The Great Recession is over?

[kishg]

The thing that most companies are saying in their guidance for next year is that there is a whole bunch of conflicting indicators out there right now. But in general, we see the conditions easing through next year. In other words, there won't be a rebound. There's just going to be slow recovery and that is mostly due to the fact that the signals are still mixed and companies are going to be slow to hire because of that.

Why are the signals mixed? Why are the indicators showing that both economic downturn and economic upturns are in play? Well, in my opinion it is simply because of the actions of the government. Their actions have thrown things out of whack, yet again, and it makes for an unnatural mess out there. It's a mess that nobody can read which lends to the uncertainty which keeps hiring low.

Our company is starting to see some small amounts of recovery in certain segments. Lets hope that continues and lets hope we don't see a second "stimulus bill". Rampant inflation is a very real possibility once the recovery starts and that will throw things right back into a tailspin. Again, lets hope that it doesn't happen that way.

agree with most of that. there will be more stimulus, it just won't be billed as stimulus. job creation is still a problem and there will be stimulus to get that jump started. its a political reality. fear of inflation is overhyped at this point but the fed will probably need to start the exit in Q1 to keep asset valuations under control. you got to understand, the patient almost died due to a severe cardiac arrest.. he ain't gonna be running a marathon anytime soon..

[Ral]

that's exactly the problem. the patient almost died, and now that he's alive the world expects him to go run marathons, and are putting more demands on him than he can handle right now. People want him to be "up and at 'em" again so soon they're not giving him the time and resources necessary to fully recover.

agree with most of that. there will be more stimulus, it just won't be billed as stimulus. job creation is still a problem and there will be stimulus to get that jump started. its a political reality. fear of inflation is overhyped at this point but the fed will probably need to start the exit in Q1 to keep asset valuations under control. you got to understand, the patient almost died due to a severe cardiac arrest.. he ain't gonna be running a marathon anytime soon..

[TexasTerp]

This. Our infrastructure is so outdated technology wise, it's not even funny (ref-geology teacher). Has anything been spent on such so far?

Approx. half of the money spent has gone back into infrastructure, I've seen the work in a couple states including here in Maryland, Vermont and New Hampshire.

agree with most of that. there will be more stimulus, it just won't be billed as stimulus. job creation is still a problem and there will be stimulus to get that jump started. its a political reality. fear of inflation is overhyped at this point but the fed will probably need to start the exit in Q1 to keep asset valuations under control. you got to understand, the patient almost died due to a severe cardiac arrest.. he ain't gonna be running a marathon anytime soon..

Normally I don't agree with Kishg but I agree with half way on this point. There will be more stimulus and it won't be billed that way, but here is where we part ways. First, as much as 75% of jobs created under the current stimulus bill have been government jobs. This includes construction contracts which have been created through the government for the infrastructure changes we've seen, these also include jobs that have been created but not yet utilized because they are for the 2010 census. Now here's the problem with this situation, these jobs that have been created are short term 1099 style contracting jobs which means after the 5 months of road construction is over, that job doesn't exist anymore. Once the census has finished those jobs are gone too. The 30% of jobs that are "long term" jobs created from this are still 100% dependent upon taxpayer money, which means that they are unsustainable non-profiting jobs. Basically that in order for the jobs to remain they are solely paid for by taxpayer money. Not enough money was put out into the private sector which is the ONLY way to create sustainable jobs, government jobs by definition are not sustainable, they are not profit inducing jobs and do not hold any form of accountability. By spending the bailout money on government contracted jobs the current administration has significantly dug our economy into a deep hole.

Second, I highly disagree that the fear of inflation is overhyped, the reason that it seems that way at the moment is because the effect of actions by both the Bush and Obama administrations of recent will not even begin to come to light for a minimum 12 months from now. Reason being is that the Stimulus bill, drafted under Bush and approved by Obama has not been fully satisfied, in other we haven't actually doled out all that money. The Fed printed 1 Trillion dollars of US currency without having any physical assets in order to base the value off of (ie they came up with it out of thin air).

When a new Healthcare bill is passed, and something will be, it is guaranteed to follow the same underestimated, overpowering debt that programs like Social Security, the US Postal Service and most importantly Medicare have. For instance, the cost of Medicare is a good place to begin. At its start, in 1966, Medicare cost $3 billion. The House Ways and Means Committee estimated that Medicare would cost only about $ 12 billion by 1990 (a figure that included an allowance for inflation). This was a supposedly "conservative" estimate. But in 1990 Medicare actually cost $107 billion. Since 1990 the cost of Medicare has multiplied exponentially, up almost 500% where, in 2005 alone, Medicare care cost $336 Billion dollars and almost doubled by 2008 to $550 Billion dollars per year! There is absolutely NO WAY, as consistently published and warned by the Congressional Budget Office, that the current Healthcare Bill will not A) add to the deficit and B) come in anywhere close to the estimated cost.

Another big issue to take into account is the way that the Obama Administration changed the accounting process for the government budget in order to "stabilize" the economy. This process included going back more than 6 months into the Bush Administration's books and changing the numbers. What happened was that the Admin went through the budget and assessed what expenditures could be considered as "investments" to the country, so things like the subsidized take over of banks and companies like GM for instance. Then they took those monies spent and deducted them from the total amount of money spent in the budget, claiming that those monies did not account into the government spending since they PROJECT a long term return. So basically this is how this hypothetically works out: according to the administration, they pay $10 to buy a pen, but since they expect to use that pen to sign documents that make money, they expectthat pen to give them a return of $5, so they deduct that $5 from the cost of the pen. When they go to report the expense they say they only spent $5 on the pen even though the actual cost was $10. This is not at all like calculation Gross and Net income/expenses, because every dollar is still accounted for in a gross/net situation. Now how does this "stabilize" the economy? Well what this type of accounting (which by the way is a federal offense called FRAUD in the private sector - think Enron people) allows the administration to come out and state that they have not spent the actual dollar amount but instead far less, this also allows for the calculation of apparent debt reduction which in turn will ease inflation, open credit markets a bit and the decline in asset value with begin to even out. This sounds all well and good but what it does is setup our economy for bankruptcy ans incredible over-inflation, reason being is that at some point we have to account for every dollar that leaves the bank. If one of those "investments" fails that it a total loss that can not be figured back in a simply money gone, because it was calculated as never being there in the first place.

[Farbin Kaiber]

^^^ Excellent. Much more concise then I could have tried to say something on those points.