The Business Cycle: Launder, Spin, Skim, Down the Drain. See Pee(on) You reset = Trickle down.

The New Economy: Dirty Trickles keep Peon Down.

Bill McBride at Calculated Risk:

From Trulia chief economist Jed Kolko:

The Post-Crash Rebound, Not Job Growth, Drove 2013 Price Gains in 2013, the housing markets with the biggest increases in asking prices were all rebounding from severe price drops in the housing bust.

Meanwhile at the Testosterone Pit, Wolf Richter writes:

 In the minutes of the December policy meeting, hidden in the middle of an interminable paragraph on page 8 of 25 pages of wooden and convoluted prose, the Fed issued a doozie of a warning. In its own abstruse manner, it admitted that its asset purchases had inflated asset prices to such levels that they’d become “financial vulnerabilities” that were starting to threaten “financial stability and the broader economy.”

Wolf Richter then asks, "Did the Fed finally read TP and other sites outside the MSM that have been hammering on these very issues for months, if not years?"

The answer to which, I'm sure both you and he know, is the refrain: "Nobody could have seen this coming."

As I blog along for nothing, as I was doing all through 2008, with no financial training or background, trying to alert folks to the level of outright fraud being embraced by the government and financial industries while everyone was focusing on Bernie Madoff (with all the money), the real criminals were laughing behind their hands, having installed the most venal, corrupt, and unabashedly criminal administration in the Whitehouse that has ever existed, the Fed was not only discouraging any legal action against fraudulent, Enron-style-schemes that were being perpetrated right in front of its eyes, they were actively encouraging them, studying them so as to adopt the same schemes for their own books once the economy had crumbled into the dust.

This demonstrates the danger of believing the Obama's nonsensical assertion in 2009 that we need to "look forward" and not at the past. To ignore not only the War Crimes of the Bush Regime, but the Financial imbroglio that was wrought by an out-of-control Fed, and a criminally negligent SEC is malfeasance because it totally negates the entire criminal justice system, as ALL crimes are judged in the present for activity undertaken in the past.

How the Testosterone Pit, or Naked Capitalism, or Zerohedge make money enough to keep on producing such bitingly accurate depictions of the state of economic affairs, I really have no idea. I'm completely amazed they're still doing this. The salaries for every Board member of the Fed, together with their large well-pensioned, Cadillac-benefited staff, however, is well paid for with your tax dollars to the tunes of millions and millions of dollars in salaries alone, yet dispenses trillions and trillions of dollars to prop up the asset prices of damaged collateral, while JP Morgan gets slapped on the wrist with what seems an enormous $2Billion fine, until you realize that the elevation of asset prices undertaken by the Fed, putting the solvency of the entire Nation at risk, yet for which the unemployed can look forward to nothing more than abandonment, has increased JP Morgans' assets back to nosebleed levels, which they can now use to payoff their fines before those same assets fall back to their actual abysmal valuations. Yet it is the highly-compensated economists at the Fed, as if to prove Upton Sinclair's maxim that, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it", who regularly blind themselves to the effects their oligarchical actions have on the Free Markets of the Capitalist economy that they are supposed to be protecting. For, if JPMorgan is guilty, then the Fed and The SEC are even more so, as its their JOB to identify such brazen schemes, especially once they've been notified of them.

So now, as house prices rebound enough for the solvency of the Banks to be reconstituted on the backs of the very citizens the Banksters despise, the criminality they were guilty of is reenforced, and even congratulated, while in Russia, that supposedly corrupt State, credit fraud and fraud in entrepreneurial activities, brings convictions that include not only prison terms, but agreements to repay damages, while China executed a former general manager of a major Chinese securities trading corporation who was convicted of embezzling and misappropriating more than USD $14 million.

But in this Democracy such crimes are encouraged, the better at them you are, the more you show your contempt for the public and the deeper your disregard is for any restraint on your behavior, the more you are rewarded and the more luxurious your lifestyle becomes, and any who raises their voice against you are characterized as being merely resentful of your good fortune. If Al Capone lived today, he would simply have Eliot Ness fired, just as they had Eliot Spitz fired in March 2008 by arranging a federal entrapment and sting operation against him, for having the balls to call for an investigation of the shenanigans going on on Wall St, and, as an added bonus, they thereby took the focus away from the Fed's involvement in the collapse at Bear-Sterns just a week earlier.

So why this rant? Because the  quotes about the success of this recovery from the depression  (look it up, the real definition of the Great Recession, as they've dubbed it, is, in any real economic definition, a depression) we're in, read exactly the same, some of them almost word for word, as those written about the Bush economy after the Dot Com crash, while only a few, such as Doug Noland, at Prudentbear.com give even lip service to the non-sustainability of leveraging a recovery on the shadow banking defalcations that came to completely dominate and catastrophically undermine the economic life of the Nation. Then, with the same epistemological  pattern as a plague, infected the entire globe.

But because the Wolves of Wall Street control the Wusses in Washington, who care more about finagling their government jobs into higher paying private sector jobs (in the financial industry, of course, all other industries being subjected to the harsh rigors of piratization), instead of protecting its citizens against a recurrence of financial collapse, the Federal government itself is, once again, stoking the very conditions which will guarantee it happens again. That is why local police all over the country are being armed to the teeth with military-style weapons. For whereas, only myself and a few others were cognizant of the fact that a maelstrom of financial fraud had brought about the 2008 collapse, the next debacle won't find nearly as many people unaware of the true nature of the crimes, nor the people who've committed them, and they will have the banksters in mind when they and their children are being thrown out into the street yet again.