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By Dennis Byrne
Human Events
Congratulations one and all, we’re doing a fine job of talking ourselves into a recession.
Thanks go to the media for acting like the kids in the back seat, unremittingly asking if we’re in a recession yet. Thanks go to Democrats, for looking for the slightest crack in the economy so they can stick it to President Bush and the Republicans. Thanks go to financial analysts who gladly deploy the most cockamamie schemes imaginable for predicting the arrival of the slide. Thanks to everyone who, apparently not content with the joys of prosperity, can be counted on to the find the dark lining in every silver cloud.
Thanks to ya’ll for knocking down the value of my house and drying up the real estate market just as my wife and I figure it’s time to downsize. Thanks for diminishing the value of my retirement nest egg. Thanks for weakening the American economy and increasing the chance of leading the world into a global recession. Is it dark enough for ya’ll yet?
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1 comment:
Dennis, as John Adams said, "facts are stubborn things." The CIA actually predicted a lot of this in its 2020 report issued in 2004 or 2005. To believe that the recession is the result of talk of politicians and financial analysts, you must believe
1) a nation can finance massive consumer spending and home construction with loans from China INDEFINITELY;
2) a nation can spend billions of dollars per month on two wars without raising taxes, while running a deficit, and not have it lower the value of its currency;
3) the trippling of the cost of energy doesn't create any inflationary pressures;
4) you can promise baby boomers the moon in terms of entitlements (esp. Medicare expansion circa 2001) and world creditors will just ignore it.
As for the subprime mortgages, you know, I'm not an economist, but when I heard for years endless radio ads pitching 2-year interest free variable mortgages and received endless mail from realtors urging me to dump my apartment lease and buy with deceptive "budgets" showing the costs would be the same, I figured it wasn't coincidence: that people were doing it. When I see a Chicago area 2000 census that said our population was relatively constant but saw housing construction everywhere I looked, it meant either the census was missing a lot of people, there was a lot of excess housing capacity, or somewhere in Chicago there are a bunch of ghost towns.
Citibank didn't just sell-off a good size chunk of itself to oil-rich foreign investors because of gloomy talk -- they did it because they had to.
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