Tricky Dick

Elon Musk - "megalomanical promoter". Ben Bernake - "befuddled academic". Janet Yellen - "career policy apparatchik". Paul Krugman - "fibber". Fred Mishkin - "preposterous".

Doug Casey often gets letters from angry readers who accuse him of hating America, disloyalty, and perhaps even treason. The truth is that he loves the idea that was America. It's the United State it has become for which he has nothing but contempt. Where to begin? ...the US Constitution was essentially a coup; the delegates to what we now call the Constitutional Convention were not empowered to replace the existing government – only to improve upon the Articles of Confederation between the then-independent states. The framers of the Constitution drafted it with the notion of a national government already in place, but calmed fears of loss of state sovereignty by calling the new government the "United States of America" – a verbal sleight of hand that worked for over half a century. Then the southern states decided to exercise what these words imply, their right to leave the union... and as the government becomes more powerful, it's completely predictable that everything – including the justice system – will become ever more politicized... As great as a US citizen's risk is in the marketplace these days, the greatest single risk to their wealth and health is the government.

Putting our trust and faith in a few unelected bureaucrats and bankers, who use their obscene wealth to buy off politicians in writing the laws and regulations to favor them has proven to be a death knell for our country. The captured main stream media proclaims these men to be heroes and saviors of the world, when they are truly the villains in this episode. These are the men who unleashed the frenzy of Wall Street greed and pillaging by repealing Glass Steagall, blocking Brooksley Born’s efforts to regulate derivatives, encouraging mortgage fraud, not enforcing existing regulations, and creating speculative bubbles through excessively low interest rates and making it known they would bailout recklessness. They have created an overly complex tangled financial system so they could peddle propaganda to the math challenged American public without fear of being caught in their web of lies. Big government, big banks and big legislation like Dodd/Frank and Obamacare are designed to benefit the few at the expense of the many. The system has been captured by a plutocracy of self-serving men. They don’t care about you or your children. We are only given 80 years, or so, on this earth and our purpose should be to sustain our economic and political system in a balanced way, so our children and their children have a chance at a decent life. Do you trust that is the purpose of those in power today? Should we trust the jackals and grifters who got us into this mess, to get us out?   

The United States of America (and the rest of the world for that matter) has not fundamentally grown much at all over the last 40 years. We have instead replaced fundamental growth with the illusion of growth brought on by constantly increasing the monetary supply, aka, inflation. But like any good Ponzi scheme, even this one has a limit and investors briefly approached it in 2008.  When it looked like our global banking system was going to collapse, investors started dumping everything in site, essentially a de facto rejection of dollar based assets.  Alas, this terrible 'fiat' system is finally coming to its' inevitable end.  And good riddance at that. The death of fiat money will be the best thing to happen to human freedom and liberty in over 100 years.  However, you must realize that the deflation associated with the collapse of the dollar-based fiat monetary system will wipe out decades worth of false asset price growth in a very short time.  Think days or months.

This is certifiably one of those days when the insanity refuses to end. The latest laugh out loud episode come from the lunatic who has outstayed his "analytic" welcome by about 2 years following his Buy recommendation on a soon to be bankrupt Lehman Brothers (sorry Dick, nobody will ever let it go): The Rochdale analyst, continues to reprise the role of the evil grandpa-in-law who just. refuses. to. leave. even though it is about 12 hours past his credibility-time, now sees Bank of America as worth $21 in bankruptcy. You really can't make this shit up. To wit: from a very funny Dick: "In death, this company would be worth 91% more than it is worth in life." You may laugh now.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRzr1QU6K1o&hl=en&fs=1]

Weekend humor