Monday, June 1, 2015

Negative Recovery



Reuters blamed the weather, the performance of the dollar on the worldwide stage and “disruptions at West Coast ports.”

This isn’t the off-to-the-races kind of expansion we envisioned six months ago,” Scott Anderson of Bank of the West told the Times. “More and more folks are coming around to the view that the long-term growth rate of the American economy is 2 percent, at best. … It’s two steps forward, one step back.”

5 comments:

ampersand said...

I'm amazed at the unashamed Pravdaesque coverage the media burps out. A few years ago,when gas prices were soaring, CBS radio interviewed some hack economist who stated soaring gas prices indicated a rip roaring comeback for the economy.

I'll believe were in a recovery when banks are paying decent interest rates, not when the Dow Jones is being stuffed and bloated with bank deposits.

Lem Vibe Bandit said...

Razor said...

"I'm old enough to remember when W's 3% growth was a *bad* report."

#WorstEconomySinceHerbertHoover

Lem Vibe Bandit said...

My tweet on this caught fire...

(An instapundit retweet helped a lot)

"3% economic growth under Bush was a "bad" report .. negative 0.7% under Obama? a Recovery"


Chip Ahoy said...

The recovery featured three contractions. But which ones? My guess: 1) Couldn't, because liberals in charge of things simply never make the connection between hyper-regulation, their natural impulse, and enthusiasm to participate, every body else's natural impulse. The conflicting natural impulses need sorting and that takes a very long time. Who's going to want to open a business that can only be connected at the hip with a government hostile to its aims? A lot of people will, Elon Musk for example, there are people who can work with government, manipulate government to their advantage, and to the disadvantage of everyone else such as high-speed rails from here to there that only a few people care about and price out everyone else. Who wants to do business in an Ayn Rand environment? Pretty much Democrats only and those few others who can comport with straight up control freaks.

So the other contraction is 2) "wouldn't" because who is going to want to become a doctor when that means marrying government? Some people will, no doubt, but the regulatory effort, thousands each year, affecting absolutely everything imaginable stifles innovation, increases risk unacceptably, and steps on the necks of citizens who would otherwise show some enterprising spirit.

3) Is "didn't" because why bother? You must be insanely aggressively ambitious to consider becoming fascist just to work with them. Better to import an entire new voting constituency, legal or otherwise, a constituency used to crony capitalism and dictatorial governments and tit-for-tat corruption and let them support people who gave up trying to do business without marrying every crackpot bullshit irrational schizophrenic impervious to their own laws control-freaks attracted to government precisely because they are nuts incapable of doing anything themselves in the world outside of government.

edutcher said...

We call a recession followed by all those "contractions" (unless we're talking childbirth) a Depression.