is a booming recovery right around the corner?

An optimistic piece from James Grant in the WSJ...

As if they really knew, leading economists predict that recovery from our Great Recession will be plodding, gray and jobless. But they don't know, and can't. The future is unfathomable.

Not famously a glass half-full kind of fellow, I am about to propose that the recovery will be a bit of a barn burner. Not that I can really know, either, the future being what it is....

A good dose of humility and transparency at the front end of the essay!

Growth snapped back following the depressions of 1893-94, 1907-08, 1920-21 and 1929-33....

To the English economist Arthur C. Pigou is credited a bon mot that exactly frames the issue. "The error of optimism dies in the crisis, but in dying it gives birth to an error of pessimism...."

Our recession, though a mere inconvenience compared to some of the cyclical snows of yesteryear, does bear comparison with the slump of 1981-82. In the worst quarter of that contraction, the first three months of 1982, real GDP shrank at an annual rate of 6.4%, matching the steepest drop of the current recession....Yet the Reagan recovery, starting in the first quarter of 1983, rushed along at quarterly growth rates (expressed as annual rates of change) over the next six quarters of 5.1%, 9.3%, 8.1%, 8.5%, 8.0% and 7.1%. Not until the third quarter of 1984 did real quarterly GDP growth drop below 5%.

One may observe that Ronald Reagan stood for enterprise, free trade and low taxes, whereas Barack Obama stands for other things. Yet President Obama's economic policies seem almost as far removed from Roosevelt's as they are from Reagan's....

He may be right. But...

It's not until this last sentence that I get off Mr. Grant's train. Bush and then Obama have pursued policies that can have long-term damage-- within an environment of debt, a culture of entitlement, and a staggering dose of unfunded liabilities from an array of expensive social welfare programs. Add to that an array of policy proposals that would be quite painful to business, labor, and the economy (from cap & trade to health care)-- and it's probably apples and rocks.

The real test is how he's investing his own money. It'd be nice to know if his money is where is mouth/writing is!