No Double Dip--We're In A Depression--Edelson

I have not read the article yet. However, just comparing hard asset prices (like gold, copper, silver, steel, lead, corn, cotton, sugar, etc) to the Dow shows that the Dow is really falling even though it looks like it is rising.

And the current "weakness" in the Dow is in reality a crash hiding behind the fiat money "printing press" of the gubmint.

I agree with the number of the unemployment which our government falsify, it certainly doesn't count people that have finish collecting their unemployment insurance. The sad part of it is that the administration have no clue of how to resolve it, their plan is to ride it out and wait for the economy to recover itself, and when things don't look good in terms of number, the printing press rows again.

Obama job plan will only give him another chance to be in office for another term.

Not only do they not count those whose unemployment have run out. It does not count those 18 year olds that are trying to enter the job market but are being turned away in droves. My son on the west coast has been looking for work for a year. The fast food industry in California only hires Illegals. As does most of the service industry. I contacted a friend who manages a temp agency. She said she has not been able to place a single recent High School Grad. Why? Because there are so many unemployed people out there with verified and stable work histories that the few companies that are hiring temp workers have the pick of the litter. She said she has people with Masters, and in one case a Doctorate, performing physical labor in Warehouses for minimum wage.

She also told me they are seeing "Skill inversion". Where, because of prevailing wage laws, companies are hiring Illegals, with no education,and paying them,roughly, a third of the prevailing wage. At the same time they are hiring citizens, with College degrees, at minimum wage for the scut work. Why? Because and Illegal will not complain to the State about the illegal wage rate, where a citizen would. A citizen can't file a complaint on behalf of another citizen, only themselves. In addition she said that INS has recently stopped deporting Illegals and making raids on work places and factories.

Go figure

I also believe that it is going to be years before this mess is turned around, it is not going to happen overnight.

Excellent article, Fredd. Thanks for posting the link. I agree with this fellow's comments. I've been saying similar things for a while.

I once heard an economist define a "depression" as a deep recession with persistently high long term unemployment. That sounds depressingly familiar.

I also agree that there is a VAST gulf between the recent fortunes of Wall St. vs. Main St. There are a lot of local stories to be read and heard that show just how many of our friends, relatives, and neighbors are having a hard time in this economy.

I suppose that to a bankster, a "hard time" is when they get a bonus that is less than a million dollars per year. For a lot of other folks, though, a hard time is when they cannot afford the simple things that make life more comfortable; such as having to choose between eating and heating, for example.



Exactly so. This mess was decades in the making but really picked up steam in the last 5-10 years. It will take many years to straighten this all out and then only if the powers that be stop doing stupid things, like printing excessive amounts of currency, and start doing smart things, like cutting government spending and raising interest rates.

They say that "to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail". This is exactly what Bernanke is doing. He sees all economic problems as liquidity problems and either increases liquidity or decreases it as seems appropriate to him. His QE program failed to achieve its stated goals. Then, QE2 was done and it too failed. Now he is considering some form of QE3 and only God and Bernanke know why.

Unfortunately, many of the problems we face have little or nothing to do with liquidity, so cannot be solved this way. We have, for example, a severe leadership crisis in the US right now. We desperately need new management for this country but will not be getting it until 2013, if then.

We also have the same problem that a number of European countries have... too much government. We have come to the point where we must decide whether we want to grow government OR grow the economy. We simply do not have the resources to do both. If we did, we would be doing it instead of flailing about financially. What we desperately need is to cut our government to about 1/2 its current size, eliminating entire departments and slimming others. Much of this could be done via attrition. Some of it cannot and would require large lay-offs of government workers. A little trimming here and a little tweaking there is NOT going to solve our problems. They are WAY too big for such tiny measures to have any effect on them at all. This, "we're going to spend a lot more now but will spend a lot less in the future" stuff is utter nonsense and an outright lie. Don't believe it.



Agreed. You can bet that IF the economy were to turn itself around, the O-Team would be right there to claim all of the unearned credit for it and that the main-scream media would be right in there helping them do it.



If that were to happen, we would truly deserve the results.

We're in chapter 5 of a real life 50-chapter economic horror novel.

Indeed we do, Fredd, but we seem to have a US Justice Dept. that is VERY selective as to exactly which laws get enforced. Much seems to depend on just who is involved. This is typical of dictators as well as would-be dictators. :-(