Tuesday, February 18, 2003

Monday, February 10, 2003

Sunshine Project: US Plans for Use of Gas in Iraq look up hypocrisy in the dictionary and youll see a picture of rumsfeld

Sunday, February 09, 2003

Sunday, February 02, 2003

CNN--Sluggish economy could be here for a while - Jan. 30, 2003: But most economists think happy days will soon be here again. According to the consensus view, all that's required for growth to return to the 3.8 percent annual rate it averaged in the late 1990s is for worries about war in Iraq to be cleared up -- either peacefully, or with Saddam Hussein's head on a stake. ...With the fog of uncertainty lifted, these analysts say, stock prices will rise, businesses will finally crack open their wallets and hang out "help wanted" signs... But not all economists are so sure. The biggest problem, in their view, is not that businesses will sit on their hands until the war blows over. Instead, these corporate managers are still trying to pick up the pieces from the sudden bursting of the stock-market bubble of the late 1990s. "There is substantial post-bubble grit in the wheels right now," said Lara Rhame, a former economist at the Federal Reserve, now with Brown Brothers Harriman. During the bubble and the economic boom that accompanied it, many businesses got the idea that profits and stock prices would grow like gangbusters more or less forever. At one point, some widely respected economists thought the Dow Jones industrial average would hit 36,000 by the year 2000 or so. ...-- businesses spent money on new technology like it was going out of style, leveraging themselves to the hilt in the process. Stocks have not fallen for four straight years in the United States since the beginning of the Great Depression. Even scarier historical comparisons... But the late-1980s boom couldn't hold a candle to the boom of the late 1990s, which was driven by a revolution in technology that promised to forever alter the way U.S. companies did business. What other U.S. booms had similar characteristics? The railroad-building boom in the late 19th century and the manufacturing boom of the 1920s -- What sort of busts followed those two booms? Depressions. Long ones. apan's post-bubble nightmare -- which has stretched on for the better part of a decade -- has been characterized by chronic economic weakness and a deflationary spiral, in which falling prices hurt corporate profits, leading to layoffs and falling wages, leading to weakness in demand, which leads to falling prices, etc., etc. "The Fed so far has done a magnificent job of holding the show together, but we don't know what effects of the bubble are still in the pipeline." Hi. I'm back I hope. Here's an update on the economy from CNN. There are two glaring omissions: (1) the "recovery" that the Fed has done such a magnificent job creating does not seem to have anything to do with turning a trillion dollar surplus treasury into an historic debt (maginitude undoubtedly understated as usual even at current flabergasting levels); (2) there does not seem to be any oil in Iraq. The former also obscures the "consumer" spending on smart bombs, carpet bombs, drones, bases in the middle east, bases in southeast Asia, homeland security apparatuses, 200 million smallpox vaccines, puppet governments, bribed coalitions, etc. Not to mention a huge housing bubble yet to pop, and industry crippling 0% interest car loans. The latter claims that all the Iraq war will accomplish is an "end to uncertainty," as though calling the whole thing off would produce the same recovery as exxonmobilbpamocochevrontexaco being forced to seize a quarter of the world's remaining oil to protect it from saddamistic destruction and inadvertently breaking the stranglehold of OPEC just when it was permanently about to surpass non OPEC in production.