Economic statistics released Friday offered the clearest sign yet that the recovery, already acknowledged to be sauntering, had slowed to a crawl.
The government lowered its estimate of economic growth in the second quarter to an annual rate of 1.6 percent, after originally reporting last month that growth in the three-month period was 2.4 percent.
The revision is a significant slowdownfrom the annual rate of 3.7 percent in the first quarter and 5 percent in the last three months of 2009.
The news came at the end of a week that showed the economic retrenchment that began in the second quarter has spilled over into the summer. Existing home sales in July were down to their lowest level in a decade, and sales of new homes that month were at their lowest level since the government began tracking such data in 1963. Orders for large factory goods, excluding the volatile transportation sector, dropped in July, indicating that recovery in the manufacturing sector is also stalling.
OK, so the recovery summer was B.S.. So What, anyone with a working brain knew that the government stimulus was going to make things worse. What bothers me about this is that the media reports it like its something new and shocking. All they need to do is talk to economists like Mish Shedlock, Peter Schiff, Gerald Celente, and Ron Paul, we would already be in the middle of a real recovery.
I remember Obama making fun of us, “the do nothing crowd”, saying that if we had it our way, everyone would be unemplyed, homes would get forclosed on en masse, etc. When in fact we said that if the Government did the stimulus, unempoyment would increase, forclosures would increase, and the currency would begin it’s journey to zero.
Well, here we are, with the whole world witnessing the failure of government intervention in the market. It’s hard to know that the right answer was not only largely ignored, but it was laughed at.
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