Kthug points out the shocking fact that no one seems to care about unemployment:
Not long ago, anyone predicting that one in six American workers would soon be unemployed or underemployed, and that the average unemployed worker would have been jobless for 35 weeks, would have been dismissed as outlandishly pessimistic — in part because if anything like that happened, policy makers would surely be pulling out all the stops on behalf of job creation.
But now it has happened, and what do we see?
First, we see Congress sitting on its hands, with Republicans and conservative Democrats refusing to spend anything to create jobs, and unwilling even to mitigate the suffering of the jobless.
We’re told that we can’t afford to help the unemployed — that we must get budget deficits down immediately or the “bond vigilantes” will send U.S. borrowing costs sky-high. Some of us have tried to point out that those bond vigilantes are, as far as anyone can tell, figments of the deficit hawks’ imagination — far from fleeing U.S. debt, investors have been buying it eagerly, driving interest rates to historic lows. But the fearmongers are unmoved: fighting deficits, they insist, must take priority over everything else — everything else, that is, except tax cuts for the rich, which must be extended, no matter how much red ink they create.
And about those bond vigilantes:
In the WSJ, Gregory Zuckerman has a report on all the big name investors who are now positioned to bet on deflation. Among the big names: Bill Gross, David Tepper, and GMO LLC.
But this isn’t that surprising, given that the “Big D” has been all the rage of late, reaching a fever pitch last week when St. Louis Fed president James Bullard dropped his big paper on the subject.
What’s interesting is that it wasn’t all that long ago when all the cool kids were betting on inflation. Paolo Pellegrini — John Paulson’s old hand — has been warning about inflation for awhile, and at least not long ago was short Treasuries, arguing that the massive funding needs of the US would necessitate more printing and higher interest rates. Whoops.
It’s almost like our government is set up to cater to a narrow brand of special interests and preserving the wealth and status of the select few.