The Exhaustion of the Cyclical Recession
Why isn't anyone all gung-ho about the end of the recession, Times biz columnist Floyd Norris wants to know! History, he says, shows us that we always land on our feet. (I dunno, historically, I think people feel better when the jobs come back and when there's money being made to offset spending mostly? But that's just a suggestion from the man who just exhausted all the quarters in the change bowl on his last trip to the deli.) The downturns of '91 and '01 are being treated as stand-alone events-despite the fact that everyone keeps saying "the economy is cyclical," and if I hear that one more time, stab me, but maybe why we're not "overjoyed" at the "end" of the "recession" is because the last twenty years of economic history so clearly are cyclical. And maybe we don't like this cycle! And the last down-swooping iteration of the cycle was a really devastating one-'01 took much longer to recover from than '91, and when will "recovery" exist in the near future? '12? And how ugly will the downturn be in 2020, at the end of Vice President Bachmann's economically-scorching world war? Also it's hard to get stoked about "recovery" when the whole cyclical system bases its downturns on more and more destruction of middle-class financial lives and on further stratifying the rich and poor.
It seems to me that it's like rationalizing autoerotic asphyxiation by saying, "Yeah, I almost die every time, but I always come back!"
Instead of waiting for the cycle to turn around, how 'bout you just stop choking yourself to get a boner?
I guess there's not gonna be another Challenge then, huh?
Yeah, it's great (really) that I'm employed again and all, but I just took an unplanned, unpaid, five-month sabbatical with a fat mortgage and two kids. I need to fill up this hole I dug for myself before I start doing coke off of strippers in Vegas again and get the cycle started all over again.
To lawyers of future: joking about the coke and strippers.
Christ, NOW you tell us? Then what am I supposed to do with all this debt?
Beginning with the caveat that I'm just an amateur spitballing here– I think it's perhaps even worse than you are suggesting; the jobs lost in the '01 recession never really came back, and while growth returned, it's now fairly well established that the growth in question was the result of a housing bubble driven by imaginary money. Since the post-war period, not only are bubble and crash cycles happening regularly, they appear to be becoming more violent– bigger inflations, more devastating contractions.
While it's true that you can have economic growth without low wages, the kind of vast and rapid growth we had for the pre-2007 period requires a low-wage workforce to produce cheap enough goods for the consuming class– that is, you need both the Chinese and the Americans. The difficulty is that now the world could really use the Chinese as the new Americans, the new consuming class, but consumers either need actual high wages or the outlay of vast amounts of cheap credit, which we have recently come to see as problematic. If the Chinese are to become the Americans, then, someone needs to become the Chinese. Again, you can have growth without decreasing wages, but the reliability and scope of that sort of mechanism is complicated and controversial.
For the Marxists out there, this need to push into more labor markets for cheap labor and the subsequent exhaustion of that labor market relative to the number of moneyed consumers is all part of the plan, so to speak. That's why the only people who love globalization as much as neoliberals are orthodox Marxists; accelerating the push into new labor markets speeds the process of capitalism's collapse (because the world is only so big).
There's actually a political science term to describe that process.
The recession can be used as an excuse for many a nefarious thing. Scaring surviving employees into working even harder for even less money. Laying off olds because youngs are so much cheaper (and easier to manipulate). A cloak to hide incompetent management, or even skullduggery. I've seen all these things over the past year or so first hand, and there's fuck all that's cyclical about it.
Hopefully, by the time Vice President Bachmann's world war comes along, my Alzheimer's will have kicked in and I can spend my time in a rocker watching Lucille Ball Show reruns. She still got plenny 'splainin' to do.
The day of reckoning is beckoning!
And with each suppression, a greater recession.
I have a hard time reading economic discussions. For me to read anything on the subject, and to consider what I'm reading, either the bullshit has to be gilded in some kind of monstrous academic clout, or it has to be sensational and/or pithy.
Typing on an iPad from the Applebee's salad bar, David Brooks wants to remind us all that America's outlook is rosy, because our moral materialism makes us create emotional experiences that the world covets because they can't afford emotions with all the socialism. And with 500 million in the US by 2050- the more the merrier! This recession talk- don't be such a Negative Nancy! Also, bacon bits at salad bars shows that America rejects the 60's liberalism.
Also, Haitians are suffering because they believe in juju. The Judeo-Christian ethic protects America like a shroud against earthquakes, the anomie that has turn Europe into a husk of its once glorious self, and fuel efficient cars. Somehow, I will turn this trenchant observation into 800 words about how there are only two types of people in the world.
those with guns and those without?
Don't tell anyone, but we're skewing OLD. So, unless you're planning on hiring a lot of people in the next two decades–sorry, three–to gum creamed corn while they type blog comments, don't look for any "recovery" that doesn't require a walker, a respirator, and a DNR order.
My favorite recession was '91, since it forced me, a recent graduate, to find a non-journalism job and allowing me to avoid a wrenching mid-career reformat at age 40. Thanks first George Bush!
Sure, everyone complains about the economy's cyclical nature during the downturns. But if you want real cred on this issue, you have to criticize and disavow the booms as well.
Which many find to be a much more imposing intellectual challenge. Not to mention what it probably does to pageviews. "MORE JOBS CREATED: FOR SHAME, AMERICA!"
Done and done, on the first point.
As for the second, this presumes that bubble inflation is largely a matter of job creation, which isn't the case; again, the housing bubble inflated to its ridiculous heights with only an decrease in the unemployment rate from about 6.3% in 03 to a low of about 4.4% in 07. Now, that job growth was great, but it was never back down to late Clinton levels of below 4%, and more to the point, the jobs loss through the popping of the bubble dwarfed the number of jobs gained through the inflation of the bubble. You can add on the fact that all of this happened at a time of stagnant real wages.
palin/bachmann 2012…i can see the end of the world from here
Things may be easing in some sectors but the recession is still real. Beside all the people still out of work, most state budgets are in shambles leading to the pain of service cuts and salary freezes and higher taxes and fees for the rest of us. Yeah, it is not over yet. I'm still really reigning in my shopping impulse, what's left of it.
Pulleeze! Don't you get it? There is no such thing as a "recession". THE WORLD HAS CHANGED. There is no such thing as "recovery" because you don't recover from change, you either adapt or disintegrate. THE ADJUSTMENT MAY LOOK LIKE INFLATION. But since there is no "inflation" because income is not going up with prices. Our currency buys less each day, bank interest can't keep up, putting it in a mattress doesn't work because it devalues every day. But,consider this: as our money loses its value, more and more the only things we can afford to buy are made in or by China! An objective view of global economic shows the U.S. as a small part of China. THAT IS A RELEVANT FACT.