Jesse’s introduction to Rick’s, at Consumer Metrics Institute, "Double Dip or Banana Split:"
Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Double Dip or Banana Split?
Courtesy of JESSE’S CAFÉ AMÉRICAIN
"If the 2010 contraction we are now monitoring in consumer demand for discretionary durable goods scales to the full economy as faithfully as the "Great Recession" did, the second dip will, at minimum, be 33% more painful than the first dip and will extend at least half again as long."
This is the case for trouble dead ahead, a worse decline in consumer activity and therefore GDP than the first, and the likelihood of further quantitative easing from the US Federal Reserve to patch over the inability of the political process to reform the financial system and balance the real economy because of their myriad conflicts of interest. These policy errors favoring a small minority will most likely result in a stagflation of the most pernicious and corrosive kind, high unemployment and a rising price of essentials, that may ultimately test the fabric of society. Obsession and sociopathy are not generally ruled or limited by the equilibrium of common sense and ordinary appetite, so I would not expect the powerful minority to draw back from the brink of this crisis voluntarily: a classic scenario for exogenous change. I would enjoy the moral irony of all this if I was watching from the distant future.
The good want power, but to weep barren tears.
The powerful want goodness: worse need for them.
The wise want love, and those who love want wisdom;
And all best things are thus confused to ill.Shelley, Prometheus Unbound
