The Booming Economy

With the 15,000 layoffs at Alcoa, the United States inches ever closer to a full-blown economic depression:

On Tuesday, the minutes of the Federal Open Market Committee for December 15 and 16 were published by Federal Reserve Board of Governors. The minutes read like nothing so much as an encyclopedic description of the first months of the Great Depression, with descriptions of across-the-board economic decline in the US and internationally. In the meeting, the Fed determined to lower interests rates effectively to zero, thereby virtually exhausting monetary policy as a tool to counter the crisis, while promising to make the federal currency printing press available to the major financial interests.

To date the efforts of the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department have done nothing to stem the crisis.