What happened to all of the doom and gloom economic threads?

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Oh, and I said it to the cashier at the hotel Buffet as well. Don't you have a dick to suck today?

Dude, just come out of the closet already. It's an anonymous board, probably the safest place for you.
 
You're full of shit. You didn't say a word to a cab driver other than telling him where you were going let alone get into a political conversation with any of them.


yeah , man...nobody talks to cab drivers except to say " step on it..."







yap yap this, Dykky
 
http://noir.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601110&sid=a6bg4BtSgZMc


Insane Fed Should Beware Unquantifiable Outcomes
by Mark Gilbert

Oct. 28 (Bloomberg) -- Albert Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different outcomes. The crazy gang at the Federal Reserve should heed those words when debating how much more market manipulation to inflict on the world of fixed income.

The worrisome thing about so-called quantitative easing -- a concept still novel enough to mean whatever the Humpty-Dumptys in central banking want it to -- is that its consequences remain unquantifiable, and the perceived need for more central-bank purchases of securities should make investors uneasy.

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke said in an Oct. 15 speech that it’s difficult to work out the “appropriate quantity and pace of purchases and to communicate this policy response to the public.” He also said that “nonconventional policies have costs and limitations that must be taken into account in judging whether and how aggressively they should be used.”

Imagine a surgeon telling her patient she wasn’t sure what size scalpel she’d be using or what the likely outcome of the procedure might be. Or an architect admitting to a planning committee that he wasn’t confident about his stress calculations or the durability of the newfangled materials he was using.

“Nobody understands QE,” says Fred Goodwin, a strategist at Nomura International in London. “We have no idea how inflationary it really is. A patient juiced up on QE wants to party and it does not matter what anyone says. Don’t worry about what central banks are worried about; worry about unintended consequences.”

‘Dangerous Gamble’
Fed skeptic Thomas Hoenig of the U.S. central bank’s Kansas City branch called it “a very dangerous gamble” in a speech this week. “We risk the next crisis four or five years from now.” Mohamed A. El-Erian, chief executive officer at Pacific Investment Management Co., said the bond-buying program “will have costs and unintended consequences.”

The Fed’s role as buyer of first resort has completely distorted the government-bond market. An innocuous report in the Wall Street Journal yesterday said the Fed would avoid the “shock and awe” tactic used in the initial $2 trillion buying spree and limit itself to “a few hundred billion dollars.” This managed to drive the 10-year Treasury yield up by 10 basis points to a five-week high of 2.7 percent.

Bernanke at the Fed, Jean-Claude Trichet at the European Central Bank and Mervyn King at the Bank of England are more powerful than any of their predecessors, given how much reliance their political masters are placing on their stewardship of the economy. Leaving the fortunes of the nation in the hands of unelected central banks, though, strikes me as an abdication of responsibility by government.

Buck Stops Where?
U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne was asked on Oct. 21 if he had a plan to fall back on if the government’s attempts to reduce the budget deficit to 2 percent of economic output by 2015, from more than 10 percent now, smothers the economic recovery.

“There is, of course, the freedom for the Bank of England to deploy monetary-policy tools,” was his complacent, the-buck- stops-over-there-somewhere reply.

Central bankers tend to be academics, and academia’s usefulness in solving real-world problems is limited at best; Bernanke’s theoretical work, made famous in the November 2002 speech “Deflation: Making Sure ‘It’ Doesn’t Happen Here” that led to him being dubbed “Helicopter Ben,” is butting heads with harsh reality, and coming off second-best in the contest.

One-Trick Ponies
Former Bank of England policy maker and Bloomberg columnist David Blanchflower calls QE “the only show in town,” and it’s possible that the outlook would look much worse if we hadn’t had any bond purchases. While repeatedly rolling out the crash cart, screaming “clear!” and slapping on the electric paddles didn’t manage to stir the comatose patient, maybe death was averted.

A contrary suggestion might posit that central banks are now one-trick ponies, stuck in a financial groundhog day with no fresh ideas. Their willingness to sacrifice their principles not only undermines their hard-won independence, it also allows their political masters to avoid the hard work of structural reform that might generate a genuine recovery. Instead, we are relying on transfusions of artificial central-bank liquidity.

The guardians of the world economy still seem to think the answer to too much debt is yet more debt. Imagine the response, though, if you had asked any of the current crop of central bankers five years ago about the inflationary consequences of pumping trillions of dollars into the financial system.

Nomura’s Goodwin says there is no reason why the U.S. inflation rate couldn’t surge to 6 percent by 2015 from its current 1.1 percent pace. Lending to the U.S. government by buying its 1.25 percent note repayable in September 2015 at its current yield of about 1.3 percent might not be the smartest trade a bond manager could make.

When the law of unintended consequences kicks in, the nasty surprise is, almost by definition, unforeseen and unpredictable. I struggle to see how this movie won’t end badly.
 
Hey, U_D, China says IT can see the inflation...

Rampant issuance of dollars by the United States is saddling China with "imported inflation", Chinese commerce minister Chen Deming was quoted as saying by state media on Wednesday.
"Given the current situation, companies have thought ahead and prepared for exchange rate fluctuations as well as an increase in labour costs," Chen said, according to the state-run China Business News.

"But because the issuance of dollars is out of control, and international commodities prices are continuing to rise, China is confronted with imported inflation, which has created major uncertainties for businesses," he said.

The comments came ahead of a meeting of the US Federal Reserve next week at which the central bank is expected to announce additional stimulus measures.

While critics in the United States accuse China of artificially undervaluing its currency to give exporters an unfair advantage, Beijing says Washington is foisting its economic woes on the rest of the world by printing more money.

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.18a92e9878f71f90e7b491d0afd4b1a3.501&show_article=1
 
How come everyone and his brother keeps calling for more stimulus if we've "turned" the corner awash in a sea of positive portends?








;) ;)
__________________
An economy works best trickle-down. A Republic works best trickle-up. A Socialist believes just the opposite.
A_J, the Stupid
 
Maybe every home will get a wheelbarrow and an SEIU guy with a shovel to help you load it...




Player Organ: You can work for Reeks and Wrecks or SEIU!
__________________
Don't shoot me! Ahm just the Player Piano player of the play.
A_J, the Stupid
 
Now, American Thinker is telling me not to be worried about deflation...

Interesting...

;) ;)

With money in ample supply, why, then, are consumer prices subdued? Money is one of many variables determining consumer prices: productivity, supply and demand for goods and services, changes in product quality, and technology matter as well. Money demand is particularly randy these days because of soaring uncertainty related to the ugly reality: cap & trade, Dodd & Frank, ObamaCare, swelling deficits, and new taxes. We can only imagine what ugliness lurks over the horizon.* **

The Federal Reserve has created a tremendous amount of money, to be sure, but the money has disproportionately flowed into financial markets (particularly equity markets) instead of into the real economy. By deflating government bond yields (and pushing up prices) through open-market operations, the Federal Reserve has created capital gains for government bondholders. Concurrently, the Federal Reserve has made equities appear more attractive compared to bonds (based on earning yields and bond yields), thus producing a surge in equity investment.

The rally in equity prices is really an extrapolation of a longer-term trend. Over the past eighty years, the stock market value as a percentage of GDP has averaged 62 percent. For the first sixty of those years, the stock market traded mostly within a 30-percent-to-50-percent band. It first plotted above 100 percent of GDP in 1996. It's been below that level only twice since, following the internet and housing busts of 2000 and 2009, respectively. After dropping to a low of 71 percent of March 2009, stocks have returned to the contemporary norm of over 100 percent of GDP.*

So much money flowing into the stock market has produced persistently high stock-market valuations. The ratio of stock prices to stock earnings (P/E ratio) for S&P 500 members now averages about 20, whereas it used to average around 12. What is more, because so much money exists, the P/E ratio of S&P 500 stocks no longer bottoms to single digits when the extent of the previous boom's malinvestment is realized, with 1984 being the most recent year the S&P 500's P/E ratio dipped to single digits.*

Cavalierly interpreting correlations as causations can deceive, but deductive reasoning suggests a causative relationship between money supply and asset prices. If the quantity of money were static, the overall level of asset prices should remain static as well. (Stock market indexes owe their persistent appreciation to inflation.) In a static-money world, capital gains could be achieved only through asset selection -- by investing in promising companies to the detriment of lagging companies. In our inflation-centric world, most stocks -- good and bad -- rise during inflation-fueled binges.

Of course, there are consequences to asset-price inflation. New money funneled into assets means less money funneled into GDP, which further frustrates and emboldens the Federal Reserve to inflate even more. When money is created via bank loans to business, the money further distorts the pattern of productive investments, producing even more malinvestment that will invariably lead to an even more painful correction down the road.*

So we have both monetary inflation and asset-price inflation at this juncture. Consumer-price inflation is in the waiting (which, anecdotally, we all know has arrived). If the Federal Reserve persists in inflating the money supply to the point where assets no longer soak up the overrun, the excess supply will flood consumer-goods markets as the public attempts to recoup its command of economic resources by raising prices to the speed of new money creation. Should that occur, consumer-price inflation will tip from a "desirable" pursuit into a viral pandemic; then we'll really have something to be anxious about.*

Stephen Mauzy



Nobody takes the American Thinker seriously though.
 
That's right.

Nobody took them seriously when they actually looked into who Obama was...

Nobody.



He was black and that was good enough.

Now look at his party, in tatters.

Look at the country, shattered.

He told us, his wife told us, everyone around him told us that he was going to get even with this country for its past "sins."

One of those sins was "wealth..."

Ahp, shadoobie...
 
All this would be enough to explain the disillusionment with this president—and with the Democratic Party that he leads. But there is also a deeper disjunction. There is an "otherness" about Mr. Obama, the sense that he is somehow not truly American. "Birthers" doubt that he was born on American soil. Others believe that he is secretly a Muslim, or in quiet simpatico with his old friends, Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, now icons of American radicalism.

But Barack Obama is not an "other" so much as he is a child of the 1960s. His coming of age paralleled exactly the unfolding of a new "counterculture" American identity. And this new American identity—and the post-1960s liberalism it spawned—is grounded in a remarkable irony: bad faith in America as virtue itself, bad faith in the classic American identity of constitutional freedom and capitalism as the way to a better America. So Mr. Obama is very definitely an American, and he has a broad American constituency. He is simply the first president we have seen grounded in this counterculture American identity. When he bows to foreign leaders, he is not displaying "otherness" but the counterculture Americanism of honorable self-effacement in which America acknowledges its own capacity for evil as prelude to engagement.

Bad faith in America became virtuous in the '60s when America finally acknowledged so many of its flagrant hypocrisies: the segregation of blacks, the suppression of women, the exploitation of other minorities, the "imperialism" of the Vietnam War, the indifference to the environment, the hypocrisy of puritanical sexual mores and so on. The compounding of all these hypocrisies added up to the crowning idea of the '60s: that America was characterologically evil. Thus the only way back to decency and moral authority was through bad faith in America and its institutions, through the presumption that evil was America's natural default position.

Among today's liberal elite, bad faith in America is a sophistication, a kind of hipness. More importantly, it is the perfect formula for political and governmental power. It rationalizes power in the name of intervening against evil—I will use the government to intervene against the evil tendencies of American life (economic inequality, structural racism and sexism, corporate greed, neglect of the environment and so on), so I need your vote.

"Hope and Change" positioned Mr. Obama as a conduit between an old America worn down by its evil inclinations and a new America redeemed of those inclinations. There was no vision of the future in "Hope and Change." It is an expression of bad faith in America, but its great ingenuity was to turn that bad faith into political motivation, into votes.

But there is a limit to bad faith as power, and Mr. Obama and the Democratic Party may have now reached that limit. The great weakness of bad faith is that it disallows American exceptionalism as a rationale for power. It puts Mr. Obama and the Democrats in the position of forever redeeming a fallen nation, rather than leading a great nation. They bet on America's characterological evil and not on her sense of fairness, generosity or ingenuity.

When bad faith is your framework (Michelle Obama never being proud of her country until it supported her husband), then you become more a national scold than a real leader. You lead out of a feeling that your opposition is really only the latest incarnation of that old characterological evil that you always knew was there. Thus the tea party—despite all the evidence to the contrary—is seen as racist and bigoted.
Shelby Steele
Wall Street Journal
__________________
Promiscuous charges of bigotry are precisely how our current rulers and their vast media auxiliary react to an obstreperous citizenry that insists on incorrect thinking.

Resistance to the vast expansion of government power, intrusiveness and debt, as represented by the Tea Party movement? Why, racist resentment toward a black president.

Disgust and alarm with the federal government's unwillingness to curb illegal immigration, as crystallized in the Arizona law? Nativism.

Opposition to the most radical redefinition of marriage in human history, as expressed in Proposition 8 in California? Homophobia.

Opposition to a 15-story Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero? Islamophobia.

Now we know why the country has become "ungovernable," last year's excuse for the Democrats' failure of governance: Who can possibly govern a nation of racist, nativist, homophobic Islamophobes?

Note what connects these issues. In every one, liberals have lost the argument in the court of public opinion. ... What's a liberal to do? Pull out the bigotry charge, the trump that preempts debate and gives no credit to the seriousness and substance of the contrary argument.

Charles Krauthammer
 
Since 9-17-2009 the libs have been assuring us that the economy is just fine, that there was no reason for all the doom and gloom and that Obama and his team "rescued" us from the evil Bush years and general Republican philosophy.

Tuesday upcoming will be America's first opportunity to properly thank the Democrats for the life line...
 
It was the "turn on a dime" election.




Everyone began to believe 180〫from what they believed before.

Deficits cure recession.

Pork is insignificant when it comes to spending.

Having a tax cheat in charge of the IRS is not a problem...
 
Oh how we hated Haliburton and no-bid contracting...




Now, not so much...

http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/10/healthcare_law_allows_open_sea.html

ObamaCare, in its most basic form, has essentially ushered in nationalized health care. Welcome to the era of "no bid" contracts with huge health insurance companies. In West Virginia, Democratic Governor and United States Senate candidate Joe Manchin has determined that his administration does not need to allow for competitive bidding to run portions of the state's Medicaid program. Six hundred million dollars in government contracts was handed out to three private health insurers at the end of September. West Virginia's commissioner of the Bureau for Medical Services, Nancy Atkins, responded to criticism by announcing, "There is no better deal to be found by bidding the contracts."

Once the big insurers only have to curry favor with politicians and bureaucrats, the last incentive they would ever have to actually improve service and provide products people want and can afford disappears.
__________________
When Government gets so powerful that its purchase price is cost effective, even imperative, to business, then business will purchase government indulgences.
A_J, the Stupid
 
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