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“.