Good news: US economy not officially in recession; Bad news: It doesn’t matter

Gee. I used my GI Bill to study finance and then watch everyone in the media lie about what really happens.... 1. Q: What is the only real cause of inflation ? Anyone who passed 2nd semester economics should know this one.... 2. Q: Where is the safest place in the world for the superrich to park their money ? 3. Q: Where is the 2nd safest place for the superrich to park their money ? 4. Q: What were the home mortgage rates before the war started ? 5. How many home mortgages (and business expansions) could be paid for with the 12 Billion Dollars this war costs each month ? Perhaps engineers need to take more business classes... 1. A: Federal deficit spending. Inflation by definition is the expansion of the money supply. Only the government can do that. 2. A: US Federal Treasury notes. The bigger the deficit the greater the amount sole and the higher the interest rates paid. ( Otherwise known as the benchmark for the Prime. 3. A: Home mortgages. Most people will go hungry vbefore they give up their home. But we have trained people to live under a mountain of debt. More than half of all credit card holders cannot pay off the bill at the end of the month. The average indebtedness for those people i $17,000. Yes people, that is a fact. 4. A: Some were as low as 4 1/2 p[ercent. How did that happen. Because the Clinton administration was reducing the annual deficit. Therefore bonds were becoming less available. So the money that could not buy mor bonds was put into the mortgage market. Business investments are too risky. ( Insider trading ! ) 5. A: This should need no answer from me ! The home mortgage market has just as many crooks as wall street. And they sold those balloon mortgages assuring people it would be easy to refinance them when they came due. So Bush and his cronies are busy bailing out the superrich once more with your money.....

John, you hit the nail on the head!

Actually, I don't think economy can be measured easily, so everything might happen, let's wait and see

We are between a stupid Bush Administration who is consistently blind sided by their ignorance and arrogance and a shameless Democratic Party who wuold rather see our country go to hell just so thay can blame it on the Republicans. many of our current problems were forcasted and our government did nothing. Our corporate leaders chose to take advantage of this stalemate to make short term profit without regard to long term repercussions and our economy and the American people are paying the price with high energy costs and higher food prices, a housing market debacle. All this with stagnant wages. Where are our great leaders when we need one.

I believe very little that the Gov't reports. For the last few years it has been reporting very low inflation, when anyone who is in the real world and buys food at the local supermarket has seen prices jump dramatically. They also report low unemployment; but that number is skewed because those who exhaust unemployment benefits are dropped out of the number. It also doesn't account for underemployment. Oh and bubba, how did we get from the economy to 500-lb bombs in Iraq? And if that story is true, would you want to be the one to go in and take out that sniper with your bowie knife? Would you want your son to do it? Someone else's son? Let the machines do the work.

I really have a very little to add. As an electronic engineer I watched that sensless transfers of production plants to China and their 40% reject rate.I remember times of American great , long lasting and great sounding electronics....that pretty much ended.Even Crown made their consumer product "low profile".History repeats itself , so we will see what happens when we go full circle.Thank God for militarand medical industry.They don't use or buy Chinese trash.As for oil ...it is a big farse and too bad that we cannot have a president like Regan , he would sort it out fast.Opec needs to be controlled.....

Most economic downturns are caused by economic excesses due to a heard mentality (Bear-Sterns anyone?). This leads to reality checks which Schrumpeter called "creative destruction". In this case it was bankers lending to people who in the past would have been refused loans. In many cases the downturn is made worse by misguided government intervention (which prolonged the Great Depression by shutting off world trade and providing government go-nowhere jobs instead of encouraging private investment), and unwillingness of Big Labor to compromise (jobs are moving south to less unionized areas - example being the auto industry). A little research shows that the freest (Hong Kong, Ireland, Australia, Eastern Europe) economies have been the most successful. I agree that any business executives who have broken laws should be put in prison, but they are not because crooked politicians are also on the take (John Murtha anyone?). As to high gas prices, don''t worry, a flood of Alaskan oil will be coming to market any day now! Oh wait, Bill Clinton vetoed that didn''t he. I guess maybe that was a bad idea.

It is extremely disappointing that we have a government that rewards companies like KB homes and mortgage companies who knowingly encouraged people to buy into a housing market that they could not afford. People are loosing their homes at alarming rates, people can not afford to drive to work because we have no public transportation, and the average person can not make ends meet. But yet our government rewards these "crooks" instead of putting them in jail where they belong. I for one am so disappointed in the US government at this time and the crooks like the Fed Reserve that they support.

Perhaps with all the fancy new financial products, Wall Street should move to a place with plenty of room to expand and a proper atmosphere representative of these products. I refer, of course, to Las Vegas.

"Test" is right. "We don''t have very many of those". The US is, in part, now paying the price for rewarding - on Wall Street - all those companies that exported US jobs to Asia. When investors start dumping stock in companies that engage in big layoffs at home, execs with stock options will smarten up and get serious about improving productivity here. Buy the companies that are hiring, not firing. And speaking of firing .... a couple of weeks ago, collateral damage (euphemism for dead Iraqi civilians) resulted because the military used a 500-pound precision guided bomb to take out a single sniper with an AK47! Good for the manufacturer, but that particular export commodity gets paid for with domestic dollars. People in other countries pay to buy cars, not to buy bombs that drop on them.

A plus at the cost of the value of the dollar. This is not a great trade-off. As the value of the dollar continually goes down, it makes other items like trade deficit look better. But at what cost.

We had the 'rolling recession' in the 1980's. Overall the economy bumbled along but depending on where you lived everything was fine or you were devastated. We're having another localized version of that, but it appears to be industry specific rather than geographically specific. The weak dollar is helping exporters, but we don't have very many of those. Most people are down somewhat, and a few are up more than the total of all the downs.

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