Unemployment of the American labor force is nearly 10 percent of those who are working or seeking jobs.  Most economists feel that the economy is not performing at it’s best unless that unemployment rate is 4-5 percent.

Gross Domestic Product is stagnated and unable to support creation of  jobs badly needed to lower the  10 percent rate of unemployment.

Gigantic companies have been said to be “too big to fail” because their demises would take with them a large section of the economy.  Where is the concept of a market test of viability?

Government loans have been needed to prevent bankruptcy of General Motors and Chrysler. Again, where is that market test?  One undesirable outcome of this government generosity is that other companies will lengthen the line of borrowers because they have been led to believe that the government will help them just as it did General Motors.

The mortgage industry and financial institutions have been turned on their heads by the practice of risky lending and sub-prime loans to borrowers who who cannot repay these loans. (The label, NINA has been applied the the worst of such cases meaning the NINA borrower has no income and no assets.) In other words, they are lending to truly unqualified borrowers.

Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac have become basket economic cases expected to cost taxpayers many billions of dollars because they are hold trillions of dollars of mortgages borrowers cannot afford to pay.

Entitlement programs (such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicate are poised to warp the Federal budget.  Some observers have even spoken of the Federal government going bankrupt. Where would that leave us?

Federal deficits and debt are growing to unprecedented and  dangerous levels.

These are some of the problems facing the United States economy today.  They appear in various forms in other economies around the world.

This blog is intended to be a platform for discussion of these problems. We call it “Econ 101″ to suggest  that it is fairly basic in scope but will try to find economic principles of economics that can be applied to the problems.

The blog will be hosted by two former students of economics, Bill Cook and Bob Pierce.  Both have studied economics at the graduate level, Cook at the University of Chicago and Pierce at Georgia State University.  Cook rates his knowledge of current economic conditions and events at the level of an average observer.  Cook leans to a conservative view of the economy while Pierce sees the current economic situation in a historic sense and with some study and observation more optimistically than conservatives and trusts his training to add some hope and knowledge in this debate. (We’ll call him a liberal – Bill Cook)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 21st, 2010 at 2:51 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.