Roubini: Recession won't end until year-end (but its looking like it will end)

Rebecca Keenan of Bloomberg News reports that Dark Side Guru Nouriel Roubini sees, in to what to this blog is a classic case of the glass half empty/half full, that, while we are still in a recession, the crisis may be abating as it is possible that, while the recession won't end until the end of the year, there appears to be hope that it WILL BE ENDING, so there is hope there. To DITHOB, with the Clunker Deals (which, ironically, are just a retail form of tax refund), the talk of Health Care Reform, and the continuing right wing hostility to President Obama,44 must be doing something right, so there appears to be hope that things will move in the right direction at a faster pace now.

Ironically, the GOP reports that they don't support the clunker deals, but they won't block the effort to re-fund it. One GOP spoilsport indicated "If you dropped money from the sky, people would be happy with that, too." Well, isn't that just what a tax cut, so favored by the late and unlamented Bush administration, truly is? Oh well, between the GOP merry-go-round and the latest posters of 44 as "the Joker," it seems clear that the GOP have nothing further to offer at the national level, so they will continue to stand in the aisles shuffling their feet. As long as they don't stand in the doorways and block up the halls. Let the current administration do its thing for awhile, until we see if it is working. If not, the GOP will certainly have a reasonable shot at recovering the White House in the future. That, thank goodness, is the American Way.

--Brooklyn Beat

From Bloomberg:

Aug. 3 (Bloomberg) -- The global economy is still in a recession that won’t end until the end of the year, said Nouriel Roubini, the New York University economist who predicted the global financial crisis.

“There is now potentially light at the end of the tunnel,” Roubini said today at the Diggers and Dealers mining conference in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia. Roubini was dubbed Dr. Doom for predicting the crisis. “I don’t think this recession will be over until the end of the year.”

Roubini, chairman of Roubini Global Economics and a professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business, predicted on July 23 that the global economy will begin recovering near the end of 2009 before possibly dropping back into a recession by late 2010 or 2011 because of rising government debt, higher oil prices and a lack of job growth.

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said yesterday the most severe recession in the U.S. in at least five decades may be ending and growth may resume at a rate faster than most economists foresee.

The U.S. economy is likely to grow about 1 percent in the next two years, less than the 3 percent “trend,” Roubini said last month. President Barack Obama said on July 30 the U.S. may be seeing the beginning of the end of the recession.

The global economy will contract 1.4 percent this year, deeper than forecast in April, and a sustained recovery from the worst recession since World War II may be a year away, the International Monetary Fund said July 8.

Link here: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aQwbwmRnTEsg#