As you may or may not have noticed, the global economy isn't doing so well right now. Even Carl Icahn, the vaunted Wall Street investment mogul, has recently come out publicly to warn Americans that we are, in fact, in a much more dire situation than most people in the finance industry are willing to admit openly. Even though he has been roundly criticized by econ majors everywhere for his "alarmist" statements (much the way Alan Greenspan was criticized in the late 90's for warning about the dangers of irrational exuberance shortly before the burst of the dot-com bubble), it is taken as a fact by many major news publications (Reuters, and also Market Watch, just to name two) that things are, in fact, getting worse (at least for the foreseeable future).
While my goal here is not to necessarily cry wolf, I do think that any thinking person ought to be concerned, given these facts. The simple and ugly truth is that the economic disaster of 2008 never really went away, it was simply delayed by seven years of ZIRP (aka Zero Interest-Rate Policy), much like giving morphine to a person who has broken their leg . Now that the government has tapered off its policy of "quantitative easing" (aka "injecting liquidity," or inventing more money out of thin air), the American, and therefore the global economy, is now for the first time feeling the full effects of the recession that hit in 2008.
In essence, we suffered a broken leg in 2008, and instead of actually treating it we simply took massive amounts of morphine (in the form of zero-interest loans from the government) in order to numb the pain and keep walking. Now that we risk dying of "liver poisoning" from all the morphine (represented by unacceptable levels of economic growth and inflation), the government is trying to wean us all off of it by raising interest rates. The issue now is that we never truly resolved the problems of 2008, and so in our broken leg analogy we are now finally feeling the effects of walking on a broken bone after seven years of morphine.
"What problems haven't we resolved?" you ask. Great question. I don't want to bore you with thousands of esoteric details, but I'll name a few major ones, as I see them. I will also add at this point that I have done my best to confirm my opinions with someone who is intimately knowledgeable on this subject (he's got a masters in econ), and to be fair, I should inform you that he will probably disagree with most of what I'm writing in this article for ideological reasons.
While my goal here is not to necessarily cry wolf, I do think that any thinking person ought to be concerned, given these facts. The simple and ugly truth is that the economic disaster of 2008 never really went away, it was simply delayed by seven years of ZIRP (aka Zero Interest-Rate Policy), much like giving morphine to a person who has broken their leg . Now that the government has tapered off its policy of "quantitative easing" (aka "injecting liquidity," or inventing more money out of thin air), the American, and therefore the global economy, is now for the first time feeling the full effects of the recession that hit in 2008.
In essence, we suffered a broken leg in 2008, and instead of actually treating it we simply took massive amounts of morphine (in the form of zero-interest loans from the government) in order to numb the pain and keep walking. Now that we risk dying of "liver poisoning" from all the morphine (represented by unacceptable levels of economic growth and inflation), the government is trying to wean us all off of it by raising interest rates. The issue now is that we never truly resolved the problems of 2008, and so in our broken leg analogy we are now finally feeling the effects of walking on a broken bone after seven years of morphine.
"What problems haven't we resolved?" you ask. Great question. I don't want to bore you with thousands of esoteric details, but I'll name a few major ones, as I see them. I will also add at this point that I have done my best to confirm my opinions with someone who is intimately knowledgeable on this subject (he's got a masters in econ), and to be fair, I should inform you that he will probably disagree with most of what I'm writing in this article for ideological reasons.
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