Friday, September 4, 2009

“This Is ... a Ski-jump Recession, with Short-term Stimulus Creating a Bump That Will Ultimately Lead to a More Precipitous Decline Later"


Kevin Harrington, managing director at Clarium Capital Management LLC - which manages over $2 billion dollars - told Bloomberg:

If we have a recovery at all, it isn’t sustainable. This is more likely a ski-jump recession, with short-term stimulus creating a bump that will ultimately lead to a more precipitous decline later.

We haven’t fixed the problem. We’ve just slowed down the official recognition of it.

1 comment:

  1. I just finished reading Paul Krugman's NYTimes latest government-policy propaganda entitled "How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?"

    It's eight pages of increasingly apologetic analysis that concludes by finding economic depression, (good call, Paul) determining massive failures (on the part of all economists), and (Krugman again) calls for more monetary-stimulus-coal to be put into the furnace of the boiler of this wrecked train.

    What? More money for the banks, Paul?

    http://preview.tinyurl.com/ku3zu2

    It will not work.

    It will not work because human lives are not economic in nature. Human lives are far more complex than greed or envy, supply or demand, employment or unemployment, or even deflation, inflation or economic-constipation.

    A depression is not just an economic phenomena, Paul.

    A depression, and especially this depression, is a crisis of belief.

    Philosophically speaking, everything we believe -is an animist religion of sorts.

    At the base of all our necessary assumptions is the necessity of an omniscient-guiding hand that is required to assure every one of us -in this infinitely complex reality- that we've got enough of our assessment of reality correct, -that we're at least looking in the right direction for a viable answer.

    We have each individually decided at this juncture, that no, -we are not looking at the right picture to get the answer to the question about what was happening BEFORE the crash -that brought about the crash.

    Everything we understand resolves essentially into being simply and only -what we believe, like religion, -just like religion.

    And, no one believes any more.

    No one believes all the conveniences and inconveniences of our modern society are worth it any more. This occurred BEFORE the crash.

    And pouring more coal on the trust-me-I'm-an-omniscient-economist fire simply isn't going to change anyone's behavior now that we've changed our focus in our search for a better understanding and a better answer.

    That's difficult for a Nobel Prize winning economist to understand, that just because he believes in something, that this belief-fact of his -isn't going to affect the actions of everyone else on the planet one iota.

    The gig is up for the empirical Enlightenment -which encompasses all these incredibly incredible economists.

    It's over.

    Science is dead.

    Economics itself is no longer even pertinent in any viable search for a solution.

    Quite a large majority of people ardently believe the solution lies in something more like -mobile guillotines. And I have to say, I think they're closer to a solution that Paul Krugman is.

    People is pissed.

    And people is pissed for good reason.

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