Beige Book Says Economic Recovery Still Slow. What Now?

The Fed should stop trying to manipulate teh economy and just adopt reasonable policies and stop tinkering. There is nothing they can do except damage. The most they can accomplish is to shift some economic activity forward in time, at the price of future devaluation of teh dollar and encouraging that time-shifted activity to be unproductive malinvestment.

We consume about 15-20% more than we produce, about 9% of that is the Federal deficit and the rest is what we should be saving and investing in new and replacement capital stock, but don't. Until we face up to that and suffer the interimpain, things will just bump along, a few rays of hope one month, dashed the next.

That has been the situation since 3Q2009 and in continues with no end in sight. The government and the Fed continue to spend what they don't have, beggaring our future and our children's future to sustain teh illusion taht there is a painless way out.

There isn't. We have immense debt and far greater unfunded liabilities, and someone is going to take a massive haircut and we'll be a decade or more recovering.

Everything else is just BS and digs the hiole deeper.

Marty of IL 7:19AM October 21, 2011