Friday, November 18, 2011

Columnist for the Banksters Notices the Upturn in the Economy

Major banksters and DC insiders regularly point me to columns written by WaPo's Ezra Klein. His columns are the go to columns for many top Washington DC-NYC corridor banksters, when they want to make a point.

It's always, "Check out Ezra Klein's article in today's paper". Which makes it all the more interesting that Klein has a new post up where he notices the start of upturn in the economy. He writes:
Here's a question you don't hear asked much: Why is our economy doing so well?

Not in absolute terms, of course. Unemployment remains high. Growth remains anemic. Markets remain shaky. But Europe has been doing something very close to imploding for months now. So just as our financial crisis sent Europe into a tailspin three years ago, you might expect that the possibility of a partial or complete break-up of the Eurozone would have American businesses taking a chainsaw to their workforces and households stuffing their paychecks under the mattress in the expectation that 2012 will be a lot like 2009. And yet none of that is happening.

Initial unemployment claims have fallen for four of the past five weeks. They're at their lowest point since April. Fourth-quarter growth is tracking, according to Macroeconomic Advisers, at 3.2 percent. Mortgage-purchase applications are above their October levels, vehicle assembly is coming in above expectations, industrial production is rising, and this quarter's retail sales are off to a strong start. As Neil Irwin writes, "despite it all, the U.S. economy has entered a strong patch." Is that really what you'd expect in a month where the largest economy on earth -- the Eurozone -- is in an acute state of crisis?

“I was expecting to see some weakening of the trends that were prevailing over the summer in response to the crisis in Europe, and we’ve not seen any of that,” Alan Levenson, chief economist at T. Rowe Price, told Irwin.

...the American economy has been curiously resilient over the past few months. Things are getting better when you could imagine them getting worse. How often have we been able to say that lately?
Klein's a Keynesian, so he is clueless to why the economy is improving, but the upturn will soon  be noticeable to even DC insiders, if Klein keeps writing posts like this

4 comments:

  1. It's also interesting with Klein how young he was and how quickly it happened that he was pushed very far up the journalism ladder. The system quickly promotes those journalists who write vigorously in protection of the system.

    Of course, Klein no doubt believes it's because of his great writing skills...and the modern job of journalist didn't exist a couple of hundred years ago. Then the job of spinning and lying to protect the regime went under rubrics like "scribe" or "court historian."

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  2. Lots of new hiring here in Cleveland, as well as Lorain, Warren and just about anywhere else were higher order manufacturing is prominent. Republic Steel in Lorain is getting ready to add 450 new workers on their arc furnace operations. US Steel are just about ready put a new line into operation and are doing a lot of "shut down" maintenance on their current capital (right now they've doubled production on some lines). Developers bought the old Chrysler plant in Twinsburg and they are gearing the development toward higher order stages of production. Basically, in my business it is already starting to boom.

    Just a note, most heavy industrial projects, whether they be maintenance, new facilities and lines of production, or large-scale projects unrelated to production (offices, excavation, utilities, etc), all of these typically have a great deal of credit financing.

    Understanding the ABCT is one thing, but actually seeing it unfold before your very eyes has only happened to me two times: the housing bubble (I lived in SoCal 2002-2007, so it was pretty obvious) and right now (I know more now than I did then, so it is pretty obvious).

    I have the feeling that over the next 6 months things are going to be much better with regard to unemployment and nominal incomes, but I think that this one might explode fairly quickly thereafter. While there are certainly structural problems in the economy there are also a lot of dollars floating around that can be borrowed and spent (or, just plain spent). Once that money starts exchanging hands the Cantillon effects will have their way, prices of certain assets will rise and we may actually get a bubble; I don't think that this bubble will last very long at all (a blink).

    However, lots of things can occur between then and now. Time will tell.

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  3. You mean Ezra Klein, the Obama/bankster apologist?
    He's already been called out several times, already:

    http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/06/ezra-klein-should-stick-to-being-wrong-about-health-care.html

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  4. Yes, exactly Mr. Wenzel. Folks around DC figured him after several outrageous claims. Notably after he claimed the Constitution is unimportant and confusing:
    goo.gl/TcOKI

    And as Anonymous said: "...the system quickly promotes those journalists who write vigorously in protection of the system."

    Yet somehow Klein's scholarly mind can't compute that he's part of the system:
    goo.gl/W365D

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