Courtesy of Lee Adler of the Wall Street Examiner
The Wall Street Journal published a post at 7:15 PM Friday evening, when no one would see it, that proved once again that conomists are clownfrauds when it comes to understanding the US economy. Except the article didn’t mention that fact. The WSJ wants to continue to report what conomists say as if it means something. Apparently this enables the Journal to sell more advertising to the Wall Street banks who employ these shills. It’s a symbiotic relationship.
For this, we, the investing public, should be eternally grateful. Where would we be without this useless information?
Actually it’s not useless. It tells traders what to fade. Savvy traders know that whatever idea the Wall Street conomist crowd promotes, take the other side of the trade.
For example, Wall Street shills had been proclaiming for months that the falling price of gas at the pump would boost consumer spending and hence the US economy. But now along comes the Journal to tell us:
Wait. What? This isn’t what the shills had promised. But what else is new? It’s just another dot in the matrix of the sordid history of Conomics, the only profession whose practitioners can become powerful and famous without ever getting anything right.
In fact, it is often the case that the more outrageously bad a conomist’s understanding has been, the more powerful they become. It’s just their luck that the damage they do while in positions of power usually doesn’t become clear until years after they’ve left their policy making post. If they’re still living, we then get to witness the embarrassing spectacles of excuse making in their self-justification world tours.
At least one observer I know, definitely not a conomist, did point out that the savings at the pump would at best be a wash, and that consumers might use them to pay down credit card debt.
We should all be clear that consumers paying down credit card loan shark debt is a good thing in the long run, but it’s definitely a net negative to the US economy’s bottom line in the short run. And it will only be positive in the long run, by people continuing to slowly repair their household balance sheets, if the economy doesn’t collapse first, thereby sending the slowly declining US middle class crashing into the poorhouse for good.
Somehow, I don’t see American consumers catching that break, given the clownfrauds at the Fed who are also pumping the fiction that the reduction of gas prices will cause the US economy to grow. This is just another delusion in the long term history of serial delusions that drive Fed policy. Every couple of generations those delusions come home to roost and reality rears its ugly head in an economic crash I think that those delusions have accumulated over the past 15 years to the degree that they are now near the moment of truth.
Meanwhile, I do thank the Wall Street Journal for publishing this useful information late on a Friday evening of Super Bowl weekend when almost no one would see it. Some of us did. To The Journal’s credit, the post is still listed on the front page, however, way down in the left column below the fold. Here it is.
If you do not subscribe to the Journal, Google the headline “Savings at the Pump Are Staying in Wallets” and click the Google link to the WSJ item.
