Comments on: Fed can’t fix broken economy, politics

By: lhathaway

lhathaway — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 13:24:28 +0000

In order to produce job growth, government investment and incentives must be poured into: research and development of clean energy and biochemistry, mass transit, improved infrastructure. Big business is not allowing these investments due to their fear that their stranglehold on the general public will loosen. Big business is not going to produce jobs, since they have just had a clear lesson in the willingness of its current workforce to increase production to keep their jobs. Only new business ventures will produce the jobs needed and that can’t happen with giant companies controlling Congress.

By: CuriousOne

CuriousOne — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 13:06:58 +0000

Stimulus money needs to focus on job creation. The Feds would be wise to institute a metric that measures accurately and publically x new jobs for $M spent.

By: wickii

wickii — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 11:04:30 +0000

@cynicalme

So who are you going to sell your prducts to at the prices American workers need to manufacture them…..you cant have cheap at walmart and USA manufactured. it has to be one or the other you dont get to eat your cake as well as bake it.

By: gAnton

gAnton — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 22:10:15 +0000

The Recovery That Ain’t

It’s my belief that the Fed could not, can not, and will not be able to fix on even improve the economy (except temporarily). What grips me is that they did such a poor and stupid job of spending the people’s money. I’m cerainly not saying that an intelligent spending of the money would have had any lasting effecton the economy.

But if their goal was making the rich much richer at the expense of the long-suffering US taxpayer, I’d have to give them an A++ for achieving that goal.

So main street is Fed-up! !Que surpresa!

By: DisgustedReader

DisgustedReader — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 21:22:39 +0000

Unlike Zambia or Weimar Germany of old, the United States has the computational technology to create electronic currency and print massive warehouses of paper money, each note bearing a unique serial number. Software with the complexity of weather modeling can manage Wall Street and the Dollar on world markets. The Fed has unprecedented powers to just about do anything they want.

Inflation the economy needs? Done. The Fed provides it! The Fed is the world’s economic power like the military controls global security. The reason the Fed can print its way out of this crisis unparalleled in modern times is precisely because it controls everything economic.

Remember the famous opening salvo of the 1963 television series The Outer Limits? The Fed ought to paraphrase that opening when it entertains the media and public in its hallowed halls, their PR tweaking it to something like this: “There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are control money creation. If we wish to make inflation, we will create more money. If we wish to make deflation, we will discourage banks from lending. We will control unemployment statistics. We will control venture funding. We can roll the image, make it flutter. We can change the focus to a soft blur or sharpen it to crystal clarity. For the next century sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear in the media. We will control all that you earn and spend.”

By: fred5407

fred5407 — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 19:01:29 +0000

I agree with cynicalme, and would like to add that most of the stimulus money bought government workers jobs. I saw no money pointed at small manufacturing jobs.

By: cynicalme

cynicalme — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 18:20:39 +0000

Not being a high paid government economist or know-it-all politician, it seems that EVERY dollar of the “stimulus” money was wasted. The only real way to get an economy moving is with private sector jobs — not government jobs because of low productivity and no product — and not union jobs which are grossly overpaid to produce junk product (are you listening UAW?). What we need are jobs that pay market wage and produce a product. Look at Japan over the last 50 years and China today, both powerhouse economies built on production of goods which are increasingly better quality, and with jobs, pumping money back into their economies. Yet the current administration did nothing to stimulate USA job creation. Conversely, only in America could a few people make a billion dollars by dumping derivatives, futures, swaps, and other financial garbage on us — while they employed no one, produced nothing and only undercut our economy. If stimulus money had been spent to stimulate private industry to employ people, with an effort to make regulation less onerous, then our economy would be improving. Now unfortunately the money is gone, the government is broke, and unemployment is worse than ever. No employment = no spending or savings = a contracting economy so be prepared for much worse conditions in the next 2-3 years. We might soon be looking at 2010 as the “good times”.

By: langco

langco — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 17:01:23 +0000

the american people need to force the removal of obama from office and bring in someone willing and able to work on the countrys growing problems……

By: paul3669

paul3669 — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 16:05:52 +0000

Now that we have shipped most of the jobs overseas, perhaps the federal reserve could just send anyone
who has lost a job due to outsourcing a check every week.
Ross Perot had it right when he said there will be a giant sucking sound of jobs out of the USA if NAFTA is enacted.
Well now that NAFTA is fully phased in we have 10% unemployment rate and probably many more underemployed or have just stopped looking for work. What a mess these politicians have got this country into. World trade was suppose to equal word peace, that proved to be a miserable failure. Pray for our nation.

By: gramps

gramps — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 15:52:59 +0000

good article..thanks, Jim Saft, and Reuters..