[LINK] Future US/World Economics

[jim birch]

When John Maynard Keynes remarked: “The expected never happens; it is the
unexpected always.” he was being a little tongue-in-cheek.  While disaster
scenarios sells books - I happen to have Robert Crumb's illustrated version
of the Old Testament on my desk :) - things are more likely to go bad
prosaically.  The US is currently in a liquidity trap and it's economy is
significantly underutilized, and, given the levels of delusion at the
political level there aren't good reasons for expecting a lot of improvement
in the medium term.  With around ten percent unemployment and significant
economic contraction it's already disaster for a lot of people.  It's
possible to imagine a wild downward swing but this would be a speculative
narrative, there aren't any models that would make this kind of prediction
reliably.

Australia is in a much better situation economically, basically by being in
the hemisphere that largely avoided the GFC and because we're selling stuff
into the Chinese economy.  And we're probably less deluded too, though it's
hard to feel confident about that.  We'd get hurt by a western hemisphere
crash but we've got a degree of insulation.

I'd suggest following some more solid economic commentators, eg,

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/

These guys aren't predicting Armageddon, rather a real risk of a lost
economic decade.

- Jim