Welcome to the double dip recession
Tyler Durden at Zero Hedge blog makes a pretty convincing case that we're already in another recession:
While the key market moving event from last Friday may have been Bernanke's Jackson Hole speech which merely left the door open to future QE episodes, the most important event from an economic standpoint was the first GDP revision Q2, which dropped from preliminary 1.3% to a sub stall speed, in real terms, 1.0%. What is just as important is that as the following chart from Bloomberg demonstrates, the YoY change in real GDP, which is now at 1.5%, is a slam dunk indicator of recession: "Since 1948, every time the four-quarter change has fallen below 2 percent, the economy has entered a recession. It's hard to argue against an indicator with such a long history of accuracy." Bernanke agreed that "growth has for the most part been at rates insufficient to achieve sustained reductions in unemployment." And while Bernanke is shifting dangerously into Greenspan territory with the open-ended interpretation of his statement, another thing that is more actionable is the observation that virtually every time real YoY GDP has dropped below 1.5%, this has led to a negative nonfarm payroll number. Granted, the result may not be as shocking as what the Philly Fed implied vis-a-vis this Friday's NFP, but we believe a subzero print in the August labor report will convince the three Fed holdouts that the time for yet another monetary intervention is here (Arab Spring part deux consequences be damned).
I'm not an economist but I'm a great believer in the past as an indicator of what will happen in the future.
Of course, this is just a technical explanation for what we all see every day in our own lives. No jobs, little hope, and the queasy feeling many people live with on a day to day basis that their own jobs hang by a thread.
We have no manuevering room as far as addressing this crisis. The Fed has QE'd too much. The federal government has spent too much money on dream world "stimulus." Meanwhile, no one is addressing what really ails us; government intervention has made the problem worse and not better.
The AP is reporting that 7 regulations proposed by the administration would cost the economy a billion dollars each. Obama and his crew of clueless gits wonder why there are no jobs being created?
2012 can't come soon enough.