Truemors
I’m sure there were many people who feared the economy was going to
tank during the worst part of the credit crunch during the summer.
Stocks were going down, it seemed like everyone was declaring
bankruptcy, and big companies were having problems finding cash. It
seems like all that worrying was for naught because the economy grew at an annual rate of 3.9% during the summer.
This, of course, is great news. Some are going to doubtlessly minimize
the importance of these fantastic numbers. They are going to come out
saying things like we are mortgaging away our future, we’re creating
another bubble (the interest rates were just lowered another quarter
point down to 4.5% today), and we haven’t learned our lessons from the
summer’s credit crunch. Yeah, right.
Ever since I started paying any attention to the news more then a
decade ago there has been a steady stream of people predicting the end
of the American economy. Even when the tech bubble did burst it wasn’t
the end of the world for us. We are now well over the top levels set in
the Dow during the last days of the tech bubble. And our economy has
continued to grow at a fast clip.
As for the relentless warnings coming out about how China and
everyone else basically “owns” America with our national debt at its
current levels and our citizen’s gigantic appetite for credit I don’t
put much credibility into it. Maybe in the very long run, fifty years
or so, we will start to witness the affects of a mismanaged America. We
do have some serious issues to deal with.
Our welfare programs are getting way too unwieldy and that is
continuously increasing the total national debt (not to mention the
debt in the yearly budget) and that is going to someday come back and
bite us in the ass. Personally, I’m significantly more worried about
the feds then any American ruining our economy.
And, as an aside, the numbers that show we have a huge trade
imbalance and country’s like China actually “own” America are very
misleading. Those numbers don’t take into account things like an
American company owning and reaping the profits made from a
manufacturing plant in China. All that production gets credited to
China, not us, even though we’re the ones who are getting the profits.
To sum it all up we’re going to continue to hear good news about the
economy. Inflation is still tame even though we’ve been lowering the
interest rates and our economy is growing at a rate well above what the
experts had forecast. Our yearly budgetary deficit is continuing to go
down because of the Bush tax cuts and our trade deficit is shrinking.
Everything may not be puppies and kittens for our economy forever but
things are looking up. BigT
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