To what extent do our leaders realize how bad things are?

Yeah, Bernanke and Co. get up there on their soap boxes and make murmering, reasuring sounds...the Ministry of Propaganda (i.e., the mass media) talks of "bottoming out," "turning a corner," and "green shoots." Fortune 500 CEOs and their bought-and-paid-for Senators tell us everything's going to be allright, just hang on tight a little while longer and soon it will be granite-countertop-and-Coldstone-Creamery time again.

Most of us at ATS and on the "alternative web" know this isn't true, of course, and more and more people in the "real world" are waking up too. The question is, what do our LEADERS know?

I know part of their job is to reasuure and talk up the markets and the economy. But deep down inside or at "closed session" events I bet the rhetoric is far more heated and terrifying. Or do these guys simply have a coolaide IV and jsut drift blissfully from one mahogany podium to the next telling the world everything's cool, calm, and mellow?

[edit on 7/30/09 by silent thunder]