Let’s hope Charles Evans is merely stupid.
Evans is the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, and next January he will become a voting member of the Fed’s Open Market Committee.
The FOMC is the group that has been rubber-stamping chairman Ben Bernanke’s crazy money-printing policy, called Quantitative Easing, or QE, all these years.
If Bernanke is the father of QE, Evans is one of its dopey uncles who nods in agreement and laughs at the Fed chairman’s foolishness.
Evans, on paper, would appear to be a smart guy. As I said, he’s the head of the Chicago Fed and has taught in college. I betcha he’s got a lot of degrees, too.
Chicago might be called the Second City, but these days Evans is talking like a third-rate economist.
So why am I madder at this Evans guy than at the New York Jets?
A short while back Evans said the Fed should keep its money-printing operation going until the unemployment rate fell below 7 percent. That statement is foolish on so many levels that I’d have to put a hard cover around my column today to write them all.
(You might care more about this subject if you realized that QE is what’s robbing you of all the interest income you used to get.)
Last Friday, the Labor Department reported that the unemployment rate had fallen to 7.8 percent from 8.1 percent. But the jobless rate is such an unreliable figure that someone like Evans should know better than to hitch monetary policy to it.
Take, for instance, Friday’s number itself. The unemployment level dropped to 7.8 percent in September because a highly improbable 873,000 jobs were said by Labor’s flaky Household Survey to have been created. When the government asked employers the same question for the same month, they were told just 114,000 new jobs had been created.
Those 873,000 jobs that sent the jobless rate plummeting — suspiciously before the election, you should note — were created mostly because of a big jump in self-employed people and a large rise in the number of 20- to 24-year-olds who said they found work.
Labor had no explanation for either of these anomalies. I’m guessing they were caused mainly because young people were working on President Obama’s re-election campaign and told Labor surveyors that this was their new job.
Worse, the drop in the unemployment rate was also due to nothing more than seasonal adjustments. Without those adjustments, there was a large contraction in the number of jobs that households reported.
And there’s more Evans should know.
Even when the economy starts improving — and some decade from now it might — the unemployment rate is likely to rise. That’s because people who have given up looking for a job will start searching again, and that — automatically — causes the unemployment numbers to jump.
So Evans might be lured into raising interest rates when the jobless rate declines for no reason other than seasonal adjustments and temporary jobs. And he’d be inclined to ease monetary policy at absolutely the wrong time — when the economy is better, more people are looking for jobs, and there is a counterintuitive rise in the jobless rate.
Charles Evans doesn’t have to call me to consult on this. Everyone who follows the job market knows most of what I just mentioned. I’m just worried that the head of the Chicago Fed doesn’t.
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Last Thursday I wrote about a law-enforcement officer who was having trouble because Facebook sold his personal data to a New Zealand company that makes the information available online.
One criminal already has noticed his personal information and made a veiled threat. And this law-enforcement guy is worried that his, and his family’s, safety might be in jeopardy. I contacted the New Zealand company and haven’t heard back.
I also asked readers if they knew a solution for the officer. Here’s one:
Hi John,
There are many in the free-software community and security community that are aware of these and other issues about Facebook.
Facebook is a public company that, like other companies, deals in surveillance for profit by selling your data to third parties.
At a talk a few years ago at HOPE (Hackers on Planet Earth) in New York, a security expert said Facebook was a police and criminal’s dream because it allowed you to follow people and know who their friends were and let you know when friends were and weren’t on vacation, etc.
Also, its openness is a boon for kidnappers, violent ex-boyfriends or spouses, and [perpetrators] of other traumatic events. One way to stop some of this is by allowing pseudonyms. But Facebook, Google, politicians and others fear the nature of discourse would degrade even more on the Internet.
That’s a lot of nonsense. Pseudonyms would disable lots of people from being tracked, robbed or killed. But it [also] might make the job of law enforcement harder.
As for the settings and privacy, you might want to try out ‘Diaspora.’ It’s a privacy-focused social media site that was created as a reaction to Facebook’s issues. And the design elements were used to make Google+.
Diaspora allows pseudonyms and has privacy setting similar to Google+. You can visit joindiaspora.com. K.M.