Gag Me With A Spoon

Via Drudge, from FT.com:

What a feeling: how emotions may yet save the economy

By Chrystia Freeland

An influential Democrat who was also one of the world’s top-ten, highest-paid hedge fund managers last year thinks he knows which book is at the top of the White House reading list this spring: Animal Spirits, the powerful new blast of behavioural economics from Nobel prize-winner George Akerlof and Yale economist Robert Shiller.

Judging by the upbeat economic message we have been hearing from the White House, the Treasury and even the Federal Reserve over the past six weeks, that is a shrewd guess. The authors argue that “we will never really understand important economic events unless we confront the fact that their causes are largely mental in nature”. Our “ideas and feelings” about the economy are not purely a rational reaction to data and experience; they themselves are an important driver of economic growth – and decline.

[...]

But, like Washington, Wall Street really does want the scheme to work and the markets to recover. Over the next few weeks the administration will be hoping those feelings are powerful enough to drive the economic data.

Wall Street, for many years a wholely owned subsidiary of the left, might have some faint hope for recovery, but Obama et al. only want the illusion of recovery -- "ideas and feelings" of happy days. What they're really looking for the total collapse of the of every aspect of American life the better to wrest control while we're still entranced by the One, his kids, his dog and his lady.

Here's an excellent editorial from IBD which explains in detail why the recent important economic events were very much not mental in nature (unless you believe out-of-control corruption a mental disorder).