It would improve faster if your bosses would engage in QE3 and started to inflate the economy. [Edit: that's an attack on the Board of Governors, certainly not you.]
Well, they're not my bosses anymore. I'm moving into software and applied stats now. :)
I'm torn about QE3. There's little evidence that businesses are waiting on it specifically to make capital expenditure decisions; it seems, from reading the Beige Book and other anecdotes that companies might be waiting for the other shoe to drop. QE3 would just adjust the shoe on the foot a bit.
Well, we could start charging the banks for carrying excess capital. I know, I know, everyone will start screaming about crappy balance sheets and all, but they're just sitting on boatloads of cash.
The problem isn't cash, its capital goods, and flooding the system with cash will just cause damage to companies who are to small to move fast enough to acquire large amounts of the flood.
Whatever its actual economic merit it seems obvious that there will be another QE3 as soon as the derivatives and bad loans still in play cause another liquidity crisis. My personal investment strategy is exactly in line with what you describe businesses doing: stay out of the market until there's another crunch which looks severe enough that the USG will feel forced to intervene. (And stay out of USD in the meantime.)
