Is it not amazing how the Government has put all the blame of our Financial Disaster squarely on the backs of the bank’s pay practices while taking absolutely no responsibility themselves?  Never mind, their Community Action policies forced on the banks or that too “big to fail” was a direct result of Clinton, Rubin, Greenspan and Paulson eliminating the 62 year old Glass-Steagle Act.  Nor did they ever mention the roles of Chris Dodd and Barney Frank in the $12 trillion FNM and FRE failures and bailouts.  Sure, let’s now let the regulators who failed miserably write the new regulations.  Great Idea?

To keep things in perspective, the DJII closing above 10,000 is almost exactly the level at which it closed at 10 years ago: No net progress in a decade. However, a dollar is worth a lot less now than it was worth in 1999, so in terms of inflation adjusted dollars, the DJII is really not worth much more than 6,000 depending on what inflation rate you use.

America’s Trade Policy

Bush helped make us poorer by signing off on higher steel tariffs as well as tariffs on Canadian lumber and Chinese textiles.  In 2009, Obama helped make us poorer by signing off on higher tire tariffs.  Was this payoff to the trade unions enough or is there more protectionist trade policy yet to come?  What will be there reaction of the rest of the world to our trade policy of allowing our US dollar to depreciate so sharply?  Is there a trade war in the world’s future as each country tries to devalue their currency in an attempt to maintain their exports?

Economic analysis has proven that trade creates wealth.  The law of comparative advantage demonstrates that when we specialize and trade, we produce much more wealth, using the same resources.  By embracing protectionism, we have adopted a policy that works against our own best self interest by encouraging destructive protectionism.  Protectionism gives politicians of every stripe an opportunity to appease special interests and can only be justified if one never heard of or doesn’t understand “Opportunity Costs.”  Simply put, preventing trade means that we use ore resources to produce less goods, which means less wealth for all concerned.