Whenever you hear an economist with a prediction or a plan he'll either present it with mathmatical rules and figures and forget about the human influence or he'll present it based on human emotion and forgets about the mathmatical rules.
Economy is always about both. It's a combination of math, physics, sociology and psychology. I rarely hear an economist incorporating all these together. In fact, most economists look at the stock market as THE economical barometer. The stock market is driven by paranoid speculants (gamblers) looking to make a quick buck without producing anything. Stocks don't really tell you anything about how good a company is doing.
They should look more at small and medium sized businesses, retail and people's spending power.
The money market is even more crazy and abstract. Some people spend the day buying yens for their dollars, then buy euros, then pounds and then dollars again but they now have more dollars than they started with.
So people are making money out of thin air without producing anything (product or service). That can only mean one thing: devaluation of cuurency. So if you wanna know how much a currency is really worth, check out the Big Mac index.
Some claim that currency should be linked to gold again. That may not be perfect but sometimes I think it wouldn't be a bad idea in a time like this.
