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...debt over the next few years. (Read "Lidia Bastianich Saves Our Dough.") Lansing and San Francisco Fed colleague Reuven Glick ran a simulation of what would happen if U.S. consumers followed a path similar to that of Japanese businesses in the 1990s. That was another episode of a great debt dump following a stock-and-real-estate bubble - it's one of the examples economists often turn to in trying to understand what's going on now. Lansing and Glick figured that for U.S. households to resume a debt-to-income ratio of 100% over the next decade, the savings...
...understand the Great Consumer Retrenchment is to look at the amount of debt the typical household carries as a percentage of its disposable income. The ratio of debt to income increased from about 35% in the early 1950s to about 65% by the mid-1960s, where it more or less stayed until the late 1980s. That's when debt started its epic rise, hitting 100% of income in 2001 and going all the way up to 133% in 2007. (Read "Five Reasons for Economic Optimism...
Still, it is likely to be a while before we hit that new normal. Rosenberg points out that during the Great Depression, the worst of GDP contraction and stock-market losses had hit by the early 1930s. And yet the malaise carried on for the rest of the decade. Unemployment hung above 15%, and people didn't spend money. "Even people who had the means didn't go on buying sprees. That's not how they lived," says Rosenberg. We may now be in for some of the same...
...compensation would have to come from the environment, and studies suggest that early intervention can have great impact. Researchers at the University of Georgia last month published a study of 641 adolescents, ages 11 to 16, some of whom carried the short allele form of the gene 5-HTTLPR - a genetic condition found in about 40% of the general population and long associated with low self-control, binge drinking and substance use. Half of the participants were randomly enrolled in drug prevention programs. After five years, those participants with 5-HTTLPR who were enrolled in a prevention program were...
...Free speech advocates were also caught off guard. Some complained that the move was yet another brick in China's notorious Great Firewall, the government's ever-expanding system of website blocking, word-recognition software and other surveillance and censorship activities that severely restrict what Chinese netizens can access. But everyone is in the dark about the details: how the software will be installed, whether it was possible to remove it from computers, whether scofflaws will be penalized and how the rules would be enforced. "The biggest challenge right now is that we don't have any details," says...