[quote=xilman;212030][strike]Pretty near[/strike] fully booked already.

Czech airspace is closed at least as far as PRG. BRQ can't be far behind.
Paul[/quote]Ryanair flights from STN are cancelled until at least 1300BST Monday. I've cancelled my trip, at least in part because the likelihood of my getting home again without delays is not particularly good.


Paul

My wife and I were scheduled to fly London to Prague Saturday for a business conference next week. Not only were the flights canceled - the whole conference was canceled.

Friends in England from the states were scheduled to fly home Friday. And then Saturday. Now Tuesday. They've returned to family in the West Country to wait it out.

Latest news indicates airlines are starting to examine low altitude flights.

William

Iceland
 

For a small supermarket chain, it sure is punching above
its weight, both economicly and geophysicly.

I can't afford a passport, and if I voted, it would be green.

If God had intended us to fly.....

Best Wishes,
David

[quote=Fusion_power;212150]What you will find is fits and starts with some markets improving and many declining. The key is that people are still losing jobs at a rate greater than the number of new jobs being created. This is the major economic weakness that is holding inflation at bay.[/quote]Is this not typical of all economic bottoms -- that unemployment is a lagging indicator?

The usual explanation I've read is that as business starts to improve, but it's not yet clear that a recession has ended (from the POV of a particular business sector), businesses will tend to increase productivity first by having current employees work longer hours or by hiring temps. Only when management feels confident of future improvement will the business hire (or call back) permanent employees. Is there any indication that's no longer true now?

[quote]This is the crucial issue that politicians must address if they want to stay in office. This is the concern that is crippling our economy, not for the big banks and lenders, but for the average Joe on the street. The surgery was a success, unfortunately, the patient died.[/quote]How about, "the surgery seems to have been a success, but it'll take a while for indicators to confirm that recovery is proceeding normally"?

Not that many voters have much patience and understanding for this, though.

Fusion_power, if you read my comments as ignoring the issue of structurally high unemployment for the foreseeable future, that was probably sarcastically meant - I am keenly aware of the economic impacts of the huge numbers of unemployed. And I am dubious about the applicability of the old "unemployment is a lagging indicator" bromide.

[QUOTE=cheesehead;212270]Is this not typical of all economic bottoms -- that unemployment is a lagging indicator?[/QUOTE]

The problem is that the "lag" seems to be getting worse from one recession to the next ... the last 2 recessions involved so-called "jobless recoveries", and this one is shaping up to involve a "job loss recovery", i.e. many of the jobs lost - especially the higher-paying blue-collar manufacturing ones - are never coming back.

This all fits very well with my observation that over the last several decades, what has happened in the U.S. is the creation of a "hollow economy" - instead of having a broad base of jobs with a solid middle-class productive-jobs component in the center of the wage-distribution graph, we have an ever-increasing bipolarization at the extremes: At the high end we find (in roughly ascending wage order) government, public-safety and high-tech/engineering jobs, skilled professionals (e.g. doctors, architects, attorneys) and FIRE-economy (finance, insurance, real estate) jobs. at the low end we find unskilled services jobs, ranging from burger-flippers and Wal-Mart cashiers to e.g. dental assistants.

Now think about those two poles ... the only jobs categories in there that actually *produce* anything are the high-tech/engineering ones. No disrespect to doctors and dental hygienists, but in a macroeconomic sense they are also service-sector professions, which must be counterbalanced by genuinely productive jobs in order to have a sustainable economic model. The once-vast productive middle - the domestic auto and manufacturing industry jobs - has been gutted, and each successive "recovery" has shown the productive middle getting sparser. The only productive-middle sector which was growing in the past decade was the part related to housing and commercial-real-estate construction, and most of that growth was strictly due to the RE bubble, so now that sector has been eviscerated, as well.

Now, it is true that the blame for the gutting of the middle class is not solely with greedy CEOs and globalization-obsessed bankers and politicians ... to no small extent, American unions have priced themselves out of the competitive running. As with so many aspects of the decline of American prosperity, there is plenty of blame to go around.

So returning to the "unemployment is a lagging indicator" issue - to quote one pundit I respect: "Not this time, it isn't".

[quote=ewmayer;212462]The problem is that the "lag" seems to be getting worse from one recession to the next ... the last 2 recessions involved so-called "jobless recoveries", and this one is shaping up to involve a "job loss recovery",

< snip >

So returning to the "unemployment is a lagging indicator" issue - to quote one pundit I respect: "Not this time, it isn't".[/quote]I think both that pundit and you are conflating two phenomena - the unemployment lag during recovery, and the more monotonic loss of jobs because ongoing (not just during recessions) changes in society/industry render some jobs obsolete. I don't see you suggesting that the ordinary explanation of factors producing the lag during recovery has changed.

It is possible, after all, for there to be at least two independent phenomena at work: a long-term monotonic trend, and a cyclic reaction in the business cycle. Acknowledging them separately is more work, but also more accurate.

Wallstreetcheatsheet.com has a nice little infographic about sovereign-default risk trends:

[url=http://wallstcheatsheet.com/trading/chart-junkie-country-deficits-vs-gdp/?p=6235/]Chart Junkie: Country Deficits vs. GDP[/url]


UK PM Gordon Brown gets regularly ragged on by me for embracing Ponzi economics like so many other leaders, but he does know the smell of blood in the water:

[url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8628231.stm]BBC | Goldman Sachs: Brown attacks firm's 'moral bankruptcy[/url]: [i]Gordon Brown has called for a "special investigation" into Goldman Sachs after reports that the bank is to pay £3.5bn in bonuses.[/i]
[quote][Brown`s] criticism follows allegations by the Securities and Exchange Commission in US that Goldman defrauded investors during the sub-prime housing crisis.

Goldman strongly rejected the claims as wrong "in fact and law".

Mr Brown said that the UK Financial Services Authority should launch an immediate inquiry in co-operation with the US regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

The Sunday Times reported that the bank was set to pay out £3.5bn in bonuses to its staff worldwide - including almost £600m to 5,500 London-based employees - for just three months work.

On Friday, the SEC issued civil charges against Goldman that it failed to disclose conflicts of interest during the marketing of sub-prime mortgages in which investors lost $1bn.

Mr Brown said that the issue underlined the need for further reform of the international banking system. "I am shocked at this moral bankruptcy. This is probably one of the worst cases that we have seen," he said. [/quote]
[i]My Comment:[/i] I`d like request that the moral bankruptcy be supplemented with a literal one, and generous jail terms for the top SquidMen all around. A veritable "Sea of red [squid] ink", as it were, leaving the psychopathically greedy Squidsters bemoaning their "calami-tous" fate.

[QUOTE=cheesehead;212471]I think both that pundit and you are conflating two phenomena - the unemployment lag during recovery, and the more monotonic loss of jobs because ongoing (not just during recessions) changes in society/industry render some jobs obsolete.[/QUOTE]Those jobs disappearing in the USA are not obsolete at all : they are just moved to places where there is no environmental regulation, no work regulation, no freedom to organise, no social security. Why pay somebody decent wages if you can have others work more than twice the hours for 50 USD a month ?

A recent trend is factories closing in western Europe and the employees are offered by the management to move along with the production to eastern Europe for wages of about 600 USD a month. Others have been offered to go to southern Asia for even lower wages.

Of course it is all the fault of the unions : people in the USA should accept a wage that is floating according to the market. The all and self regulating market is the solution to everything.

Jacob

[quote=S485122;212522]Of course it is all the fault of the unions : people in the USA should accept a wage that is floating according to the market. The all and self regulating market is the solution to everything.[/quote]Careful! Many in North America don't do irony.

Paul

[QUOTE=xilman;212533]Careful! Many in North America don't do irony.

Paul[/QUOTE]I thought my sentence was just heavily sarcastic. I must still learn the subtleties* of the English language :-(

Jacob

* Had to do some searches to spell it right : I wanted to write "subtilities".

Just another great Tom Toles cartoon...

Norm