Kudos to Bloomberg for sounding the alarm before the building is on fire.
Today he predicted that if the job picture does not get better that there will be riots in New York and called on politicians to get their act together.
This is the first instance of someone clearly identifying a near-term risk of civil unrest in the US. I suppose Bloomberg might be grand standing (who knows, maybe he'll run for President) but I don't see that as his style. I actually did a press conference years ago which Bloomberg participated in and from what I could tell he seemed like a really nice guy.
I don't see him doing this simply to garner headlines or as a PR strategy to apply pressure on the politicians. I think he's saying this because he believes it's a serious threat.
The reality is that while we use the stock market, GDP and unemployment to gauge whether we are technically in recession or not, that's not how every day Americans gauge a recession. They gauge it by standard of living, which factors in real-world variables like cost of goods, unemployment figures, wages, benefits, hours of work (both over and under), etc.
If you spent 100k and eight years of your life getting your PhD (or 50k and four years for an undergrad) and you're making six bucks an hour working at 7/11, guess what, that's not a recession, that's a Depression, it's a total break down of society from your perspective.
While nine per cent unemployment (which is really 16 per cent) may not seem disasterous, just about everyone knows someone who is suffering - and that creates stress on people as well.
The thing that sets off riots though tends to be a combination of:
Anyway, I really don't think Bloomberg likes to cry wolf, if he's saying there's a real risk of rioting, then there probably is.
At least he's acting like a leader and identifying a crisis before it happens in the hopes of preventing it. If only America had elected federal politicians who behaved the same way.
This is the first instance of someone clearly identifying a near-term risk of civil unrest in the US. I suppose Bloomberg might be grand standing (who knows, maybe he'll run for President) but I don't see that as his style. I actually did a press conference years ago which Bloomberg participated in and from what I could tell he seemed like a really nice guy.
I don't see him doing this simply to garner headlines or as a PR strategy to apply pressure on the politicians. I think he's saying this because he believes it's a serious threat.
The reality is that while we use the stock market, GDP and unemployment to gauge whether we are technically in recession or not, that's not how every day Americans gauge a recession. They gauge it by standard of living, which factors in real-world variables like cost of goods, unemployment figures, wages, benefits, hours of work (both over and under), etc.
If you spent 100k and eight years of your life getting your PhD (or 50k and four years for an undergrad) and you're making six bucks an hour working at 7/11, guess what, that's not a recession, that's a Depression, it's a total break down of society from your perspective.
While nine per cent unemployment (which is really 16 per cent) may not seem disasterous, just about everyone knows someone who is suffering - and that creates stress on people as well.
The thing that sets off riots though tends to be a combination of:
- hyper inflation (when bread costs 10 bucks a loaf type of thing)
- high unemployment
- when corruption (or the perception of corruption) runs amock
Anyway, I really don't think Bloomberg likes to cry wolf, if he's saying there's a real risk of rioting, then there probably is.
At least he's acting like a leader and identifying a crisis before it happens in the hopes of preventing it. If only America had elected federal politicians who behaved the same way.
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