Feeding of Ole’s comment from the last post: What are your predictions for the US economy?
I’m not sure I have a prediction, but I have an observation. I was criticized last year for breaking up my viewpoint in three parts: Financials, Fiscal, Fundamentals. Tough, I still think it’s a good way to look at things. The crisis was created at the financial level and excacerbated by the poor fiscal status of the government. I think Obama has done a credible job of fixing things at the financial level. There aren’t anymore huge financial institutions going under, credit is slowly starting to flow again, the mess of the housing market may not be getting better but at least it is getting clearer, etc. Fiscally, we’re a little worse off thanks to all the stimulus debt, hopefully that was still the right thing to do. I think as the financial ship rights itself other areas of the economy will improve. So color me an optimist, I see things slowly but steadily improving through 2010.