Economic Experts have little Expertise.

More and more investment firms are jumping on the phrase that we are heading for a recession if in fact we aren’t already in one. I have read that statement several dozen times and always the question I have is why these so called experts are hedging their statements. If indeed they are the best and brightest and most well paid among us shouldn’t they know if we are in a recession or not?

I love how all these “Gurus" are paid seven figure salaries to run our mutual funds and investment houses and if you ask a hundred of them what is going on you will get a hundred different opinions. If economics is guess work rather than science then why do these so called experts get paid salaries that make even a utility chairman blush with envy?

Washington is a joke of course. We have a President who has surrounded himself with allegedly some of the finest minds in the country but even they couldn’t see reality till it him them in their own investment portfolio. Instead they continued to tell our President that the economy was on a solid foundation. Obviously none of them understand anything about construction or they would know a foundation laid on faulty ground will not hold.

Ben Bernanke the head of the Federal Reserve has shown he is clueless. Now he is quoted as saying, “something needs to be done quickly" as more and more indicators tell us we are descending into an economic maelstrom. Bernanke and the Federal Reserve could have done something last summer or more than they did in the fall when they played with ¼ point drops in the prime rate. Even the Feds relate that prime interest drops take months to work their way into the economy so the stock market continues to be engulfed in uncertainty even after a ¾ point “emergency" reduction in the prime was instituted.

There is talk of an instant rebate to the middle class of from $300 to $600 dollars per taxpayer. That will do the trick. I can just see the news team watching one of us walk into a store with the loot. “Ladies and gentlemen, Joe Blow is about to spend his rebate check. Prepare for the repercussions to be felt on Wall Street any minute." Just as soon as he can find something to buy that wasn’t made in another country by the company that moved the plant he used to work for overseas that is.

This rebate will come quickly to us according to the Feds. We might have it by mid May. This is January. They plan on doing something quickly and we might get some money back in four months? Thank goodness these people don’t run our 911 services.

The reason we are firmly entrenched in a recessionary spiral is simple. Experts, The Federal Reserve Board and politicians kept listening to their hacks and cronies tell them everything would be fine. They kept looking at charts and graphs and interpretations that were guided to fit the political persuasion that the sky wasn’t falling. It had to be viewed that way because if not that meant they were wrong and politicians and bureaucrats in Washington can never admit they were wrong no matter how obvious.

All these experts had to do to find the truth and avert this crisis last summer was to get off their duffs, quit listening to corporate chieftains filling their pockets off the backs of hard working Americans and visit any town in America.

It was obvious in the coffee houses and greasy spoons and local gathering places that things were getting tight. Too high a price for gasoline, and credit card interest and utilities taking huge increases in rates told the story. People who had lost their well paying job and were forced to take another less paying one were running out of cash and resources to sustain anything but the basics.

The American people have known for months there was hell to pay around the corner. Unfortunately we don’t get paid for being smarter than the experts. Rather we will all end up paying for the mistakes of others whose trust and observations no longer bear any credence.

The sadness in all of this is that few of them, if any will lose their jobs. In fact most of them will receive huge bonuses for being absolutely and unequivocally incompetent. I’m afraid we must blame ourselves for that. We allow it to happen.

Comment by Danny Davids^(13,494) (124 days 20 hours ago.)