How much of that article do you agree with?
None of it, I hope. As someone who is trying to build wealth, keep my job, and considering buying a house in the near future, the current state of the economy has me concerned. I try to stay informed, read a lot, and think through things on my own. However, the end result is that I have only become more confused with regards to the economy.
For example, I have listened to a lot of Alex Jones and the people he has on like Gerald Celente. In fact, the CT stuff is eventually what brought me here, which I'm grateful for. Clearly those guys have a product to sell, which is doom. Celente has been predicting collapse for like 15 years or something so I suppose you can just disregard everything he has to say on the subject.
What's more troubling than those guys however is something like the recent article Krugman wrote about his concern that we're on the edge of the next great depression. Here's a guy who won the Nobel prize in econ and he practically sounds like Celente. A little harder to disregard.
Something else which throws me off is the profusion of different takes on the subject from various 'experts'. Any day of the week you can check the op-ed pages of NY times, WSJ or whatever and find someone recommending austerity, someone else recommending increased govt spending, etc. Skeptics understand that you can't be an expert in everything. Hence when Joe Sixpack states that the WTC towers couldn't have been brought down by fire he is directed to the NIST report explaining the physics behind the collapse. I'm an electrical engineer, not an economist. Where is my NIST report on the economy? Who is the keeper of truth when it comes to explaining the recent financial collpase?
Even on this forum you see lively discussion and the butting of heads and ideas when it comes to economics because its not exactly a hard science. If I'm in my lab and I measure 5 volts on my multimeter, it would be silly for someone to argue with that unless the argument was that my instrument is broken or something. However I believe its possible that you could have lively disagreement between two intelligent, well intentioned people with PhD's in econ on the topic of whether or not the government should extend unemployment benefits. Which one am I to believe? Is economics a science at all, or is it just politics hiding behind numbers?
So, how much of this article do I believe? I don't want to believe any of it. I fear that it may be true. What I know is that the economy is still not doing well, e.g. unemployment is still high, a lot of people I work with have lost or are possibly going to lose their jobs. Japan has apparently been pursuing the same sorts of Keynsian policies that we are now, resulting in 20 years of stagnation.
I just want to get on with my life, work hard and build wealth. At least for now I have a good job, make pretty decent money, and want things to stay that way. I'm not emotionally invested in doom, in fact I would love nothing more than for the economy to 'get fixed' whatever that means exactly.
So, is the doom implied in the title of this article, namely that we will bear witness to an economic collapse this year, totally misguided? More broadly speaking, when it comes to the economy who are we to trust? Politicians? Conspiracy theorists? Nobel prize winners? JREF forum posters? Drkitty?
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