ON RECESSIONS & ECONOMIC STORMS

It's taken almost one year, a market collapse, record bailouts, really ugly job loss forecasts, global crisis, and presidential incompetence only a Third World dictator could hope to rival but the the National Bureau of Economic Research has finally been convinced that we're in a recession. To quote my 11 year old daughter, "Ya think"?

And the news gets better. We've officially been in a recession since December of last year! What the heck have these guys been waiting for, soup lines and street riots?

Now, I'm not going to point out that I called this a recession almost one year ago (I know, I just did; I can't help myself). But it should be noted that waiting almost one year to point out developments that others saw happening a long time ago is not very encouraging. What good are the experts if we can't trust them to give us timely information? To paraphrase John Maynard Keynes, "I don't know that we're served by an agency that can only tell us we're in a storm only after the seas have tossed our boat."

It seems to me that we also need new adjectives. Somehow, "incompetence" begets "negligence" are no longer sufficient.

Sheesh. I sure hope these guys get better at forecasting "market hurricanes." Although - if we're using the Bush administration as a gauge - and to continue our analogy, we're not too good at dealing with hurricanes either.


- Mark