In the "no kidding department" CNN is polling people to ask if we are in a recession…

posted by Bill Arnett @ 12:30 PM Permalink

…when there are articles like this in the NYT ("All the News Republicans Tell Us to Print").

From the article:

Two worrisome trends for the economy — falling house prices and the rising cost of everything else — picked up speed in the latest data reported on Tuesday, putting policy makers in an increasingly tough position.[…]

“The Fed is now having to walk a very fine line,” said Jane Caron, chief economic strategist at Dwight Asset Management, an investment firm that specializes in bonds. “We have clearly seen an accelerating in inflation pressure in the last couple of months and the risk is that the markets are going to react negatively to aggressive easing going forward.”

Not surprisingly, a measure of consumer confidence fell to its lowest level in nearly five years. But the stock market was up slightly in late morning trading after falling modestly at the open. Treasuries moved slightly higher, indicating that bond investors were not overly fearful of inflation.

Maybe being on a fixed income makes me more sensitive to these things, but when people start making statements that the economy is worse than the after the dot.com bust, worse than after 9/11, record, no staggering numbers of home foreclosures, car repossessions, and the price of everything under the sun going up as one of the direct results of bush's Oil War Failure, I'd say it's, "…it's pr-r-r-e-t-t-y f*ckin' bad, Captain."

But I'm no economist, so I could be wrong, but when the best financial advice CNN's so-called economists can apparently give is, "…refinance your house now if you have good credit…," like it's the easiest thing in the world, it's a sure thing that these "professionals" are so out of touch with what's really happening out here in America that they are unaware that the average schmoe ain't gonna be "refinancing their homes" or "paying off their credit cards" or doing anything else but trying to conserve gas to get back and forth to the two or three jobs many families are required to work just to keep a roof over the head and food on the table and just hope that no one falls ill in the family.

Two years ago when I saw the sixty year-old houses in my neighborhood starting to sell for over $500,000.00 I knew this crash was coming and that it wouldn't be pretty. There's not a single house in this neighborhood worth half a mil or more and son-of-a-gun, wouldn't you know it? Suddenly NO HOUSES are selling at all here in the neighborhood and haven't been for the last two years.

What makes the wealthy think they are qualified to offer advice to the average American, whom all know how bad it is out here? Just how ignorant are these people, really?

Labels: big oil, big pharmaceutical, Budget, Economy, federal reserve, foreclosures, hypocrisy, inflation, rant