All wrong WP! The USA consumer is 95% employed. They get their pay. They spend it. Simple. They need to buy groceries, clothes, SUVs, petrol, gasoline if they prefer, engine oil, a new tv, a computer, a CDMA phone and another one for luck, a trip to visit their family at Thanksgiving and other times [well, the list will be too long here - there is a lot of stuff bought].
Debt is not out of control in the USA. I have debt, it is under control. So is the debt of other people I know [though I think one or two might have dug themselves in for a long haul, working to pay debt...yuk!]. Debt is well under control in the USA. There are all sorts of debt control.
They are not tapped out. They keep on earning, they keep on spending. Going to be an interesting six months as the end of the world doomsters learn once again, as always, that the end of the world is NOT nigh.
Alan Green$pan will go down in history as the great Maestro of the money market who managed the US$, the greatest currency in human history by a long, long way, from the mid 1980s to the 21st century and did it highly successfully.
He brought the currency from the industrial age, not long off the gold standard and still coming out of the maelstrom on the oil crises, through the 1987 speculative crash around the world, through the 1991 recession, through the amazing years of the 1990s as the technological and internet revolutions combined with globalisation and huge inflows of capital to the US economy, avoiding the Mexican currency crisis and fixing up the mayhem from Long Term Capital Management and the Asian contagion and the great financial panic of 1998, into the irrational exuberance of the dot.coms which was contemporaneous with the Y2K fears [which was a fizzer, contrary to wide expectation] and into the 21st century and the dot.bomb and tech.wreck as people's wild expectations came back to earth and here we go through the tidying up process and very well into it with no mayhem evident other than for individuals and companies which got things very badly wrong.
It has been a great era and seems still to have plenty of time to run. The average middle class working American is ignorant. The smart people who can understand funds flow and all this stuff and have market models which predict the movements of markets and those who can figure out which companies will flourish will continue to do extremely well.
The era when the dramatically rising markets made everyone a financial genius have ended, for now. But I don't think that era is over - though the geniuses will be fewer and chastened.
Worse than Hitler or the coming Satan? Okay, I know which of you or my idol should be caged.
Mqurice |
