Bumping into each other. “Its a jobless recovery. Its a jobless recovery.” Three days of the same programming. Complete with panicky news editors, caught on film trying to readjust their arms. One of them on a cell phone, “but Lloyd, we already hit the reset button”… “Hit it again?” ….they stop and look at each other and then they too short circuit with small fire burning from behind ear piece.

Everybody will wonder if this is what it feels like, being one of the sucker clients for GS or Bear Sterns.

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Other than that, I think items you mention Dave, are more on the level than a lot of the things market optimists have been blubbering on about lately. None of them ever mention the caveat (or asterisk type statement) with their optimism, about how at the bottom of this so called “rally” our government leaders determined to make material changes in accounting methods. Frankly such a rally based off a tweaking in accounting methods, used to rally the market so that (LETS NOT FORGET) banks could sell shares and raise capital (when no one else in the world economy trusted them enough to lend to them or invest in them) … is not something to be that optimistic about. Add to that, the whole thing was set to dance, in step, with a couple trillion in “off-balance sheet” transactions, circumvented around Congressional approval, and it would seem a more prudent and intelligent people would question the actions, than celebrate them. That so many are not raising up sustained questions, and expressing some disappointment about this model, is in imo, more a negative than it is a positive.

Defining two encampment: Such wide spread omission, with optimism, is not as good as, as omission, with a pessimistic view attached. I do not like omissions of this size, with any outlook on the economy, but the pessimistic view does seem more prudent, in light of widespread omission from both encampments.

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Yes, more on the level Dave. I especially found myself rereading this part: “The ratio of household debt to disposable income is up from a 30% ratio back in the 1950s to 125% today…. Mean reverting to a ratio closer to 60% means that the deleveraging process will be a multi-year event and by the time it is over, more than $7 trillion in additional household credit will have to be extinguished.”

7 Trillion is not trivial. Now add some of those accounting changes back into consideration. And Fed’s unwillingness to make disclosure about some of its lending, going back as far as August, Sept, Oct and November 2008. Say nothing about what they were doing in 2009. Add to that the idea floating around think-tanks in D.C. that Fed should incorporate military-grade secrecy about who its chosen business partners are. It just seems to me like a recipe “on how” to destroy confidence, than restore it.

Whoever is writing the mantra for wall street these days (jobless recovery and confidence being restored), seems a bit touched with what psychological profilers might call, the same type of profile or pathology as a compulsive liar.

Our government acts like Americans have never know a pathological liar; and like they have no real life experience to draw on when making their own conclusions on how to categorize what such a person or entity might say, to continue promulgating illusion/dilution.

Now add to all this in reminder, that not many optimists are invoking their duty to inform the public, as custodians of other people’s money, that U.S. government has made material changes in accounting, which are in violation of standing law. This is an important asterisks* to be leaving out of a review of where we have been and where we are going imo.

*legal reference:
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2009/06/obamas-regulatory-proposals-smarter-or-just-more/comment-page-1/#comment-184398