ot: Who got a raise?

Yeah. You'd wonder what in the hell you'd gotten yourself into.

19 of those were people promoted into a new position.

But don't let facts get in the way...

================= Just came across an article on this topic.

One of my brothers got his MBA on that campus. CSC footed the bill.

When I was in school there was never any need to analuse this sort of transaction to see if it made financial sense. What have we come too.

My girl friend has three daughters. Two are still in school - or want to go to school.

But college loans are dumber than a 30 year mortgage.

We hear about it a lot.

You are right on..

==============

I wrote this in 1999, and things are much worse (i.e. lower ROI) today. Needless to say this did not get published in any of the post-secondary education journals and several members of my dissertation committee about choked when the read it.

Geeze, George. Makes you wonder why any of today's youngsters even bother. They must love their work. A LOT! LOL

================ While not up to the vampire squid Goldman article, if you find this tread of interest, this is a good read.

the SEC Covering Up Wall Street Crimes? A whistle-blower claims that over the past two decades, the agency has destroyed records of thousands of investigations, whitewashing the files of some of the nation's worst financial criminals.

At This Camp for Girls, Crafts Definitely Require a Drill Press By MOTOKO RICH RIVER GROVE, Ill. - Forget tie-dyed shirts, lanyards and water games. At summer camp this year, Nautika Kotero, 13, learned to use a drill press, solder electrical wires and build a lamp.

Though the slim, 5-foot-5 teenager dreams of becoming a basketball star, Nautika now has a backup plan after her weeklong immersion course: a career in manufacturing.

Just over a quarter of the 11.7 million workers in manufacturing are women. But Gadget Camp, a workshop for girls in this suburb west of Chicago, is part of an effort to change that.

Although the economy is wobbling and nearly 14 million people are looking for work, some employers are still having a hard time finding skilled workers for certain positions. Manufacturers in particular complain that few applicants can operate computerized equipment, read blueprints and solve production problems. And with the baby boomers starting to retire, these and other employers worry there will be few young workers willing or able to replace them.

Gadget Camp, sponsored in part by a foundation affiliated with the Fabricators and Manufacturers Association, which provided financing to nine other camps this summer, is intended to help over the long haul by exposing girls to an occupation they might previously have considered unappealing, if they considered it at all.

By the last day of camp, Nautika had told her parents that manufacturing was "cool." Fashioning a lamp shade out of a thin piece of cardboard, she mused, "I have two good careers ahead of me." Since the fragile recovery began, manufacturing is one of the few sectors that have added jobs. But the image of manufacturing as an occupation of the future has been tarnished by the exodus of factory jobs to foreign sites and the use of machinery to replace workers. Younger people, especially, see more alluring opportunities in digital technology, finance or health care.

"The perception is that there are no jobs in manufacturing," said Susan H. Palisano, director of education and training at the Connecticut Center for Advanced Technology, a nonprofit group in East Hartford that promotes manufacturing employment and has run summer programs for middle-school students for the last three years. "It seems that everybody had an uncle or grandfather that got laid off."

Across the country, a handful of companies, nonprofit groups, public educational agencies and even science museums are trying to make manufacturing seem, well, fun. Focusing mainly on children aged 10 to 17, organizations including the Da Vinci Science Center in Allentown, Pa.; and Stihl, a maker of chain saws and other outdoor power equipment in Virginia Beach, Va., run camps that let students operate basic machinery, meet workers and make things.

Nuts, Bolts & Thingamajigs, the foundation that helped sponsor the Gadget camp in River Grove, has awarded $2,500 grants to 112 manufacturing-themed camps - most of them for boys and girls - around the country since 2004. "It's not easy getting people into the career field," said Marcia Arndt, a board member of the foundation. "I think there's a myth out there that manufacturing is dirty and undesirable, but it's really highly technological."

Impressions also persist that manufacturing is a man's job. Technical fields in general, and those that require scientific or mathematical backgrounds, are indeed dominated by men. Yet a Commerce Department report released early this month showed that women in such fields earn 33 percent more, on average, than women working outside of scientific and technical fields, a higher premium than men enjoy in similar occupations.

Antigone Sharris, who came up with the idea for the all-girls Gadget camp, had worked extensively in manufacturing before becoming an instructor in electronics, welding and computer-aided machinery at Triton College, a two-year public school here that provided some funding for the camp.

Ms. Sharris is a mentor to high school robotics teams and wants to encourage young women to consider a range of technically oriented careers. "Girls don't naturally gravitate toward engineering," said Ms. Sharris, a jolly and patient instructor who interspersed practical tips on using a band saw or a drill press with casual explanations of fractions, the concept of leverage and Newton's laws.

In a windowless classroom and shop on Triton's scruffy campus, 16 girls aged

11 to 15 designed and constructed a cat feeder, a candy dispenser and various pieces of jewelry and music boxes, using foam board, wood, metal, fiberglass and PVC pipe.

"Not letting your children learn the hands-on component of the theory of science is killing us as a nation," Ms. Sharris said. "You have to stop giving kids books and start giving them tools."

To give the girls a concrete sense of what such skills could mean in the workplace, Ms. Sharris invited a human resources coordinator from a local manufacturer to tell them about salaries - starting in the $40,000 range and moving up to six digits, including overtime.

Several of the campers came from low-income and minority communities near the college. Only five of the 16 girls at the camp had paid the $99 fee; the rest were subsidized.

While Ms. Sharris focused mostly on basic technical skills, factory tours aimed at introducing the girls to modern manufacturing work brought out talk that might have fit at a nationalist rally.

During a tour of Tru-Way, which produces precision metal parts, Stan Mastalerz, the company's president, showed the girls a tiny component used in electronic circuit boards.

Ms. Sharris jumped in. "See that?" she asked. "This is something that might be in your Game Boy that you don't even know about. The game may be made in China, but there are pieces that are made right here in your backyard."

The reality of factory life gave a few girls pause. Visiting Tru-Way on a scorching summer afternoon, they noted the extreme heat and noise of the shop floor.

Brittany Orr, 15, who asked questions and jotted notes, said she liked the tasks that involved some thought and analysis. But "I would not want to do a job where you just do the same thing again," she said. "It seems tedious."

A tour of MSi Testing & Engineering, a small company in Melrose Park, Ill., that evaluates the strength and quality of metal materials used by manufacturers, showed that it offered more of the work she preferred.

In the end, the campers learned lessons in persistence and problem-solving as well as technical skills. When Nautika began building the lamp she had designed, she wanted to install a rotating shade.

Ms. Sharris brought out a tiny motor. "What you are trying to figure out is what to use to make your lampshade so that it will spin," she said.

Ms. Sharris rejected Nautika's first suggestion of foam board: too heavy. Ms. Sharris recommended a simple piece of copier paper, then spied a paper plate on a table. "Humor me," she said, showing Nautika how to affix the motor to the plate with generous daubs from a glue gun.

Next came wiring a battery. To tutor Nautika in basic electronics, Ms. Sharris recruited Ariana Vargas, a 17-year-old counselor who has competed on her robotics team. Ariana demonstrated how to strip the green coating from the electrical wires with pliers. On Nautika's first try, the whole tip broke off.

A few fumbles later, Nautika was frustrated. "I don't know how you did it!" she said.

Ariana replied, "Practice, practice and more practice."

Finally, the coating came off, exposing bare wire. Her confidence building, Nautika stripped another wire and slid both ends through a PVC pipe and connected them to the battery.

The plate began to spin.

"Yea!" Nautika exclaimed. "I did it."

Is the SEC Covering Up Wall Street Crimes?

That's a very curious story. It will be interesting to see what (if anything?) comes of it...

Ed disses me for quoting from Mother Jones, but that's where the story is, so...

I think it's obvious that there are lots of openings to criticize both Texas' economic performance and Rick Perry's role in it. For one thing, the Texas virtues that Perry likes to emphasize are actually common to lots of low-tax, low-service states in the Sun Belt and the South. As Ed Kilgore says, "Eventually, someone will draw attention to the fact that if Perry?s low-tax, low-services, corporate-subsidizing policies really were an economic cure-all, similar conditions should have made states like Alabama and Mississippi world-beating dynamos years ago." This is going to make it hard for Perry to make a convincing case that taxes and regulation and general business friendliness are really behind his state's performance. What's more, there are lots of obvious chinks in the Texas armor: its poor rate of health care coverage, its high poverty rate, its weak educational system, and so forth.

And yet?jobs! It's still the case that Texas has created lots and lots of jobs and has attracted a huge influx of new residents thanks to those jobs. No one's putting a gun to their heads and forcing them to move to Houston, after all. No matter how many hits Perry takes over his simplistic explanations, and no matter how many sophisticated arguments his opponents make about the emperor's lack of clothes, it's still the case that Texas has created lots of jobs. All Perry has to do is repeat that until his face turns red while tossing out some folksy mockery of the eggheads and bureaucrats and their ivory-tower Harvard counterarguments. After all, who are you going to believe, all those East Coast twerps who have never run a company in their lives, or your own eyes?

This is going to be a tough row to hoe for Perry's detractors. It's worth going after it, but in the end, Texas' record on jobs is good enough and real enough that Perry will probably be able to brush off most of the criticism. The Texas Miracle is going to be one of his strongest calling cards.

His weakness for Texas-style crony capitalism, however, might be a real problem. I suspect we're going to be hearing a lot more about that as the oppo teams start to seriously gear up.

CNN) - Former Treasury official Bruce Bartlett labeled newly-minted Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry "an idiot" Friday. Bartlett, who served at Treasury under former President George H.W. Bush and as a domestic policy adviser to the late President Ronald Reagan, delivered the choice words to the Texas Gov. in reference to his recent comments about Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.

"Rick Perry's an idiot, and I don't think anyone would disagree with that," Bartlett said Friday on CNN's "American Morning."

Bartlett's 2006 book "Imposter: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy" accused the administration of departing from conservative economic principles. More recently he attributed the economic recession to the former president and Republican Party.

Team Perry did not immediately respond for a request for comment.

================ And this just in -- where your money went

By 2008, the housing market?s collapse forced those companies to take more than six times as much, $669 billion, in emergency loans from the U.S. Federal Reserve. The loans dwarfed the $160 billion in public bailouts the top 10 got from the U.S. Treasury, yet until now the full amounts have remained secret.

Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke?s unprecedented effort to keep the economy from plunging into depression included lending banks and other companies as much as $1.2 trillion of public money, about the same amount U.S. homeowners currently owe on 6.5 million delinquent and foreclosed mortgages. The largest borrower, Morgan Stanley (MS), got as much as $107.3 billion, while Citigroup took $99.5 billion and Bank of America $91.4 billion, according to a Bloomberg News compilation of data obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, months of litigation and an act of Congress.

Yeah well, who are we that we should even know about any such thing?

Taxpayers of America - Pay Up!

==============

This looks a good a spot as any to post this.

Now we know where the tipping point lies. Debt becomes poisonous once it reaches 80pc to 100pc of GDP for governments, 90pc of GDP for companies, and 85pc of GDP for households. From then on, extra debt chokes growth.

The paper on which this is based:

FWIW -- bis = Bank For International Settlements, operationally *THE* central bank for the central banks...

{abstract}

{full paper}

The federal debt was 122% of GDP in 1946 Did debt choke growth in the years that followed? Was the debt poisonous?

================ Yes, but it was rapidly paid down.

Another component is the private debt, i.e. corporate + individual. In 1946 this was very low, and because of rationing and war bond drives considerable individual savings had been accumulated.

What's different at this point is that not only is the Federal governmental debt now at or beyond the "tipping point," but so are the other levels of government, i.e. state/local, and private debt, corporate + financial + individual is far beyond the "tipping point." The synergism of simultaneously having all categories of debt at or beyond the "tipping point" is unknown but is almost certain to be far more than simply lineal/additive.

Total corporate debt in a JPMorgan corporate debt index rose

3 percent, or $60 billion, to $2.4 trillion in the three months ended March 31 from the final quarter of 2010. Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization costs increased 6 percent, or $21 billion, during the same period.

As of 2010, total individual debt in the United States is up to $2.46 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve.

The Fed reports that, as of the third quarter of 2010, $2.39 trillion of state and local government debt was outstanding. Of this total, long-term debt composed

94.6%.15 The Census reports that for FY2008, the latest year available, total state and local government outstanding debt was $2.55 trillion ($1 trillion in state debt and $1.55 trillion in local debt).16 The Census further reports that in FY2008 state long-term debt was 98.6% of state total outstanding debt and local long-term debt was 98.0% of local total outstanding debt.

"F. George McDuffee" wrote:

No it was not paid down. Ten years later the debt was even larger. And it has continued to grow. But the economy also grew. which puts a big hole in your theory that the public debt crippled or poisoned the economy.

That is right. In the 30's the private sector was bogged down in debt just like it is today It is the private sector debt that then and now caused =

low aggregate demand and that produce high unemployment. It is sales that put people to work and it is the lack of sales due to private sector saving that has put people out of work

And it has been the government overspending that countered the =

private sector under-spending that allowed the economy to survive

Nonsense, you have a short attention span. The federal debt is not at a tipping point It was much higher back in 1946 and nothing tipped over.

The private sector is already past the tipping point The private sector debt tipped over 3 years ago and that in a nutshell is the problem. This is private sector debt:

Back at the beginning of the great depression private debt was =

230% of GDP =

Then it took 15 years of deleveraging before the private sector had saved enough to be able to confidently invest, =

borrow and spend and make the economy grow The deleveraging ended just as abruptly as it started =

This time the private sector started at 300% of GDP There is a long long long ways down from there =

How long will it take this time for the private sector to delever? Extrapolating from the graph above it looks like at least =

another 10 years And when the private sector is saving where does the money go? =

Well we know the money doesn't go to buy the goods and =

services that keep people employed. But where does the savings go? =

In 1939 Robert Heinlein had a pretty good incite into the relationship of depressions and savings and the public debt:

********************************************************************* Excerpt from From Us, The living by Robert A. Heinlein..

=93We discussed before the cause of economic depressions and I asked you to take on faith the idea that the only thing that caused depressions was a financial system that automatically caused a spread between goods to be bought and money to buy them, or =91over-production=92 as it was euphemistically called. I=92m not going into the mathematical theory even=

now.

You can take it up later with an economist or in several books I can recommend. But President Holmes was one of the few men to occupy the White House who had sufficient insight and mathematical ability to see the trouble, the reasons behind it, and to devise a cure. He had a powerful weapon to work with, the Bank of the United States, and he had the free intellect necessary to do what needed to be done without clouding the issue with a lot of moralistic tape. In fact he helped to formulate a realistic social ethic that justified his new departure. To begin with he saw the =91over-production=92 or, as he looked at it, under-consumptio= n or shortage of purchasing power. He directed a staff of actuaries to supply him with approximate figures showing the percentage of under-consumption and its dollar value for the past year. Then he undertook to make up the missing purchasing power by literally giving away through the Bank of the United States the necessary amount of money. He was aware that to do so without some control over prices would result in inflated prices and a new spread between production and consumption. So he held back about half of the newly created purchasing power and used it to control prices in the following manner: All of the retailers of consumption goods in the country were invited to join in the New Economic Cycle. If a dealer joined he agreed not to raise his prices over what they were when the new regime started. On the contrary he was to sell all his goods at a ten per cent discount, and the Bank of the United States would hand him the difference on presentation of his sales records. Then Holmes proceeded to give away through the Bank twenty-five dollars per month to anybody who would take it. Naturally business boomed. Prices didn=92t go up because all of the business went to the merchants who had joined the agreement. Presently all the other merchants joined, too, in order to get in on the rush of business. Factories re-opened, labor was needed and unemployment disappeared like snow in July. The country hummed. And that is a thumbnail sketch of the present situation, Perry. No unemployment, plenty of well paid work for anybody that wants a job, and enough credit issued every month to anybody that wants it to keep body and soul together in decency.=94 . Perry looked bewildered. =93Wait a minute. It looks fine at first glance, but where did he get the money? Not from taxes, surely,with the country already broke. And not from the private bankers, They were ruined in the war.=94*

Cathcart grinned. =93He got the cash money the same way we have gotten all cash money since Roosevelt put the gold back in the ground-right off the printing presses. But he didn=92t have to print much of it. The checks were issued at the Bank and the merchant and a great many others had accounts at the Bank and very little cash money changed hands. The bulk of it was mere bookkeeping entries, made by the bank clerks. Holmes had implemented what the bankers had known for centuries but were barred by LaGuardia from doing-taking money out of an inkwell. What=92s the matter, son? Still not satisfied?=94 =93Well, I don=92t know. Everything you have said seems okay, but how about this? If you keep pouring money into a country indefinitely, you are bound to get inflation, fixed prices or no fixed prices.=94

=93You don=92t pour it in. You add just enough to keep it running. Each fiscal period the additional amount is the closest possible approximation of the amount necessary to prevent a spread between consumption and production, based on the value of the nation=92s inventories.=94 =93But why do you have to keep adding money all the time?=94 =93I said I would stay away from theory but I=92ll give you this hint to chew over: the amount necessary to add each period is theoretically equal to the amount of savings invested as capital in the preceding period. And one more hint: Doesn=92t it take more money to run the country=92s industry now than it did when George Washington was President?