That 'Thud' We Heard

It was almost a year ago when I wrote a little piece called The Decline and Fall of the United States. At that time the unlamented George W. Bush still had ten months left in his term.

At that time unemployment had reached what we would now consider a robust 5.1% with 80,000 jobs lost in March. Today unemployment is 8.1% with 651,000 jobs lost in February alone. Bush was boldly predicting there would be no recession. Damn, was he wrong about that. Conservatives opined that the economy was just tickety-boo - except when they were blaming the liberal media for the economy. (Conservatives are still doing this claiming at the same time that things really aren't very bad and that it is all President Obama's fault.)

I was brought back to last year by a conservative commenting today to that year old posting calling my analysis "retarded." Actually, I think I was pretty prescient. The only thing I got wrong was predicting inflation. Instead we have old-fashioned depressionary deflation.

Art source: Vanity Fair, Dec. 2008