Oh, Good… The Recession is Over

According to Dennis Kneale of CNBC, the recession is over! Someone, grab the champagne and hire the strippers.

Wait, who is Dennis Kneale? Yeah, that’s what I said…

I can’t find the video of exactly where he proclaims that the recession is over, but he did. Here’s a clip where he tries to drum up support for his position, and almost everyone on the panel tells him (politely) that he’s bonkers:

Here’s what I think, though. He knows he’s bonkers. He’s a nobody. I had never heard of this guy before, and chances are you hadn’t either. He, or his marketing team, recognized that he can drum up some ratings by making this ridiculous proclamation (with which even the most optimistic of Federal Reserve projections disagree).

Then, the blogs called him out on it, as blogs often do. He, or his marketing team, then realized he had struck a publicity gold mine. So he stoked the fire:

Yes, friends. He googled himself in that clip.

Shut Up, Already

This guy is not an idiot. There is no way he believes what he’s saying. Unemployment will continue to increase throughout AT LEAST this quarter (Fed says even into next year). That means fewer people have jobs. That means fewer people can buy goods. That means company revenues drop. Et cetera. To say that the recession is over is to suggest that unemployment has long since stopped declining and has recovered enough to support a recovery of spending and prices. That’s fantasy, and there is hard data (um, from Thursday) to prove it.

Job losses increased

He’s not even worth talking about. To do so (like I have in this post) just gives this nobody exactly what he wants… publicity.

Instead, we should just chalk this up to CNBC continuing to increase its irrelevance and horrible track record of predicting anything of value.

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