koalabear
~Armed and Fuzzy~
- Joined
- Mar 14, 2001
- Posts
- 101,964
Where is your recovery?
He refuses counseling, he will never recover.
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Where is your recovery?
Where is your recovery?
Where is your recovery?
Back in 1987, after the stock market meltdown, Reagan created a little stealth agency that buys and sells stock. Reagan created it to stabilize the market. But in recent years its been used to stampede bears and bulls, and spin things for the President.
The Presidents people manipulate all kinds of things but they havent learned how to manipulate prosperity for the whole nation.
really?
show me THOSE sources
I'll
wait![]()
AJ posted a "non-Keynsian" study out of the Fed that he swore was more accurate than Moody's Analytics. He branded the Moody's models as crap and "Keynsian" (despite providing no evidence for that argument).
The only problem was that AJ's study concluded that the stimulus saved 3-4 million jobs, which was 300,000 to 1.3 million jobs more than in the Moody's analysis. If you want to see his source why don't you ask him. I'm certain he has it bookmarked. I mean unless he cherry picks his research and bookmarks only studies that support his position![]()
show me
Its OK
I'll wait![]()
Please try this on somebody who doesn't know any better. Taxes are set to rise next year.
Obama's biggest mistake, a mistake common to all of his supporters, is having thought he was up to the job.
Well, I see that in the face of a new recession, Harry and Barry came out strongly in favor of increasing taxes, the markets heard them and voted...
And Jen, I told you, it was 50-50 that we would go below 12K again.
So, U_D, merc, celb, Luke, HOW ARE MY SOURCES NOW????
show me
Its OK
I'll wait![]()
Ask AJ. I'm sure he has his precious study bookmarked.
AAAAAnd the goal posts shift once again. First the stimulus was going to do nothing, possibly even hurt the economy. Now the stimulus clearly did a lot, but only for about 2 years while it was being spent.
And we're going to have hyperinflation. And deflation. And preposterously high food prices.
But hey, at least your very own sources showed that we'd be -3 million to -4 million jobs worse right now without the stimulus, looking at a 12% unemployment rate, a far lower GDP, and far lower government revenue that would jack up our deficit and credit rating even more. How does that work? You're talking out of both sides of your mouth again....![]()
Larry DoyleA wide array of supposedly smart people are now informing us that the economy is slowing and may slip back into recession. The new phrase being used to describe our economic condition is 'stall speed.'
Well how about that? Stall speed, they say. Is the economy truly slowing? Is it really? Or perhaps did the real economy -- the one in which we live and operate, not the one fabricated by Wall Street pundits and Washington politicians -- never truly rebound?
I ask because I firmly believe that our domestic economy never truly rebounded in a meaningful fashion over the last few years.
I cautioned people to avoid the regular smoke and mirrors emanating from our financial and political hotbeds in spring 2010 when I first equated our economic malady as akin to "walking pneumonia."
I wrote then, U.S. Economy = "Walking Pneumonia":
I strongly recommend that people not get caught up in the daily, weekly, or even monthly reports. Take a step back and look at things from a quarterly, semi-annually, and annual basis. Let's work a little harder to eliminate the noise in figures so we can grasp the fact that the economic road in front of us will remain long and hard.
We were not healthier then and we are not meaningfully healthier now. How do we know?
We received a more honest and complete economic reading a few days ago in the revisions to prior year's GDP reports. These reports received limited attention.
How can we accurately measure our current condition if we do not appreciate and understand the depth of our 'walking pneumonia'? We can't, although the aforementioned strategists and Washington wizards would rather you not know that.
On that note, let's look at the report released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis last week highlighting the fact that our recession ran deeper then and, in my opinion, continues to significantly impact us now:
Negative real GDP readings to me spell one thing. We have never officially gotten out of recession despite all the sugar highs produced by Uncle Sam and executed by his boys, Ben and Tim. Talk of green shoots, V-shaped recovery, and assorted other tricks were designed by those who are more interested in your vote, your spending, your purchasing overpriced securities, and your daily trading than your long term economic well being.For 2007-2010, real GDP decreased at an average annual rate of 0.3 percent; in the previously published estimates, real GDP had increased at an average annual rate of less than 0.1 percent. From the fourth quarter of 2007 to the first quarter of 2011, real GDP decreased at an average annual rate of 0.2 percent; in the previously published estimates, real GDP had increased at an average annual rate of 0.2 percent.
As an eternal optimist, though, let me also share with you how I concluded my March 2010 commentary referenced above:
Navigate accordingly and spread the 'sense on cents.'We'll make it. I am fully confident. That said, much like those with 'walking pneumonia,' we need to take care of ourselves rather than allow the daily spin to trick us into believing we are healthier than we really are.
Your sources are just as bad as they always were. Worse than ever even. You honestly think that the market's reason for stepping back yesterday was because a couple Dems chattered about taxes?
What you need to realize, though you never will, is that the business community puts far less credit into partisan politics than you do. Watch the business shows on a daily basis like I do and you'll see that people with money are far less interested in your partisan talking points than you are.
But... fuck... you get your business and investing news from WND and Pajamas. You've shown over and over again that you could care less about real business analysis. I'm wasting my breath telling you this, but your sources will ALWAYS lead you astray from the truth. Always have, always will.
Steve McCannThe members of Congress and President Obama, having exhaled a sigh of relief over extending the debt ceiling, are tripping over themselves in the mad rush to get out of Washington before the relentless heat, often mixed with overbearing humidity, sets in. However the world and U.S. economy and markets are in the throes of a summer of discontent with a real possibility of genuine global panic in the fall.
In Europe, equities are down for the year, investors are fleeing European bank shares (as their exposure to the debts of Greece and other debtor nations becomes more precarious), bond spreads are widening on Spanish, Italian, and now French debt (which relative to Germany, has doubled in a month). There is now a silent run on the banks in Greece, and Spain cannot pass and sustain a viable austerity program, and France, similar to the United States, has been slow to cut a chronic budget deficit. The latest Eurozone rescue package was far too small as a solution to calm spirits for more than a matter of days and the scale of the overall dilemma grows by the day.
The debt ceiling crisis in the US revealed to the world two disconcerting realities: 1) Barack Obama is inept and incapable of being a leader and 2) the debate brought out the overwhelming scale of the fiscal challenges in the world's largest economy. This was further exacerbated by a dramatic revision of the nation's Gross Domestic Product in the previous two quarters to virtually stagnant levels. A report that consumer spending (which accounts for 70% of US economic activity) had dropped to its lowest level since September 2009 -- in the midst of the 2008-2009 recession. Lastly there was a surprising drop in the manufacturing index in July indicating a significant decline in that sector.
The United States is not alone in the receipt of bad economic news. Across the developed world there has been a tidal wave of nasty surprises. The Citigroup economic surprise index (which reflects how recent economic reports have been trending versus expectations) is at its worst level since February 2009.
Claude SandroffStandard and Poor's has warned that there's a 50% chance it would downgrade the credit rating of the United States of America from its once-untarnished AAA perch to a Spain-like AA. It seems that the credit rating agency and its peers including Moody's are finally concerned about the creditworthiness of the US, even with a debt ceiling compromise. And they are looking for firm government commitments to large cuts in spending, perhaps as large as $4 trillion. Or else.
First, what took them so long? Second, who cares? After all, it was once the case that S&P and the other ratings agency declared Freddie and Fannie mortgage obligations to be AAA as well. We might forgive their incompetence and conflict-laden corruption if they hadn't been a major agent in the mortgage meltdown disaster of 2008 and all that it engendered, from TARP to the 2009 stimulus and from QE 1 to QE 2. But who, at this stage in our country's path to insolvency and currency degradation, is naive enough to take any proclamation by a rating agency seriously?
The opportunity to downgrade our debt for maximum effect has long since passed. A downgrade might have riveted our attention had it come in January 2010 a year after the stimulus package added $860 billion to our debt but led to no rise in employment levels therefore providing no new source of organic growth to offset Obama's added debt. Or perhaps a downgrade might have been welcome on March 22, 2010, the day after ObamaCare passed, promising to add another $1 trillion to the national debt. Maybe a downgrade was appropriate last Friday, completely unrelated to the debt ceiling negotiations, but rather reflecting the downward revision in gross domestic product to under 1% for the first half of 2011.
Instead of enduring another dead-boring press conference presided over by Obama, Reid, or Boehner, S&P, Moody's, and Fitch should have scheduled their own press conferences on stages festooned with black bunting. That might have helped rouse the country from its slumber of dependency.
But even in less turbulent economic times, downgrades by the ratings firms have a mixed predictive history. Tom Lauricella of the Wall Street Journal cataloged the effect of agency downgrades on stock, bond, and currency markets, in several countries with original AAA ratings. In Australia in 1986 and Canada in 1995 the major indices rallied after the downgrade. And in Australia the dollar rallied as well, though in Sweden in 1991 the krona crashed after the downgrade. Clearly a ratings agency downgrade is hardly a death knell, and each unhappy country is unhappy for its own reasons.
Mikiel de Bary is a securities industry professional in New York City.It is high time to judge macroeconomics -- the pseudo-economics of "aggregates" -- as a disaster. We must challenge both the premises of the macroeconomists and their "policy" alternatives. Let us recognize them for what they are, namely, public relations consultants for the entitlement state.
From its beginnings, which we can date from 1936 (the publication year of Keynes's General Theory), macroeconomics emphasized (on rather vaguely argued grounds) the importance of the biggest numbers in business statistics -- the so-called aggregates. The macroeconomists, as it were, even named themselves after these politically potent "macro" numbers and laid claim to an expertise precisely in tracking and, well, producing them.
The supposed tie of macroeconomics to reality has always been its "national income and product accounting" -- the vast statistical project that they claim "measures" aggregate production and, even, national economic performance. But the difficulty such accounting could never overcome (and, therefore, ignored) is its inability to do anything more than record aggregates of spending, which could never reveal much more than various unremarkable manifestations of change in money supply and velocity.
In fact, though we are conditioned to believe otherwise, so-called "real GDP" has never given information as to aggregate physical production of goods and services, for it wholly evades the crucial fact that production increments induce spending only on themselves (and on closely-related production) at the expense of spending on other, competing goods. This means that new production cannot be the cause of an increase in aggregate spending, since it deflects, but does not increase, spending.
Also mistaken has been the near-universal belief, taught in macroeconomics, that a rising grand spending aggregate implies improved national economic performance. In a large economy, such an increase is far more likely to signal that a central-bank money-pumping boom is in progress, resulting in malinvestment and, in due course, an inescapable bust. But business activity and employment arising from such artificial booms have little more right to be called improvements in national economic performance than did pyramid-building under the pharaohs. (And there has never been an "unemployment problem" to be solved by a central bank, but rather a government-war-on-employers problem to be solved, if ever, by some future generation of politicians.)
Now, why did the macroeconomists find it expedient to label aggregate spending as the measure of production and aggregate spending as the indicator of "economic performance"? The clue to the answer is that their fundamental policy recommendation is long-term money supply increase, which can reliably alter virtually nothing other than aggregate spending. (Macroeconomics, then, was merely the 20th-century variant of the much older quackery of inflationism.) For the macroeconomists, the fuel for the economy is continual new money injections, their substitute for relying on the price system to guide production and for guaranteeing property rights to assure incentives to production.
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In effect, macroeconomics was a two-step public relations strategy for those seeking to finance the entitlement state. Step 1 was to define the goal as aggregate spending increase (which, of course, you always refer to as "economic growth"). Step 2 was to have the central bank engineer a long-term expansion of the money supply. And (as a footnote to Step 2): Never forget that money supply expansion is the sine qua non in achieving increases in aggregates (i.e., "growth") and that by it you will achieve your key (non-public) goals as well, namely, enhancing tax receipts and facilitating government borrowing.
The subtext of the macroeconomic message was that one can hardly build the entitlement state -- in America, at least -- without deficit spending, Americans being exceptionally sensitive to outright taxation. Moreover, successful execution of the marketing strategy provides an invaluable, bipartisan, political bonus: the ability of successive administrations and Congresses to plead that their policies are all about "helping" the economy to achieve "growth."
The essential role of macroeconomics is to provide rationales to politicians, who want to spend more money, and to their central bankers, who earn esteem insofar as they create more money over the long term. This is why macroeconomists advocate central banking, a fiat currency and every legislative effort to free money growth from being in any way restricted by the supply of precious metals. This is why they sanction the 1913 government restructuring of our money and banking system, the 1933 confiscation of gold from American citizens, and the 1971 denial to foreign central banks of dollar-to-gold convertibility. Macroeconomists approve each of these events because they were required for the development of the late 20th century "growth" machine in support of the entitlement state. (To be sure, macroeconomists can, and sometimes do, advise governments to engage in so-called stimulus spending, another avenue of entitlement state expansion. But the bread and butter issue for macroeconomic policy is invariable: long-term monetary expansion as orchestrated by the central bank.)
The macroeconomists characterize the pre-Fed money and banking system as an intolerable burden on the economy of the late 19th and early 20th century (the period during which America -- surprisingly -- became a world economic superpower). By the 1960s, they had fashioned the Federal Reserve System into a sophisticated fiat money creator for the late 20th century (the period during which America transformed itself into the sclerotic entitlement state now -- surprisingly -- in hock to the People's Republic of China).
In the U.S. and around much of the world today there exists the probability of cuts in entitlements. This is historically unprecedented and shows the macroeconomic project to be on the verge of collapse. For Europe, Japan, and the United States, the evidence for this is the de facto insolvency of their banking systems (which are burdened with unacknowledged collapses in prices of both real estate and sovereign loans), the desperate, ineffectual central bank "quantitative easing" (read: bank propping-up) programs, and continuing bailouts of governments and their banking systems at taxpayer expense.
Today's economic conditions should make clear the difference between "economic progress" and "macroeconomic growth." Progress was what occurred when an un-subverted price system (last seen in the decades before World War I), along with its prerequisites, economic liberty and hard money, guided spending in a non-macroeconomic world, i.e., a world of relatively stable spending aggregates. "Growth" was merely the offspring of continual pumping of the money supply, which caused ever higher spending aggregates but effectively disenfranchised the price system even as it enabled increases in government spending and indebtedness.
In all this there is a lesson for would-be opponents of the entitlement state: it is a mistake to join the macroeconomist's cult of "growth" as indicator of economic progress, as savior of entitlement state programs, or as solution to the problem of government indebtedness. The economic progress we make (if any) is only what remains after deducting the cost of the entitlement state from macroeconomic "growth."
When the U.S. took substantial steps toward the entitlement state during the hard times of the 1930s, objections as to its affordability had considerable force, and many then still looked upon the palliative of "easy money" as immoral on its face. Owing to such quaint attitudes and the old-fashioned dicta of some pre-Keynesian economists, the entitlement state program was in jeopardy in its infancy. It faced what promised to be an endless public relations problem. To survive, it needed an effective rationale.
Cue the macroeconomists, who reassured opinion leaders that the entitlement state was not only affordable but that growth of government and even deficit spending was downright advisable from the economic point of view. In Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, a ministry of propaganda would have handled this sort of thing. In the U.S., the propaganda war against gold, small and balanced budgets, and a banking system free of government domination was merely outsourced to the macroeconomists, who became the financial advisors to the entitlement state, the economy's chief enemy.
...
Regarding recent history: Panic-mongers warned, “Raise the ceiling lest the stock market experience a TARP convulsion.” Yes, the market declined almost 778 points when the House rejected the Troubled Assets Relief Program. But who remembered that after TARP was quickly enacted, in the next five months the market lost an additional 3,800 points?
WAPO...
Before this debate, who knew that the government sends more than 100 million checks or electronic transfers a month to employees, vendors and — much the largest group — entitlement beneficiaries, including 21 million households receiving food stamps?
During various liberal ascendancies, the federal spider has woven a web of dependencies. The political purpose has been to produce growing constituencies of voters disposed to vote Democratic. This disposition, a.k.a. the entitlement mentality, is triggered by making the constituencies constantly apprehensive about the security of their status as wards of government.
Obama’s presidency may last 17 or 65 more months, but it has been irreversibly neutered by two historic blunders made at its outset. It defined itself by health-care reform most Americans did not desire, rather than by economic recovery. And it allowed, even encouraged, self-indulgent liberal majorities in Congress to create a stimulus that confirmed conservatism’s portrayal of liberalism as an undisciplined agglomeration of parochial appetites. This sterile stimulus discredited stimulus as a policy.
Obama’s 2012 problem is that he dare not run as a liberal but cannot run from his liberalism. The left’s narrative for 2012 is that by not offering another stimulus, Washington is being dangerously frugal. This, even though his stimulus — including cash for clunkers, cash for caulkers, dollars for dishwashers (yes, there actually were money showers for home improvements and greener appliances), etc. — led downhill.
The economy’s calamitous 0.8 percent growth in the first half of this year indicates that the already appalling deficit projections for coming years are much too optimistic. The debt increases caused by anemic growth and job creation may dwarf whatever debt reduction results from the process initiated by the debt-ceiling agreement. This may portend a vicious downward spiral as increased borrowing and the burden of debt service further suffocate America’s dynamism.
America may be one-third of the way through a lost decade — or worse, toward a lost national identity. So, Republicans have their 2012 theme: “Is this the best we can do?”
On the current policy path, it would be surprising if growth were rapid enough to reduce unemployment even to 8.5 percent by the end of 2012. A substantial withdrawal of fiscal stimulus will occur when the payroll tax cuts expire at the end of the year. With growth at less than 1 percent in the first half of this year, the economy is effectively at a stall and facing the prospects of shocks from a European financial crisis that is decidedly not under control, spikes in oil prices and declines in business and household confidence. The indicators suggest that the economy has at least a 1-in-3 chance of falling back into recession if nothing new is done to raise demand and spur growth.