Sunday, October 31, 2010

Restoring the American Dream: Fareed Zakaria

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/politics/2010/10/21/ps.zakaria.american.dream.cnn?iref=allsearch

I found this clip of Fareed Zakaria on Parker Spitzer's show on CNN. This is just a clip but Fareed also has a full length special that I DVRed Saturday nightj called "Restoring the American Dream". Though I couldn't find it online yet if you can see it at some point I think it is one of the most useful things I've seen in regard to understanding what happened to us from the global perspectives of CEOs of International Companies alike Coca Cola, Alcoa and Google. One of the things said is that we are in a 7 year cycle that will prevent major jobs coming back until then we are now 3 years into this 7 year cycle. However, you won't hear politicians talk about this. Though this wasn't in this program I also learned that unemployment cannot get that much better until the U.S has a yearly 3.3% or better increase in GDP. In fact until it gets to this place it is likely that unemployment will increase by at least 1% per year until then. Also, companies won't be hiring back as many employees in the big companies worldwide even then because they were hurt as much as individuals were by this crisis, so the only way the the big ones that survived did is that they laid of up to half or more of their employees. And at most even during good times they might hire back very few relatively of those they let go. So, the only way forward for most of these laid off people might be either retirement or retraining for a different job or starting your own business or businesses. Though this is hard to swallow it is likely a reality for all.

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