[Newsbot]

Title: The U.S. economy: Desperate, and bizarre, measures
Category: Business
Posted By: andyt
Date: 2010-06-12 08:42:07
Canadian

[andyt]

$1:

Builders in Las Vegas are busy slapping up new homes in a market that's already crowded with thousands of empty houses.

In Cleveland, recruiters from the University of Phoenix, a private for-profit college, are showing up at shelters and pitching the homeless to sign up for courses.

In Detroit, home of the U.S. auto industry, Mayor Dave Bing plans to bulldoze thousands of derelict houses to make way for urban farming, not assembly plants.

[Khar]

I find that the media uses two types of economists in making their decisions or getting their news as to the current climate. The first ones tend to be their own economists who, more often than not, are not horribly experienced in the economics fields but do have some basic education alongside whichever degree they needed to get into the media, while the other group listened to is the Wall Street Group, who try to encourage or discourage actions through their reports.

I think the article writer needs to remember on the count of the latter is that they were overly optimistic in an attempt to get money flowing again through encouraging consumption and investment with those with assets. That it didn't happen is not a surprise -- the more prevailing opinion I've heard is that the recovery slope is going to be quite shallow, and that we're still more trough than anything at the moment...