It was no White House official but Rep. Jim Cooper of Tennessee, a conservative Blue Dog Democrat, who called my attention to a short story in the Wall Street Journal last week reporting that U.S. companies are hoarding more cash -- $1.84 trillion -- than at any point in financial history.Lost upon the current White House is the thought that if you're running around talking about having your boots on the throats of private companies, if you're preserving ghastly toads like GM and Chrysler, if you're still clinging to idiotic green energy investment programs that even socialist Spain has given up on, the wiser and more experienced people who run the nation's large corporations are going to gather their resources and await a more rational, less invasive government. Once the investment picture clears, they'll expand again.
The newspaper noted that the cash reserves had jumped 26 percent in one year, the largest increase since at least 1952. Cooper's point is that by stockpiling that vast amount against the possibility of a double-dip recession or another wave of bankruptcies, nervous executives are starving business of investments for expansion and freezing unemployment at a painfully high level.
The problem with predicting things as a straight line extrapolation from where you are right now is that it doesn't take into account changes in external realities. We won't always have economic illiterates running the government.
One can only hope for a complete upheaval of the congress this fall.
ReplyDeleteWe have to hope that if the republicans do win big, they don't take it as a 'mandate' to do all their fringe ideas, instead of what it is, a mandate to undo the horrible damage of the current administration.
My big worry is whether they can undo the absolute trampling of the rule of law and the Constitution that is going on from the White House