Ted,
Truth is I'm being a bit one sided on Europe, because you and I have had this debate before and I get tired of re-iterating my position so you'll absorb it. Yes, there are some countries in there practicing austerity. Ireland for one and the UK is another. Spain, Greece, etc are others. These harsh policies are imposed by the ECB and Germany and they will most certainly continue to fail. However, your posts imply that I approve of that. I do not. Austerity in response to UNPAYABLE debt is a fool's errand. It crushes the middle class to prop up the debt slavery that the elite live off of. The program I think is ideal over there as well as here is to repudiate the debt. The governments should be putting bankers in jail, nationalizing the TBTF banks and winding them down SLOWLY, meaning writing off bad debts (NOT trying to collect on them), wiping out shareholders, and embarking on a slow 10-20 year program of CREDIBLE deficit reduction. QE, ZIRP, and other means to prop up the TBTFs and all their debt assets that the 99% will never pay off is tantamount to debt slavery with the top 1% as the feudal overlords. Bernanke is the chief enabler of this regime, with Obama and Geithner as his backers.
Iceland has implemented the plan I favor and they are reaping the rewards. All other countries should follow suit. Here in the US, we're trying to get our budgets under control, but have failed miserably. Bernanke has become a drug pusher to keep the debt viable. We have NOT put bankers in jail and we have NOT written down the debts that are unpayable. That has crushed our own 99% into debt slavery and financial repression, where the meager savings they have managed to squirrel away in banks earns no interest and the cash in those deposits is losing value. So Europe is not doing the right things, but neither are we. We favor the 1% over the 99% and I will never be aligned to policies that do that. I thought Obama would be more of a champion for the 99%, but economically, he has not been.
On another note, CAT just had a horrible earnings quarter. And don't blame it on the sequester. CAT is representative of global demand for industrial projects. They have seen a massive downswing from Q1'12 in both top and bottom lines. This is the most obvious sign yet that global growth and that in the US is in a recession.
prnewswire.com
PEORIA, Ill., April 22, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Caterpillar Inc. (NYSE: CAT) today reported profit per share of $1.31 in the first quarter of 2013, down from first-quarter 2012 profit per share of $2.37. First-quarter 2013 sales and revenues were $13.210 billion, a decline from $15.981 billion in the first quarter of 2012. Profit was $880 million in the first quarter of 2013, compared with $1.586 billion in the first quarter of 2012. "In our year-end 2012 financial release, we said the first quarter of 2013 would be challenging, and it certainly was. As expected, inventory changes were a major factor. Caterpillar and our dealers usually add inventory in the first quarter to prepare for higher end-user demand in the spring and summer. In the first quarter of 2012, we added about $2 billion to inventory, but this year, we cut inventory by about a half billion dollars. In the first quarter of 2012, Cat dealers added machine inventory of about $875 million, and this year, they reduced machine inventory by about $700 million. Those are significant year-to-year swings, and coupled with moderating end-user demand, resulted in sales and revenues being down 17 percent," said Caterpillar Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Doug Oberhelman. |
