Posted on 01/01/2009 9:44:55 AM PST by Sub-Driver
It’s not only foreign policy that the MSM has a destructive effect. This poll is encouraging.
Yes, but the massive spending did not begin until October.
And they want to continue the same policies. “If we borrow and spend more while making credit available to people who are marginal then we can get back to the good days....”
Our GDP needs to contract at least 20% in order to get it back in line. Spending at the government level needs to be reduced by amounts people simply cannot fathom. Housing needs to come down at least 15%, maybe even 20% and savings rates need to come up.
The money the gov’t spent is going into banks balance sheets so they somewhat stabalize. They are not lending money (ie that money is not circulating into the economy). Velocity of money is dropping drastically. Nothing is being spent that will help GDP.
1) The percentage is understated. After all, who is reporting it but the very media people are condemning?
2) Much more than making it WORSE, the media in effect CREATED this "crisis," which, oddly enough, did not exist until the campaign began to ramp up, and which is likely to result in fearful voters displacing the curren regime.
Yep—we’re in for a rough ride.
Actually, now that I look at the data again, I see that I misstated. The NBER says that the economic peak began in Dec. 2007, and that the economic decline that has happened since then qualifies as a recession. But the BEA says that GDP has actually increased at a 3.2% since then:
So yes, we are in a recession, but the GDP is still increasing at a pretty healthy rate, at least as of the end of the third quarter.
The 2nd quarter bump was the $300 billion stimulus (annualized at 1.2 trillion). That was nothing but borrowing from future GDP.
Our economy is a resillient one. It may be weak in certain areas and pretty good in other areas.
The shopping center scenes, I mentioned in our area seem to be replicated in many N California areas.
Our Dil called a few minutes ago, she and our two grand kids got a few Target gift cards and Walmart gift cards. So she and the kids went out shopping to use those gift cards.
She called from a Carls Junior restaurant. She told my wife that the stores and parking lots where they went (at least two shopping centers) were busy. The fast food places were busy. Now maybe that will clear out when the gift cards are used up.
I80 to the Sacramento/Tahoe area and back has been busy this morning. And other friend called and said the traffic reminded her of weekday commutes. It took her a little over an hour to make a 35 mile trip to outlets east of here.
Friends with relatives in the rust bucket and the NE say that the economic situation is very bad back there. A friend when he hears this, says those are his old friends and relatives back in Michigan, still waiting for Studebaker to reopen its car and truck factories. They refuse to move and to develop new skills needed in today’s world.
My wife watched a local news special last night while I was getting Tuxed Out. They had a guy who runs a new type of employment agency strictly internet in the San Francisco area. In spite of the 8% unemployment rate, he had a lot jobs that he was not able to fill due to lack of job skills and people not willing to change or really work in those jobs.
One of our younger relatives is a N California Senior Project Manager for heavy duty types of of construction. He needs 3-4 project managers and about a dozen supers besides 100’s of skilled workers. Their current open windows for future jobs due to the shortage of those skilled people are out past 2011/12. He just hired a new/young project manager from Oregone, whose company went belly up. The new guy starts working this week. His pregnant wife is due any day. Our younger relative has not been able to get any other laid off skilled workers from that closed company to move down.
Last night at our NY’s party, one of our friends talked about a friend, who is a semi retired heavy construction project manager in Western Canada in his 70’s. For a decade he comes to southern California during the winter months as a trouble shooter/consultant. They called our friends on Christmas to say they had arrived in Southern California, and he started to work on Monday.
Yes, this is not scientific. But in a way it is like watching Weather on TV telling you that global warming is causing a drought and extreme heat in your area. You walk to your front door and walk outside and it is cold and rainy. Yet the so called experts say it is hot and dry in your area.
Thanks for the link; I was wondering how Investor's Business Daily could get 'underemployed' numbers from the BLS, even when the BLS says they don't do stats for 'underemployed'.
Look at how the number is only figured back to '94 when the level was still less than it is now. One would think somebody there didn't want us to see worse 'underemployed' numbers with Clinton's jobs bonanza.
Sort of like how the folks at NBER came up with a new definition of 'economic downturn'.
A 3-5% drop in traffic with a 10% smaller basket size isn’t noticeable by the average shopper but would result in a 13-15% drop in sales (those are the #s for the retailer I work for by the way). There are *jobs* out there but that doesn’t mean anything other than we haven’t reverted back to cave man yet. The classifieds here has dropped about 80% in size in the last 6 months. The U6 unemployment rate is at 12.5% and skyrocketting and continuing unemployment benefits hit an all time high last week.
Possibly, although I really don’t see how a stimulus which was passed in the second quarter could have much effect in the second quarter. As I said in an earlier post, there is a delay between what the government does and what the economy does.
But irrespective, the fact remains that it is not as bad as you’d think listening to the media. This is not a Depression.
When you look at all the statistics, the one that most closely resembles what happened during the Depression is the stock market crash. But even that is not that comparable. The stock market declined by 90% during the Depression. So far, the Dow is down less than 40%. And even that is misleading on the high side. During the Depression, the 90% decline set investors back to the levels they had in 1910 or thereabouts. Right now, we are at 2003 levels. The 40% number ignores that between mid 2005 and October, 2008, there was an increase of almost 40%. If you did not buy at the peak in October, 2008, and you were properly diversified, then your losses are probably less than 40%.
And of course, the stock market is not the same as the economy anyway.
We’ve got 6.7% unemployment and a decline of GDP that is a fraction of a percent. That’s wildly different from what you’d expect in a Depression.
You are correct that the stock market dropped 90% in the great depression but it took FOUR YEARS to get there. We're only 15 months into the stock market's peak.
By the way, U6 unemployment is at 12.5% which is the #s the gov’t use during the depression. Oh, unemployment rate didn’t hit double digits until 1931 by the way.
Which gov't source is this?
Well DUHHH!!!! The sonsofbitches along with the dim-0s have been trying to talk up a failed presidency for Bush since his 1st day in office!
I heard the new Fox Business channel tag line the other day: ‘Facts, not fear.” All you need to do is watch a few minutes of CNBC each day to see how they are slanting the news. They run the negative side of data and news for a few days, and it seems for no reason will switch to the positive side for a few days. As boring as it is, data is all I need (facts).
10,000 banks failed during the Great Depression. So far, we’ve had 23. The money supply contracted by 30% during the Depression. Our monetary base has almost doubled in just two months.
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/BASE
We’re in a recession, but it at this point the recession we’re in doesn’t even rival the 2001 recession in depth, and that was the mildest recession in history.
If you want to compare this recession to the Depression, then you should have some parallels. But where are they?
Parallels? Huge 1st year decline in stocks, 2-3% jump in unemployment, 5% jump in broad based unemployment, bank failures by deposit amount was huge, breaking the buck, bonds trading at depression levels, GDP should contract at 7+% rate this quarter and next, 9 consecutive quarters of shrinking corporate profits, etc. Again, we're in the EARLY stages--in 1929/30 they weren't calling it the great depression yet or even a depression for a long time.
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