Financial Crisis Called Off

By James Howard Kunstler
on August 24, 2009 7:49 AM

Whew, what a relief! Everybody from Ben Bernanke and a Who's Who of banking poobahs schmoozing it up in the heady vapors of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to the dull scribes at The New York Times, toiling in their MC Escher hall of mirrors, to poor dim James Surowiecki over at The New Yorker, to - wonder of wonders! - the Green Shoots claque at the cable networks, to the assorted quants, grinds, nerds, pimps, factotums, catamites, and cretins in every office from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to the International Monetary Fund - every man-Jack and woman-Jill around the levers of power and opinion weighed in last week with glad tidings that the world's capital finance system survived what turned out to be a mere protracted bout of heartburn and has been reborn as the Miracle Bull economy. Our worries over. If you believe their bullshit. Which I don't.

All this goes to show is how completely the people in charge of things in the USA have lost their minds. They seem to think this mass exercise in pretend will resurrect the great march to the WalMarts, to the new car showrooms, and the cul-de-sac model houses, reignite another round of furious sprawl-building, salad-shooter importing, and no-doc liar-lending, not to mention the pawning off of innovative, securitized stinking-carp debt paper onto credulous pension funds in foreign lands where due diligence has never been heard of, renew the leveraged buying-out of zippy-looking businesses by smoothies who have no idea how to run them (and no real intention of doing it, anyway), resuscitate the construction of additional strip malls, new office park "capacity" and Big Box "power centers," restart the trade in granite countertops and home theaters, and pack the turnstiles of Walt Disney world - all this while turning Afghanistan into a neighborhood that Beaver Cleaver would be proud to call home.

By the way - and please pardon the rather sharp digression - but does anybody know if they buried Michael Jackson yet? It's only been a couple of months. And, if not, is that the stench now wafting across the purple mountains' majesty from sea-to-shining sea? Isn't it a little indecent to keep the poor fellow waiting? Or is a really surprising comeback secretly planned, with product tie-ins and all?

http://kunstler.com/blog/2009/08/financial-crisis-called-off.html#more

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Roubini, for one, thinks we're headed for a "W" shaped recession. So does Krugman. I'm more likely to listen to them rather than the folks who didn't see this coming, or did and did nothing to stop it.

I think Jackson is to be buried on September 8th, or somewhere around there.

Nice.

No jobs, no recovery.

That simple.



Last number, as of July 2009, was 9.7%:
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/laus.nr0.htm

We manufacture T Bills and sell them to Asia! All is well.

"All this goes to show is how completely the people in charge of things in the USA have lost their minds."

So, to follow the insanes and keep on sharing their insanity, or to start recuperating from the insanity, to find sane ways?

There's a very simple test to judge if the speaker is sane or insane; does it speak from the fundamental belief system of insanity or plain sanely:
Insane = more growth
Sane = balance

the economists who say the recession may be over are almost all saying the recovery will be anemic and that jobs will continue to rise for several months. NO ONE is claiming that it's all gold-plated rose petals from here on out. they point to the drag from unemployment, lingering debt at all levels, and the portend of inflation if any when anything does settle.

in fact, most economists are characterizing this period as "stabilization" rather than recovery. the stock market, for the most part, is up simply because depression appears to be off the table, or at least delayed. NO ONE IS EXPECTING BOOM TIMES.

what's more, the economists are focusing on a very narrow range of econometric statistics, in particular gdp. gdp says nothing about the distribution of growth. it is entirely possible for gdp to grow while many regions and industries continue to suffer as if in a recession. if there's enough production from the parts of the economy that are doing well enough, that's all that matters as far as gdp is concerned. and that appears to be where we're headed, where whatever recovery there is will once again bypass huge swaths of america. but enough corporations will get rich, so america's doing fine, right?

it's the MEDIA, as usual, who is playing everything to extremes. "sell" becomes "buy" and that's all there is to it as far as the sensationalists are concerned.