Tuesday, August 18, 2009
John Williams: Numbers Show "Ongoing Depression"
In his "flash update" today, PhD economist John Williams says:
July Housing Starts Showed Ongoing Depression...
The economy continues in a severe, deepening downturn, with no meaningful signs of a pending upturn. Based on continued weakness in weekly money supply reporting, the systemic solvency crisis is intensifying and also is far from resolution.
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Posts
Recent Data Show Risk to U.S. Properties Stands at over $3 Trillion
ReplyDeletehttp://www.americanbankingnews.com/2009/08/18/recent-data-show-risk-to-u-s-properties-stands-at-over-3-trillion/
Yup obama 08=DEPRESSION 09 not just a bumper sticker anymore!
Words like "hyperinflation" get bandied about without our knowing much about their meaning, or the conditions these words are meant to imply.
ReplyDeleteThe economy has suffered massive damage. The damage is ongoing. This damage is not just to money and banking.
The damage is to the structure and function of how all the pragmatic fixes of humankind have been fit together by a mundane and unnoticed history of "progress", -fixes that were meant to address recurring, smaller, temporarily addressible problems that ultimately led to this collapse.
It is the tenuous sum of the imperfections of every pragmatic fix (because pragmatic fixes are inherently imperfect) that cause depressions. The number of these imperfections are nearly infinite, -just as they are unaddressible by any human intellect.
Now, -this depression is the collapse of all these pragmatic fixes, as are all depressions.
And this collapse is ongoing regardless the government's efforts.
In the analysis of many -looking at a whirlwind of ongoing destruction- the government's efforts are about as effective as what we might expect would happen, if the government sent out a brigade of soldiers to do rescue and recovery missions in the midst of the height of a hurricane.
The brigade of rescuers would themselves become missiles hurled by the high winds of a hurricane at its height.
Getting back to hyperinflation: hyperinflation would be the natural result of government throwing too much money -at too few goods.
The government in its attempt to fight this hurricane has put more money into the marketplace.
This money flood does not however, re-employ the people who once worked in the businesses that supplied the goods in the marketplace.
So, to understand hyperinlation, -we must understand, hyperinflation is as much caused by a flood of money -as it is caused by a shortage of goods in the marketplace.
The world is no longer capable of supplying its own needs in the marketplace -because the destruction of the structure of the collection pragmatic fixes that existed before the depression -has been so great.
The extent of the damage is what makes of it, -a depression.
A depression is not a phenomena that lends itself to the pragmatic fixes of mortal men.
A depression is a phenomena that is created by the pragmatic fixes of mortal men.