As an Economist...

The intellectuals define economics as the Dismal Science. They are half right. Economics is not nearly a science. It is guesswork obscured by jargon and a few impenetrable graphs quickly glossed over.

Good economists develop a gut feel for the economy. People make the whole thing work and they bring their emotions with them. More than greed on the upside and fear on the downside, there is trust. Most of our government and business leaders have lost our trust.

It is akin to finding the spouse participating in an orgy without you.

As an economist, my first rule was to discover who paid the salary of the brother economist who had written the article. His reasoning usually dovetailed with that of his bosses.

When I had a client, my first job was to understand his viewpoint and to feed it back to him with a more sophisticated slant. Usually, this justified my fee. Since I have some scruples, my report would include a modicum of straight thinking sugar-coated so as not to offend him.

Generally, people prefer lies to the truth. This is why Cramer is on television while I am not.

It Aint Easy Being Anybody

Incredibly, until Lehman Brothers collapsed, John McCain had a lead over Obama. If the Republicans had managed just two more months at disguising the recession, they would have been in the catbird seat still. Somehow, the US public failed for 40 years to realize that the GOP was doing a tap dance on their heads. This was fabulous for the upper one percent of us who did the dancing. The others of us 99% in the have not group simply got big headaches.

Yeah, I guess many are right about the lower 99% class. Even now they let the 1% avoid prosecution.

Two days ago I posted an article on Eric Holder's prosecution of bankers and brokers. Nobody responded.

Understanding and Compassion

To me, the sick world embodies mortgage payments, the rat race, expense accounts, avarice and greed. This 'civilization' vanished one night in 1976 in Manhattan when the electricity grid failed. This culture is not sustainable.

The Great Depression called many people back to the basics understanding and compassion.

Job Training

The stimulus spending bill signed last month includes $4.5 billion for job training. That only begins to address an area long neglected, said Andrew Stettner, deputy director of the National Employment Law Project in New York. In current dollars, the nation devoted the equivalent of $20 billion a year to job training in 1979, compared with only $6 billion last year, Mr. Stettner said.

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