We’re in the Charles de Gaulle airport, in Paris, en route to the USA.

Not much to report anyway…at least not to you, dear reader. The Dow went down 119 points yesterday. Gold lost 2 bucks.

Nothing revelatory…no burning bushes…no booming voices from the heavens.

But, the rest of the world is waking up to what you’ve known for years.

Here’s the headline in The Financial Times today:

Hopes for global recovery take a hit

Yes, the world’s financial elite still believe in the recession/recovery concept. What a pity it never seems to work out. The report continues:

The global manufacturing recovery appear[s] to have come to a grinding halt in August, activity surveys suggested on Thursday, undermining hopes of a vigorous economic recovery in the second half of the year.

And what’s this? Martin Wolf, chief economist at the FT, has finally realized…

This is no normal recession.

Of course, Dear Readers, have known that for years. Now, after trillions spent trying to treat it as though it were a typical post-war recession, leading economists are finally noticing the obvious. All that spending has stimulated nothing but larger debts:

In the US, unemployment is still double pre-crisis levels…

But neither Mr. Wolf nor Mr. Bernanke are ready to give up. Nor are any of the other misters who are in position to manipulate the system…influence it…or steal from it.

Mr. Wolf promises to give us his ‘fix it’ solutions in next week’s newspaper column. He hints that the US government should…surprise!…spend more money.

Either he has learned nothing. Or we haven’t. He still believes that the challenge is basically a matter of repairing the economy…fixing it…so that it works like he thinks it should. What does that mean? How many people should have jobs? How fast should GDP grow? What should be the interest rates charged by lenders?

Ask him!

Dear readers see the absurdity of this immediately. In the minds of the meddlers, an economy should work as they command. It has no natural state…no normal functioning…no purposes to which they aren’t privy.

In short, the economy should do as it is told!

How will this command economy thing work out? Stay tuned.

Bill Bonner is the President of Agora Publishing. For more on Bill Bonner, visit The Daily Reckoning.