All Posts Tagged With: "recession"

But don’t worry, boys, sometimes failure is the best you can hope for. And come to think of it…defeat is not so bad. Think how much better off the Chinese would have been if Mao’s long march had ended in the total collapse of his army. And suppose George W. Bush hadn’t been such a total failure? People might not have elected Barack Obama.

There is an increasing amount of focus on the Australian residential property market. Last week, outgoing BHP Chairman Don Argus said: ‘I think the Australian Banking Sector has gone too far. You can look at some of them now as giant building societies.’ He was referring to the large exposure that the big four Australian banks have to residential property.

Stock markets are fixing to make their highest highs since September of 2008. The Dow nearly closed at a post-Lehman high of 11,000 overnight in New York trading. And here in Australia, the ASX/200 looks to break out of a long channel of indecisiveness and close above 5,000.

Surely those numbers indicate that people feel good about the economy.

Without technically lying, Krugman perpetuates the myth that Herbert Hoover insisted on budget austerity in the midst of the Great Depression.

“How can you keep talking about a depression,” asks a Dear Reader, “when the economy is clearly recovering just as it should be.”

Of course, that is not what the President of the United States of America thinks. He believes a recovery is underway…and that he can now take action to reduce the feds’ stimulus.

Enron? Bear Stearns? Bernie Madoff? They’re all big stories about big losses and have hurt a lot of employees and investors. But none come close to getting my vote for the decade’s most dastardly deception…

Meanwhile, the financial world keeps working its way through this period of great confusion and uncertainty. Nobody knows what to think. Nobody knows what anything is worth.