Helicopter Ben can’t quite bring himself to admit the obvious:
“Recession is possible, but recession is a technical term,” he said, during testimony to the powerful Capitol Hill committee. “I’m not ready to say whether or not the US economy will face such a situation. It’s clearly a period of very slow growth extending back to the fourth quarter of last year, and we are trying to set our policies appropriately for that situation.”
Here’s yet another prediction. GDP will not only retract in Q1, but will continue to retract in the third and fourth quarters of 2008, contra the publicized estimates of most professional mainstream economists:
most forecasts suggest the first quarter will be the most difficult of the year and that in the back half of the year … we will see the economy perform a lot better,” Gutierrez said.
I’m not in the least bit concerned about a recession. They happen and they’re no big deal. What I’m concerned about is the increasing probability of a serious depression thanks to Helicopter Ben’s inability to learn anything from his studies of the Great Depression.