Eighteen months after the recession officially ended, the government’s latest measures to bolster the economy have led many forecasters and policy makers to express new optimism that the recovery will gain substantial momentum in 2011.
Economists in universities and on Wall Street have raised their growth projections for next year. Retail sales, industrial production and factory orders are on the upswing, and new claims for unemployment benefits are trending downward.
Despite persistently high unemployment, consumer confidence is improving. Large corporations are reporting healthy profits, and the Dow Jones industrial average reached a two-year high this week.
All we have done is to take money from our right pocket and put it into our left pocket and now we are saying we are rich. We borrowed a trillion and a half dollars, put it into the market, and the market has “growth”. And they said Reagan practiced “voodoo economics”!