Our Recovery

Miscellaneous Current Events
1

Just some anecdotal evidence:

  1. I was speaking to a friend, who told me many of her friends are totally out of luck, and have been on unemployment for a year.

When I mentioned that getting free money [unemployment] is pretty lucky right there, she replied. “They lost thier homes and their cars.”

  1. On the other hand, another friend of mine is a secretary for a company whose CEO spends much of his time at parties featuring Pentagon officials. She makes $65,000 a year.
2

The reality is that there is no recovery. There is talk about at “double dip”, but the depression never ended, so there can be no double dip.

It is exactly as Austrian Economics explains. Here is Lew Rockwell interviewing Frank Shostak in October of 2008, the beginning of the Great Bailout. Shostak said the government is determined to make things much worse. He said everything that is being done (the Fed, bailouts, deficit spending) will make things much worse than they would have been without the interventions. He emphasizes the word MUCH worse. Here we are 20 months later…things are much worse after squandering $1.5 trillion in government debt / spending and $1.7 trillion in quantitative easing. The economy is no closer to recovery.

Yes, GDP is up due to government spending, and the stock market is up from a year ago due to quantitative easing. But the Austrian perspective understands what has been done to the structure of production and capital formation. Thus, it is easy to conclude there is no recovery.

Frank Shostak October 2008 The date is October 23, 2008!

3

There’s also an article by Lew about this, writen nearly a year ago. (He says to check up on the article 18 months from his publication date)

http://mises.org/daily/3700