Credit: New York Fed / Via newyorkfed.org
American households are back at peak debt, with new data showing the highest level of household debt since 2008.
Kind of.
Americans now sit on a $12.73 trillion pile of household debt, meaning mortgages, loans, credit cards, home equity lines of credit, car loans, and student debt. That figure previously peaked at $12.68 trillion in the early days of the Great Recession.
Those numbers aren’t adjusted for inflation, and $12.68 trillion 2008 dollars would be equal to more than $14.5 trillion today. And while debt number is at it’s highest ever, the economy has grown significantly in the last nine years, meaning that as a percentage of the total economy, it’s still well below its 2008 high.
“Almost nine years later, household debt has finally exceeded its 2008 peak but the debt and its borrowers look quite different today,” said Donghoon Lee, a Research Officer at the New York Fed. “This record debt level is neither a reason to celebrate nor a cause for alarm.”
The […]
Attorney General Jeff Sessions
Credit: Reuters/Lawrence Bryan
US attorney general Jeff Sessions may not be part of the biggest investigation in the Department of Justice, but as he reaches 100 days in office, there’s little doubt that he’s had an important impact on the American criminal-justice system—potentially for years to come.
Despite the political turmoil of the Trump administration, Sessions has moved to reverse a tide of progressive reform and to fulfill his boss’s law-and-order agenda, a collection of concepts loosely articulated during the 2016 presidential campaign. Sessions’ biggest actions, from undermining federal oversight of police departments to cracking down on undocumented immigrants, have worried a wide array of lawmakers, law-enforcement leaders, advocates and scientists.
“Of all the cabinet members, maybe even the president, he has to this point had the most significant impact as to policy changes,” said Jesselyn McCurdy, the deputy director at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Washington Legislative Office told Quartz.
Unlike his boss, Sessions is delivering on what he has promised—sometimes on causes he has […]
MSNVC commentator Joy Reid
According to MSNBC’s Joy Ann Reid, if President Donald Trump is impeached for his scandal tsunami and cover-ups, Vice President Mike Pence should be forced out along with him.
“There is a consciousness of guilt here,” Reid said of Trump asking Pence and his attorney general Jeff Sessions to leave the room. “It’s not that he doesn’t understand. Not only does he ask Jeff Sessions, the head of the Department of Justice to leave, he asks him twice.”
Reid said that even Sessions, “who’s no paragon of virtue” had to have recognized that there was “something entirely improper about leaving them alone.”
“Even Jeff Sessions understood that,” Reid reiterated. “Trump insists that he leave the room, twice, two requests and he also ushers Mike Pence out of the room. And by the way, I think that Sessions and Pence are not out of the woods either. Russiagate is going to ensnare everyone who touches it. Mike Pence has a very implausible story as […]
View of the Goesgen Nuclear Power Plant near Daeniken, northern Switzerland
Credit: AFP Photo/FABRICE COFFRINI
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND — The Swiss voted Sunday in favour of a massive overhaul of the country’s energy system by gradually replacing the power from its ageing nuclear reactors with renewable sources.
A full 58.2 percent of Swiss voters supported the shift, according to a final tally after Sunday’s referendum, with only four of the country’s 26 cantons voting “no”.
The move has been in the making since shortly after Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant was destroyed in the March 2011 tsunami disaster, when the Swiss government decided to gradually close its nuclear plants.
Instead, it aims to increase reliance on hydraulic power as well as renewables like solar, wind, geothermal and biomass.
Sunday’s vote paves the way for the government to gradually begin implementing the measures starting next January.
BEDFORD, MASSACHUSETTS — Today’s world is run on batteries, and keeping batteries going is a major technical challenge. For decades battery improvements have been ‘recipe’ driven, searching for exotic compounds to improve capacity and lifetime. Now, Fractal Antenna Systems (FRACTAL) reports a new approach with invention of batteries that have greater performance through geometry, using fractals and self-complementarity.
Fractals are self-similar patterns that have the same simple structure built up on many scales. Self-complementarity is a technique where a structure is defined by its own outer mask—with the same structure. These geometric methods, in math, science, and art, have long been enjoyed in popular culture through the artist M.C. Escher, and the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot.
Inventor and FRACTAL CEO Nathan Cohen describes the battery benefits simply: “Fractals make the electrodes smaller and batteries higher capacity, and self-complementarity curtails the fingering that creeps through the electrolyte and destroys the battery.” The new invention has been awarded patent 9,647,271 and discloses electrodes for electrochemical batteries with self-complementary and fractal geometries.
Cohen is the world’s top expert on engineering applications of fractals, and is the source inventor on fractal antennas and components, fractal metamaterials, fractal plasmonic surfaces and radiative near-field transfer, fractal heat exchange, fractal energy […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
