For all the recent talk about a "double-dip recession," the vast majority of economists still insist that we're in a "recovery."
The Wall Street Journal surveys some 40-50 big-name economists each month. The results for September reveal that not one of them forecast any GDP declines for the rest of 2011 or for all of 2012.
I'm not a mind reader. I can only imagine what you really think about such opinions. For my part, I wonder if economists have forsaken rationality -- and hope that if they chant "recovery" often enough, then GDP will levitate the way a magician makes his assistant float up into mid-air. It will "just happen..."
What kind of recovery from the past looks like this one? What sort of stock market rallies for two-plus years, even as employment, housing and the credit supply remain dismal or are still falling?
Why are "nearly all the experts...convinced that the economy is strengthening" when so much evidence says otherwise?
If recovery or double-dip were the only two choices, then the evidence would push me into the double-dip camp. In truth, however, the double-dip analysis is also chock-full of flawed assumptions. That's why, in his latest Elliott Wave Theorist, Bob Prechter is so straightforward and blunt in his analysis for the economy:
Bulls say the economy is in recovery....Bears are calling for a 'double dip' recession....But, as is often the case, we disagree with both camps: The economic contraction of 2007-2009 was not a recession; the respite since then is not the start of a new economic expansion; and the economy is not going to have another 'dip' into recession.
That quote is from page five of the current Elliott Wave Theorist. From there, Prechter spells out exactly what he DOES expect for the economy. Virtually every word of that 10-page issue stacks up the evidence for his forecast.