The Recession Is… Over?

I feel so much better now that the "three P's" are signaling the end of the recession !!!!

Now if only the "three P's" would give me some business, and pull up my 50% + loss in revenues that would be great.... But the "Three P's" are apparently AWOL in real life, and I am hardly alone in this view... In fact outside of Wall Street circles,and financial TV shows, there's no one out there including the companies whose stock has gone up, that believe the recession is over.

Wall Street has had a Spring, and Summer rally and a commodity rally led by oil for good messure. The stock rally is based on Companies slashing expenditures across the board in a desperate attempt to stop the bleeding. Dismal expectation were met by cost cutting, and presto !!! We have ourselves a rally, and now people telling us that the recession is over with a straight face. The Commodity rally like oil is simply based on pure naked short term futures trading speculation that has nothing to do with fundamentals period.

Callm e old fashioned but in my book a recession is not over until the following economic conditions are met ; 1) Unemployment upward trend is reversed for good, 2) comapnies start beating analyst expectations on profits from sales, not cost cutting, 3) Our deficit and fiscal picture starts improving dramatically 4) the most talked about new regulations to rain in our corrupt financial system , are implemented, and inforced.

Absent that , all I can say to the Con-Man in Wall street proclaiming that the recession is over in a rather ovbious self-serving way, is that I will buy their over priced stocks, with the profits I get from their end of recession pick up in SALES in my business.

The abyss we are now trying to avoid is one of the occasional occurances of a fundamental shift in economic structures. Our current version began to manifest in the "great" depression. The transformation to a post-capitalist era would probably have ensued then, but WWII intruded with its ensuing post-war boom, based largely on sheer demographic serendipity. As this aberration waned, two-worker families emerged in an effort to sustain the lifestyles that existed during the "aberration." A series of inflation/recession cycles followed -- all driven, at root, by the failing system's inablility to sustain itself beyond the post-WWII anomaly. As two worker families failed to maintain their lifestyle, debt-financing began to be used for this purpose. In effect, funds from the future were taken to sustain present lifestyles. Recently (hastened by mistaken, government regulatory changes) the "future," defunded by past leveraging choices, has become the present. Our options are gone. The massive leveraging engine that arose in the recent past's efforts to sustain the unsustainable, which also provided the soothing illusion of an economic "growth" without fundament, is now impossible to maintain (our current economists were trained in models that were nothing more than cheerleading arguments for the debt/leverage episode, so they have no notion of what is occurring) We are in a situation similar to the transition from a nobility structure to a market-industrial pattern. I think the future is something akin to a system without the inherent costs of private stock and private investment capital. If so, China and its ilk are moving toward the model of the future. We'll see -- probably in a couple of years or so.

Try this on for size.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/29127316/the_great_american_bubble_machine

Gross is late on this -- ECRI started seeing recovery signs (ahead) back in March/April.

www.businesscycle.com

Daniel Gross is smoking some real good $hit. typical newsweek spin. What's happening is people are paying down their debt. that means the banks are getting rich off the interest rate hikes and the "2005 credit predator act" that prevents people from applying for bankruptcy. The trillions of dollars doled out to the banks that created this burden in the first place is just to keep this debt deflation system afloat. If the people don't have money to buy anything then no money can be put into the system to move the economy forward. In fact banks won't be lending much until they too see they are free and clear of any gov't interference and any signs of recession.

Your recession may be over, or close to it, but mine wont be over until my retirement funds are not only back to where they were a year and a half ago, but have 1 modest 5% on top of that, my house is worth what it was 3 years ago, and I can afford health care which I've neglected, insurance that I've cut to the bone and gas for my car at levels of 3 years ago. You must be living in a different world than I, Mr. Gross.

This recession started in 1999 when the Republican congress with a veto proof two-thirds majority vote overturned the Glass/Stiegel Act of 1932 which separated commercial banking from investment banking. This recession is the product of Regan, Bush Sr. and Bush Jr. and the Republican Party almost 30 years ago with invention of derivatives, hedge funds and the call for total deregulation by the Republican Oligarchs during the Reagan, Bush Sr. and Bush Jr. Administrations.

These three presidents and most Republican members of congress are all members of a Christian Mafia group called The Family. Read the book The Family, by Jeff Sharlet, also read The Fourth Riech, by Jim Marrs. If you want to know where our economy, government and country is headed read these books. This group is supposedly a Jesus based religion where the ???real??? Jesus teaches the religion of greed for the wealthy class and to hell to the rest of the people. In other words it???s a religion for the oligarchs running this country for raping and stealing Americas??? wealth.

This is just another bubble created by the oligarchs running Wall Street and the banks nothing more. It too will burst. Know your history be informed before posting your lying propaganda.

You got to be joking.

I understand there might be economies of scale involved here for the magazine, in which case you should have my and the readers sympathies. But seriously how can you put this laughable piece of wishful aircastles to print?

Looks like the spin that comes out of an investmentbank lost in an imaginary world.

Rolling Stone magazine ran a brilliant piece on the crisis and Goldman Sachs role in it today. Thats what journalism looks like, in any case your interested.

Thanks

Richard, London.

Your copy and paste skills are remarkable " still free". As for my teeth, they have been cut in places people like you only see on the news. Personally, I perfer Judge Judy.

You point is useless, Mr. Author. This recession was contrived mostly by liberals to win the election, and then spiralled out of control into a real recession. It worked in 1992 to get Clinton elected, then the economy magically turned around 1 month into his term. This time it got away from you and look what it has done. We aren't getting out of this anytime soon, not with the curerent "stimulus" package. Jobs are needed, not more spending!!

Newsweek, go back to your liberal cheerleading.

Still Free, your post is pretty asinine. I consider myself to be fairly liberal, and I have no interest in half of the things you're talking about and including in my apparent "Agenda". People like you, (and there are many on both sides) who paint others with broad brushes, are a large part of the problem with the political arena these days. Your comments are just mud-slinging, and really aren't backed up by any facts at all. There are plenty of happy and "free" folks in Europe. They'd do well to learn some things from us, and we'd do well to learn some things from them. Your rhetoric reads like right-wing masturbation. I probably agree with you on more than a few issues, but your approach is such a turnoff that I'd be discouraged to try.

When you wake up you will be working for Fidel Obama

"Liberal SOCIALIST Agenda": Those who prefer welfare to will and interference to independence. Those who settle for group think and herd mentality rather than those who fight for individual initiative and the right to be out of step with meager political fashion. those that say media has to be controlled so as to be balanced, without realizing the extraordinary irony within that statement, all the while slamming the ONLY one that is (FOX).those who believe the state is better qualified to raise children than the family those who prefer teachers' unions to teaching and for those who are naively convinced that if the West is sufficiently weak towards its enemies, war and terror will dissolve as quickly as the tears on the face of a leftist celebrity. those for social democracy even after most of Europe has come to the painful conclusion that social democracy leads to mediocrity, failure, unemployment, inflation, higher taxes and economic stagnation those for intrusive lawyers, banal sentimentalists, social extremists and urban snobs. THAT is a small portion of the Liberal Agenda.. And it is like a cancer to this country

Morons like you are the root cause of the social condition today. See you on the battlefield!

Maybe one day you will wake up and realize that, in politics, democrats and republicans are the head of the hydra. Regardless of which one you deal with, the "body" is the same.

Foster PIG like behavior and you get lazy, fat, PIGS who gorge themselves at the trough. Must you resort to name calling whenever someone is not in your little "camp". Have you said the same on Sonya? When she implied her wisdom and abilities HUMAN ATTRIBUTES came from being a wise Latina?