Follow this link to Paul Krugman’s column February 15th in the New York Times.

His interpretation of the Federal Reserve’s latest Survey of Consumer Finances is that there has been no wealth creation in the United States since 2000.

Earlier today I posted a link to remarks by Robert Kuttner.  He noted that 40% of the economy had been in financial services.  It occurred to me that if you take out that 40%, what is left may be a real measure of the size of our productive economy.  I wonder if that number is commensurate with what the Federal Reserve has discovered.

Follow this link to read Robert Kuttner’s prescription for the economic crisis.

Perhaps he said it before, or someone else may have said it.  Japan didn’t get out of its economic malaise of the 1990s until it finally made the banks realize the losses that were hidden in their books.  He is now saying the U.S. must do the same.

One of the things that I have been saying for a while is that with so many of our manufacturing jobs having been outsourced, soon the world will discover that the management of these jobs can be outsourced as well.  The only thing the U.S. will have left in our economy is the financing through our banks.  Then the world will realize that, with the jobs and the management having been outsourced, they no longer need money management from the U.S.  Then we will have nothing to support our economy.

Maybe that day is arriving much sooner than I thought.