A tax cheat and a cheating liar

That Timothy Geithner. What a guy. People desperately want to believe Obama knew what he was doing in appointing him chief tax cheat.

It's Over ... or Not. The deepest recession in modern memory is coming to an end, said Department of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner during a May 18 briefing. Geithner pointed to improvements in credit and financial markets, among other indicators, as signs that the economy was starting to come back. However, the Federal Reserve Board's Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC)—the body that sets the federal funds rate, or the interest rate banks charge each other for loans—downgraded its economic forecast for 2009 in the recently released minutes of its late April meeting. Almost all FOMC members downgraded their projections from the ones they made in January, and the group as a whole is now projecting the U.S.'s real gross domestic product in 2009 to decrease by 2 percentage points from 2008, to 1.3 percent. The FOMC also predicts U.S. unemployment to continue rising and increased its projection for unemployment in 2009 to be between 9.2 and 9.6 percent, up from 8.4 to 8.8 percent in earlier prognostications. The FOMC projects nationwide unemployment to remain near 8 percent through 2011, before trending back to between 4.8 and 5 percent over the longer run. The FOMC did agree with Geithner in one respect, though, saying it expects a recovery in sales and production to begin in the second half of the year."

Weekly Federal Update, May 18-22, by Ethan Butterfield, Architect Magazine On-line edition. I'm always amazed at people who can count how many years FDR drug out the Depression, and yet believe following his example will somehow not cause the same disaster.