I’d like someone to explain to me what is going on with the economy and what is going to happen and how it might affect me. I’m a 30 year old single male with a steady job as an engineer for a defense contractor.
It seems like asking this question these days is like asking people the meaning of life. Everyone has their own spin on it and there aren’t any consolidation of ideas to come up with a coherent picture.
Generally, the outlook for engineers is good. As you doubtless know.
It depends upon your circumstances.
Some states have high unemployment, some do not. You can look this up.
It sucks if you’re selling your home - it’s not so bad if you’re buying. You need 20% down in most cases, but that won’t last forever. Ten percent as standard is not that far away - a year or two. Donald Trump was on TV the other night saying that, despite what is commonly thought, you can talk a bank into selling you a foreclosed property with very little down, if you can truly afford the payments, which makes sense.
College-educated white people should be able to get a job, and inflation is under control for the moment - that doesn’t figure to last, but it will only bring interest rates down a bit more.
Contribute as much as you can to your 401(k) - stocks are cheap. A Dow index isn’t a bad idea.
If things get bad, look me up. I’ll give you a job as a waiter. We’re currently hiring, as business is growing.
No lie.
The economy is the same as it has always been, a free for all. And public opinion is a free for all too.
If we understood everything, we probably wouldn’t be so barbaric, but perhaps we would be more barbaric… anyway…
It’s all about perception. If teh news papers say america is doing good, then it does do good, if it says things are going down the drain, then they will.
The narrow mindedness of America is ridiculous. If you’ve ever entered a mainstream american political arena you are likely to vomit just by observing the beliefs of others.
You got your bible thumpers, your neo-conservative echo chambers, your racists . there are those who worship poltical icons like limbaugh, palin, steele, and bush. One thing that makes me want to vomit is teh fact that bush failed so miserably and scarred the U.S with tyranny and muder to a ridiculous extent, yet these right wing nut jobs suddenly come out of the closet to pontificate against Obama like he’s the source.
They blame Obama for the state of the economy, and in all honesty it makes me want to stab them. Just shank them real quick, not fatally, but enough to put some fear in them.
Then you have Obama himself, who i despise for being just another front running puppet and image designed to passify the population. They call him left, and call him socialist. In all fairness most “socialists” i know who have recently taken to the term and support obama are nothing but fad chasing morons who are wrapped up in the messiah like qualities of the first black president in a now post racial society.
The left and the right are just one part of the giant free for all which creates the chaos used by those in power to confuse, misinform, and distract teh population from how governments have actually been operating… Which is not unlike the roman empire…
(sorry for that rant)
Has all you need on one simple video 
Large banks were making bogus claims that they had a lot of wealth. When their poverty was exposed, everybody lost confidence in the banks. Bankers, recognizing were holding a poor hand, stopped lending. People generally stopped buying and selling as much. Hence the recession.
I think a 30-year-old with a good education and marketable skills shouldn’t worry too much. Even if you lose a job now, even if you have little savings, you’ve still got another 25-30 years to generate income and grow a nest egg. Unless you’re an entreprenurial sort, which is a whole different ball game, then I think it’s also important to consider the non-salary benefits that employers offer, like health care and retirement plan, because this can make a significant difference in your overall economic health (not to mention personal health!) over the years. You’re luckier than some of us who are older and therefore have less time to make up for the recent losses we suffered (okay, okay, the end of our ability to pretend we actually possessed that wealth, lol). But there are general principles about how to invest, like high risk for larger return is good when you’re young, less risk when you’re closing in on retirement. And balance in the middle. All of that has to be assessed in terms of the quality of life you want, too. Do you want to travel, own a nice home (or two), send your kids to private schools, etc.? Then you’ll have to consider the level of income necessary to acquire those things when the time comes. And ALWAYS steer clear of credit card debt. I consider that advice as in the same league as advising kids of the hazards of smoking: you do it now and you’ll suffer for it later. And consumer credit’s even a worse scam now than it was when I learned the hard way in my early 20’s, lol.
These are interesting times, certainly unlike any I’ve lived through. I don’t expect to see the end of free enterprise, but hopefully we’ll see the needed long-term controls return once the short-term crisis stimulus measures are finished (and if they work). I’m still contributing to my 401K, but I squirm sometimes at doing it --so I just don’t let myself think about it too much – because my impulse is to take the money and just buy gold and hoard it somewhere, although christ knows where. We have enough wingnuts on this forum and in the real world, I just refuse to venture down such a nutty path. And…while I think most people are generally superficial and not much inclined toward either self-reflection or the grander inquiries, I do think that there’s enough of a chunk of the population left who believe in the timeless principles of hard work and self-restraint in order to gain economic benefit and security over the long term. If not, meaning if the middle class is really coming to an end, then we’re all screwed anyway. Even the wingnuts. Well, except for the rich ones…but they aren’t really wingnuts, anyway, just opportunists who enrich themselves by spouting the rhetoric.
ONE HUMONGOUS HALF-TRUTH. (And I had to reboot my computer it locked up when it ended.)
I’d post the other half of the Truth, but my fingers are worn to then nub typing it umptijillion times already, and the ones that want to understand already do–on both sides.
Global investment advisor and CNBC economics commentator, Barton Biggs, said: “It’s 50-50. A 50% chance it goes good and 30% chance we’re in the doldrums like Japan for nine to 12 years, and 20% chance it’s catastrophe.”
i hear people tend to eat more when the economy is crappy, sort of a reaction against their being depressed or feeling out of control or something. 
Thanks, Faust. I should be okay with my job now.
I hadn’t thought of funding my 401k. I pulled out of the market last year but it might be a good time to move back in.
I like Obama. I felt really uncomfortable when Bush was president. It felt to me like the world was going crazy with wearing american flags, boasting about patriotism, and scaring the Muslims by wire tapping their phones.
Do you feel safer now?
That was their intention. Bush was a wack job and a complacent media was doing a poor job of keeping the public quiet. so naturally Obama steps in to apologize.
Pretend you’re a PR specialist.
I was afraid of what Bush was promoting…
I mean Dick Cheney had seemed to make it his life mission to legitimize brutality and consolidating power. It seemed like whenever I turned on the TV DIck Cheney was on there trying to tell me why torturing is good, why the president having more power is good. What kind of man dedicates so much time of his life to promoting these values? He has a black heart.
Black hearts are alright if they’re on your team, but he wasn’t and it was scary.
I read a book by George Soros, and it’s kind of enlightening. What I understand is that he thinks this crisis is much worse than the earlier ones, after the 1980’s. The Reagan years created a super-bubble that lasted until now. Hence this is a super-bust.
yep. bend over and open your wallet, because youre getting f*ed up the a by washington, and its only gonna get worse.
better learn to enjoy it, because theres still over 3 1/2 years to go. 
ill agree with Imp here, i see dead liberals…
Nobody will ever know what the hell is going on with the economy.
Both the good guys and the bad guys know. The bad guys hide it and the good guys can’t be heard.
They don’t know they produce educated guesses that are limited myopic views, bits and pieces of the total understanding of the totality of the entire system which may end up not being true based on further review. Economics is an impossible science as are all social sciences.
An overly simplified answer:
The federal reserve system is the problem. You have bankers that are playing both sides of the aisle so they can continue their banking cartel. They (the bankers) don’t care who is in office as long as the country keeps spending lots of money. The federal reserve banks loan money to the government and the government levies taxes on the citizens to pay interest on the loans. I hate to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but if you want to learn more you should read the amazon.com/Creature-Jekyll-I … 0912986212
Apparently there’s a second financial crisis possible.
AIG crisis could be tip of an insurance iceberg
latimes.com/news/nationworld … 7696.story
Bleh.