Chart of the Day: Synchronized Cliff Diving

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Last week I blogged about a new paper suggesting that the European and the U.S. economies are more interconnected than most people think. The basic story had to do with credit conditions: Starting around 1999, European banks began to supply (or recycle) a lot of America’s credit, and this means that when European banks start deleveraging it’s likely to produce a severe credit contraction in the U.S. as well.

That conclusion was a little speculative, but you may recall that last week I also posted a chart showing that industrial orders had plunged 6.4% in the eurozone in September. Today, Tim Duy overlays U.S. industrial orders on the same chart and produces some sobering news:

Not a perfect match, but enough to suggest the idea of substantial decoupling looks like more myth than reality, especially in the face of a severe recession….Bottom Line: Don’t take US resilience for granted this time around — Europe is getting ugly, and it is far too late to prevent severe recession. The best policymakers can hope for at this point is too avoid a depression.

Correlation is not causation. But whatever the reason, it sure looks as if the U.S. and European economies really are linked closely in some fundamental ways — which shouldn’t be too surprising since Europe is our biggest trading partner and their banks are pretty tightly joined to the U.S. market. If Europe tumbles — and it sure looks likely that it will — we’re likely to tumble too.

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We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

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In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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