by Jeffrey P. Snider
Alhambra Partners
The only common factor on the economy viewed from the mainstream in the past few years is the shrinking standards by which it is judged. Janet Yellen can somehow suggest erratic 2% GDP growth is “overheating” or close to it only because that is the reduction of the “new normal.” Because that has been so declared by the very same people who never saw it as possible, that is the ceiling by which everything was to be measured. Now, however, even the “new normal” is undergoing its own discounting.