Jean-Paul Cassone's  Instablog

 The HTB News editor Jean-Paul Cassone’ today hinted that he doesn’t wish to be “the Grinch that stole Christmas”, but reiterated his prediction that the US economic recovery would not arrive until at least the year 2020! He went on to warn that any nation caught believing that the US will lead them out of the economic doldrums will get sucked-in along with the rest of us during the second dip that is soon to arrive!

Cassone’ insists that the US is far worse off than Japan was during its “lost decade” and similar to Nobel winner Joseph Stiglitz, Cassone’ believes that the Whitehouse is “overly exuberant” about a so-called recovery. However, he extends his prediction of the recovery a full 8 years or more past Stiglitz’s 2012 prediction. “The government has sloshed around trillions of dollars and yet disposable income is down, jobs are horrendously weak and the only GDP rise was from wasteful, government spending such as cash-for-clunkers and extremely unaffordable housing tax credits”."Now the Democrats want to raise the debt-ceiling limit to $2 trillion for the 2010 elections".“Meanwhile, you have an administration and a Federal Reserve that are riddled with corruption and corruptive practices”.” There can be no oversight and there will always be another bubble to burst when you hire the bank robbers to fix the economy” says Cassone’! "In essence, the president appointed many individuals he should have arrested". "What, now we're suppose to believe that these criminals are no longer criminals and that we should take their figures for retail sales, family net wealth, inventories and manufacturing at face value"? "Ha, if you're inclined to say yes to that one I've got a bridge in Brooklyn I want to sell you"! "More than 85% of US households have little or insufficent savings, while wages are stagnated". "This alone puts the US scenario a full 2 years past Japan's former problems and that equals 12 years", Cassone' related!

The editor went on to point out that six hundred thousand jobs were lost in the last 3 months, bringing the total to 7.2 million lost since the recession began. This correlates into 1 in every 10 Americans being unemployed. Tack on to this all the part-time workers, along with those who’ve given up the job search and the actual total is said to be more akin to 1 in 5 of the labor force. As Cassone’ points out, many of those jobs will never return, due to the fact that they were related to the housing industry. He cautioned while he hopes all Americans enjoy a happy and healthy Christmas holiday, that they should not permit themselves to be intimidated into spending money which they don't have and that this was only #2 of at least ten more tight-budgeted Christmases to come! The editor finally warned us that the Great Depression was a 16 year affair that was caused primarily by a massive, government failure. He does not think that the current powers that be have learned the lesson needed from that time and he insisted that other nations and other currencies will be forced to lead the world out of the quagmire this time around!