Posted on 09/05/2009 4:15:00 PM PDT by WeatherGuy
I would like read much more from Prechter. I only discovered him last year. Those I follow taught me that the collapse was imminent. The collapse wanted to happen after the dot.com bubble, but Greenspan flooded the world with liquidity, which delayed but greatly worsened the collapse.
I would love to read more Prechter if I could find him. I guess he has some books but I would hope he had a column I could find on the internet. I do value his analysis. He seems to be on the ball.
Problem is that many of these jobs were in manufacturing, retail, real estate, finance, and many others. It was an across the board massacre hitting both high and low wage earners. There was a massive glut built up in many of these sectors, not just US, but worldwide, on the back of easy credit, over leveraging, fake growth, and ponzi schemes.
These retail, real estate, insurance, finance, jobs were fake BS jobs for the most part. In a healthy economy sectors could get along just fine doing 20% of what they have been doing and with 10% the personnel. These sectors came to dominate corporate America. They earned an increasing share of corporate profits over the last 30 years as other sectors stumbled such as manufacturing. Manufacturing increased but did not keep up with the needs of Americans so we importing trillions of dollars of Asian consumer goods
As we let real sectors wither more and more people jammed into retail, real estate, finance and hyped it up. The much hailed consumer economy
But what really caused the credit crisis was the trillions in losses on credit derivatives (credit default swaps, etc...) by dealers like JPMorgan Chase, BofA, Goldman Sachs, and Citi. The economic fallout from these weapons of financial destruction is still occuring. The smoking crater left in the worldwide economy by these will take decades to repair.
The US government under both the Bush and Obama administrations are doing everything possible to cover up the losses which is going to drag this out even longer.
I agree that it could take 5+ years for some of these sectors to repair themselves and have any type of positive job growth. In the meantime, many of the unemployed are going to face complete career changes and a 1/4 or more loss of yearly income going forward.
Cutting government takes more than wishful thinking. It takes a movement. Republicans will increase taxes and spending. Back during the republican revolution in the 1990s a few independents warned me that republicans don't want to cut spending, except maybe spending that does not lose republican votes. The Bush Rove 2004 election plan was to win votes by expanding increased spending to other voters, with tax cuts to get republican voters too. The debt was called economic growth.(borrowing from the future)
So conservative talk radio labels “Spending that goes to primarily democrat voters” as redistribution, note the argument that nation building is constitutional (as defense) but some public spending project (ironically passed by republicans) is not. Medicare and social security is defined as liberal spending , but cuts in them are opposed by conservatives as attacking seniors.
Democrats have their own games, like health care will pay for itself, calling pork investments, saving jobs instead of creating them. In general, we are screwed.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.