Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has said that the recession is likely over. The Associated Press has interpreted the three-month decline of new jobless claims from June through August as an indicator of the economy getting better. Then oops! The new jobless claims in September went back up, and unemployment hit 9.8 percent.
The ups and downs of the stock market have played many investors like a yo-yo, as they look for any signs that sustainable economic growth may be back.
News flash! We are in a recession, and it is a long way from being over.
Here are three reasons we will have a prolonged recession: 1) the non-stimulus $787 billion stimulus bill; 2) the threat of increased taxes in the Cap & Trade & Tax & Kill bill; and 3) the prospect of health-care deform legislation. None of these proposals inspires businesses to hire people. That’s reality.
I do applaud Bernanke’s economic optimism, but I would applaud economic realism even more.
The real measure of an economic turnaround is when businesses start hiring people again, but businesses are still trying to survive for at least another year in the midst of tremendous uncertainty about legislative proposals in Congress. The evidence is to just ask a business owner and not an academic, a bureaucrat or a media economics writer who has a vested interest in making the Obama administration look good.
Claiming that the Cash for Clunkers program has caused a surge in consumer spending is ridiculous. The program sucked some sales from future months into August, and now September is down in sales even worse than the previous seven months of 2009.
Ben Bernanke is probably happy that we have indeed avoided a meltdown of our entire financial infrastructure, and we have. But we are a long way from the end of this recession, and blindly agreeing with the president is not going to make it end any sooner.
And on a related note! All this crap about racism because people disagree with President Obama on policy issues is just crap. Thank you, Walter Williams, you said it so eloquently.
When businesses start hiring people, then that’s a leading economic indicator. When Joe Public is able to get a new job, then that’s a leading economic indicator. And when there are no new jobless claims, then the recession is in remission.
A recession is defined as two consecutive quarters of negative Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, growth, which started the last two quarters of 2008. A group of unknown quack economists started saying that the recession started at the end of 2007, and the Associated Press economics writers jumped on the band wagon. This was done to try to make Bush’s last year in office sound even worse that it was.
Now, the president, the vice-president, the AP economics writers and those same quack economists are trying to wish us out of a recession before it happens, so Obama’s first year can seem better that it is.
Wishing doth not a recession end! Business growth, and not growth in government, doth a recession end.
I am one of the most optimistic people on the planet, but I am also one of the most realistic people on the planet. A recession ends when people have jobs and can pay all of their bills, and when businesses can start growing again. More government bureaucracy, more government spending, more taxes and more Cash for Clunkers programs are not going to stimulate sustainable economic growth.
Bad policy doth not make a great president.
