Friday's Rant: Economists

A quote from Thursday on CNBC: "Despite the surprising growth in the US economy in the second quarter, many economists—and average Americans—aren't convinced that the country has avoided a recession."

I'm not an economist and I'm certainly not one that is competent at predicting how the economy will be doing in the coming year, quarter, month or even tomorrow. But with each passing day I'm getting the very distinct feeling the economists are nothing more than the meteorologists of the fiscal world. They sound smart and like they might know what they're talking about, but in reality, they're full of crap and really don't have a clue.

For the last year, we've all been hearing about how bad things are. How a recession is just around the corner - how there is basically no hope and we should all quit now and move to China, with all the other cool people.

Now don't get me wrong, there are areas of the economy that are weak. But try this test...over the next week or so, as you're reading the paper, watching the news or perusing articles online, notice how whenever a new piece of news come out the headline usually reads something like, "Economy Grew More than Expected" or "Economy Beat Expectations" or "Supply Growth Beats Analyst Expectations" or "Job Loss Less than Analysts Predicted."

You get the point. There is another element that each of these stories must have: the economist must find the dark cloud in every silver lining. Somewhere in each article begrudgenly reporting good news, it must contain an economist warning something like, "although this is good news, bad things are just around the corner." Give me a break. Who are these people? It sure seems like they are wrong a lot or, at least, suffer from very low expectations.

Take for this article on CNBC.com: "US Economy Grew Far More than Expected". They decided to mix it up a little by using "Far" in the headline. You really get the feeling that they are genuinely bummed about the economy growing at 3.3%!

Friends and neighbors, I've gone off on this before, but I am sick of all this pessimism. And I am REALLY sick of all these economists, all these news channels and media types actively HOPING for bad news. And when the news is good, trying to find ways of making bad. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts. Has the thought ever crossed their minds that maybe the news is, in fact, GOOD!? Seriously.

High gas prices suck, more for a gallon of milk sucks, watching my 401k balance plummit over the last year sucks, too. But are things really that bad? Overall, I think not. Just last month Batman had a debut weekend of nearly $160 million. People in soup lines don't shell out $160 million for a movie. So my unsolicitied advice is this: stop listening to these stupid economists, quit buying into this sheep-like fear and be happy that things are looking pretty good.

Whew!

Breathe in, breathe out...this week's rant is over.