Down 2.9% for the month of August.

Slowing demand and a stronger Yen are to blame…

Prepare for global meltdown

Usual suspects like politicians at home and abroad bickering over money troubles.

Full article

Shocker. I love how the Obama Administration then accuses the study of “looking backwards.”

Yeah, dipshits, that’s kind of the point of a study.

The signature legislation of the Obama Administration, the Affordable Care Act, came under damaging assault Wednesday from a Kaiser Family Foundation survey that found it has already partially contributed to increasing health care costs.

The Kaiser survey helps to shed some light on why so few employers are hiring, as health care costs for employers are spiraling upwards.

The survey found that insurance premiums rose by 9 percent in 2011. Healthcare costs for a single worker went up on average from $5,049 to $5,429, and for a family, costs rose from $13,770 to $15,073, on average.

The survey also found that some provisions of the Affordable Care Act already in place — including the allowance for young people up to 26 years of age to remain on their parents insurance policy — contributed to 20 percent of that increase.

But other factors are also contributing to the rising costs of health care. They include the prices of new technologies, research and development for new prescription drugs and the proliferation of chronic diseases like diabetes.

The aging of the baby boom generation is also placing a tremendous strain on the health care system, as baby boomers have begun qualifying for Medicare this year. The survey found that with better treatments and drugs, they may live longer than previous generations and impose huge costs on the system as they age.

The White House, seeking to limit damage from the report, issued a statement on its blog in advance of the reports’ release, accusing it of, “looking backwards.”

“When we look to the future we know that The Affordable Care Act will help make insurance more affordable for families and businesses across the country, ” wrote Nancy- Ann DeParle, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff.

White House spokesman Jay Carney later defended the provision of the Affordable Care Act allowing 26-year-olds to stay on their parents insurance policies. “That has already had this tremendous impact on young people in America, which we obviously think is very positive,” he said. Most other provisions of the Affordable Care Act will not take effect until 2014.

The survey suggests that if costs are going to come down, people will need to live healthier lives. Health information technology will need to be improved, as will efficiency. The survey also calls for greater consumer involvement in health care such as those provided in health reimbursement accounts, where employers contribute to a health account managed by the employee. But the report also acknowledged deep political differences over those accounts, as well as over other proposed solutions.

Full review

3% this year and 2.9% next year

Not sure anyone cares, but Swiss and French banks are on the hook for Eastern block debt….

Full article

These expectations are over the next five years.

“It is something that we’re going to be watching very carefully,” Bernanke said in response to questions from the audience at a forum sponsored by the Cleveland Fed.

“If inflation falls too low or inflation expectations fall too low, that would be something we have to respond to because we do not want deflation,” Bernanke said.

Rates are not low enough 

Full article

Interesting take on U.S./Japan comparison and the nature of we two to the rest of the world.

TOKYO — Japan and the United States combined produce 30% of global economic output and register 50% of all new patents.

These two powerhouses of productivity and innovation should be leading the world into a dynamic new age of prosperity, right?

But they’re not. Why? That’s what I kept asking myself as I listened to a parade of global industrial executives, government policymakers and academic big brains hold forth at the 43rd annual Midwest-U.S.-Japan Association conference, where Gov. Rick Snyder began his weeklong Asian trade mission.

Why are the economies of both the U.S. and Japan stalled? Why are their middle classes hollowed out?

Why was Keiro Kitagami, vice-minister of Japan’s once-vaunted Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry talking about his nation’s industrial giants rapidly shifting operations overseas, mostly to Southeast Asian countries? Doesn’t that sound like Michigan over the past few decades?

Why do government leaders in two such sophisticated nations seem clueless about how to stop the bleeding?

I put my questions to several attendees and speakers. The responses were intriguing.

Sandy Baruah, president of the Detroit Regional Chamber, noted the troubling parallels between Japan’s 20-year tailspin and America’s current funk. “They each began with real estate busts and breakdowns in financial services. Japan didn’t fix those problems fast enough and neither did we,” he said. “Are we repeating the same cycle?”

Are we, indeed?

Cheng-Guan Michael Quah, who was chief technology officer of the nonprofit NextEnergy incubator in Detroit before becoming chief scientist of the Energy Studies Institute at the National University of Singapore in 2009, said Wall Street and hedge fund lobbyists now control policy making in the once-rich nations — and their focus on short-term gains is choking the manufacturing sectors.

“I believe we are still a very innovative nation,” said Quah, who led a panel on innovation at the Tokyo conference and who travels often between Singapore and Farmington Hills, where his wife still resides. “We need to revive manufacturing. We need to get Wall Street off our backs.”

OK, but how?

Perhaps the most sober, but still unsettling, assessment came from Diego Donoso, president of Dow Japan and Korea, a unit of Midland-based Dow Chemical.

The dynamic economies of Asia at the moment — China, Singapore, South Korea — are “all tremendously focused on where they are and where they want to go, and their governments are all tremendously focused” on massive support of leadership in key technologies, Donoso said.

Winners in the global economy, by his reckoning, will be those companies and hands-on government units that collaborate intensively to implement key technologies in ways that are deemed to benefit their societies.

What we’ve witnessed in Japan, and seem to be seeing in the U.S. today, are endless rounds of federal monetary tinkering that are insufficient to re-ignite economic growth. Yet among free market purists and their powerful lobbies, there is an entrenched aversion to overt industrial policy that would choose winner and loser industries or — heaven forbid — decree that the manufacturing sector must be maintained at a certain scale for the national good.

Which leaves the rich nations of the U.S., Japan and Western Europe sort of sitting on the sidelines, watching the aggressive growth strategies of China, Singapore and Korea — and wondering whether they will fizzle or leave us in their dust.

Gobble gobble

Fugly is a conservative description 

Really

Economic growth remained unchanged from last q posting +0.9%

Education seems to be his message.

Full article

Perhaps premature to judge, but some results are in; the question is what are longer term implications ?

Full article

Damn…telling it like it is hurts Jim. Where are the kid gloves ?

Really