Orders for durables rise 0.8% in Sept., lifted by aircraft - MarketWatch
The longer I'm alive the more I suspect that most people that lived through an era and paid reasonable attention to what was actually happening would scarcely recognize the "general historical view" that ends up being accepted by people in the future reading history. Part of this is simply the need for humans to arrive at a "story" that has a narrative form that "makes sense to humans". We know that everything no longer revolves around us, but we live in the constraints of our gray matter and existence which needs to have a "simple, historical, narrative story that"makes sense".
In many cases, that alone is enough to make the "story" wrong in a lot of significant ways, add some biases (which we all have), sprinkle in the fact that everyone's picture (including mine) is RADICALLY incomplete, and pretty soon, "historical reality" starts to look more like a cartoon of something that might not even be recognizable to those that were alive and not total sheep during the era.
It appears that the fact is that we never had a recession prior to the 4Q of 2008 (two successive quarters of negative growth) -- it seems unlikely that with a lot of corporations reporting reasonable numbers in 3Q that GDP is going to be negative. HOWEVER, kind of like Katrina, Valerie Plame, Global Warming, "lying about WMD", Bush/Cheney supposedly "creating" connections between Iraq and 9-11, etc, we live in an era when manufactured reality IS reality for 90% of the population. Therefore, "We have been in a recession" for something like a year now, so when we now have what appears to be a real downturn at least impending, it CAN'T just be a "recession" -- therefore, "Depression".
Kinda like the little kid that lies about what happened to his homework, the lies just have to keep getting bigger. The PROBLEM is that with the economy, a major part of economic activity depends on what people think! When 90% of people believe we are in a recession ... and then a bunch start to think we are in a depression, that can have a really big effect on how they behave.
Worse, when they are told that the "fault" lies with "capitalism and too little regulation", and they start to believe that as well, then LESS capitalism and MORE regulation is likely to be the "fix"--which of course makes the situation worse, and now we have what is commonly referred to as a "death spiral".
The longer I'm alive the more I suspect that most people that lived through an era and paid reasonable attention to what was actually happening would scarcely recognize the "general historical view" that ends up being accepted by people in the future reading history. Part of this is simply the need for humans to arrive at a "story" that has a narrative form that "makes sense to humans". We know that everything no longer revolves around us, but we live in the constraints of our gray matter and existence which needs to have a "simple, historical, narrative story that"makes sense".
In many cases, that alone is enough to make the "story" wrong in a lot of significant ways, add some biases (which we all have), sprinkle in the fact that everyone's picture (including mine) is RADICALLY incomplete, and pretty soon, "historical reality" starts to look more like a cartoon of something that might not even be recognizable to those that were alive and not total sheep during the era.
It appears that the fact is that we never had a recession prior to the 4Q of 2008 (two successive quarters of negative growth) -- it seems unlikely that with a lot of corporations reporting reasonable numbers in 3Q that GDP is going to be negative. HOWEVER, kind of like Katrina, Valerie Plame, Global Warming, "lying about WMD", Bush/Cheney supposedly "creating" connections between Iraq and 9-11, etc, we live in an era when manufactured reality IS reality for 90% of the population. Therefore, "We have been in a recession" for something like a year now, so when we now have what appears to be a real downturn at least impending, it CAN'T just be a "recession" -- therefore, "Depression".
Kinda like the little kid that lies about what happened to his homework, the lies just have to keep getting bigger. The PROBLEM is that with the economy, a major part of economic activity depends on what people think! When 90% of people believe we are in a recession ... and then a bunch start to think we are in a depression, that can have a really big effect on how they behave.
Worse, when they are told that the "fault" lies with "capitalism and too little regulation", and they start to believe that as well, then LESS capitalism and MORE regulation is likely to be the "fix"--which of course makes the situation worse, and now we have what is commonly referred to as a "death spiral".
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