QUOTES OF THE DAY – RESPONSES TO HILSENRATH

Thomas Moran wrote:
Dear John,
The American consumer had to absorb a $1500 increase in out of pocket health care costs over the past 2 years. Insurance premium increases and deductible increases were passed on to the consumer under the “ACA” ; your paper routinely ignores this fact when discussing consumer spending. Today you are reporting another significant premium increase in the works for next year. So start reporting the news instead of blaming others for the Fed’s, Administration’s and Wall Street economists consistently inaccurate economic forecasts. Yes, the “ACA” has hurt consumer spending.
Meanwhile, mean U.S. family income is stuck at the same level as the late ’90s in part because of the trade deals that outsourced millions of middle class jobs. Now your paper is supporting the fast track of another piece of legislation that we need to pass to find out what is in it.
Why don’t you spend more time talking to consumers than your inside Fed sources?

josap wrote:
Welcome to Main Street. We don’t think 5 years is a long time and in those years many of us have not “recovered”. The cost of utilities, insurance, education, food has gone up – our inflation is measured in what we buy week to week. We don’t buy a car or a stove or an airplane everyday, we buy consumables.

Many are paying off old debt, student loans, subprime car loans. Main Street has not been the recipient of 0% interest rates. Some are increasing their savings, if they have any to save.

You want us to spend? You think buying cheap foreign goods helps US Main Street? We figured out buying plastic nonsense that doesn’t last isn’t worth it, we are saving to buy quality if we buy at all.

Tom wrote:
So, according to this “logic” spending is only when you consume something. When you spend your money on investments, i.e. saving, then you are not spending at all and this is a “problem”. Countries with high saving rates end up with high economic growth. As US economic growth slows, perhaps permanently, one might question the economic policy that wants people to consume all the time and not save. No saving, no capital formation, no growth; that is what is wrong with America.

Guy wrote:
have lost faith in the system The crooks were reward with trillions in print money for breaking the financial system. The people responsible for justice were rewarded with 8 figure jobs from the crooks running the banks. The same crooks are still running the same crooked mega banks.I didn’t receive a dime from the printed trillions! Savers have been STOLEN from for 7 years. I don’t happen to be a IPO ZERO revenue company sitting on a billion in stock. PEOPLE KNOW THE FED HAS BEEN BOUGHT! Please explain the punishment meted to those that broke the financial system! We have a CRONY ECONOMY… People know it is another BUBBLE!

Giorgio wrote:
Wow Jon, is this the most sarcastic thing you’ve ever written or does this actually represent the Fed and now by extension your logic/thinking?

The American consumer is apparently smarter than you, Wall Street or the Fed have given them credit for. There are so many things wrong with this editorial it’s hard to know where to start but a numbered list will have to suffice
1) This “recovery” you speak has largely been in the inflating of asset prices, stocks and some housing. The majority of the US “middle class” (or what’s left of it) have not enjoyed any significant change in their wealth due to this.

2) If you are sitting in a house that has increased in value you’d have serious short term memory deficit (of which you seem to think 5 years is a long time) to take out an equity loan on your house to consume unnecesary goods. Yeah, that worked out so well for Americans the last time they did that….underwater loans anyone?
3) The fabulous jobs recovery you are always speaking of, is in low paying, part time, service jobs. Show me where good paying actual middle class jobs have been created beyond the wall street brokers and real estate brokers benefiting from easy money policy
4) Please go out and measure actual real inflation (not the constantly changing definition that the Fed uses) and you’ll see the prices of everything have risen, in some cases dramatically (see health care premiums) and you might understand why Americans aren’t spending on anything beyond the necessities
5) Virtually none of the measures of economic growth have had any real impact on average Americans
6) You’re really going to point to Greece and say we don’t have it as bad as them??? but you somehow want us to spend money we don’t really have to juice the economy, which is exactly how Greece got into it’s own troubles.
7) At what point do you recognize that the Fed’s policies have done nothing for the real middle class American consumer and there’ zero interest rate policies are destroying the elderly and bottom tiers of the middles class who are trying to build some savings.
8) Your letter here is almost as bad as Ben Bernanke’s blog post this week, trying to defend the Fed’s actions and dodge the questions of why their policies have done so much for the wealthy and so little for the poor. He also doesn’t seem to realize the poor have to use payday lenders not banks.
9) Finally, maybe this letter of yours was supposed to be submitted to The Onion instead of posted to the WSJ?

Tex wrote:
Yet another elitist who appears to be completely out of touch with middle-class America.

Jim F wrote:
Well, let’s see. Oh, I just paid the $2200 penalty for Obamacare.Now I’m saving for my $12K property tax bill in December.

Central Wanker wrote:
Dear John,

Our apologies if we refuse to believe that the cure to a debt laden house of cards is ever more debt.

Our deepest sympathies for not buying into the wealth creation via vacuum tube mantra that is the current state of the stock market.

Please understand our most heartfelt decline of the idea that by over extending ourselves for a third time, in this, still brief, 15 year old century, will somehow yield an explosion of capitalistic and growth-centric light at the end of the tunnel that establishment so desperately yearns for

Please give our kindest regards to those great unelected men and women who gaze and pontificate from their safe house in the Ivory Tower for us when it comes to the bastardization of capital allocation, the vast misdirection of resources when risk is but a word relegated to the annals of financial history, and the quagmire of a zero bound tailspin when the music stops once more.

We know you have all tried… and try you continue, to convince the common man that you have all the answers, and we, the commoner, are just simply too stupid to understand.

Our collective apologies,
Central Wanker

Retired Accountant wrote:
I made the mistake of saving for my retirement. I planned on an interest income. Seven years of zero interest has my income near zero. So John how exactly am I going to spend? I would if I could..
The Fed has it wrong. You can not borrow yourself out of debt. You can’t give to the rich freshly printed money without creating income inequality. Central control of the price of money is not a feature of a free economy. Punishment for white collar criminals is absolutely necessary for a free economy. John, when you find yourself in a hole the first thing to do is stop digging. The Fed has been digging now for far too long.

NSA wrote:
Yes, thank you all for contributing to my collection efforts. Your responses have all been collated and cataloged. Please move along.

Dan W wrote:
Dear Mr. Hilsenrath,

My apologies for not spending beyond my means in order to satisfy the hack economists and central bankers of the world. You see…there is this problem that you and the people of your ilk seem to forget when you all are high on your “intellectual” soapboxes telling us how to spend. That problem is that your formulas, smoothed statistical models, and seasonal adjustments are so far from objective reality that you dopes actually believe the stuff you print. To make matters worse, you and your people use the media to promote your failed policies as if they worked. Well, they didn’t. Very little of that cash that you gave to people at zero interest rates apply to people like us. That money was meant for your elitist friends. None of it made it to where people like us are on the social totem pole. Actually, it made matters worse for us. While your arrogant, schmuck banker and elite friends were allowed to speculate with the zero interest rate money you gave them, my rent, food, and medical care all have gotten much more expensive. Its very difficult to make ends meet when you have to make a choice between paying rent and putting food on the table, and living paycheck to paycheck is simply the way it must be for us to survive nowadays. It is hard to part with what little cash you have when you have lost your job due to the epic crashes you genius central bankers have caused with your monetary policies, and you are forced to take on 3 waiting jobs because all of the good American jobs went overseas. So, sorry for not helping you and your clown friends out.

It would be very much appreciated if you could tell your central banker elitist friends that they can f–k right off, and please…don’t forget to include yourself on that memo.

Sincerely,

Everyone

Interested Observer wrote:
Dear Mr. Hilsenrath – If we are to take Prof. Robert Shiller’s recent comments seriously, that all asset classes are now overvalued, then where exactly is it that the Federal Reserve proposes that we put any excess cash? While I don’t fully subscribe to the Keynesian definition of a Liquidity Trap, it is pretty darn close to what I am looking at right now.

Oh, and yes, I suppose we got here through the best of intentions.

TheReplacement wrote:
Dear Jon,

We Americans are tiring of the central planning committee and their Goebbels like propaganda outlets, such as you and the Wall Street Journal. We sincerely wish for the system to crash and reset. We have had enough of being ruled by unelected bankers who operate a private bank, and print a private fiat currency based on an wholly unsustainable model of ever increasing debt, all for the benefit of themselves and their fellow dual citizens, both in public and private enterprise. We are Americans, not Israelis nor communists, after all.

As such, we hope you fall off the cliff with the system, never to be heard from again. If we are the victors, and we do end up writing the history, you will be most unpleased with what we have to say.

Anonymous wrote:
Dear the Fed (via John H),

To respond to your question: “What’s up?”

The economic fundamentals have not recovered. No amount of propaganda has convinced the “American Consumer” otherwise. The consumer is dying due to constrained income after increased housing, food, medical, energy, and education costs. The consumer has less marginal income with such costs growing faster than the economy and wages. All of which are a direct consequence of your actions.

They didn’t teach you this during your economics education? It’s pathetic you even have to ask “What’s up?” Your assumptions and theory don’t equate to reality.