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Fear driven: Economists urge folks to 'breathe'

Hurray for the Wells Fargo economists for being the voice of reason. This current recession "talk" has been blown totally out of proportion. If one actually looks at historical economic indicators, this fact becomes abundantly obvious. This panic and fear that is being fostered by so many (including many economists)will only prove to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. And, hurray for Wells Fargo Bank for not participating in the madness that created this crisis.

If they weren't out there trying to create all sorts of panic in everything then I doubt this recession would be as bad as it has gotten. The media thrives on scaring people so I blame them. Here is some free advice for the media: No sense in being pessimistic, it wouldn't work anyway.

also contributed to the fear of recession. A "crisis" allowed them to pass a stimulus bill with a huge amount of pork that they couldn't have gotten through otherwise. Since the stimulus bill "had" to be passed immediately things could not be vetted.
Keep in mind President-elect Obama's Chief of Staff to be Rahm Emanuel's comment that they wanted to take advantage of every "crisis opportunity". A crisis lets them get legislation passed without the discussion that should occur.

.. and it is the Federal Reserve Bank, for me. My biggest fear is they will continue to print money at unprecedented levels until my fixed income becomes worthless. Soon there will be a bunch of us that used to "get by" with what we had standing in the soup lines.

The democrats are in power so the recession they have been talking about the last year no longer exist. Hooray!!

Thia news is doubleplusgood!

Nothing has changed in the financial industry to improve the economy and regulating this industry so why should consumers take it for granted it is a better world? The economist should be doing more to evaluate the financial industry and stop wasting time telling consumers to stay in indentured servitude. Sure, the consumers are scared and don't trust the lending industry, the industry wants to keep us in debt. It's not the debt, it is the getting out of debt that is the hard part and what consumers don't want. The days of the cashless society are at an end, consumers as well as the industry has no money. Even the bailout money was borrowed by government, now every one is in a panic becasue this borrowed money is just sitting there accruing interest charges that can't be repaid. Lending laws and regulations still don't exist that are consumer friendly. All regulations, laws, and indebtness are anti consumers. Economist have lost their usefullness and should be sent packing with Bush. Economist are nothing but bean counters and the voice of greedy corporate america trying to persuade consumers they should continue to be victimized by our failed financial system.

The current treasury secretary is the worst we've had in a long time because he has seemed so clueless about economics and he, also, perpetuated this fear and panic mode, as did GWB.

I'm looking forward to a new administration with a more positive attitude. We've had some bad personal and national financial habits that will take some time to correct, but it can be done.

I agree the media furthers panic with their non-ending news and analysis from the talking heads. There is a downside to the 24/7 news, and this is it. Endless hours spent discussing unhappy topics of any kind gins up fear and panic.

This economist says in one line, that consumer spending just needs to return to normal levels, and then in a latter line that consumer debt was far too high. People ran out of credit for good reason, because if people had any more debt than vastly larger number of people would need bankruptcy in order to be free from that debt.

In short housing prices grew too quickly, people stopped buying and housing prices fell, both speculators and regular home owners defaulted on negative value homes. This put out of business many over leveraged investment banks holding mortgage backed securities. With almost everyone losing home value, an enormous amount of collateral evaporated thus severely reducing debt fueled consumption.

In the background there's the building retirement tsunami putting relentless downward pressure on stock, equity investments, consumption levels, and workforce size, all the while putting greater obligations on government programs.

This crisis won't be resolve until something is done about poeples debt levels, and raising the retirement age among other things.

It's scary to me that even with the obvious fact that uncontrolled and unwise debt caused by uncontrolled consumer (and business, and government) spending has led to this so-called "credit crisis," that the presumed solution seems to still be more uncontrolled spending by consumers, government, and business. Does that really make sense?

An article in yesterday's Wall Street Journal had the following headline:

"Hard-Hit Families Finally Start Saving, Aggravating Nation's Economic Woes"

That pretty much says it all about how mixed up our journalists and some economists are.