The Glade 4.0

Montegue:

Germany's GDP expanded by a sum less than the total amount of stimulus money injected into the Economy. And 0.3% is not substantial enough to lead to a yearly gain in GDP for the nation. The problem here is that the media fails to account for Germany's unemployment and declining production. Likewise, it provides no information on the export situation in Germany, which markedly suffers from the economic situation in the United States.

So, no, it doesn't mean the recession is over in Germany or France or Japan. And Japan is in a curious place, because it's still suffering from the over-leveraged government bailout of their recessions in the late 80s and early 90s.

Forgive the tautology, but complex macroeconomic systems are complex. No single indicator or data set leans one way or the other on the subject. The majority of industrialized nations are still in a recession for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the systemic economic illness troubling the United States. While U.S. talking heads keep speaking of recovery, what they're doing is masking the false green shoots caused by 4th Quarter production runs and inventory accumulation for the Christmas Consumer Season. It's not actually growth. More importantly, the rate of jobs lost is declining only because excess personnel were removed from the payroll months ago. The last demographic data on new jobless claims shows that companies are releasing asset-level personnel. And that's key to understanding why there really is no end in sight: if we were in a recovery or turn around phase, companies would take the hit to the solvency to keep asset-level personnel.

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0.3% is a rounding error.

It's the tiniest of errors in your baseline assumptions.

Basically, you don't even have to be trying to cook the books to come up with 0.3% growth. I mean, it can be legitimate too, but is it balanced against inflation? Is it simply a measure of GDP? I mean, what is the metric?

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

'nuff said.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

Khross - it still expanded. Growth occured after stimulus. Now, you can argue that the stimulus had nothing to do with the growth, and that's fine, but a lot of economists disagree with you. Either way, Germany passed a stimulus *and* had growth, and that proves the point that you questioned.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

It did not "expand". All it said was a GDP increase of 0.3%. What did interest rates and savings do concurrently and what did spending as a portion of GDP do?

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

So, Rafael, in your opinion, all those economists are incorrect? Or lying, or something? Growth means recession has stopped, right? When an economy goes into recession, groth goes negative. Once growth becomes positive, it's no longer in a recession, right?

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

okay I'll yeild that stimulus money did attribute in part to the growth in GDP. However I am not certain it was a cost effective measure. I feel that perhaps we could have gotten more for the money in different ways (perhaps more in tax breaks or other features that could create permanent jobs.)

Unemployment is still growing and I think that's what matters to a lot of people on this board (and a lot of people on that proverbial "Main street" we heard so much about during the election). So I think saying the "recession is over" is tantamount to Bush's "Mission Accomplished" statement back in 2003.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

That may be true, however, jobs *always* lag a recession. I believe that we did not do enough stimulus, and should have really focused on more job creation in the process. Had we done more, I think we would have saved and created more jobs.

I would have been fine with paying people to chase pigeons from the park again, to be honest. Folks might find that offensive, but employing people needs to be our next goal.

Though I do believe we are in serious trouble. Our push for globalization has left us with a gutted industrial infrastructure.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

No, it doesn't. The Growth in Germany's GDP was less than the amount of stimulus money put into the economy as a matter of absolute dollars. This means no real growth occurred. More importantly, GDP growth has very little to do with when a recession actually stops. All sorts of things have to happen: the value of currency relative to goods has to increase; employment has to increase; production has to increase; inflation has to decrease; etc.
No. This is not correct.

And no, jobs do not always lag behind a recession. Real job growth starts before the recession ends. This whole "jobless recovery" bullshit is exactly that: bullshit.

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I guess I take other economist's opinions over yours, Khross.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

Really? Paul Krugman's already proven himself to be a liar and charlatan, so who are you listening to? Nouriel Roubini says we're headed for a double dip. Is he credible in your world?

The Recession hasn't ended anywhere in the world, yet. The financial crisis, the credit crisis, the leverage crisis, and the currency crisis facing the United States merely make it easier to lie on paper for other countries that value their assets in dollars as they shift to more Euro-centric currency valuations. And 0.3% still less than Germany actually put into their domestic economy with stimulus. Their unemployment is still rising, investing declining, and production is still negative. The recession isn't over in Germany by a long shot.

And, it's not over here.

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We shall see. There were dire predictions about the stock market, and that didn't play out. Jobless numbers continue to come in lower than expected.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

Lower than expected when? by whom? I can try to dig it up if need be but I remember the number 8% being tossed about as the threshold we would avoid crossing if we passed the stimulus.

I'm concerned about what will happen to these construction workers when their stimulus projects are over and the housing and job market have not recovered to give them new work. I fear some of our saved jobs yet be laid off again.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

5 of the last six weeks those numbers came in under expectations. Now, if you want to quibble with the expectations, that's cool. However, the numbers have been showing signs of slowing at least.

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

As folks run out of benefits, they fall off the unemployed list. We could have zero job growth, and in a year we would have a low unemployment rate as more and more folks fell off the list and were not counted.

This is smoke and mirrors, much like when GW tried to reclassify McDonalds workers as "manufacturing" which would have shown growth in that industry. It's creative accounting which is ment to placate the people and infuence markets. All administrations do it as a cheap and easy way to show whatever policy they are enacting is "working".

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A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. ~ John Stuart Mill

Comparing to the expecations are the only thing you can do, though. Either a prediction is accurate, or it's not. You don't get to say "well, it's less than it would've been if we did the other guy's idea," because we didn't DO the other guy's idea.

So you compare reality to expectations, and judge the guy's advice you chose based on whether you met expectations or not. Stimulus failed.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Do you even read what people post? First of all, that's a terrible definition for "recession". One, because it's predicated on the flux (and oftentimes manipulated and distorted) definition of "growth" and two, why should that be the only fundamental indicator?

I already wrote that I have major contentions with what mainstream economists consider "growth" (typically measured by GDP) and furthermore I have contentions when they just post "growth" or "expansion" with little or not reference with how the term is being defined.

Yes, a lot of them are incorrect. Nearly no one said anything (maybe except Jim Rogers and Peter Schiff) prior to the equity crash last year, and they were talking up financials as though their bedrock assets were some built of some fundamentally unshakable investment vehicle. This is obviously not the case. It's oftentimes the ones that dress up the situation with lots of technical wizardry that are wrong: all it takes is some common sense, a little idea about how credit, bonds, equities work and how specific investment vehicles are structured to see how things work. What we saw last year was the most pathetic rationalizing of complete garbage.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

What? Where did you get this information? Equities last year PLUNGED to where they needed to be, circa 1999 pre NASDAQ bubble. Now Front Month Future Contracts for the USD and Cash Indecies are plunging and so cocurrently is the Dollar Index as it sets 52 week lows daily, as various indecies on the NYSE continue to underperform the losses in these indecies.

So how exactly are the predictions about the stock market not playing out again?

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones