Here's a chart (courtesy of ZeroHedge) that shows you the drop in USPS employment all the way back to the mid 1960's levels!
The illusion of the elections is lifting, as the truth flows out on the US economy. This morning, the initial claims jobless numbers posted a multi-year 104,548 surge in weekly non-seasonally adjusted claims from 361,800 to 466,348, an increase of 29%. The seasonally adjusted number also soared from 361,000 to 439,000 on expectations of a 375,000 estimate, an increase of 21.6%.
Let's explore more examples of malinvestment in financial and human capital. Mark Spitznagel at Forbes has penned an analysis of the election fallout. Here are a few selected sections:
""President Barack Obama managed to overtake Republican challenger Mitt Romney on the exit poll question “Who is better for the economy?” and a strong majority of Obama voters felt that the economy is better off than four years ago. Indeed, anyone (particularly Bernanke) would concede that without the Fed’s zero interest rate policy we would be experiencing a far worse economy—the true Obama-Keynesian economy.
The danger here, as we have seen in every other bust for a century or more, is that we can only suspend the laws of economics for so long. And in general we are only good at considering immediate consequences, while being very, very bad at considering later consequences.
***
In the short run (and this is what is so insidious about the Fed’s
artificially low interest rates), all we are seeing is an illusion of economic
progress. Specifically, the Fed has manufactured a distortion intended to trap
both consumers into spending more and entrepreneurs into investing more, or
lengthening their production periods (becoming more “roundabout,” as the
Austrian School economists said), as if savings were more plentiful. This
combination would never occur in an unhampered, noninterventionist economy for
the simple fact that higher consumption would mean higher interest rates (from
less savings), which would discourage longer production.
Thus, investment in this illusory economy is malinvestment, or
investment that always unravels with the intervention’s inevitable end, due to
either untenable credit levels (such as today’s corporate debt-to-asset ratio,
still at historic highs) or a resource crunch (rising commodity prices) that
eliminates any advantage from printing money; and one or both of these scenarios
is unavoidable.
***
This leads to another unfortunate kind of malinvestment, of a higher order,
if you will: the malinvestment of an electorate in its political class and their
policies. Just as entrepreneurs cannot differentiate between real economic
information and monetary illusion, so too the electorate cannot differentiate
between the effects of Obama’s fiscal policy (of his historic assumption of
debt) and that of Bernanke’s loose monetary policy—and without the latter the
former wouldn’t have even been feasible. Both Obama and Bernanke pursue a great
economic evil to come, but Bernanke keeps them both cloaked as a great present
good.
As the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises noted, laboratory experiments
cannot be performed in an economy; “We are never in a position to observe the
change in one element only, all other conditions of the event remaining
unchanged."
This is our grievous position in the United States today,
trapped in the status quo by first consequences, by what we can see,
due to a cause that we cannot even see. And so we are left to learn from
experience, an eventual tragic unfolding of our collective malinvestment. As
Bastiat said, “Experience teaches effectually, but brutally.""
The Obama voters will richly reap the consequences for sowing the seeds of Socialism.
2 comments:
Thanks. Great post.
The Obama voters will suffer the consequences, but they won't know that they brought it upon themselves.
If only we could have fielded a credible candidate.......
Thanks RW; yes the 49% will suffer for the 51% that voted for Obama. Apparently, a combination of a malinformed electorate and a GOP candidate that just could not deliver the message to inform them.
Whatever. The message delivered worked to the 49%, but just couldn't give Romney the edge to flip that extra 2%. What a lost opportunity to save the USA.
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