Whee! The recession’s over! Except…

Going forward, many analysts expect the pace of the budding recovery to be plodding due to rising unemployment and continuing difficulties by both consumers and businesses to secure loans.

All this focus on “securing loans” - it’s ridiculous. Can’t speak for what businesses are doing but as for consumers - hell, I don’t know anyone who’s dying to get a loan and can’t. The people I know are trying to get out from under the debt they have.

But you read these reports and you get the idea that there are hordes of consumers out there who’d spend spend spend, if ONLY more debt was made available to them!

Yet it’s also worth asking - if such people DO exist, should they be getting loans? That’s one of the big questions about the home buyer subsidy; people who are using the $8,000 for their down payment, so they can get into houses with virtually no money - how is that wise or sustainable?

Credit cannot keep expanding forever and it should not keep expanding forever. But “continuing difficulties by consumers to secure loans” implies that we need to lower lending standards even further.

That’s pretty much the exact opposite of what ought to be happening. So naturally - that’s what we’re doing.