I'll suggest two possibilities, both trend lines that may or may not turn out to be meaningful, one good, one bad. The good one is that jobless claims are falling a bit more...the four-week average is now below 450K, and at its lowest level, an AP story I'm looking at says, since before things went really south in September 2008.
The bad one is that after a summer in which year-to-year American and coalition deaths in Afghanistan had flattened out, casualties are back up this month. November is usually the start of a winter lull in casualties, but not this year (at least so far); in fact, this November is already the worst ever for American military deaths.
That's what I have. What do you think mattered this week?
Saturday, November 13, 2010
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Hi Jonathan,
ReplyDeleteThis weekend will be remembered as the week the next shoe dropped. The Irish are about to ask for help as the interest on their debt is going asymptotic.
We're approximately at the mid-summer 2008 point of the coming Euro crisis. It isn't September 2008 yet, but that moment is getting closer.
I think that the week of November 7 - 13, 2010 will go down in history as a week where, on the domestic front, nothing much happened that will matter in the long run. One week of falling unemployment claims. The Simpson-Bowles draft will fade into distant memory, the sooner the better. The DADT survey was leaked, but it won't really have an impact in Congress. Congressional leadership skirmishes were mainly resolved without all-out war being declared before we could even pop the popcorn. Preparations being made for the lame-duck Congress. Cantor sides with a foreign country against the President of the United States and official US foreign policy, publicly undercutting lengthy talks by SecState Clinton to save the peace process.
ReplyDeleteMeh. Another week in the life.
It remains to be seen whether Obama's efforts in India and Indonesia will pay dividends, whether the increase in casualties -- American, Pakistani, Afghan -- will go higher or level off, whether Aung San Suu Kyi's release from custody will foreshadow democratic change in Myanmar.
Oh, and the 43rd President of the United States of America publicly admitted -- bragged -- on national television that he personally authorized war crimes and crimes against humanity during his term of office.
ReplyDeleteNope. Nothing happened to write home about.