EconomicCrisis.US

We will be hearing a lot about debt between now and the U.S. presidential election. What will likely be absent in the debate, however, is any consideration of the relationship of debt to the requirement for perpetual economic growth and its role in the dramatic increase in economic inequality in the United States and the rest of the world. If debts go unpaid, we face economic crises. But when debts are paid, money flows from the less rich (the “99 percent”) to the more rich. Debt, as presently constituted, is a regressive tax and a trickle-up economy. How did we get into this dilemma?
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Michael Snyder: The Federal Reserve says that everything is going to be okay.  The Fed says that unemployment is going to go down, inflation is going to remain low and economic growth is going to steadily increase.  Do you believe them this time?  As you will see later in this article, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has been dead wrong about the economy over and over again.  But the mainstream media and many Americans still seem to have a lot of faith in the Federal Reserve.  It doesn’t seem to matter that Bernanke and other Fed officials have been telling the American people lies for years.  As I always say, most people believe what they want to believe, and many people seem to want to have blind faith in the Federal Reserve even when logic and reason would dictate otherwise.  The truth is that things are not going to be getting much better than they are right now.  When the next wave of the financial crisis hits, the U.S. economy is going to fall back into recession, financial markets are going to crash and unemployment is going to absolutely skyrocket.  But you will never hear any of that from the Federal Reserve.
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Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said Thursday that he thinks the U.S. economy will return to its long-term growth of around 3 percent a year despite the weaknesses it still faces.

Bernanke made his observation in his fourth and final lecture to George Washington University students. The lectures this month have been intended to both demystify the Fed and defend the steps it took to confront the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession.

The Fed chairman showed the students a chart illustrating that annual U.S. economic growth over the past century has been about 3 percent. Since the recession ended in 2009, the economy has averaged about 2.5 percent growth.
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Chairman Ben Bernanke says the U.S. job market remains weak despite three months of strong hiring and that the Federal Reserve’s existing policies will help boost growth.

Further job gains will likely require more robust consumer and business demand, Bernanke said Monday during a speech at the National Association for Business Economics spring conference in Arlington, Va.

Bernanke’s comments suggest the central bank is prepared to keep interest rates near zero for some time.

“Despite the recent improvement, the job market remains far from normal,” Bernanke said. “The number of people working and total hours worked are still significantly below pre-crisis peaks.”
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