The Great Anxiety

The Great Recession has morphed into the Great Anxiety.  Economic growth is tepid, enough so that it inspires little confidence.  Unemployment, still high, is falling, but so slowly that consumers' animal spirits remain tame.  Individual investors, confronted by three year highs in the stock market, celebrate by fleeing.  The members of Congress devote their energies to calling each other finks, rat finks, double rat finks, and triple rat finks, while the nation veers toward a fiscal vortex.  Both candidates for the Presidency, although individually quite intelligent and accomplished, swap lies about how the other is lying and inspire little more than resigned sighs from their supporters.  The Federal Reserve is operating the only show in town, and its program consists of printing money, printing money while riding a bicycle sitting backwards, printing money while juggling eight balls and printing money while doing double somersaults on a trapeze.  But the Fed can't do much to resolve the problems in Europe, which is now sliding into recession even as the sovereign debt crisis gets kicked farther down the road.

If the Federal Reserve Board is correct in believing that public confidence is crucial to economic growth, then we are a long way from healthy, sustainable growth.  By all current indications, whichever candidate for President wins won't inspire much confidence.  Congress appears likely to remain divided between a Republican House and a Democratic Senate.  Gridlock isn't that big a problem when the economy is strong.  But it is deadly when the economy is moribund.  For better or for worse, a somnolent economy needs a decisive government, and we probably won't have one. Can kicking isn't a sound federal economic policy.  Both Japan, and more recently, the European Union, have vigorously kicked the can numerous times.  The problem, though, is that business people and consumers all know that the can is still there, and can bite them in the butt big time.  So they don't make big commitments; they don't go exuberant.  Can kicking virtually guarantees stagnation.  Yet can kicking has been the order of the day in Washington.

In a time when lukewarm coffee is all that you can hope for, invest cautiously.  It's not a bad idea to hold some risk assets.  But limit your exposure, and avoid the riskiest.  Hold a good dollop of stable assets, and don't stretch for yield.  One important way to give your net worth a boost is to save more.  Remember that the thriftiest squirrels have the best chance of surviving winter--and the coming winter could be cold indeed.