I was a member of this forum in 2003/2004

[seenmostofit]

Actually it is partly about salary. Folks lucky enough to get another job now almost always make less than they did before this jobless recovery-----US median incomes are down by about 8% since 2007 while net inflation is over 12% for the same time period, resulting in a ca. 20% loss of purchasing power for Americans.

Again, this isn't really unexpected in a post recessionary period is it? There was a bubble, as with all bubbles (be it real estate or the current level of activity drilling wells in North Dakota) people are paid way more than they would for the same amount of work during a normal time.

So of course once the bubble deflates, predatory lender brokers are now forced to find honest jobs, and it turns out honest jobs don't pay as much as risking imprisonment by changing around the numbers on mortgage forms to entrap honest Americans wanting to participate in said bubble?

The high-paying jobs that obama promised to deliver in 2008 just haven't materialized---instead folks who lost their jobs are either mostly either still unemployed and in poverty (which remains at record high levels) or they are employed but are much poorer then they were prior to 2008---.

Obama is a politician, so you know he is lying when his lips are moving. No different than his predecessors. Certainly unemployment is still high, but in part that is okay because some of those people were only worth hiring during a bubble, and would otherwise have been unemployable at their bubble sized salaries anyway. Let's face it, a breathing body which could speak English could get a job during the bubble times, and a little reality intruding on America in terms of employability is a good thing, long term.

[Ferretlover]

What high-paying jobs did he promise? Got a direct quote on that?

I think Obama did a great job, creating high priced jobs. I wonder if the people get paid as much as the job actually cost the rest of us? Blogspot

[Keith_McClary]

So of course once the bubble deflates, predatory lender brokers are now forced to find honest jobs, and it turns out honest jobs don't pay as much as risking imprisonment by changing around the numbers on mortgage forms to entrap honest Americans wanting to participate in said bubble?

More likely they will find other scams, not quite as lucrative.

[Plantagenet]

Again, this isn't really unexpected in a post recessionary period is it?

Actually, it is. Most recessions are followed by a period of very rapid economic growth during which the economy recovers the ground it lost during the recession as it resumes "normal" growth. The recovery that started in mid-2009 is remarkably weak ---- so weak that jobs, wages, housing prices, etc. etc. still haven't recovered. It is the weakest recovery in 70 years
current recovery is unusually weak

[seenmostofit]

More likely they will find other scams, not quite as lucrative.

That would imply a very poor opinion of the mortgage broker predatory lender types. I'll bet most of them were in it for the money, didn't mind winking at the law when needed, and after having their own lifestyles shut down by the housing crash, are now some of those UNDERemployed people, at least in their minds. Mortgage brokering wasn't a scam for the honest folks, and really still isn't, but there are just a lot fewer of them, and the dishonest ones hopefully took more of a employment hit than the dishonest ones.

[seenmostofit]

The recovery that started in mid-2009 is remarkably weak ---- so weak that jobs, wages, housing prices, etc. etc. still haven't recovered. It is the weakest recovery in 70 years

I see. I suppose it is best just to note that "darn glad it wasn't a depression!" and move along. Some of those charts you provided are interesting, it looks as though all the "gains" of the past decade weren't, which would imply that nearly everything over that time span is bubble related, rather than honest gains. So Clinton started this bubble, George kept it going and it started to crash under him, and now Obama is making sure we don't face the issue squarely and certainly won't recover from it under his enlightened leadership.

[Plantagenet]

Clinton started this bubble, George kept it going and it started to crash under him, and now Obama is making sure we don't face the issue squarely and certainly won't recover from it under his enlightened leadership.

+1 Well said.

[davep]

Err, didn't Thatcher and Reagan start the whole bank deregulation thing?

[Plantagenet]

There is plenty of blame to go around, but the most important bank deregulation was the repeal of the Glass-Stegall act that had been in place since FDR's bank reforms during the Great Repression. Glass Stegall was repealed on Clinton's watch.

Glass-Steagall “repeal” and the financial crisis

Robert Kuttner, Joseph Stiglitz, Elizabeth Warren, Robert Weissman, and others have tied Glass-Steagall repeal to the late-2000s financial crisis. Kuttner acknowledged “de facto enroads” before Glass-Steagall “repeal” but argued the GLBA’s “repeal” had permitted “super-banks” to “re-enact the same kinds of structural conflicts of interest that were endemic in the 1920s”, which he characterized as “lending to speculators, packaging and securitizing credits and then selling them off, wholesale or retail, and extracting fees at every step along the way.”[6] Stiglitz argued “the most important consequence of Glass-Steagall repeal” was in changing the culture of commercial banking so that the “bigger risk” culture of investment banking “came out on top.”[7] He also argued the GLBA “created ever larger banks that were too big to be allowed to fail”, which “provided incentives for excessive risk taking.”[395] Warren explained Glass-Steagall had kept banks from doing “crazy things.” She credited FDIC insurance, the Glass-Steagall separation of investment banking, and SEC regulations as providing “50 years without a crisis” and argued that crises returned in the 1980s with the “pulling away of the threads” of regulation.[8] Weissman agrees with Stiglitz that the “most important effect” of Glass-Steagall “repeal” was to “change the culture of commercial banking to emulate Wall Street's high-risk speculative betting approach.”[396]


--Wikipedia

[Ferretlover]

JS is right... I was one of the original 100 on this site. Was on here for four years and left. Came back a long time ago could remember my password so I started using this account. The fact are simple, the world has finite amount of oil, and you all have an infinite amount of scaredy Text deleted

I recognize a few of you lazy text deleted worthless text deleted from back in my old days. Still attacking anyone who doesn't worship at the same ground you do. Every year releasing and claiming a new end of the world scenario, each year being proven wrong. You are no different than religious zealot doomsayers who each year claim Jebus is coming.

The fact is every year you are wrong with your predictions. Every year you will be wrong. The world will run out of oil, but I will be long dead before than happens. There is always going to be some big disaster over the horizon. Shut up live your text deleted lives and stop with this text deleted doomsday prophesy s***.

[Ferretlover]

2cher: Public suggestion: Don't take your fear out on the board's posters. If you are uncomfortable discussing this aspect of reality, pick another topic--or, another website.
Thank you for your interest in PeakOil.com.

[AirlinePilot]

2cher,

I'd suggest that the majority of us here are very concerned about PO. We are not fast crash doomers, nor do we make yearly predictions of catastrophe. Thats pure hyperbole and unsupported conjecture on your part. I will freely admit that at first I thought things might unfold on a faster time line, and agree that things are not at any dire level. Reality will be ugly enough. I'm more a "long emergency" type and plan accordingly.

That being said, I am also not blind to the changes we have lived through over the last several years. For me at this point in time, PO is alive and well. We are living through SERIOUS economic upheaval, despite cornucopian denial . Some of that is due to Peak oil. I can only look back over the last two to three years and say that everything which the more realistic PO advocates predicted is unfolding before our very eyes. If you cannot see this then I'd say your not looking very hard. Either that or you are in denial.

At this point i think this site provides a good place for folks who want to learn, understand, and come to some sort of consensus on solutions. Its a clearing house for gathering and sharing ideas. Focusing on the smaller minority of "doomers" here is once again a common mis-characterization of what goes on here.

[ralfy]

The bubble might have started earlier, i.e., following the debt chart presented in this article:

"Krugman and the pied pipers of debt"

http://blogs.reuters.com/rolfe-winkler/ ... s-of-debt/