Carlos Olin Montalvo III

Since late 2009, the region has accounted for almost 12,000 of the 66,000 jobs–or about 18%—that California has added back.

The local unemployment rate remains far higher than the 4.9% in late 2007 and is above the national 9% unemployment rate.

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"There are three types of pitchers you have to deal with. Some you just have to tell what town they're in, remind them where they are. Some you remind them about mechanics, and some you have to bust their tail. You have to make them your friend and have them trust you."

Source

Source: Engadget

"In the wake of a financial crisis and punishing recession that the models failed to capture, a growing number of economists are beginning to question the intellectual foundations on which the models are built. Researchers, some of whom spent years on the academic margins, are offering up a barrage of ideas that they hope could form the building blocks of a new paradigm.

Today's models emerged from a revolution of their own. In the 1970s, economists were struggling to figure out how policy moves, such as raising taxes or cutting interest rates, could change how people behave. They were also eager to subject their own reasoning to the unforgiving judge of mathematical logic.

So they populated their models with rational people who can calculate the value of various possible moves and choose the optimal path. A person deciding whether to buy a car, for example, would take into account the potential return on investing the money, the probability that car prices will rise, and the chances that an increase in tax rates will cut into her disposable income.

By translating peoples' preferences into equations, and finding the point at which they meet those of firms and other players, the models forecast an exact trajectory for the economy. That feature makes them very attractive to economists, who can plug in a change in interest rates and see precisely how the move might affect an entire country's output for the next few years.

The problem...is that the models bear too little relation to reality. People aren't quite as rational as models assume...Advocates of traditional economics acknowledge that not all decisions are driven by pure reason.

...

To keep things simple, economists leave out large chunks of reality. Before the crisis, most models didn't have banks, defaults or capital markets, a fact that proved problematic when the financial crisis hit. They tend to include only households, firms, central banks and the government. They also commonly use a single equation to represent each player, impairing the models' ability to explain the unexpected outcomes that can emerge when millions of different people interact.

...

'Economic forecasts have never been very good, and it's not clear that if we stick with the methods we're pursuing we'll do any better...We need to try something new.'"




Source

AdAge

USDebtClock.org

Link

"One can tell a seemingly optimistic story - the threat of the double dip is behind us, setting the stage for a nice return to potential growth.  But that story holds the dark side of persistent, pernicious low levels of labor utilization.  


Still, I think now the Federal Reserve would have chosen the optimistic narrative had it not been for the obvious slowdown midyear.  Which suggests to me they are not eager to do more, especially if growth settles back in at trend.  Reinforcing that belief is the Warsh speech, which makes a strong case that further monetary policy is increasingly ineffectual and very risky.  


But even more important, he makes clear a belief that only Congress and the Administration have the tools to restore growth.   I imagine if that view is, or becomes, a widespread opinion among policymakers, we have seen the last gasp of quantitative easing.  


They have abated the financial crisis, serving as the lender of last resort, and flooded the economy with cash.  They have done what they can.  The rest is up to the fiscal authorities."


Tim Duy

Randfish

Source

Source

Gartner has examined the maturity of 1,800 technologies and trends in 75 technology, topic, and industry areas.

The Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies features technologies that are the focus of attention in the IT industry because of particularly high levels of hype, or those that may not be broadly acknowledged but which Gartner believes have the potential for significant impact.

High-impact technologies at the Peak of Inflated Expectations during 2010 include private cloud computing, augmented reality, media tablets, wireless power, 3D flat-panel TVs and displays, and activity streams, while cloud computing and cloud/Web platforms have tipped over the peak and will soon experience disillusionment among enterprise users.


Gartner

• Video will comprise 90% of all Internet traffic by 2013 

• 20 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute

• More than 1,000 pictures are uploaded to Facebook every second

• PC users worldwide have an estimated nine billion high-definition video files stored in their systems

Forbes

• In 1990, 62% of the world’s poor people lived in just two countries, China and India
• A dramatic fall in China’s poverty rate, from 60% to 16%, has therefore had a big impact on global poverty, which seems set to meet its 2015 target. But that is small comfort to the poor in many other countries where poverty has barely budged
• Goals such as those involving primary enrollment and reductions in child mortality are unlikely to be met, though some, such as access to clean drinking water, are likely to be exceeded.

Economist 

 

Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke stressed the need for banks to hold more cash in reserve and face stricter regulations and told a panel investigating the causes of the economic crisis that the central bank's policies did not spur the collapse.

He cited ongoing negotiations on the amount of reserves banks must keep to cover their operations and recently passed US legislation as the key tools to tackle the risks posed by big banks.

"Monetary policy is a blunt tool; raising the general level of interest rates to manage a single asset price would undoubtedly have had large side effects on other assets and sectors of the economy."


AFP

During dinner at the Technology Policy Institute's Aspen Forum, Intel CEO Paul Otellini warned government officials that unless government policies are altered, people will not invest in the United States and cites the U.S.'s hostile legal environment towards business.

He used the example of factories, explaining that costs $1 billion more per factory for me to build, equip, and operate a semiconductor manufacturing facility in the United States and 90% of that additional cost of a $4 billion factory is not labor but the cost to comply with taxes and regulations that other nations don't impose.

He argues there is likely to be:

"Every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends' social media sites." -Google CEO Eric Schmidt



...creepy...

FastCo

Eric Schmidt
Chief Executive Officer, Google
Speaking at Techonomy Conference in South Lake Tahoe

Shane Robinson
Executive Vice President and Chief Strategy and Technology Office, Hewlett-Packard
Speaking at the Techonomy Conference in South Lake Tahoe