The interest rates can’t be lowered much more. When it comes time for the Fed to drop rates to stimulate the economy and growth there won’t be any margin to do so. I won’t be surprised if the fed drops them again to help float the banks until after the election.

The way I see it is that the Fed is doing everything to just tread water until after the election. The new president will look at the books and then they will bring on the pain and suffering. We need a big correction and to do it will take cutbacks and more taxes. If this isn’t done the problem will just get worst. Nothing has been fixed yet. They’re still printing money and borrowing from other countries like there’s no tomorrow.

And then there’s pension plans, health care and social security……

There’s no point in trying to be a cheerleader and sugarcoating the problem. We need to face and fix it. I think right now the banks and the fed are not telling the truth… just trying to buy some time…

That light you see at the end of the tunnel…it’s a train!

PRL I would like to say that perhaps you are not coming up with these numbers out of thin air but the so called experts are. Reality is that the US is headed straight down and there is not much anyone is doing about it. We have over stated our economy to make the deficit look tiny.

Basically the only way out of this mess we are in is to just buckle down and build factories to produce goods and pay people real wages so they can buy things. Having 1/4 of our people on welfare, 1/4 of our people on the way to retirement is not a good way to run a country.

So we need to clean up the polution in America we have lots of welfare people who could do the recycling. Tell them if you want to stay on welfare go down to the land fill and help dig up the trash and get all the good stuff out that we have been throwing away for years.

Tell Donald Trump to sell his 30 million dollar yacht and 5 million dollar Ed Mcman house he brought and spend the money making a factory in Detroit making socks for people. I am sure a lot of people in Detroit would love to have a job.

Tell the $150,000,000 a year CEO’s to cut their pay to $150,000 a year and use the rest to bring jobs back to the USA from China. After all that is why they moved the jobs over seas in order to give themselves $150,000,000 a year increase in pay. Only they forgot once they all did it there would be no one left in America to buy the goods the Chinese were making.

Gee it is so easy to get the economy going again that I have to believe that the leaders of this country are making us broke and poor because they want to see us as the poorest country in the world. You want houses for everyone get some people to lumber trees and make sheet rock and other things for the house and get others to build them the stuff to make houses is just sitting on the ground doing nothing until someone does something with it.

We did not evolve out of the caves into modern cities we built them out of free raw materials the earth provides with our muscles and brains. Our brilliant financial leaders have led us down a road to ruin and we need to just bypass them and start building things for people to use and create wealth the old fashion way by building things not trickign people out of their 401k plan funds.

I don’t believe that anything different is taking place in Michigan or elsewhere in the midwest. I do suspect, though, that some UofM economists have been smoking in the boy’s room. And I don’t mean cigars.

Put simply, we decided that manufacturing was passe — best outsourced or something — and that the future was in the so-called ’service sector’. This neatly explained away changes in manufacturing and provided a rationale for people to move into selling real estate loans and other service type jobs. These jobs don’t create value, they may have their uses but they’re essentially parasitical, so they rapidly become unsustainable. And here we are. Unwinding this lot will take a generation.

Also as the government uses a phone survey to figure who is not in the work force because they quit looking is kind of silly as the phone is one of the first things that get cut off when you are broke. I figure their figure of 1.6 million who quit looking for work is more like 8.5 million giving us like 10 percent unemployed.

Persons Not in the Labor Force (Household Survey Data)

About 1.6 million persons (not seasonally adjusted) were marginally at-
tached to the labor force in July, an increase of 197,000 over the past 12
months. These individuals wanted and were available for work and had looked
for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed
because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey.
Among the marginally attached, there were 461,000 discouraged workers in July,
94,000 more than a year earlier. Discouraged workers were not currently look-
ing for work specifically because they believed no jobs were available for them.
The other 1.1 million persons marginally attached to the labor force in July had
not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey for reasons such as
school attendance or family responsibilities. (See table A-13.)

Anyway, just to defend myself…I am trying to provide a counterpoint to the almost relentless doom and gloom that is pervasive in the financial media. If you read my stories closely, I am not sugarcoating what are certainly some tough economic times. I am just trying to put things in perspective and not let emotions cloud facts. I have never claimed that happy days are here again. I’m just saying that we’re not heading to a Depression, as many readers seem to believe. There is a big difference between saying that there’s nothing wrong with the economy and that this is simply just another inevitable cyclical downturn. I’ve been consistently arguing the latter, not the former.

Also, while this is a column, and hence, includes many of my opinions, I am basing many of these opinions by doing my job as a reporter, i.e. talking to experts and top economic sources. So I’m not coming up with facts and figures out of thin air.

Anyway, please do keep reading and commenting. I do enjoy the spirited debate on the Talkback posts. But let’s try and keep the dialogue a little friendlier. I have no problem with people disagreeing with me or other readers. But sometimes it gets a little mean-spirited and that’s not right. Just because we all have the freedom to post whatever we want without ever really being accountable for our words doesn’t mean we should stop acting civil. Disagree with me all you want but the name calling is a bit silly and detracts from what are otherwise, intelligent arguments. That is all.

PRL

Does everyone out there not able to do math?

according to http://www.bls.gov the number of unemployed people in the first quater was 7,591,000 and the number of unemployed as of july 2008 was 8,784,000 substracting the two you get a net loss of 1,193,000 jobs unless you want to look at it that those people had no jobs anyway so employment went from 146,070,000 to 145,819,000 or a reduction of 251,000 jobs.

Either way you can not come back to the 463,000 reported job loss.

I guess what Joan Crary is trying to say if we do not get 2.6 million jobs created in 2010 we are in deep trouble.

I want to have the same stuff you have in the big mug you are holding……LOL

While his coffeepot
(MADE IN CHINA )
was perking, he shaved with his
electric razor
(MADE IN HONG KONG ).
He put on a
dress shirt
(MADE IN SRI LANKA ),
designer jeans
(MADE IN SINGAPORE )
and
tennis shoes
(MADE IN KOREA )
After cooking his breakfast in his new
electric skillet
(MADE IN INDIA )
he sat down with his
calculator
(MADE IN MEXICO )
to see how much he could spend today. After setting his
watch
(MADE IN TAIWAN )
to the radio
(MADE IN INDIA )
he got in his car
(MADE IN GERMANY )
filled it with GAS
(from Saudi Arabia )
and continued his search
for a good paying AMERICAN JOB.
At the end
of yet another discouraging
and fruitless day
checking his
Computer
(Made In Malaysia ),
Joe decided to relax for a while.
He put on his sandals
(MADE IN BRAZIL )
poured himself a glass of
wine
(MADE IN FRANCE )
and turned on his
TV
(MADE IN INDONESIA ),
and then wondered
why he can’t find
a good paying job
in AMERICA .