As good as it gets
Despite all the hand-wringing over the economy in
the last few years, people need to understanding something: It ain't going to
get any better. The economy has been "booming" for nearly three years. It has
been booming under a massive weight of debt which the 2001 recession failed to
reduce.
All the lack of performance strength stems from
the monstrous load of debt, of debt excess that fueled the nineties boom and was
never taken care of during the subsequent recession. Through various speculative
tricks and the release of veritable torrents of liquidity (which haven't helped
the debt situation one bit—only made it worse), the Fed, in cahoots with
the U.S. Treasury and Wall Street, engineered the current boom. Everybody would
like to think that this boom is only beginning, that it has been slow to get to
its feet because of the war on terror and all that. This, however, is not the
least true; in fact, the current boom has just about run its course. The latest
unemployment stats, coupled with a mediocre Xmas sales season, point strongly to
the notion that we are in the latter stages of the boom, that it's all downhill
from this point onward. The question is: when the economy go down the hill in a
somewhat orderly fashion, or will it rush down like a runaway train, only to
break into pieces at the bottom?
Posted: Sat
- January 8, 2005 at 06:20 PM