This Just In: Recession Now Over (HA!)

When corporate interests and government policy intertwine, we call the marriage fascism as defined by Benito Mussolini who knew a thing or two about it.

The recession is over for the power money because their losses have been negated and papered over with the federal plays like AIG, GM and Citibank using taxpayer dollars. There is no limit to the bailouts and most won't realize this until it's too late and the purchasing power of their dollars has evaporated.

The depression and collapse is on in full force for the middle class. The power money is blowing one more bubble to extract any remaining capital from the United States and move it off shores pulling the underpinnings of the American dream and ushering in Thomas Jefferson's worst nightmare:

If we run into such debts as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, and give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses; And the sixteen being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they do now, on oatmeal and potatoes, have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; But be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains around the necks of our fellow sufferers; And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for a second, that second for a third, and so on 'til the bulk of society is reduced to mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering...and the forehorse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression.

Goldman Sachs’s Cohen Says Recession Is Ending ‘Now’

By Thomas R. Keene and Lynn Thomasson

Aug. 17 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. recession is ending “right now,” said Abby Joseph Cohen, a senior investment strategist at Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

The economy may grow by 3 percent in the next couple of quarters and expand by 1.5 percent to 2 percent next year, Cohen said. While consumer spending is likely to rise, it probably won’t increase as fast as at the end of prior periods when the U.S. was emerging from a recession, she said.

“Clearly the economy is on the mend,” Cohen said in an interview with Bloomberg Radio. “We do think that profit growth will be more substantial going forward.”

Cohen, known for her optimistic forecasts for stocks during the 1990s stock-market rally, was replaced in March 2008 as the bank’s chief forecaster for the U.S. equity market. She predicted in a May 1 interview that the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index might jump 20 percent to 1,050 in the next 6 to 12 months. The index climbed 15 percent to 1,010.48 through Aug. 7 before retreating 0.6 percent last week.

The S&P 500 has rallied 48 percent from a 12-year low on March 9 as 76 percent of companies in the benchmark reported better-than-estimated second quarter results and economic reports showed improvement. Equities fell last week for the first time in five weeks as a drop in consumer confidence fueled concern the steepest rally since the 1930s isn’t justified by economic prospects.

So-called fair value for the S&P 500 is between 1,050 and 1,100, Cohen said. David Kostin, who replaced Cohen as Goldman Sachs’s chief U.S. market forecaster, estimates the index will end the year at 1,060 and earn $52 a share for 2009.

“The bottom line looks pretty good,” she said. “The companies that are still in business are showing that they have pretty good margins.”