Federal Reserve

It's costs 2 cents to make a penny. WTF!

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/03/31/080331fa_fact_owen?currentPage=all

A penny minted before 1982 is ninety-five per cent copperâ€”which, at recent prices, is approximately two and a half centsâ€™ worth. Luhrman, who had previously owned a company that refined gold and silver, devised a method of rapidly separating pre-1982 pennies from more recent ones, which are ninety-seven and a half per cent zinc, a less valuable commodity. His new company, Jackson Metals, bought truckloads of pennies from the Federal Reserve, turned the copper ones into ingots, and returned the zinc ones to circulation in cities where pennies were scarce. â€œDoing that prevented the U.S. Mint from having to make more pennies,â€ Luhrman told me recently. â€œIsnâ€™t that neat?â€ The Mint didnâ€™t think so; it issued a rule prohibiting the melting or exportation of one-cent and five-cent coins. (Nickels, despite their silvery appearance, are seventy-five per cent copper.) Luhrman laid off most of his employees and implemented his corporate Plan B: buying half-dollars from banks and melting the silver ones (denominations greater than five cents arenâ€™t covered by the Mintâ€™s rule); mining Canadian five-cent coins (which were a hundred per cent nickel most years from 1946 to 1981); and lobbying Congress.

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The Real Unemployment Rate

I originally posted this on the Daily Gotham earlier in the week.

Mark Twain said there are lies, damn lies and statistics and his adage applies to unemployment measurement. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) publishes six unemployment metrics monthly, each referred to in ascending order of inclusiveness of the unemployed as U-1, U-2, etc.

The measure reported by the media as the unemployment rate that severely undercounts the unemployed is referred to as U-3. The U-3 rate is obtained by dividing the narrowest definition of the unemployed by the work force.
The U-3 definition does not include whom the BLS calls discouraged and marginal workers, those who want a job but have given up the search because market conditions and personal experience indicate the process is futile.

U-6 Unemployment counts the marginal and discouraged plus those seeking full time employment but can only find part time work. The Federal Reserve tracks what it defines as the Augmented Unemployment rate, which Iâ€™ve read is equivalent to U-6 less part time workers. I couldnâ€™t find any Augmented Unemployment releases on the Fed site and despite major data inclusion differences, some bloggers have used U-6 and the Fedâ€™s stat interchangeably.

Naive supply side economics fans and the heartless and often evil advocates of cutting the wealthyâ€™s taxes as a means to kill the beast of New Deal and Great Society programs love to brag that the historically low recent unemployment numbers (Aprilâ€™s seasonally adjusted U-3 was 4.5 percent) are evidence that their tax policy scam truly does trickle down to those who are not tax cut direct material beneficiaries. Despite those wishing to give handouts to Gates and Buffettâ€™s (who personally donâ€™t even want the cuts) spin, the economy just isnâ€™t that robust. The seasonably adjusted April U-6 numbers, which are a much more accurate economic suffering barometer than what the media regularly announces, increased to 8.2 percent.

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Words to live by

While a considerable number of Muslims in the U.S. are African American, and most of the African Americans are engaged in limited income jobs, Muslim immigrants in the US have relatively higher household incomes -- partly, a consequence of liberalization of U.S. immigrant policies in the 60s that opened the doors to skilled and educated immigrants. Consequently, many in the immigrant Muslim population did not face the same level of economic, political, and institutional discrimination termed "structural racism", as faced by many in the African American and now predominantly in the Mexican immigrant communities in the U.S.

Here, then, lies a promise in the recent spate of racist attacks against Muslims in the US. There is a parallel in racism meted out to Muslims, African Americans, and Latino immigrants. It is hoped that many in the American Muslim immigrant community will use the present climate of Muslim xenophobia to challenge the trap inherent in their own class privilege and the status as a high achieving "model minority" that often creates a distance from those less privileged in the community.

— Manzoor Cheema, Activist and a journalist
Muslim WakeUp! Billboard Muslims