10-30-2007, 11:06 AM
Quote:The important topic we kept coming back to was: What is the United State's economic future? In all earnest, housing economy and other recent woes aside, the US is facing a period of turmoil in economic vision. We are no longer a country reliant on our production force. We have some great advances in science and technology, but those are shrinking quickly with other nations becoming a lot more competitive. Not to mention how troubling the years of sub-par math and science grades in school.
Cheers,
Munk
I don't think the production, science and education are the biggest problem. The US is still world class in all of these things, plus that the US does a much better job (compared to europe) to attract high educated foreigners.
The only problem is the over the top consumers culture. The central bank in the US, thinks only about the interest of hedge funds and investment banks. By keeping interest rates low, they continue to make it easy to lend money, and to keep consumption high. Interest rates need to go up (slowly) but instead are being kept too low. This avoids a crash in the housing market (for now) but will in a while will gives us a bigger one together with a crash on the stock exchanges.
The US government has to pay around 500 billion dollars of interest each year which is quite alarming. A thing that scares me is that the people with power (like bernanke) probably think more about the interests of the big investors than about the interest of the people.
Another thing that worries me is that when you read about these things, not many people seem to know what can be done, some say it will all fly over, but answers..no.