The wealth that was lost in the crash of 2008 never actually existed. That's why the crash fundamentally doesn't matter.
The U.S. isn't recovering from the bust, it's recovering from the boom. Fear-mongers and ponzi-schemers joined forces to distract a nation for a debilitating decade.
Remember the Black Friday financial panic of 1869? Happened the same year the Transcontinental Railroad was completed. Which do we remember? There's a reason.
There is no Left. There is no Right. There's backward, and there's forward. That's it.
There is not a single institution more than a decade old in the United States of America that is not ready to be repurposed.
Go.
Spot on! The best and shortest explanation of our current "downturn".
ReplyDeleteHere (I'm from NL) we have financial "circularities" and political "obsolutions", both national and EU-wide, that could do with some repurposing just as well as in the USA. We're in this together.
Except the "vapor wealth" did fuel the creation of a huge number of jobs that evaporated when the crash occurred. These debt and leverage-fueled jobs helped mask the loss of "real" jobs due to off-shoring. So there is a real crash because we lost both the "vapor wealth" fueled jobs and while everyone was too happy looking at their stock portfolios and home prices to notice and call their political representatives to task, core industry jobs moved away and now we are left with chronically high unemployment.
ReplyDeleteYes, it is recovering from a politically manufactured false boom but the problem is that real assets were invested in the bubble and when it burst people's life's savings went with it. Sure hundreds of billions of imaginary profits were lost but hundreds of billions of dollars that people worked decades to build up were lost along with it.
ReplyDeleteRoschler and Clint make great points. But even more important is that the US is now in a debt crisis without any apparent solutions. Dramatically reduce government spending to reduce the deficit, and the economy goes into the tank. Keep up with the deficits, including stimulus spending, and the accumulated debt becomes unbearable. The US is in a debt spiral that can only be resolved through drastic means: bankruptcy or monetary reform. What politician has the courage to implement either solution?
ReplyDeleteIf only the mortgage debt was treated in the same way.
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