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

[busybody..]

you missed the other lies Dough NUT boy spewed yesterday, O'Fendy!

 

[busybody..]

 

[busybody..]

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

With the Dow climbing near 10,000 again what's happened to all of the dire, end of the world ravings of our resident "conservative" economists?

Where is all of this inflation we were warned about? According to reports the Consumer Price Index is down 1.5% overall from last year. Despite Augusts increase in prices, gasoline is still down 30% from the high a year ago.

Despite the dire warnings of some of Lit's resident math wizards the Chinese are still very much interested in buying US Treasury securities.

I guess the sky isn't falling after all.

*chuckle*

The Chinese are not so interested any more; they're calling for an end to the role of the dollar...

While the architects of this Brave New Economy point fingers at everyone and everything but themselves.

 

[unregistered]

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Liberals are liars.

Moreso to themselves than others...

As long as they are surrounded by the chattering consensus, no self-examination is necessary.

I took the red pill, they chose the blue.

The Tea Party are those who decided to stop being copper-tops...
__________________
Why can't Liberals (, Blue Dogs and Republican moderates) stomach the Tea Party?
Because it requires a strong Constitution!
A_J, the Stupid

 

[unregistered]

 

[busybody..]

Liberals are liars.

you may recall who RUINED Fannie

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

If the Tea Party is effectively isolated, besmirched and marginalized, we will see it yet.

I think the elites in both parties are in total denial...



Let's hope their August break and being around their peeps wake some of them up to reality.

Maybe they just don't want to see the cities burn now in the wake of austerity, but like the Stimulus, if you put off a burning, then you will only get a bigger burning as discussed in Yojimbo and demonstrated by the green movement when they successfully put the kibosh of forest management and replaced it with Forrest management...

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

IRL Main Street fuels 70% of the jobs in America. But after reading all the C&P on this thread you'd think Washington and the MegaCorps is the golden goose who shits prosperity. The media, Washington, and the elites feel contempt for Main Street. Main Street isnt part of their plans for our salvation.

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

AUGUST 9, 2011 4:00 A.M.
A Tottering Technocracy
Here and in Europe, the financial meltdown exposes the hollowness of our elites.
Victor Davis Hanson
NRO

We are witnessing a widespread crisis of faith in our progressive guardians of the last 30 years. These are the blue-chip, university-certified elite, employed by universities, government, and big-money private foundations and financial-services companies. The best recent examples are sorts like Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Larry Summers, Peter Orszag, Robert Rubin, Steven Chu, and Timothy Geithner. Politicians like John Kerry, John Edwards, and Al Gore all share certain common characteristics of this Western technocracy: proper legal or academic credentials, ample service in elected or appointed government office, unabashed progressive politics, and a free pass to enjoy ample personal wealth without any perceived contradiction with their loud share-the-wealth egalitarian politics.

The house of a John Kerry, the plane of an Al Gore, or, in the European case, the suits of a Dominique Strauss-Kahn are no different from those of the CEOs and entrepreneurs who were as privately courted as they were publicly chastised. These elites were mostly immune from charges of hypocrisy or character flaws, by virtue of their background and their well-meaning liberalism.

The financial meltdown here and in Europe revealed symptoms of the technocracy’s waning. On this side of the Atlantic, Geithner, Orszag, Summers, Austan Goolsbee, Paul Krugman, and Christina Romer apparently assumed that some academic cachet, an award bestowed by like kind, or a long-ago-granted degree should give them credibility to advocate what the tire-store owner, family dentist, or apple farmer knew from hard experience simply could not be done — borrow or print money on the theory that insular experts, without much experience in the world beyond the academy or the New York–Washington financial and government corridor, could best direct it to productive purposes.

But now they have either left government or are no longer much listened to — and some less-well-certified accountant will be left with the task of finding ways to pay back $16 trillion. Abroad, at some point, German clerks and mechanics are going to have to work a year or two past retirement age to pay for those in Greece or Italy who chose to stop working a decade before retirement age — despite all the sophisticated technocratic babble that such arithmetic is reductive and simplistic.

...

Kindred media elites in Europe and the United States lauded supposed technocratic expertise without much calibration of achievement. Indeed, to examine the elite media is to unravel the incestuous nature of power marriages and past loyal service to heads of state. Those who praised Obama as a god or attributed their own nervous tics to his omnipresence or reported on his brilliant policies often either had been speechwriters to past liberal presidents, enjoyed family connections, or were married to other New York or Washington journalists or powerbrokers. Their preferences about where to send a kid to school, where to vacation, and what to think were as similar to those they reported on as they were foreign to those who were supposed to listen to them. Like wealthy people in the Middle Ages who bought indulgences instead of truly repenting their sins, the more our elites preached about egalitarian politics for the fly-over upper middle classes, the less badly they felt about their own mannered conniving for privilege and status.

A generation ago, we were supposed to be grateful that a few gifted and disinterested minds were digesting our news for us each day on cash-rich ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, and PBS, and in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, summarized periodically on weekend network discussion groups and in newsweeklies like Time and Newsweek. Now the market share of all these enterprises is shrinking. Some exist only because of government subsidy, rich parent companies, or like-minded wealthy benefactors.

The technocratic pronouncements from on high — that Barack Obama was “sort of GOD,” or at least “the smartest president in history”; that a Harvard-trained public-policy wonk alone knew how to save us from a roasting planet — are now seen by most as laughable. An education-age Reformation is brewing every bit as earth-shattering as its 16th-century religious counterpart.

There are also generic signs of the technocracy’s morbidity. It deeply distrusts democracy, most recently evidenced by John Kerry’s rant that the media should not even cover the Tea Party, and by the European Union’s terror of allowing the public to vote on its intricate financial bandaging. It is no accident that technocratic journalists love autocratic China — with its ability to promote mass transit or solar panels at the veritable barrel of a gun — while hating the Tea Party, which came to legislative power through the ballot box.

So the elites’ furor grows at those who seek and obtain power, exposure, and influence without the proper background, credentials, or attitude. How else to explain why a Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin earns outright hatred, whereas a Mitt Romney or John McCain received only partisan disdain?

There is an embarrassing lack of talent and imagination in the last generation of the technocrats. One banal memo about a “tea-party downgrade” or a “jihadist” takeover of the Republican party is mimicked by dozens of politicians and journalists who cannot think of any more creative phraseology. Calls for civility are the natural accompaniment to unimaginative slurring of those outside the accustomed circle. When Steven Chu exhorts us that gas prices should match European levels or assures us that California farms will blow away, should we laugh or cry? Do learned attorneys general call the nation “cowards,” refer to fellow minority members as “my people,” or really believe that they can try the self-confessed terrorist architect of 9/11 in a civilian court a few yards from the scene of his mass murder? Was Timothy Geithner really indispensable in 2009 because other technocrats swore he was?

__________________
"The more communal enterprise extends, the more attention is drawn to the bad business results of nationalized and municipalized undertakings. It is impossible to miss the cause of the difficulty: a child could see where something was lacking. So that it cannot be said that this problem has not been tackled. But the way in which it has been tackled has been deplorably inadequate. Its organic connection with the essential nature of socialist enterprise has been regarded as merely a question of better selection of persons. It has not been realized that even exceptionally gifted men of high character cannot solve the problems created by socialist control of industry."
Ludwig Heinrich Elder von Mises

 

[busybody..]

A PREDICTION: When Fall 2012 rolls around the killer question in the Presidential debates will be…. “Are you better off now than you were a month ago?”

 

[busybody..]

AUGUST 9, 2011 4:00 A.M.
A Tottering Technocracy
Here and in Europe, the financial meltdown exposes the hollowness of our elites.
Victor Davis Hanson
NRO

VDH? O'Fendy?

Where did he get his degree from, Clown College, O'Fendy?

I

AXE

cause

DOUGH NUT BOI

isnt here yet

 

[unregistered]

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Keynesian economics represented a major shift in economic thinking. To understand how it dominated, some commentary on paradigm shifts is useful.

Thomas Kuhn described how knowledge advances in the physical sciences. His work popularized the term "paradigm shift." He asserted that more than just a crisis and "proof" was needed for a new paradigm to be accepted:

[C]risis alone is not enough. There must also be a basis, though it need be neither rational nor ultimately correct, for faith in the particular candidate chosen. Something must make at least a few scientists feel that the new proposal is on the right track, and sometimes it is only personal and inarticulate aesthetic considerations that can do that[.]

Kuhn's understanding of progress did not claim monotonically increasing knowledge. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Kuhn anticipated occasional loss with the adoption of a new paradigm:

[A] later period of science may find itself without an explanation for a phenomenon that in an earlier period was held to be successfully explained. This feature of scientific revolutions has become known as 'Kuhn-loss' (1962/1970a, 99-100).

The social sciences are more complex, but presumably paradigms shift in a similar fashion. The degree of uncertainty regarding the interpretation of data in the social sciences complicates the problem. Some epistemologists argue that behavioral data cannot prove or disprove anything. Friedrich Hayek's "scientism" was coined to describe the misuse of physical science methodologies to behavioral fields.

More variables, sometimes exceeding thousands, are related to an outcome. Most of these variables are not knowable or measurable. Many exist only in the mind of the actor(s). Controlled replication of experiments is virtually impossible.

"Proof" is a difficult hurdle. It is in this context that the paradigm shift to Keynesian economics should be viewed. Politicians wanting to expand the role of government delighted in the new theory. This attractiveness, plus the desperation associated with the Great Depression, enabled hundreds of years of prior economic knowledge to be discarded without normal due diligence.

Economists were also beneficiaries. Economists gained higher income and prestige as well as more power. Government-funded research ensured the continued academic support for economic activism.

President Eisenhower warned about the corrupting influence of such funding in his farewell address:

The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present - and is gravely to be regarded.

...

Keynesian economics lost much of its luster during the 1970s when the economy was burdened by both slow growth and high inflation. Slowly, however, it climbed back to its position of prominence as a result of its usefulness to a government committed to expansion.

The current economic crisis is more severe than any since the Great Depression, causing the Keynesian paradigm to again be questioned.

Kevin Hassett claims that the net effect of Keynesian stimulus must be negative:

Every stimulus effort has not two but three stages. When the stimulus is imposed, there is some positive short-run increase in GDP. When the stimulus is removed, there is an approximately equal and opposite reduction in GDP. But after that, the stimulus must be paid for with higher taxes or ongoing borrowing -- causing a further reduction in GDP. Thus the total impact of the Keynesian policy is negative over its life. This fact is visible even in the fine print of Congressional Budget Office analyses so often cited by stimulus apologists, such as its 2009 finding that the Obama stimulus would reduce output in the long run.

In a sense, Mr. Hassett cedes the value of stimulus to Keynesians and still shows it is not net beneficial. Some Keynesians now question the value of stimulus itself -- an unpardonable sin in the eyes of big-government economists.

According to the Austrian School of Economics, governmental intervention (government spending/credit creation) disrupts market prices, necessarily creating distortions in relative prices. These "incorrect" prices serve as false signals to economic actors, resulting in decisions which may be both unwise and unsustainable. An imbalance between consumption and investment is one result, as are distortions within these categories.

Imbalances are not immediately apparent but they do lower the efficiency of what an unhampered economy would produce. Additional stimulus, generally in increased dosages, is necessary lest the distortions surface. These additional stimuli further distort until a point is reached where additional stimulus is insufficient to cover up the problems.

The current housing crisis is an example of a major distortion that can no longer be hidden. It was created by a credit-induced misallocation of resources. Housing prices are now painfully correcting. Governmental interventions to prevent these adjustments have failed.

The continued unresponsiveness of employment and economic growth at this stage of the so-called recovery indicates serious underlying structural problems. Additional stimulus is unlikely to prevent the inevitable, as described by Ludwig von Mises:

There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit (debt) expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit (debt) expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.

...

The relationship between economics and politics is tenuous. Politicians are notoriously short-term-focused while economics is properly long-term-focused. Mr. Keynes was an influential politician sans office. His economics reflected this. He famously defended his economic policy against criticism by retorting that "in the long run, we are all dead."

Mr. Keynes died within his "short-run," but the rest of us are left to deal with the "long-run" distortions of continuous short-run economic fixes. To be fair to Keynes, it is not clear he would have approved what his epigones have done in his name.
Mr. Hassett described the relationship between politics and intervention economics as a "Keynesian death spiral":

[A]ggressive stimulus sets off a kind of Keynesian death spiral in which nervous politicians adopt repeated stimulus packages in order to avert near-term distress, the cumulative effect of which can be ruinous.

The economy is now well into this death spiral. The continuing shadow of Keynes on current policy and our feckless and cowardly political class was demonstrated in the debt-ceiling charade. This deal was pure snake oil. It accomplished nothing regarding spending or deficit reduction.

...

Aided by Keynesian economics, the political class cultivated and promoted the myth that government was responsible for economic success, especially the notion that more government means more success.

Government is like the rooster who believed his crowing caused the sun to rise. More accurately, the propaganda-conditioned voters see government as this rooster.

Government cannot cause the economic sun to rise. It can, however, prevent it from rising. That is the point this country has reached. Government has crippled the economy with an unbearable burden of poor policies, unnecessary regulations, and overspending.

...

That is why no political solution to the economic problem will be forthcoming. The rooster will crow until markets behead it. Spending and deficits will not decrease until the economic system collapses and we rebuild from the ashes that remain. Ludwig von Mises described both Keynesian economics and our current situation:

Keynes did not teach us how to perform the miracle ... of turning a stone into bread, but the not at all miraculous procedure of eating the seed corn.

Monty Pelerin
The American Thinker

 

[busybody..]

would you stop with the never ending C n Pees, O'Fendy!

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Between bouts of door knob sucking Barney Frank made a supreme effort.

Franklin Delano Raines (FoO) cooked the books, walked away with $90 million in bonus money and when the spotlight was shone upon the roach, fellow roach Waters screamed...

RACISM!!!​

... and right before the collapse, merc's favorite independent rated it AAA and slobbering technocrat Bawney Fwank pwonounced it as sound as, as, well as sound as sossial secuwity, which Harry Reid told us is completely self-funding for thirty years, but then remained stone-cold silent when Barack Hussein Obama needed a downgrade panic and went out and told Seniors that he could not the cut a check if the Tea Partiers got in the way of more Keynesian spending...

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

What did Obama say? We knew how bad off we were when we took office?

In February, six months before the downgrade, Obama offered a budget that increased spending and the debt. After ten years, the deficit still would have been more than $1 trillion. In April, four months before the downgrade, Obama delivered a gimmicky budget speech with no specifics. On April 11, just seven days before S&P assigned a negative outlook to our AAA rating, White House press secretary Jay Carney said the president wanted a debt-ceiling increase with no deficit reduction whatsoever.

Now that the downgrade is upon us, the administration is lashing out. It reeks of desperation and blame-shifting, but, hey, this is the way the game is played down at AA+.

Geithner scolded S&P: “They’ve handled themselves very poorly. And they’ve shown a stunning lack of knowledge about the basic U.S. fiscal budget math.” His huffiness is badly misplaced. Whatever S&P’s failings, it’s not under the misimpression that it’s okay to spend 40 percent more than you take in, which is the basic error in “budget math” of Geithner’s boss.

S&P had barely acted before every Democratic henchman hilariously deemed it “the tea-party downgrade.” S&P does complain about “political brinksmanship” in Washington. But what does it expect in a divided government? We had blissfully united government for two years in 2009–10, and it gave us a historic spending blowout vastly more irresponsible than the debt-ceiling deal.

The denial runs so deep on the left that MSNBC host Rachel Maddow insisted on Meet the Press that S&P downgraded us “not because there’s too much debt, but rather that Washington is not working.” If there weren’t such a huge and growing debt load, though, Washington’s fiscal squabbles wouldn’t be so momentous. As S&P notes, “the trajectory of the U.S.’s net public debt is diverging” from that of our former peers among AAA countries.

The reason is fundamentally political — “elected officials remain wary of tackling the structural issues required to effectively address the rising U.S. debt burden.” Tea-partying House Republicans don’t suffer from this endemic deficiency. The Ryan budget undertook precisely the containment of entitlements that, S&P says, “we and most other independent observers regard as key to long-term fiscal sustainability.”

It’s President Obama who is “wary” to reveal his secret plan to control entitlements as part of the aborted “Grand Bargain.” As the president of a country that has just suffered a humiliating rebuke for its inability to deal frankly with entitlements, it’s now time for him to show his hand with concrete, detailed proposals. If Obama favors significant entitlement savings in private, it’s his duty to favor them in public.

Rich Lowrey
NRO

Who does he blame for the downgrade?
☝☟☛☜☟☚☞☛☝☟☚☜☝☟☛☟☜☞☚

 

[unregistered]

 

[Ulaven_Demorte]

Please pardon me if I don't find the juvenile rantings of a middle-aged pool boy/boiler kicker/lightbulb changer credible on the topic of national security. In fact, I find it rather alarming that anyone is calling for the dismantling of our defense and national security infrastructure in a time of war and continuing international destablization. Even the democrats are shying away from significant defense cuts.

When faced with irrefutable fact, that our defense spending is more than 6 times that of the number two spot (who coincidentally is named as the bogey-man of the year, China), ignore it and go for the personal attack. One that's just as misinformed as your other opinions by the way.

Typical. You should stick to C&P bullshit from right wing blogs. At least then you can claim that it wasn't YOU who said whatever stupid shit that gets thrown in your face, you simply repeated it. As if that makes a difference.

 

[unregistered]

 

[Ulaven_Demorte]

Comparing our defense needs to those of other countries is a great big non sequitur.

No it isn't. It's called perspective, you should get some.

 

[busybody..]

Oooooooooo, Bad BUSYBODY is gonna say something thats gonna piss off O'Fendy and LustyCrummy

How can we GROW with all teh NIG -REG he imposes?

By Jeffry Bartash WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) - The productivity of U.S. businesses fell 0.3%` in the second quarter while first-quarter figures were revised lower to show a decline, as labor costs rose faster than the amount of goods and services produced, according to government data. Economists surveyed by MarketWatch had expected productivity to decline by 0.9% in the second quarter. Productivity in the first quarter, meanwhile, was revised to a 0.6% decline instead of a previously reported increase of 1.8%, the Labor Department said Tuesday. The amount of goods and services produced, known as real output, grew at an annual rate of 1.8%. Hours worked rose 2.0%. Compensation per hour rose 1.9% at an annual rate, but hourly wages adjusted for inflation actually fell 2.1%. The unit cost of labor, meanwhile, rose by a 2.2% annual rate.

 

[unregistered]

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

When faced with irrefutable fact, that our defense spending is more than 6 times that of the number two spot (who coincidentally is named as the bogey-man of the year, China), ignore it and go for the personal attack. One that's just as misinformed as your other opinions by the way.

Typical. You should stick to C&P bullshit from right wing blogs. At least then you can claim that it wasn't YOU who said whatever stupid shit that gets thrown in your face, you simply repeated it. As if that makes a difference.

And yet your President has thrown down in yet another war to the silence of the lambs, who bleated incessantly before...

Do they fear the wolf?

Tell us again Uncle Remus, how all the signs are pointing up...