We rarely agree with Dr. Reich’s policy prescriptions, but we gotta give him this: his current assessment is reasonable:
“But we’re not at the beginning of the end. I’m not even sure we’re at the end of the beginning. All of these pieces of upbeat news are connected by one fact: the flood of money the Fed has been releasing into the economy…The real question is whether this means an economic turnaround. The answer is it doesn’t.
Cheap money, you may remember, got us into this mess.
Some of the big banks will claim to be profitable, but don’t bank on it. Neither they nor anyone else knows what their assets are really worth. Besides, the big banks are sitting on over $500 billion over taxpayer equity and loans. Who knows how they’re calculating profits? Most importantly, there’s still a yawning gap between the economy’s productive capacity and what it’s now producing, and absolutely nothing will turn the economy around until that gap begins to close.”
Dr. Reich is right on, “don’t bank on it“.
It’s one thing for somebody to piss in the wind. It’s another thing to be standing beside them when they do it.
Knowledge is power. The FEDury seems to have the information market sewed up. It’s no skin off their nose if somebody makes a bad investment based on false and misleading information put out (directly or indirectly) by the FEDury.
Truth is sacrificed on the altar of “the Greater Good”. That mindset is very, very dangerous.
And .. how do you argue with it when they won’t tell anything from the get go.
There’s a whole lot more at risk here than just your money.
It should have been an easy job to connect depleted 401(K)s and home equities with Wall Street bandits. But not quite.
Dems are no longer the party of “sweaty dockworkers and dirt farmers in bib overalls,” says Victor Davis Hansen in the Washington Times. Billionaires like Warren buffet and George Soros have invested heavily in them.
But the GOPers ran up some big debt before the Dems got their surge in power. On the other hand, O voted for Bush’s stimulus while he was a senator and Treasury Secretaries Robert Ruben and Lawrence Summers both pushed to free investment banks from federal regulations, which led to the “reckless gambling with trillions in subprime mortgage debt.
And though O promises to tax only the rich, there aren’t enough rich people to pay all the bills that are coming due. It’s a fantasy.
You can blame either side, but we might have to put some blame on ourselves. If only we had known what they were up to. Moral: Make it your job to know what they are up to.