No Deal for new, New Deal
We found out today that we have been in a recession for a year. It's hard not to talk about a possible depression because being mentally prepared does help. Yes, we have to be positive, but some practicality is in order along with it. From what I have been reading (and not just Celente) a depression in 2009 would vastly differ from the one our parents and grandparents knew. Grocery shopping would be different. Places like Whole Foods would suffer or adapt. Anything gourmet would give way to more frugal buying. In fact, it would be encouraged and would quickly become a social norm to be frugal and buy only durable goods. On the social end, Americans would tend to isolate themselves due to dining more at home and using television to take up more spare time. Gardening or any activity that takes place at home will have the focus of advertising with television, radio, internet, and magazines. In the Globe’s article, staff writer Drake Bennett sees a 2009 depression unfolding differently from the 1930s: not bread lines, but long lines at emergency rooms; not migration from dust bowls to California, but an exodus from exurbs to cities. Durability would trump fashion, frugality and escapism would rule, and people might grow more isolated...The Boston Globe. One industry to benefit would be the web. Social groups would continue to thrive as well as the various 'meetup groups.' New comp for E-Bay would emerge benefiting a lot of Americans. Bartering and hosting would make its way onto the net stronger than ever before. The best news I heard was this: Out of a recession or depression, new ways of doing things will emerge that will be permanently beneficial to all of us. We will have used our ingenuity and good old "american know-how". Hopefully, we will all glide through this. That's what I am hoping for all of us tonight...TRedwine Early in what became the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes was asked if anything similar had ever happened. "Yes," he replied, "it was called the Dark Ages and it lasted 400 years." It did take 25 years, until November 1954, for the Dow to return to the peak it reached in September 1929. So caution is sensible concerning calls for a new New Deal. The assumption is that the New Deal vanquished the Depression. Intelligent, informed people differ about why the Depression lasted so long. But people whose recipe for recovery today is another New Deal should remember that America's biggest industrial collapse occurred in 1937, eight years after the 1929 stock market crash and nearly five years into the New Deal. In 1939, after a decade of frantic federal spending - President Herbert Hoover increased it more than 50% between 1929 and the inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt - unemployment was 17.2%. "I say after eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started," lamented Henry Morgenthau, FDR's Treasury secretary. Unemployment declined when America began selling materials to nations engaged in a war America would soon join.NO DEAL
THE PITFALLS OF FDR-ESQUE PLANS
The New York Post
By GEORGE F. WILL
