Extend And Pretend - How Does It End?

Recent economic signs increasingly point to a "double dip", although I have to agree with Robert Reich that most (98%) Americans never got out of the first dip. I think that even the idiots in DC and on Wall St are starting to realize that there is a snowball's chance in hell that the housing market can get back to where it was in 2007 any time in the next year or two. (I'd argue that it will take ten plus years to that, maybe longer if you include inflation.) Plus, it's now obvious that TBTF banks are making "record" profits, but this has done little to nothing to re-starting the economy. (I would make the argument once again, that bailing out the banks is the problem, not the solution since time, after time, after time, all that was done since the Reagan 80's has been to bail out failing Wall St firms rather than letting them go bust - with one notable exception: Lehman Brothers.)

So when does the Obama government decide to end "Extend and Pretend" and actually start to fix the problems with our economy?

Here's my best guess - we're all Katrina victims now. NOLA is the new role model for how our nation will recover. The middle and lower class will get left to fend for themselves, the rich will be protected and coddled by the state. The economy will continue to disintegrate, our country will continue to fracture.

2009 Wall St Recovery, What About The Rest Of Us?

So Wall St had a very good year, but then again, they got a massive amount of money from us, the US taxpayer. How much did they get? 12.2 Trillion Dollars. Now, most of that was supposed to "trickle down" to us, but very little actually did anything for Main St. Not to shabby a deal for wrecking the world's economy.

But what did we get? Well, by the same report, we got 1.8 trillion dollars which is not exactly nothing, but it's certainly almost an order of magnitude less than Wall St, and honestly, the trend here about who gets what is very distressing. The talk in DC is to reign in the deficit by cutting Social Security and Medicare. It looks like Wall St is going to pull off a double whammy - they've wiped out my home equity, crushed my pension, gutted my 401K, and now thery're going to take my Social Security and Medicare (and no, those are NOT entitlements, I've been paying for them my whole adult life.) And, there is more than a passing suspicion that even health care reform is nothing but a taxpayer bailout of failed financial companies.

Here's a couple more astute financial experts discussing our recovery - or lack of it:

Robert Reich

Joseph Stiglitz

Paul Krugman

So here's hoping that the US taxpayer gets a better deal next year than this year - because this year, we got screwed.