Don't Quit Your Day Job…

The number to keep your eye on, obviously is a $200,000 annual salary if you’re single and a $250,000 combined salary if you’re married. These, as you likely know, are the lines in the sand drawn by the current administration to determine who is ‘rich’ and who isn’t. Does the electorate agree? For the most part. A Marist poll showed that 55% of Americans believe that a household income over $250,000 means you are wealthy, while 45% disagreed.

Yes, the headline is true. As of two days ago, the (“Great”?) recession was declared over by the US National Bureau of Economic Research. The Bureau looks at lagging indicators of recessions, and therefore declared the end of the recession to be June 2009. With a start of December 2007, the recession lasted 18 months, becoming the longest recession of the post-World War II era. And yes, if the economy does decline into recession again, it will be considered a ‘double dip’ recession, the likes of which haven’t been seen since (according to NBER records, that is) the early 1980s!

Is it okay to welch on a financial commitment? Yes, I know that ‘welch’ is a gambling term – and we’re about to talk about mortgages. If an unproportional amount of recent mortgages were actually bets that house prices would continue to increase, maybe ‘welch’ is the right term after all? Anyway, Pew recently polled people to ask their opinion on the practice of ‘walking away’ from mortgages.

My web host got hacked a few days back, and we obviously didn’t have any service. I hope you didn’t think DQYDJ was off the internet!

Anyway, we’re now back to give you more stuff to think about.

Close your eyes or do whatever it is you do when you meditate… ponder the following question, “At what salary would you be content?” Okay, end the meditation. Were you thinking $75,000 annually? That’s the number that an analysis of 2008-2009 Gallup poll data by the economists Angus Deaton and Daniel Kahneman came up with. So, what does that mean?

The official U-3 unemployment rate is now 9.6%, up a tick from the 9.5% we saw last report. However, private employers added 67,000 jobs in August, while July’s numbers were revised upwards to 107,000 private sector positions and June numbers were also adjusted to 61,000.