Economics

Ready to shop? It certainly doesn't look like it. Consumer confidence recently posted its biggest monthly drop in 15 years. Gasoline prices remain high and consumers are bracing for more expensive heating bills. The nation lost jobs last month for the first time in two years, the federal government reported last week, although not as many as feared. Past-due credit-card accounts were at a record high, bankers recently reported. The economic impact of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita are still lingering.

The record price that Peter G. Angelos and a large group of investors have pledged to pay for the Orioles probably won't have a direct effect on baseball's volatile labor situation, but it may make it more difficult for the owners to convince players that the financial state of the game has deteriorated.The owners will meet next week in Wisconsin to work on a revenue-sharing proposal for the coming collective bargaining negotiations with the Major League Players Association. That proposal -- in whatever form it takes -- figures to be a harder sell in the aftermath of the $173 million that was offered at auction for the Orioles.

Budapest. A HUGE bronze statue of Karl Marx dominates the central foyer of the Budapest University of Economics on the banks of the Danube in this ancient Eastern European capital struggling to find its way from a stifling communism to a prosperous free-enterprise system. The old ideologue sits on his marble pedestal and reaches out his hand in a gesture of earnest objection. But on this first day of classes as the new semester begins, the young Hungarian college students pay him no attention.

Mary Lou Cole, who had worked in the field of affordable housing development before becoming legislative director in Annapolis for a Baltimore County delegate, died Saturday of cancer at her Roland Park home. She was 64. Mary Lou Brennan, the daughter of a bailiff and a sales associate, was born and raised in Providence, R.I., where she graduated from high school. Mrs. Cole attended the University of Pennsylvania on a full academic scholarship and earned her bachelor's degree in 1968.

An economics professor from Loyola University in New Orleans traveled to Baltimore's Loyola last week to give a lecture, and everybody's been apologizing ever since. Everybody, that is, but the professor, Walter Block, who chalks up the flap to political correctness. Block said he knew he'd step on toes, since, by his account, he started off with a bit about how the Jesuit order has been "hijacked by a bunch of Marxists and liberation theologians." "I imagine that didn't go down too well with the Jesuit audience," he later told me by phone.

In America it would be called a stalemate, or a standoff, or gridlock. In Germany, when the voters can't give a clear sense of direction, they dress it up and call it a Grand Coalition. For three weeks following an election in which voters split down the middle with Germanic precision, party leaders bargained and politicked and postured like aggrieved soccer players trying to draw a phony foul, and now they have created a government that puts both major parties in power, to keep an eye on each other.

By now it's apparent to anyone paying any attention at all that the political process here and abroad is a game fixed to favor big banks at the expense of ordinary citizens. The banksters take enormous risks. If everything falls their way, they pocket vast bonuses. If, as in the case of the subprime mortgages that cratered the world markets the last couple of years, their bets go sour, the losses are socialized — that is, absorbed by the nondifferentiated mass of taxpayers — and the banksters celebrate by further lining their pockets.

On May 1, the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit its highest peak since December 2007. But April's jobs report was a disappointment -- only 115,000 new jobs were created. At least 125,000 are required each month just to keep up with the growth of our working-age population. What's going on? Shares are up because corporate profits are up, and profits are up largely because companies have figured out how to do more with less. One of the most striking legacies of the Great Recession has been the decline of full-time employment -- as companies have substituted software or outsourced jobs abroad (courtesy of the Internet, making outsourcing more efficient than ever)

Watch out, baby boomers. The Millennials are coming for your jobs. This generational warfare is the story developing in the media, and as with most trend stories, it does have a kernel of truth. The baby boomer generation - born between 1946 and 1964 - has had a stranglehold on nearly every arena in American life, including politics, economics and the culture wars, since I was born. Even President Barack Obama, who campaigned on a promise to leave behind the boomers' old campus feuds, is, technically, one of them.