If Consumer Spending Doesn't, What Will?

There was more on the news about how they expect the recovery to be "jobless", how employment will lag behind other indicators, and we'll have slow, slow growth for the next several years. Consumer spending, they say, is not bounding back robustly -- and why should it, since we were spending way too much and borrowing to make it happen and pretending house prices would never go down and we really, really, don't want to go back to that again.

Indeed, it's time to save, not time to spend, because so many of us are facing the uncertainty of an overstressed Social Security system with underprepared portfolios. Consumer spending is going to have to take a back seat to consumer saving.

So, the economy is not going to be recovering the way it has after the last several recessions. But it could still recover faster than they think. It could be about investment. And it could be about ending the violence of extreme poverty around the world. It could be about building some sort of post-capitalist system that made it possible for family incomes and consumption to rise around the world and didn't require the families of the United States to overextend themselves to keep everything working. Where is the creative thinking that once made American capitalism famous?

If the folks who make loans keep looking in the same places for their business, we'll just end up in the same old mess we were in the last time, only later. Let's do something different!