The Economy — “Guest Interpretation” – Food — “World’s Hungry”

THE ECONOMY–”GUEST INTERPRETATION”: We, like you, have seen interpretations ad nauseam of the current economic crisis and background causes leading up to it. We’ve commented on a number of these and have restrained ourselves from commenting on many more but…we ran across a short piece (a letter actually) responding to comments made by Charles Hugh Smith on his Of Two Minds blog (oftwominds.com) presentation on 12/10/08 entitled, “End of Work, End of Affluence 111”. The letter was from a Bob Z and here’s some of it:

“Corporate America has successfully de-industrialized the U.S. over the last 25 years and the number of decent U.S. service jobs is dwindling as those jobs are outsourced to Asia as rapidly as possible. …remaining economic activity is going to provide revenue to U.S. corporations.

Basic economics tells us that the inputs for economic activity are Capital and Labor. This Depression is the natural result of allowing Capital to successfully prosecute an economic war against Labor for the last 25 years.”

Our position at PrudentHome is that the above is a different opinion from that of those most commonly referenced on the business channels. Perhaps it deserves at least a small hearing.

FOOD–’WORLDS HUNGRY’: Our comments on food and the hungry come in response to a Financial Times (ft.com)of 12/10/08 entitled, “World’s hungry ’close to one billion’

The worlds food crisis has pushed nearly 1 billion people into the lifeboat of food insecurity. This is the result of record high food crisis the first part of the year coupled with the current global financial crisis and it’s economic implications.

It’s our opinion here at PrudentHome that the world food crisis and the U.S. (and world) economic downturn will result in record U.S. food stamp usage both as an actual number and as a percentage of total U.S. population for 2009. We also believe food banks in the U.S. will fall farther behind in their attempts to alleviate hunger and general food insecurity next year.

With the new year fast approaching (only two weeks or so until 2009) we’d like to comment on some of the more prominent economic predictions for 2009 and offer some ideas for coping with what promises to be a challenging time. We’ll leave both the predictions and ideas till next week however.

Until next week, keep your eyes on the horizon.