dailyreckoning.com.au / By Bill Bonner / February 4th, 2013
‘US economy slips into reverse,’ was the headline in the Financial Times.
The US economy didn’t move ahead in the last quarter of 2012. Instead, it started backing up at a 0.1% annual rate, to be precise.
That didn’t seem to bother anyone. They hardly noticed; and they didn’t seem to care what direction it was actually going. The Dow slid a little, but not much.
In the bar car, journalists generally dismissed the whole thing. It was a kind of optical illusion, they seemed to think, caused by the fact that the gunslingers had been a little slow on the draw in the waning months of 2012.
Perhaps, on the south bank of the Potomac they had heard that the world was going to end on 21 December and decided that further security spending might not pay off. They had no defence against the end of the world, after all.
Or maybe, as the press reported, they were just preparing for the curtain to come down on their freewheeling, free-spending ways. That too was on the calendar during the darkening days of last year.
Maybe morale among the terror fighters fell into a terror of their own…and their generals, with downcast eyes, went around the Pentagon switching off the lights and turning down the heat.
We don’t know what happened, but it didn’t seem to matter anyway. Everyone said it was a fluke. The rest of the US economy was OK.
