"After dinner, Larry [Summers] leaned back in his chair and offered me some advice. I had a choice. I could be an insider or I could be an outsider. Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don’t listen to them.
Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. People — powerful people — listen to what they have to say. But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: They don’t criticize other insiders."
Elizabeth Warren
"Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one."
Charles Mackay
And at what point will that brave individual, who begins to see things as they are, dare to call the madness of doing the same ineffective things, over and over, as the form of madness that they are?
The stock markets slumped a little today when Fed Vice-President Stanley Fischer said at an NABE conference that he is 'starting to see signs of inflation in the data.'
Oh really, is that data related to the US economy? Because if so, no one else seems to be seeing it, except for those whose positions demand it.
They are not seeing it in the Consumer Credit numbers from this morning, with the rather big downward revision from the month before. And certainly not in the Payrolls number from last week, which was jam packed with low paying, part time jobs, declining hourly wages, increasing costs of healthcare and rent, and further erosion in the middle class. Only someone insulated or detached from the reality of the day to day economy could have seen those numbers as 'good.'
Is it really so hard to understand that the point of stimulus is to stimulate aggregate demand from the bottom up, organically, by creating decently paying jobs and enabling the broadly based purchasing of essential goods? Would J. M. Keynes be able to stop throwing up if he came back and saw what these purblind bean counters call 'stimulus?'
The purpose of stimulus is not to prop up an oversized and corrupt financial system that has already laid waste to the economies of the developed world. It is not to further cripple the long suffering labor market that is being forced to compete with sweatshops and rigged currencies from regions that do not subscribe to that same social compact that defines the very fabric of America. It is not to further enrich a very small percentage of already very wealthy people, allowing their greed and short sighted stupidity to imperil the future well-being of entire nations.
These are simple truths. And they are being led down blind alleys by careerism, self-interest, and vain and self-deludingly complacent bureaucrats, and strangled.
Have a pleasant evening.
