We could use a good Stoic right now.
Let’s not waste time. What gives with the stock market not rallying off the best GDP report in six years? For one thing, it was a total sell on the news play; the whispers for some time had GDP coming with a “5″ handle.
But for another thing, even that hot, blistering number can’t obscure the fact that the economy remains stagnant, and the administration, rather than spending its first year stoically addressing this nation’s problems, wasted it propping up connected banks and dithering over its pet project.
When this crisis began, more than two years ago, I opined that the only true solutions were time and open markets. I still believe that. But we are wasting time, and we’re shielding connected players from the vagaries of open markets. That is making our open markets, the deepest and most liquid anywhere, and the envy of the free world, less open and more rigged. And only a fool doesn’t see it.
It’s not just the 10% unemployment rate, as bad as that is. It’s not just that wages for everybody else that aren’t keeping pace with even slight inflation. It’s that as those two situations persist, as the overall state of the consumer continues to stagnate and decompose, it drains demand, which keeps the lid on corporate profits, so companies are reluctant to ramp up new operations. It keeps state and federal tax revenue dropping, straining already strained budgets, especially on the state level. Something eventually will burst.
