Big, Brazen Lies Sustain Economy

By Rick Ackerman, GoldSeek

With the help of a credulous news media, Obama, Bernanke, Geithner et al. have continued to sledgehammer the “green shoots” story.  Actually, it is no longer timid green shoots that supposedly are sprouting up, but a recovery so strongly rooted and powerful that it has sent stocks soaring since March and, more recently, goosed T-bond yields skyward.  Have mere words caused this, jolting the economy from its worst slump since the Great Depression? We very strongly doubt it, much as we doubt that a rising stock market has anything whatsoever to do with the nation’s economic health. If you doubt this, take a good look at the chart below and consider the ebullient mood of America in August 1929.

Still, we don’t fault the spinmeisters for trying so desperately to tell it like it isn’t. As Joseph Goebbels famously said, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” The rest of this quote is less often repeated, but it holds dire implications for the economy and perhaps even for the political system if and when Americans realize that it is lies alone that have kept us from crashing. Here’s how the Nazi propagandist finished the thought: “The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie.”  Indeed, how much longer can taxpayers be shielded from the consequences of a federal deficit on its way to $14 trillion or more? And how many believe the whopper that spending yet more trillions in Keynesian fashion – which is to say, flushing it down the toilet – will enable us to grow the economy out of indebtedness?

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