Zeev's Turnips Patch-No Politics (ZEEV)

[hightecheast]

A little ice skating story I wrote for a friend just now ... I haven't talked with her in about 15 months.

Ken
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It is as if the American people and our economy have been ice skating on a clear day (for the last 4 years) on a beautiful pond that froze quickly without any wind so that the ice is very smooth and transparent. You can see through it, so we have no idea how thick or safe the ice really is. Our weight spreads stress on the surface as we move along as we listen to the ice cracking in the distance, adjusting to our weight and movement. We might think of those sounds as the “wall-of-worry” Wall Street people refer to. They don’t mean much to us, but we do hear them. Unbeknownst to us (as this is a pond we are unfamiliar with), we are skating towards a distant edge where the water flows more quickly underneath us and skips over a dam and into a stream. The closer we get to the dam, the thinner the ice gets, and the deeper the pond gets. But we are not aware of that. We pass “thin ice” warning signs every now and then, but they are written in Chinese, Japanese and German … and since we only understand English, we ignore them. The sun is bright, and there is a steady wind at our back. Think of the sun and the wind as the economic enablers I call the Federal Reserve and Wall Street. They keep telling us that we are safe, and that things are improving … not to worry.