Jack Rasmus is a west coast economist who puts out the most thorough review of the economy. This article was written in response to the bad job numbers and low GDP growth. It is the most thorough I’ve seen and puts forward predicators for the future. KZ
IT’S OUR ECONOMY: …One cannot miss jobs and GDP forecasts that badly without something being fundamentally wrong with forecast methodologies employed today by most mainstream economists, a point this writer has been making publicly repeatedly since last December.
…As this writer concluded last October 2011 in the book, ‘Obama’s Economy: Recovery for the Few’, which predicted a rapidly slowing global economy in 2012 driven by the Eurozone and a ‘hard landing’ in China, Brazil, and elsewhere, “The U.S., Eurozone and U.K. economies are tightly integrated, not just financially but in a host of other economic ways. What happens on either side of the Atlantic soon produces a similar reaction on the other.”
In the months to come the jobs markets in the US will continue at best to stagnate; apart from seasonality factors the housing market will continue to ‘bump along the bottom’ as it has for four years now; government spending will continue to decline; and business spending, bank lending, manufacturing and exports will continue to slow, while consumers will continue to rely on credit and dis-saving to maintain consumption. GDP as a result will continue to lag.
And when US political elites gather immediately after the November elections, both political parties’ leaders will agree by December 31 to cut $2-$4 trillion more in spending in addition to the $2.2 trillion already scheduled to begin in January 2013. But they won’t call it austerity, which is the term for deficit cutting in Europe from Greece to the U.K that is driving their economies into a deeper crisis. US capitalists and policy makers are more clever than their European counterparts. The US code words used for austerity will be called ‘grand bargain’ and ‘fiscal cliff’. (more)
