Or, here's a thought -- Maybe it has nothing to do with money. Maybe it's the actual will and intent of the Masters of the Universe, the Oligarchs. If you really believe in a secret cabal of aristocratic, hidden gadzilionaires conspiring against the slave class, to keep us frightened and oppressed --- (AND I DO) ---maybe ---whenever the people start getting organized in progressive movements, fueled by anger over low salaries, high interest rates, anger at not being able to educate children or buy homes, maybe at that exact juncture, sensing a Spartacus rebellion, --the oligarchs pull the ole chair out from under the whining masses, give 'em something to really weep and snivel over. Endemic firings.joblessness, Foreclosure, HOMELESSNESS.
In other words, are there perhaps 'designer recessions', Lab-grown recessions? Whatever they are and wherever they came from nothing like the word DEPRESSION to scare the poor into groveling fear and silence gratefully taking all pennies thrown their way. Instantly they forget about unity and dissent, rainbow coalitions in a nad scramble to see to their own butts. And that makes the oligarch happy. He can rest in peace. No hippies will come pillaging at his Estate.
The chart below shows the historical average Annual Inflation rate
(red
line) compared to the time periods where the country was in recession (blue
shaded areas).
SEE IT QUADRUPLE SIZE AT http://inflationdata.com/inflation/images/charts/Annual_Inflation/inflation_and_recession_chart.htm
Since 1914 there have been eight recessions. Three lasted for a single year, (in 1953, 1957 and again in 1990). The longest recession was actually the "Great Depression" which lasted ten years from 1929 to 1939.
Well guess what. THE PROGRESSIVE MARXIST movement was going fast and furious in the earlier two, LENINISM so in style, that it took TWO BIG ONES to shake the people into terror.
TIMELINE on progressive movements, their growth
'spurts' and valleys:
A 19th century TIMELINE
http://www.google.com/#q=%22progressive+movement%22+%2B+Marxism+%2B+timeline&hl=en&tbs=tl:1&tbo=u&ei=OZTdStnWFIzOsQOA5sDqDw&sa=X&oi=timeline_result&ct=title&resnum=11&ved=0CCIQ5wIwCg&fp=c7431b543f067006
And a MORE MODERN TIME LINE: http://www.sonoma.edu/users/w/wallsd/progressive-movement.shtml
Now, you might say, "RIGGED RECESSIONS" Nah... it's the ole PRICE INDEX that does it and as inflationary PRICES SURGE, costs would be getting higher so people would be unable to afford goods and the merchandise would collect dust and the factories would close just like GM and CADILLAC and TOYOTA and all of those guys are closing up shop today. That's gotta HURT somebody! So if they're engineering failure, they're stepping on their own feet. But wait a minute. Not unless they own TOYOTA and not when somebody in GOV is giving them bailout money, and clunker subsidies.
Marx who said, you gotta take the consumer with you or you aren't going to sell what you make didn't forsee that GOVERNMENTS would pay the factory owners twice, in subsidies and clunker gifts. That wasn't in his crystal ball. These are AMERICANSKI RUNNING WILD.
So back to the theory that OLIGARCHS do a lot of things behind the curtain. Ferinstance, RIGHT after we were forced out of the BIG OIL WAR, IN VIETNAM, (more oil under the ocean there than anywhere! Rocks wanted that oil. Kennedy wouldn't go, they shot him, JOHNSON was TEXAN and played ball) but then we LOSE that war & the OIL BOYS gave us a huge pistol whipping OIL PRICE SURGE, remember we had to wait in line to get OIL ? YOu may not. I DO. Dead Cars littered the sides of all freeways..Tuesdays you could get gas if you had an EVEN number on your license plate! That was almost certainly a weird kind of engineered DEPRESSION we had during the 1973 Oil crisis. OPEC (read BRIT and ROCK OIL,) squeezed our jugular good, resulting in a recession which lasted two years from 1973 through 1975. Basically, as OPEC drastically raised oil prices it put a drain on the economy which resulted in an inflationary recession.
But this CEO SNIT type of provoked depression over a single kind of merchandise (i.e. oil,) is not always the norm. Looking at the post World War 1 recession from 1918 - 1921 we see a sharp drop in inflation from +20% to -10% during the three year recession. That was the economic exhaustion of the GREAT WAR, WWI, the usual POST WAR EXPENDITURE depression that really can be a nation finisher. Same thing happened to France 120 years earlier. French Aristocrats and posh traders wishing to obliterate Britain's monopoloy on world trade, helped our 13 colonies RISE UP against GEORGE III to the tune of millions francs and the Marquis de Lafayette a total Aristo leading their boats, soldies over here... and just as we finally won, poor France went bankrupt. Their friendship with us caused them great monetary loss and the French peasants rose up and ate them alive.
PEASANT REVOLTS really scare oligarchs. They have meetings all the time to take our core temperature and discuss strategies. Put aluminum in our toothpaste so we're stupid, flouride in the water by law, creating chemical lobotomies then chips and dip so we're clogged. More Bilderberger meetings, more strategies, use the IMF and Fed to strangle us into anoxia..
ANYTHING so we don't pull a RUSSIAN REVOLUTION like in 1917, mobs, Kent State guns shooting into crowds, children dead. Lenin's triumph caught the world by surprise. EVEN MARX predicted only a sophisticated industrialized society like GERMANY could go for that high falootin Marxist dogma and form RED Revolt ORGS. No way Peasant RUSSIA would be the first. Yet it was! We Americans were busy fighting WWI and bingo, there goes the Czar. PING! So OK, maybe LENIN and a bad winter caused one of those depressions there but CNN wasn't around so nobody knows how it happened. The Oligarchs trembled & anticipated we'd all follow. And oddly AMERICA had a huge progressive movement in USA first decade of the 20th century, 1905, stretching from Europe to New York and to the pen of John Dos Passos and Upton Sinclair. .That movement started in 1872 - If one had to pick a time that it infected America, it would probably be when Karl Marx moved his First International to New York in 1872. It was this party and its offspring that was the intellectual driving force behind the Progressive Movement, so the Oligarchs cinched our oxygen tubes.
The Great Depression of 1929 was a ten year deal, synonymous with deflation or falling prices. During the first half of it, prices fell 10% a year by the end prices were rising in the 2-3% a year range but then in 1938 prices lost 2-3% again. The progressive movement was huge. Somebody should take the core temperature of RADICAL PASSION and map it. Plot its growth as a trend. Look at 1900 to 1914 you see this big RED ROSE BLOOMING! And it kept growing branches & vines, spreading across America manifesting in the UNION MOVEMENT. Right up thru the THIRTIES when our intellectuals joined Hemingway and went to Spain to fight alongside commies in the Civil War. Then Hitler created a TIME OUT. Everybody got lean and mean, America became a war Machine.
THEY'RE BACK! After WWII, we had the communists and socialists and progressives surging again, this time not just in New York but out west in the film industry where supposedly nobody had a brain.. OLIGARCH TACTIC: an engineered DEPRESSION. During the 1953 recession prices were falling very slightly with inflation moving from slightly above 0% to slightly below. Well, who shows up but Joe Mc Carthy and the RED HEARINGS which finished the Progressive movement in America. There were no more real recessions.
The 1957 recession saw slightly declining inflation rates but the inflation rate didn't turn into actual falling prices. All that happened was that the rate of inflation fell slightly from around 3% to around 2%.
Viet Nam was America's progressive heyday. A bonfire lit itself under the youth. ( 1968 thru 1972) That had never happened. A COMPASSIONATE QUAKER mood in all the kids provokes GANDHI like non violent pickets? Oligarchs pulled wires and this period was immediately followed by an ugly, scary OIL RECESSION. No doubt the oilmen were sorely disappointed that they could not capture the lush, offshore oil fields in Vietnam (today they are raking in the yen,) so they pulled the noose in a personal vendetta on car drivers. Paddy Chayefsky wrote "NETWORK" 1976, giving us the lines "If we don't go wage these dirty wars to get you people your oil, you're going DOWN." .
In the 1980 - 1982 recession inflation fell very sharply from around 13% to under 4%.
And in the 1990 - 1991 recession inflation fell about 2 points from just above 5%. And finally in the 2001 - 2003 recession inflation was relatively flat hovering around 3%. As if the oligarchs didn't want to pull any big switches on the people. Wary of another MASS PICKET like VIETNAM produced. Not about starving Asians but about starving US!
So based on these time periods most recessions saw falling (or negative) inflation rates. But does that mean that falling prices cause recessions. No not at all.
Generally, stable or gradually decreasing prices and interest rates too, are good for the economy but other than the "Great Depression" what we see are high inflation rates prior to the recession which are "wrung" out of the economy by a recession.
We see this prior to 1918 when inflation rates were 20% and in 1980 they were over 13%. So how do we explain the other examples that weren't so high?
The "Great Depression" was actually an example of fiscal mismanagement as the government clamped down on the money supply too tightly in an attempt at fiscal responsibility.
The 1953 recession was once again caused by the government clamping down on the money supply in an effort to wring the almost 6% inflation out of the economy. Unfortunately they over did it a bit which resulted in the one year recession.
Monetary policy was tightened during the two years preceding 1957, followed by an easing of policy at the end of 1957.
The 1980 recession was closely related to the 1973 Oil embargo recession because the Iranian Revolution sharply increased the price of oil around the world in 1979, causing the 1979 energy crisis. This sucked capital out of the system causing both recessions.
On "Black Monday" of October 1987 a stock collapse lopped 22.6 percent off the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The collapse which was larger than that of 1929, drastically decreased the money supply and although the economy quickly began to recover it was hit by the one-two punch of the savings and loans collapse which sent the economy into a tailspin.
So this was once again a result of a collapse of liquidity in the system.
The 2001 - 2003 recession was similarly caused by a contraction of liquidity after a stock market bubble this time the result of excess liquidity created by the FED flowing into the new "DotCom" stocks. When this bubble burst it drastically reduced liquidity once again sending the economy into a tailspin.
But actually recessions although painful serve a useful purpose by wringing out excess liquidity out of the system and returning the economy to a more stable footing.
The key of course for individuals is to not get caught up in the excesses that precede the recession so they can weather the storm once it arrives.
So does high inflation cause a recession? In a way yes, but it precedes the recession. Usually, high inflation corresponds with liquidity creation and a booming economy. But after a while the party balloon can get no bigger and it eventually bursts. Liquidity contracts, inflation falls and the economy contracts into a recession.
That is exactly what we are seeing now. The money supply is beginning to contract and the economy is sinking into recession.
Bernie Madoff gave back everything he had left but weirdly it's only a thousandth of what he stole. SO far nobody can account for the man's spending habits. A little yacht, a home here and there? Where do the rich people stick their money? I wonder if even they could tell us. It just goes. So they have to economize. ON US!
OK what's our tactic to be? Go progressive so they whip us with poverty?
I don't think so. Mao told us the revolutionary fish should swim in the
sea with the other fishes and quietly incite revolution and not try to
walk on the river banks. That might have worked for Mao in China but we
need progressives to not only walk on the river bank but to haul carts!
To become lawyers, and whip the CEOS, transnationals with ruinous class
action suits, alleging that pharm and war lobbies and war toys and all
their DEATH INDUSTRIES have got to pay up for the damage. There's a price
tag for profiteering on dead bodies. We need Flouride and Aluminum toothpaste
lawsuits, we need ecology LAWSUITS. Salary lawsuits. HMO lawsuits And last
and best, we need Progressive LAWYERS to really walk on the river banks
and BECOME CANDIDATES and not get corrupted by politics.
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