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US Has Been In Recession Since December 2007
The National Bureau of Economic Research said Monday that the US has been in a recession since December 2007. The NBER is a private, nonprofit research organization of academic economists who determine business cycles. The stock market took a dip on the news that reached double-digit percentages for some tech stocks.
step aside intel 45 nanometer chipset, cloaking materials, telepathic controllers, and internet technology....its time for an economic recession story from the National Bureau of Economic Research.
you nerds can thank us later after you're done spending your way to patriotastic victory over the stock plunge and housing crisis.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Sure they are more accurate but they are mixing up precise esoteric terms with the 'generally understood' terms.
People understand what the general term means in terms of their daily lives and for them "recession" is bad. What started in 2007 it wasn't "bad" for the ordinary Joe - in fact a recovery might have occurred and we'd never have known about it. Now that it's the 2 quarters of negative growth thing, it's a real recession.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
It's sort of like a junkie being asked diagnostic questions like "Where does it hurt?" by a doctor who is prescribing him opiates.
Seastead this.
Since the only growing industries seem to have been weapons and war, it's only natural that when you take the influence of government debt out of the picture, the economy has been shrinking for a long time.
There are some people who think you can replace economic growth in the private sector with economic growth in the public sector and it's the same thing. That may be true in Soviet Russia, but in the free world, pork financed with debt is an inflationary measure that doesn't increase the actual size of the economy.
What's worse, this 3.4% growth in the economy financed by debt is going to cause a cascade plunge. Right now we're like a family using debt to pay off debt (the growth in the national debt is equal to the money spent maintaining the current debt). What always happens in cases like these is the debt supply runs out, and the family goes bankrupt. If you think we're seeing hard times today, just wait. Paying back this 10 trillion is going to send the US back to the stone age by comparison.
It's been a long time.
Recessions are a normal part of the capitalist business cycle. Recessions wash out excesses in the system by shaking out inefficient companies, thus clearing the way for new competitors, and they work to keep supply and demand in sync over the long term.
[...] recessions are considered a normal part of a capitalist economy [...]
Etc.
As for your assumptions about Bush:
1. I didn't vote for Bush.
2. I voted for Obama.
So it's kind of funny you just called me "one of the last hard core republicans" when I'm anything but. What I don't like is hypocrisy and the one-sidedness of always only blaming one political party or one President -- whether it's Clinton and the Democrats or Bush and the Republicans -- for whatever ill is at hand. For the current economic situation, we had unprecedented political opportunism: it was politically expedient and beneficial for some liberals to push the notion that we're in really bad shape, even rolling out the Great Depression talk, and that Bush (and all the other things you hate about Bush, like the war!) is to blame for it.
There are so many contributing factors that it would be ridiculous to assert that economic decisions made in the current administration in the last 8 years have nothing to do with it. But at the same time, it's equally ridiculous to put blinders on to the incredible irresponsibility and shortsightedness of the decisions with regard to sub-prime lending in the name of getting people into homes. We never fully paid the piper for the internet bubble collapsing, and a lot of that, on a large scale, was parlayed into a booming housing market (and artificially created, so some extent, because of changes encouraged in lending practices).
Of course, you can't say that the financial industry is much the same, that all these speculators add nothing, are fluff. But that is what happened, we had the financial industry fluffing itself up by selling itself its own products over and over again. This whole mortage reselling would be similar to Ford and Chrysler (apologies if they are the same) buying each others cars over and over and counting that as total production. The financial industry obtained a far larger share of the total market then it really is supposed to have. It worked because everyone believed it, believed that Wall Street really is important. It isn't.
Then it collapsed, people did indeed loose fate. Somewhere someone burst the bubble. What we got now is not so much a reccesion, as a re-appreasal. We now got to decide what exactly the role of the financial industry is supposed to be. Is it a service industry to the rest of the industry (exactly like say a cleaning company is a service industry) or is everyone else in the service of the financial industry.
It is a mistake to assume that the current financial clusterfuck is because of bad mortgages or a bubble burst (we didn't have any serious issues with the Dot Com bubble). The bad mortgages are nothing but the trigger to two serious underlying problems:
(1) Most people in western countries live beyond their means.
(2) But most importantly: Credit Default Swaps.
The current financial situation is due mostly to [banks/investment firms/everyone and their dogs] betting on the failure of different entities. This is all due because of Credit Default Swaps are totally unregulated and they are a speculator's wet dream. The current house of CDS cards of about 50+ trillion $ (yes, trillion) is crumbling. First wave was MBIA and other bond insurers being downgraded by rating firms. This immediately triggered a metric fuckton of CDS collateral calls. Bear Stearns and Merill go under (well, saved last minute). Freddie and Fannie get bailed out, this immediately calls for another round of collateral calls. This second wave caused the collapse of Lehman, the nationalization of AIG and the massive cash infusion into Citi. If either big auto makers goes down, prepare for the worse. Oh and Goldman Sachs has started to write down bad assets too, no bank is safe.
This all thanks to speculators betting on companies with their unregulated toys: the Credit Default Swaps. It has nothing to do with believing or not in a system or losing faith in Wall Street. It's all about making a bunch of really bad bets without having cash on hand to cover the losses. And now that the bets are lost, it's time to pay. But t here is no money ...