I've made it already, and it's one I can -- and will -- keep.
by Noni Mausa
For me, salmon and tuna have always been at opposite ends of my food spectrum -- cheap staple versus delicacy.
I'm a boomer, and I am sure I'm not alone in having a mother who used tuna as a tasty way to feed seven or more of us on a budget. Make a cream sauce, open 3 cans of tuna and a tin of green peas, and pour it over toast -- that was the comfort food of my childhood and adulthood too.
And heaped up tuna sandwiches with mayonnaise and little chopped gherkins ... pasta salad with cheese, peas and more gherkins ... tuna casserole with onion rings on top ... well, you can tell I grew up in Minnesota.
I miss them already, and it's only been a few weeks.
At my parent's table tuna was the rule, not the exception. We must have eaten a school of tunas in my school years. Oh, tinned salmon showed up now and then also, but I never got to know the delights of broiled salmon till I grew up.
But this autumn I decided I couldn't have either of them anymore.
Eating a tuna isn't like eating a cow. Cows are grazing animals, but tuna, silvery streamlined and one of the fastest fish in the sea, is a peak predator. Eating tuna is like eating cheetahs -- yummy, endangered carnivores, in cream sauce.
At the other end of my delicacy spectrum we have the beautiful wild ocean relative of the trout, the salmon. The wild ones, as are tuna, are endangered.
But I can't eat the farmed salmon either -- it's now certain they act as a reservoir for disease and parasites for the wild ones, and there are other problems too numerous to detail here.
So earlier this autumn I had my last tin of tuna (creamed with a sprinkle of curry powder - very un-Minnesotan) and my last tin of salmon (can't remember what I did with that.) There is a single salmon steak still in the freezer. Then that's it. Those last two tins hang from my cedar tree now, clinking gently in the wind, to remind me. But so far I haven't been tempted at all.
Maybe someone else will eat the last tuna, or the last salmon. But it won't be me.
Tyler Cowen can count:
In sum, maybe three percent expected inflation conflicts with the desire to rapidly recapitalize banks through maintaining a wide interest rate spread. Maybe we need that zero nominal short rate or at least the Fed thinks we do....
I also regard this as a somewhat gruesome hypothesis. It means that "Main Street" is paying for "Wall Street" (forgive me the use of those awful terms) in at least two ways: high unemployment and inability to earn much on one's savings....
The term structure also implies that the market is expecting rising short rates, so if the bank mess isn't cleaned up soon, heaven forbid. The spread, as a means of restoring bank profitability, won't last forever.
And Ryan Avent (via Brad DeLong) points out the next piece of that puzzle:
[T]he Fed's commitment to undo its interventions is already having an effect. In expectation of more of these moves to come (as well as, perhaps, increases in interest rates) markets have been bidding up the dollar, which has busily appreciated during the month of December. That, in turn, will deprive the American economy of a potential source of demand—growth in consumption of American exports thanks to the effect of a weak dollar.
More bluntly, we're seeing a move toward contractionary monetary policy at a time when unemployment is at 10%. Funny that.
I can't think of a scarier way to end the year. Sorry about that. Best wishes for 2010—we're all going to need them.
The BLS released its employment and labor force projections for the period 2008-2018. The report highlights a more diverse and slower growing labor force stemming from a falling labor-force participation rate. Some headline findings of the report are (bold font by yours truly):
Total employment is projected to increase by 15.3 million, or 10.1 percent, during the 2008-18 period, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. The projections show an aging and more racially and ethnically diverse labor force, and employment growth in service-providing industries.The last part is very interesting. According to Table 9 of the employment projections, the growth rates of jobs requiring an associate degree or higher are generally in the double digits. In order to work in a top 10 wage and salary growth industries, one must attain a higher degree.
...and...
Projected employment growth is concentrated in the service-providing sector, continuing a long-term shift from the goods-producing sector of the economy. From 2008 to 2018, service-providing industries are projected to add 14.6 million jobs, or 96 percent of the increase in total employment. The 2 industry sectors expected to have the largest employment growth are professional and business services (4.2 million) and health care and social assistance (4.0 million).
...and...
The largest decline among the detailed industries is expected to be in department stores, with a loss of 159,000 jobs, followed by manufacturers of semiconductors (-146,000) and motor vehicle parts (-101,000).
...and more...
Occupations that usually require a postsecondary degree or award are expected to account for nearly half of all new jobs from 2008 to 2018 and one-third of total job openings. Among the education and training categories, the fastest growth will occur in occupations requiring an associate degree.
That little fact explains the projected trend in labor-force participation among those aged 16-24 years: down.
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