Markets and Dollar Sink as Slowdown Fear Increases – New York Times
As predicted when Mr Bush lowered tax rates for the very rich – the US economy devalued itself giving it the impression of a lot of spare cash. But he had gone to war with an already crippled Iraq and has spent hundreds of billions getting American troops in Iraq killed for very little resulting improvement in world safety from terrorism. When an economy becomes too sanguine (too much blood in it) for too long – idiots start throwing billions about. Weird ideas spring forth like crazed cults and adherents may be expected to invest in companies and ideas that have no real product or effect no real change. (I am not talking about Google – here we have an economy developing its own force from the work of a simple workable idea. Text advertising on the internet is not a new idea that Google suddenly came up with, there was text advertising already. What they did was leverage it against relevance. Effective useful advertising has value. Google did what others were stabbing in the dark trying to make work. They provided motivations for each part of their business to work with other parts of their business).Instant public perception reveals the turkey – but sometimes not before thousands have thrown millions at it. Too much property investment capital inevitably results in sales that get reversed. Too many mortgagee sales depresses prices. Declining prices could become deflation. That would cause massive problems.
What flooding the market with low value dollars has done is cheapen the US economy. Hence the foolhardy effort to get everyone on the mortgage train we now insidiously refer to as sub-Prime. No-one is talking about how many citizens are losing their homes in the USA as a result of Bush indifference to the needs of real people. It has provided the grass roots market players with a sense of uselessness – or irrelevance. What we hear about is how investors are losing their punts in these non-productive organs of real estate wheel greasing. How many cents in the dollar they can expect. It is a damning and sad story but not half as hard as the young couple expecting who suddenly lose their house and entire life structure. Not to mention to effect on the overall health of the USA economy. How are they going to make productive lives for themselves now? Some one please tell me how this is a good result of the Bush tax massacre? Go on – go to the Discussion site and lecture me on the merits of running huge deficits to fight a war that has little economic benefit but heavy costs. Where is the beef?