“A Year of Living on the Brink,” as charted by the Wall Street Journal’s Dan Henninger:
History will mark down 2014 as the year predicted 49 years ago by Martha and the Vandellas. In 1965 the group recorded a Motown classic, “Nowhere to Run, Nowhere to Hide.” We’re there, at the brink.
Liberia, ISIS, Ukraine, Hong Kong, a hospital fighting Ebola infections in Dallas, the year’s stock-market gains obliterated, and I almost forgot—just last week Secretary of State John Kerry warned that climate change could end life as we know it.
Then this week the clouds parted and the year’s best news arrived: Led by Europe’s sinking economies, global economic growth is falling, taking stocks and bonds with it, and the world’s central bankers say they have run out of ideas on doing anything about it.
How this is good news requires explanation.
Read the whole thing; as Henninger writes, “No one should underestimate the political dangers of persisting with a Keynesian economic model that looks depleted.”
Depleted? This 80 year old economic policy wouldn’t jump-start the economy if you put four million volts through it! It’s bleedin’ demised! This is an ex-policy! Bereft of sanity, it rests in peace!
But as Henninger writes, mentioning alternatives which revitalized the economies of America in the 1980s, Canada and the post-Soviet Union satellite nations in the 1990s, and Germany in the mid-naughts, first America needs a president who will junk the left’s cargo cult of Keynes, as one former Democrat did when he was elected to the office in 1980.
In the meantime, as Roger L. Simon asked last night, “Could It Possibly Get Any Worse?”
To paraphrase the slogan of our semi-retired closeted crypto-Keynesian president, yes it can.
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