In Defense of the ‘Zombie Economy’
About .com has a short two paragraph piece by Melissa Phipps entitled “A Zombie Economy?” questioning yesterday’s CNBC headline.
after reading it a couple of times I’m still trying to figure out what makes our economy zombie-like. It’s not a dead-economy walking. We’re still growing at a rate of about 2 percent. Not great, but still alive. Instead, our economy is more like a thing that moves reaaaaalllllly slowly, perhaps in circles, and it won’t listen if you try and reason with it. Or maybe it’s a zombie because it keeps going despite everything that’s trying to take it down: unemployment, troubles in Europe, consumer and employer confidence,
Phipps then encourages retirement planners who don’t think the economy is dead yet, to invest now and try to get a big upside “when the zombie comes back to life” or to even just let mutual funds do it for you.
She even has like a magical incantation: Dollar Cost Averaging”. Phipps links the phrase to another About.com article but Wikipedia says:
While some financial advisors such as Suze Orman claim that DCA reduces exposure to certain forms of financial risk associated with making a single large purchase, others such as Timothy Middleton claim DCA is nothing more than a marketing gimmick and not a sound investment strategy. Middleton claims that DCA is a way to gradually ease worried investors into a market, investing more over time than they might otherwise be willing to do all at once.
Sounds like a scheme to zombify unwitting investors to sending in monthly checks to fund the dying funds (that’s how Ponzi schemes work, right?) Meanwhile, Melissa Phipps claims to be a writer with 15 years experience, yet her twitter has never tweeted (I am now one of her three followers). So who’s the zombie now?
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