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it amazes me the suicidal economic policies these keynesians have pursued. they're creating the collapse of western capitalism, which they will then (as they already have at the beginning of this "global recession") turn around and blame the very system they destroyed. basically, every nation in the "the west" has  been operating with expanding deficits for decades (since the leftist revolution of the 1960s). we're all in a huge amount of debt, in order to support these liberal-socialist experiments, and when this inevitably fell in on itself, what did the keynesians suggest? massive stimulus', running up even more deficit spending, and massive bailouts, running up even more. and it didn't work. or did it?

in the u.s., the bailouts went to keeping private sector dues paying union jobs (as in the automakers), and keeping the banks afloat, who were in danger of going under, thanks to the regulations encouraging, and even mandating bad loans to low income people who couldn't afford to pay them back.

the stimulus went toward government dues paying union employees, as this is a prime source of election funding for the democratic party. it's classic keynesian and crony-capitalism philosophy. prop up certain industries and entities that are "too big to fail" and they feel like the government can subsidize the economy toward prosperity. it has never worked.

we're now monetizing our debt, printing huge amounts of currency and driving up inflation (which doesn't exist by the way), giving bailouts to nations in trouble, all in an effort to try to maintain the spending and keep this house of cards standing.

meanwhile, for the little people, there is no recovery. in fact, we're heading to a double dip, because the dips that are running the show are bankrupting our futures, for the spending of today.

even time magazine is starting to get the picture that this has all been a horrible failure...though they stopped short of blaming obama. surprise surprise, it's the private sector to blame.

What Recovery? The Five Myths About the U.S. Economy

A couple of weeks ago, the Obama Administration was poised to switch to growth mode. Then the ugly data started pouring in like the overflowing Mississippi. First-quarter GDP numbers showed a measly 1.8% increase, well short of the expectations of above 3%, and second-quarter estimates are not much better. Then came a report on housing-price declines that have not been seen since the Great Depression, followed by reports of consumer spending at six-month lows and weak manufacturing surveys. The worst was unemployment figures to make you cry: a mere 54,000 jobs were created in May, less than half of what was expected and less than a third of what is needed to lower a 9.1% unemployment rate.

You can hardly blame Council of Economic Advisers head Austan Goolsbee for picking this moment to retreat to his tenured university post in Chicago. The professor tried to put a good face on things, brushing away worries of a double dip and citing stiff but temporary "headwinds" from such factors as the Japanese-nuclear-disaster-related supply shocks and higher gas prices. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke was somewhat more sober, admitting that the recovery was proving to be "uneven" and "frustratingly slow." Yet he gave no hint of being willing to helicopter in a third round of fiscal stimulus — at least not yet.

"Monetary policy," he said, "cannot be a panacea." Or as Goolsbee put it, it's time for the private sector to "stand up and lead the recovery."

If only. There may be $2 trillion sitting on the balance sheets of American corporations globally, but firms show no signs of wanting to spend it in order to hire workers at home, however much Washington might hope they will.

While the White House's official 2011 growth estimate, locked in before Japan and the oil shock, is still 3.1%, most economic seers are betting on 2.6%. That's not nearly enough to propel us out of an unemployment crisis that threatens to create a lost generation of workers who can't find good jobs and may never find them. Welcome to the 2% economy.

But at the same time, the growth problem is Obama's. Every President inherits his predecessor's economy; indeed, it's often what gets him the job. It's then up to the new guy to change the numbers as well as the debate.

No wonder the rest of the world is so worried about our future. Sadly, other regions won't be able to help us out, as happened in 2008. Europe is in the middle of its own debt crisis. And emerging markets like China, which helped sustain American companies by buying everything from our heavy machinery to our luxury goods during the recession, are now slamming on the growth brakes. Why? They're worried about inflation, which is partly a result of the Fed's policy of increasing the money supply, known as quantitative easing.

There are half a billion middle-class people living abroad who can do our jobs.
It used to take roughly six months for the U.S. to get back to a normal employment picture after a recession; the McKinsey Global Institute estimates it will take five years this time around. That lingering unemployment cuts GDP growth by reducing consumer demand, which in turn makes it harder to create jobs. We would need to create 187,000 jobs a month, growing at a rate of 3.3%, to get to a healthy 5% unemployment rate by 2020. At the current rate of growth and job creation, we would maybe get halfway there by that time.





now that's just part of the story, which can be found here.

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2076568,00.html

and i cut out all the liberal mumbo jumbo excusing the democrats and obama, and placing the blame elsewhere, but the basic fact is that it IS the democrats policies which HAVE turned an ordinary recession into such a drawn out affair. this is keynesian economics. in order to prevent the busts of the economy, they sacrifice the booms, keeping the economy at anemically low growth rates.

why would businesses choose to expand their operations in an environment that's so unstable and inhospitable to business? unless you're one of the chosen companies like GE, or the automakers, who are being subsidized by the government. virtually every policy enacted by the democrats raises the cost of doing business, and adds new layers of bureaucratic red tape to doing business. why do you think the price of oil is up? this article suggests it's because of investors, but how about obama's oil moratorium that was even deemed unconstitutional? you think employers want to hire people when no one is buying anything? when they don't know how much that employee is going to cost them, due to new regulations at every turn? when they don't know if they can afford to give those employees healthcare any longer? when the entire system looks to be on the verge of collapse? you think there's an american private sector conspiracy NOT to make money? you think they just don't want to do business?

i mean this article basically announces that obama's economic policies are a failure, it just shifts the blame onto everyone else, BUT the annointed one himself. our dear leader, obama. unfreaking real

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on this subject....


Gretchen Morgenson, a New York Times business report­er and col­umnist, is never one to pull her pun­ches – and certainly not in her new book, Reckless Endangerment, about the causes of our recent “economic Armageddon”, as the book’s subtitle has it.


Throughout the financial crisis, Morgenson has persistently ferreted out inst­ances of wrongdoing in the mortgage market: from the charlatans who pushed un­affordable mortgages and the investment bankers who packaged dodgy mortgages into securities and sold them off as triple-A rated investments to commercial bankers who prefer to foreclose rather than work with a borrower to keep her in her home and the cash flowing.

Reckless Endang­erment is written with Josh­ua Rosner, a fin­ancial and policy analyst at Graham Fisher & Company. The gist of the argument is that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two housing-oriented, government-sponsored entities (GSEs) now in receivership and liquidation mode, and their defen­ders in Congress laid the foundations for the Great Recession. The book is late to the party, but Morgenson says that it “identifies powerful people whose involve­ment in the debacle has not yet been chronicled and it connects key incidents that have seemed heretofore un­related”.

Morgenson and Rosner are particularly critical of James A. Johnson, the long-serving chief executive of Fannie Mae and an ambitious Washington operative who aspired to be Treasury secretary. Morgenson des­cribes Johnson as the architect of Fannie Mae’s drive to become “the largest and most powerful financial institution in the world” and then cites numerous examples of how he used his political connections to advance Fan­nie’s – and his own – agendas.

Although Johnson left Fannie in 1998, by the time it failed in 2008, Morgenson claims, “Fannie Mae bec­ame the quintessential ex­ample of a company whose risk-taking allowed its executives to amass great wealth. But when the gambles went awry, the taxpayers had to foot the bill.” Although the authors say they tried for five months to interview him, Johnson apparently never responded to their requests.

Among the many others whose record is challenged by the authors is Barney Frank, the Democratic congressman and head of the powerful House financial services committee from 2007 to 2011. We learn that Frank, who did agree to be interviewed for the book, has a selective memory about the times he defended the GSEs. We also learn that in 1991, Fannie Mae hired Herb Moses, Frank’s partner. Frank tells the authors that Moses’s role at Fannie Mae did not influence him and that he was “not totally engaged with” Fannie and Freddie. This is contradicted by the authors, who point to “Frank exercising a deep and abiding interest in defending the companies in 1991”.

Years later, in 2005, one of the authors confronts Frank after he gives a speech on housing. Were there any risks to the relentless push for homeownership? What about the easy lending programmes that could encourage people to buy homes they couldn’t afford?

In the famous last words department, one must inc­lude Frank’s cranky resp­onse: “We’ll deal with that problem if it happens.”