[ExI] "recession is going to end in about 6 weeks"

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Sun, May 3, 2009 at 5:21 PM, BillK <pharos at gmail.com> wrote:

> As a general rule, the bust takes about the same amount of time as the boom.
>
> So. you get a quick boom, followed by a quick bust and then recovery.
>
> Unfortunately, this last boom was the biggest bubble ever,

### ????

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 and in all
> the world economies at the same time, so we are now in unknown
> territory. As trillions of free  money, in all currencies, has been
> produced out of thin air, I would expect this to have some effect.
> (Exactly what effect, nobody knows).

### Everybody knows the effect of diluting currency - inflation. But
don't worry, the US economy is bigger today than ever, so even the
unusually large amount of poison injected during this round of
stupidity is not likely to kill it. Yet.

------------------

But as I see it, a quite likely
> scenario is a mini-recovery accompanied by shouts of 'Free money!',
> then an absolutely horrendous crash. Mainly because none of the
> underlying problems have yet been fixed.

### Unfortunately, you could be right here, although the misallocation
of resources into home-building has somewhat abated. Really hard to
tell what is gonna happen, which is the usual situation when it comes
to predicting the future.

We have to remember that capital productivity continues to increase,
and so far has been keeping up with the feeding frenzy of voters and
politicians. If scientific progress continues, we may live to see the
black rain of the singularity with our bank accounts in good shape.

Rafal

P.S. Yes, I really think the singularity will kill us. Aren't you ppl
worried about this?