To those of you old enough to remember, don't these times remind you of the early 1970s?
1. Oil price escalation amid supply concerns;
2. Evidence of inflation, amid weakness in job growth (anybody remember the term coined for this? "Stagflation");
3. An increasingly unpopular war begun for what turned out to be, in retrospect, dubious reasoning;
4. Exploding public deficit and burgeoning public debt;
5. Despite evidence of inflation, only limited movement on interest rates;
6. Stock market adrift after strong growth a half a decade earlier;
7. A Republican president in power - many who think got there through dubious (but different dubious) means.
It will be interesting to see if the parallels continue into the later part of this decade.
JW