Originally Posted by Porsche-O-Phile
It's going to be a long time before we see a sustainable recovery. Very little has been either learned from or done about this recession. People are still living way beyond their means, savings rates are still dismal, government expenditures are still way beyond revenues, we still have virtually no manufacturing base in this country, retraining/retooling our work force is not happening nearly quickly, efficiently or cheaply enough, education is still abysmal, small businesses are still getting slaughtered and the housing situation is only getting worse (millions of foreclosures held in shadow inventory with more and more mounting daily, pricing still way out of whack with peoples' earnings and job prospects, etc.)
We'll eventually recover but it's going to be a long, hard, miserable slog. I'm not sure it'll be a "double dip" or even a "triple dip". Any sort of "dip" implies the presence of an initial climb, which I'm not certain really exists. I know economic metrics say it technically is happening but IMHO it is completely contrived, manufactured and has been conjured into existence by statistical manipulation to make things appear better and (hopefully) get the markets to ride on the wave of optimism thus created as a self-fulfilling prophecy. I sincerely doubt there's any real recovery at all. Common sense - you can't have a recovery (certainly not a sustainable one) with 20% of your population out of work. You just can't. This whole notion of a "jobless recovery" is a joke - it doesn't exist. It's made up just like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny or an intelligent liberal. It's not real - and as I've pointed out elsewhere, the current "leadership" in this country doesn't care about unemployment, trade deficits, sustainability, domestic production or other fundamentals which really WOULD initiate a recovery - it is just fine with keeping things the way they are (or exacerbating them) in order to increase the role of and dependence upon government and therefore legitimize it.
Politics and self-interest uber alles, unfortunately - and this is the result. We will have a flat, wallowing "non-recovery" (maybe even slow steady declines) for the next few years. Eventually something will come along to really instill optimism in the markets, but it isn't happening right now - everyone's still sitting around waiting for it to come along. In the meantime things are going to be bogged down by high deficits, low production, low savings, high unemployment and an aging population with ever-increasing costs associated therewith.
2014-2015 at best for any sort of a "real" recovery - and that's assuming we get rid of the current bunch of idiot "leaders" we have and start repealing a lot of the big-dollar drag items (i.e. entitlement spending, like ObamaCare) they've created or promulgated.
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