Monday, July 23, 2012

A Recession So Nice, We're Doing It Twice

Aren't things just wonderful? Don't you feel good about your future prospects and those of your family? Are you going to buy that vacation rental house on the coast? You know, the one you'll rent out when you aren't using it?

How about that new car to replace your old one that is in need of repair? That kitchen redo you've been needing for a couple of years? Some new clothes?

No?

I suppose inside the Beltway, things are just peachy. Even President Obama says the private sector is doing just fine with all those businesses you didn't build.

It's doing so well that it appears we're about to have another recession.  Whee! Summer of Recovery IV!!

While this quarter's earnings reports have crossed a substantially lowered profit bar, future expectations through the year indicate a recession could be on the way.

Estimates for the third and fourth quarters have been dropped to levels not seen since the days of the 2008 financial crisis, below even the muted 2 percent expected level of inflation.

That's an ominous recession sign for an economy that has barely managed to attain positive growth this year even with the strong level of earnings beats, according to an analysis by Nicholas Colas, chief market strategist at ConvergEx in New York.

"Revenue estimates for the back half of 2012 have been slowly working their way lower this year," Colas said. "This trend, however, has accelerated to the downside over the past 30 days and we are fast approaching levels where these estimates are unambiguously pointing to the risk of a U.S./global recession later into 2012 and 2013."

Shorter message: BOHICA.

Regardless of what you think about Glenn Beck, he accurately described a big problem with the "global economy" thingy a few years back. I looked on YouTube to find that particular episode where he outlines the plan to connect all the world's economies in the misguided hope that we'd all be too busy working to declare war on each other. I couldn't find the video clip, but I did find this transcript.

He compares the concept of warfare and Mutually Assured Destruction with Mutually Assured Economic Destruction. He says,


I read "Tragedy and Hope." It was written in the 1960s by a very well-respected professor — he's taught at Georgetown, Harvard, Princeton — named Carroll Quigley. He was a very close mentor to Bill Clinton; he's advised other presidents.
Quigley had a better idea than the Doomsday Device or mutually assured destruction to prevent nuclear war; tragedy is war, the hope was an end to the wars.
Instead of tying everybody to a master computer, they decided to tie the world's economies together. That way no country would dare wage total war on another without risking the destruction of its own economy. The book came out in the early '60s — can you think of a war since then where there has been a clear winner and loser since then? Vietnam. The Gulf wars. Afghanistan. The War on Terror. They did this to stop wars. Just like it's mutually assured destruction if someone launches a nuclear weapon; this is mutually assured economic destruction.

I've touched on the idea of economic warfare before. Be sure to click on the link inside that post to read the PDF that puts all the pieces together, after you get yourself a good stiff drink. You'll need it.

I've also mentioned how to stop a catastrophic global economic meltdown from happening here. We must decouple ourselves from this global economy as much as is practical. I'm not calling for protectionism or a trade war, or anything like that. We need to turn inward and make ourselves as whole and self-sufficient as possible. This means generating our own energy, mining our own ore, building our own products and creating as much wealth and circulating as much of our money within our shores, for each other, as possible.

I'm not claiming to be Miss Cleo, Batman, or Sarah Connor or anything, but I see a storm coming.

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