,” an advice column for the American Bee Journal, America’s oldest bee magazine. He is Dear Abby for beekeepers, counseling readers on everything from capturing swarms to making shoe polish from beeswax. (To Tommy, a North Carolina beekeeper asking why his bees swarmed too late to survive the winter: “Sometimes the stupid gene expresses itself, Tommy. Genes are always testing themselves to see if they bring reproductive value.”)
World population may rise to nearly 10 billion by 2050
Ever Wonder Who's Next?
The world population will reach 9.9 billion in 2050, increasing by 33 per cent from an estimated 7.4 billion now, the latest report from the Population Reference Bureau (PRB) has predicted. If the assumptions underlying 2050 projections by the PRB’s World Population Data Sheet are applied to subsequent years, the world population would hit the 10 billion mark in 2053, with set to Asia gain about 900 million to 5.3 billion.
(ALSO READ: Humans altered 97 per cent of most species-rich places on Earth )
“Despite declines in fertility rates around the world, we expect population gains to remain strong enough to take us toward a global population of 10 billion,” said Jeffrey Jordan, president and CEO of PRB. “Significant regional differences remain, though. For example very low birth rates in Europe will mean population declines there while Africa’s population is expected to double,” said […]
