Ouch!
A funny thing happens when government decides to bail out all the wrong people to the tune of trillions of dollars …
Regular people get screwed.
Actually that’s not a funny thing at all, it sucks.
But it’s exactly what’s happening to the American economy right now, which continues to take a nose dive the likes of which we haven’t seen in decades.
The latest bad news is the implosion of retail sales, which fell twice as hard as economists had predicted during the month of December.
From Bloomberg:
The 2.7 percent slump marked the sixth straight month of declines, the longest string since comparable records began in 1992, the Commerce Department said today in Washington. Labor Department data showed the global collapse in commodities caused prices of goods imported by the U.S. to fall for a fifth month.
Today’s sales figures indicate the hit to spending in the recession is even deeper than estimated, and spurred a sell-off in stocks. The loss of 2.6 million jobs and declining home and stock values are squeezing households, hurting retailers from Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to Tiffany & Co., which today said its holiday sales fell 21 percent and cut its earnings forecast.
“There is a major retrenchment going on,†said Joshua Shapiro, chief U.S. economist at Maria Fiorini Ramirez Inc., a New York forecasting firm. “All that policy can do at this stage is cushion this. You can’t short circuit it.â€
Wait … all we can do is “cushion” this?
You gotta be effin’ kidding us … if we’re going to incur a record $10 trillion in new taxpayer debt (i.e. this much) then we should be blowing this global economic recession out of the f*cking water, not just “cushioning” it.
Of course as we’ve said all along, thinking that more government intervention is going to solve a problem created by government intervention is retarded.
Comments
By Hugh Briss on January 14th, 2009 at 3:41 pm
You do realize that it’s negative articles like this that cause a lot of the problem, right? People are worried so they’re not spending money. Why are they worried and not spending money? Because people like you keep telling them how bad things are. Who in the world is going to go buy a car or a big screen TV when they’ve read that they are probably going to lose their job?
By liz on January 15th, 2009 at 7:57 am
I disagree with the above statement. Articles like this show something other than what we know is going on.
One thing is that the Social Security Trust Fund is gone. It was drained using surrendered and terminated accounts , falsely paid out over twenty years or more….
Perhaps the Tarp only covered the US investments?????
If anyone would listen to me…… they’d understand far more than they understand now. Thankfully new people in DC ARE listening.