Saturday, September 11, 2010

America Is Off-Course

Japan was the world's most admired economy in the 1980s. But over the last twenty years, it has become the most disliked economy on the globe, as its economy has been mired in a two-decade long slump.

Japanese businessmen were feared in the 1980s. However, by 1995 economists pointed their fingers and laughed at the Japanese businessman...the world's most admired businessman had lost a "shoe".

In today's global economy, we have seen that most of the developed countries are "barefoot", caught in a seemingly never-ending cycle of too much debt and currency debasement caused by excessive money printing.

Respected economics professors Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart (perhaps the most accomplished female economist today) studied 15 economic crises over the last 75 years.

What they found is what one would expect...Real recoveries in the post-Keynes economic era are very rare.

As mentioned in a previous article, modern-day politicians follow a perverted form of Keynesian economics. It makes sense to stimulate an economy when it is suffering. But politicians forgot about the other part - stimulus money is supposed to come from money SAVED during good economic times. Instead, politicians have resorted to adding enormous amounts of debt.

Professors Rogoff and Reinhart found that in the 10 years following an economic crisis economic growth rates are lower and unemployment is higher than in the years preceding the crisis.

In two-thirds of the episodes, jobless rates never recovered to pre-crisis levels, EVER.

And in 9 of 10 of the crises, housing prices were still lower 10 years after the crisis ended.

Their findings sadly should sound very familiar to many Americans today. The bad news is that if this financial crisis plays out like the prior ones have, the US economy looks set to struggle for years to come.

What is truly sad to me in America today is that most Americans still refuse to take actions to correct this.....

They need to hold the feet to the fire of the people responsible for this mess - the elites in Washington, on Wall Street, and in the Federal Reserve.

But instead, many Americans go off in search of bogeymen to blame for their problems. Bogeymen that are the most "different" from them.....

By all means, let's let the crooks off the hook and solve our problems by attacking the BP chief executive or Muslims or by burning books.

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