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I've collected a whole little library of links detailing that there's something rotten about the economy right now. The most shocking thing I found out, actually, was that everything we're seeing today on the stock market happened in 1999 and 2000. Some people on the board might be too young to remember when the Dow first hit 10,000. That was a big loving deal. And everyone was saying that we were in a bull market to end all bull markets, that we had entered the End of History and the 1997 recession, a very very mild one, was the "last one ever". And then the Dot-Com Bubble burst. What's frightening is that the US economy was genuinely healthy at that time. The budget was balanced, debt was under control, and there were definitely no emergency measures in place to make sure the global economy didn't collapse. Around that same time, there were big economic collapses in Russia and East Asia, collapses that simply did not affect America at all. The '90s were Apex Americana, the point at which American hegemony was most unchallenged. Compare to today, after 8 years of Obummer's zombie economic policies and 10 years after Dubya nearly led us to the Apocalypse. They don't tell you this on the news, but it's information you can easily find out just by looking on government websites. Not conspiracy websites, not wingnut "this chalk triangle in the street is evidence of the Crypto-Jewish Illuminati plot to control the omniverse" places, but genuine government websites. Despite the fact that the Great Recession ended in 2009 (officially; 2011 technically), the economy is structured as if we're still deep in recession. So deep that you'd think we were borderline in a depression. But supposedly we're in the middle of an 8-year long bull market. Dow's hit 20,000 due to the Trump Bump; unemployment's at 4.8%, thanks Obama; our economies are on a neverending upward trot to eternal greatness. If that's the case, why are interest rates so low? Why have they only been raised twice in nine years? Why is the bond market crashing? Why are people pushing away American credit? Why are we still talking about bailing out banks (though to be fair, that's mostly an Italian problem right now)? Hmm. Something's not right. I bet Trump's most ardent Trumpettes will be the first to say "It's not gonna happen" or, at the very least, "It won't be so bad". If Clinton had won, Clintonoids would be screaming that Obama's era was the greatest period of economic expansion since the '50s and that the Great American Boom was going to accelerate under a second Clinton. Seriously, it smells like poo poo in here. Not only that, but we can literally see the big, oily turd on the floor over there. Don't tell us it's not there or that it doesn't smell that bad. And there's a huge whale sitting outside, rear end in a top hat to the open window, and whose bowels are gurgling furiously. Something awful is about to happen. I'd rather get out of here while I still can and watch from a good, safe distance. It's not a recession— it's a depression. Not necessarily on par with '29, but perhaps like '93. The old gay '93, that is, not the grungy one.
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Feb 16, 2017 16:25
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 10:16 |
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