Economic Dequations - American Style

I am not talking about economic equations.

I am wondering when the prices of houses in the United States skyrocketed out of the reach for the average wage earner - where on all this pious horses***, meal ticket, economics, academic, Chinese checker rules - style federal bureaucratic equations – where did the “inflation” of the price of housing doubling and tripling and quadrupling in a decade – where were these precious announcements from the Federal Reserve Bank about this unaccounted for housing inflation?

The Economics reported in government statistics is many times footnoted to say that this or that segment of the economy with growth or downturn is factored into or out of any general prognostication or economic forecasts and the like.

Didn’t anybody in the government get fired some week or two ago when the news was announced that the recession started last December? What a joke for what passes for competence these days in the fading old dream of America. We are not laughing.

In fact I think I heard the retired Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank deliver a few pearls of wisdom from his sermons on the mount delivered before Congress in Congressional investigative hearings. I heard a teaspoon of warning about the possible dangers of unbridled deregulation or what not. Then I heard about five pounds worth of "if workers wages go up that would be a dangerous thing – inflationary".

I am talking off the cuff here. But there are many network news stations and major newspapers who seemed to rubber stamp what seemed more like Public Relation Press Releases from the Fed instead of challenging the voodoo, K-Y jelly, free market, 24/7, non-stop economic mantra heard over American airwaves and in newspapers these past decades. That to tell you the truth, what I heard or read back when did not sound or look like the macro or micro economics 101 and 102 that I took freshman year in college.

The retired Chairman, venerated as he was for decades, was in fact retired the first day he took office for all the good or real warning or real sound economic advice that he never bothered to dispense to prevent the present financial meltdown and crisis.

"Faded Jaded Mandarin", a lyric from somewhere, would have been a better title for the Fed Chairman but let us not do the blame game. He looked out his front door and there were no riots or blood in the streets – so his Economic Dequation – like some weather reports was good with only a chance of cloudiness.

And they pay people to do this? Wow! America is a great country! (or at least it once was)