About Recovery

"Recovery to what? To Wall Street booking stupendous profits by laundering "risk" out of bad loans with new issues of tranche-o-matic securitized paper? This I doubt, since there isn't a pension fund left from San Jose to Bratislava that would touch this stuff with a stick, even if it could be turned out in collector's editions of boxed sets."JK

You are, as usual, simply great, Mr. Kunstler.
You are like a great painter that with a few strokes and few colors gives the idea of the Universe.
Because in spite of all the big words that politicians and economists wash their mouth with, the situation could be so easily understood that a stupid fool student of the Grammar school could, just being able to count 1+1 minus 4.
That is what happened.
You can presume that the -2 will soon become a 0 adding 2.
But when the 2 doesn´t appear in your paper and you are not able to borrow from somewhere else, that -2 will easily become much worse, if you go on subtracting.
The painter is great too, being Peter Bruegel-the-elder's one of my favorite.
Germans tend to be quite rational and that makes them a great economical power.
Italians tend to be great dreamers and that tends to make them a failure as economic power.
You just have to decide if you prefer to eat or just lay in the sun waiting for the "Provvidenza"...
Americans many years ago were a good mixture of both, and it lasted as long as they were not too busy to amuse themselves and enjoy life (and bombing around).
That didn´t work for the greatest Empire which ever existed: Rome.
And there is no reason why what happened to Rome cannot happen to Washington...
In Italy we have a saying: the sun rises for all, not just for one, may be this is the time to leave somebody else to enjoy life.