Posted on 02/26/2006 3:43:27 PM PST by peyton randolph
-snip-
Dissenters say our prosperity is hollow. While the economy appears healthy, a disease is eating away inside, a disease that Dr. Greenspan has been treating with oxycontin. The chairman, they say, was a friend to presidents and kept them happy and himself in power by the greatest expansion of money and credit in history. And just as the easy-money Fed policies of the Hoover-Coolidge era led to the crash of 29, a day of reckoning is ahead.
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at amconmag.com ...
Pat's angling for the Stopped Clock Award. Eventually he'll accidentally get one right. Not this one ... but eventually.
He's become a crackpot, just like his brother.
No need to read any further than this to understand that Pat's got an agenda, and an ax to grind, and is more than happy to willingly misrepresent any information to appeal to his protectionist disciples.
I guess everyone is happy that energy, metals, and real estate has doubled?
I've been hearing these stats all my adult life. While they sound worrisome, they don't seem to have slowed us down much. The truth is that there is a lot of debt out there and the Federal Budget deficit will get steadily worse as the Boomers retire. At some point, the piper will have to be paid. It's possible we've just been postponing the day of reckoning and they, when it arrives, it will arrive with a vengence.
Yes, but Pat thinks (and asserts in the article) that trade deficits create debt. That's ridiculous. They do no such thing. He's doing nothing more than appealing to the economic ignorance of his followers. And that's just the beginning. He carps about our personal savings rate but has no understanding of how it's calculated and why that makes our rate of savings look low. He cries about household debt but refuses to recognize that household net worth is at an all time high. Pat's a doomer who works far too hard to find bad news, thereby losing all credibility.
Fools gold.
The Chinese lend us cash; we buy their goodslike the college kid whose binge drinking is put on a tab by his bartender until the terrible settling of accounts at the end of the term.
. . . . . . As Chinese goods come to us, our technology, factories, and industrial jobs go to them. As China talks of exporting a $10,000 sedan to the United States, Ford joins GM in slashing 30,000 jobs
Pat is the Winston Churchill of our times.
Time will prove him right (and a true conservative).
More likely, our media elites will, as they did to the hapless Hoover, lay it all at the door of the White House. If the economy is going into the dumpster, George W. Bush will take the hit in the history books
Except I think the plan is to keep the economy propped up until the next Democrat president, so that the democrats can take the blame when the economy crashes.
Free trade bump
Free trade bump
Buchanan's brother threatens Clinton associate
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1999/05/20/buchanan/
It's true that Pat Buchanan is lacking in credibility, but that doesn't mean trade deficits and consumption debt are good things. The United States is losing its manufacturing base. Even weapons and military parts are made overseas, and the countries producing them are not necessarily friendly to the United States.
Trade deficits are enabled by the creation of debt for the following reason. In a trade deficit, foreigners can either hold more U.S. dollars [and they already have a boat load and do not have any real need for more]; buy U.S. assets from domestic holders; or buy U.S debt at what they perceive to be interest rates that will provide reasonable compensation [or at the very least allow their export driven economies to continue to export to the U.S.] from domestic sources ... usually with newly created Treasuries and GSE debt as the first choice.
Does that make Pat's statement "ridiculous" or only technically incorrect?
After the party is over, the debts both internal and external will remain to be repudiated [through outright default]; inflated away through inflation; or continue as a drain on the taxpayer / average Joe homeowner.
Bump!
I'll make you a billinaire. I offer you one billion for your house, trust me.
I agree with you, and it will only take one or more major acts of domestic terrorism, or some major international disasters, to break not only our economy but the globalized world economy as well and produce recession/depression. If it has to come, I would prefer it to happen under a Dimocrat - but I dread the thought of another Toon-type administration.
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