Economy

Staples to close 225 stores.

Fed stock and housing bubbles push phony wealth to record level.

The US is in permanent recession.

"The idea of a general glut is that all markets for all goods are in surplus. And for some reason, prices are unable to fix the problem. Ricardo opposed Malthus, arguing that the concept of general glut violates sound economics and clear thinking. He argued this point using Say’s Law: because demand is constituted by supply, aggregate demand, meaning the demand for all goods on the market, consists exactly of all things supplied. Aggregate demand is not only equal to, but identical to, aggregate supply. The two can never be out of balance. And if a general glut is a logical impossibility, then it cannot be the cause of a recession.
The idea of aggregate supply and demand in getting out of balance has appeared many times in the history of economic thought. The same idea is either called overproduction or underconsumption, depending on whether the problem is too many goods or not enough purchasing power. Keynesian economics is a form of underconsumption theory. The overproduction/underconsumption theory has been debunked by sound economists, but like a zombie, it refuses to die."

That's because it empowers rulers to steal.

"Kates and Gerard Jackson have argued that the classical economist had a theory of producer error much like the one later developed by Mises. Mises developed existing ideas and integrated Austrian capital theory and time preference theory to provide an explanation of why many producer errors occur at the same time. We know this as the Austrian theory of the business cycle.
Mises called the production errors malinvestment. These errors happen systemically because of fractional reserve banks loan money into existence that is not backed by savings. That misleads producers into thinking that there are more real savings available than society wishes to save. Producers then make both the wrong mix of capital goods of different orders, and the wrong proportion of capital goods in relation to consumption goods.
When there is malinvestment there must be a recession, for the following reason: there were never enough real resources to complete all of the capital projects that were started during the boom. The firms that started these projects either over-estimated the demand for their output, or, under-estimated their costs. Somewhere along the way, firms will discover that they cannot obtain all of the factors they need at a price below their costs. They cannot make profits. Many of them fail."

We see businesses fail every day.

"Anything that prevents wages or asset prices or capital market prices from falling moves markets away from clearing. In the modern world, one of the main barriers to recovery is Keynesian stimulus. Stimulus tries to create more demand without creating more supply. We know from Say’s Law that this is doomed to fail because supply and only supply constitutes the demand for other goods. What stimulus is really trying to do is to inflate the fake price system of the boom so that more expenditures can occur at the fake prices producing more of the wrong things for which there was never a real demand in the first place. And that cannot work because it was the breakdown of production under the fake prices that caused the boom to end. For a real recovery to occur, production must be reorganized along the lines of consumer demand. "

That's why Obama's first stimulus boondoggle made the recession so much worse. And now he wants another transportation stimulus boondoggle.

"Another way of measuring the economy is through the capital stock. The US economy requires about a trillion dollars per year of gross investment just to replace capital consumption. Higgs has written that real net private investment for 2012 was at an indexed level of 60 compared to a baseline of 100 for 2007. Corporate America is sitting on huge piles of cash rather than investing it. American non-financial corporations hold more cash than they have for 50 years.
Many measures of labor markets show zero to negative wage growth. While this is to some extent due to problems in labor markets themselves, a shrinking capital stock should show up as lower wages. Look at the labor force participation rate: it is now at the lowest level in decades and is plummeting rapidly. Also check out the trend in median household income. Analyst Jeff Peshut at RealForecasts publishes some similar graphs showing the negative trends in the volume of employment in labor markets.
Anecdotally, the media frequently reports that new college graduates cannot find career path entry level jobs, so they are forced to enter the labor force on a low wage track doing relatively unskilled work.
Another way of looking at the size of the economy is through the rate of time preference. Higher time preference means less saving, less investment, and less capital accumulation. But how do we measure it? Interest rates and yields generally of all kinds of assets, both financial and corporate balance sheets, are a measure of this.
Profit margins reflecting internal yields on US corporate assets have increased in the last few years. According to what Andrew Smithers disparagingly refers to as “stock broker economics,” high rates of profit are good for stocks. The Austrian economist Jesús Huerta de Soto makes an under-appreciated point about profit margins and stock prices.[2] Pervasively high or increasing rates of profit may show that the rate of time preference is increasing, implying that the capital stock is shrinking. If not time preference, then the perception of risk may be increasing, which would have a similar depressing effect on investment."

This is why I keep saying we're getting poorer. It's part of the process of creating modern feudalism.

"As Hayek said, the more the state centrally plans, the more difficult it becomes for the individual to plan. Economic growth is not something that just happens. It requires saving. It requires investment and capital accumulation. And it requires the real market process. It is not a delicate flower but it requires some degree of legal stability and property rights. And when you get in the way of these things, the capital accumulation stops and the economy stagnates. "

This is a great, if long, article. 

Movie-making flees California because of tax incentives in other states. Attracting business and boosting the economy is that simple.