Monday, August 31, 2009

U3 and let 'em eat cake

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If Marie Antoinette were alive today, she'd be down with the U3 method of calculating unemployment. This method of calculation is cold-hearted, soulless and a downright infuriating insult to the American people. For it declares some of the worse off among us, those that have exhausted unemployment benefits and have given up looking as non-persons unceremoniously tossed out of numerator and denominator.


Perhaps economic calculations should indeed be soulless, but they shouldn't be Satanic, and the U3 calculation is.


It's simply a way to gin up a better looking number to report, by creating an ever-shrinking "eligible employment base," down to almost 59% of adults these days, from a high of 65% just a few years ago. This measure simply tosses those folks out of the base and recalculates. Poof - through modern day statistical witchcraft, hoards of our fellow Americans disappear. A potion no less offensive than that of the witches of Macbeth, whose brood called for "liver of blaspheming Jew."


By the end of 2009, 1.5 million Americans will be thus cooked out of the sauce. Look for some of theses government-declared non-people to be taking to the streets in food riots by Christmas.


Our government needs to stop hiding the truth in statistical chicanery. The closest measure we have to an apples-to-apples measure of comparison to the way we calculated unemployment during the Great Depression is the U6 method. The U6 method adds back in the discouraged lookers and those who have had to settle for crappy part-time work to put some food on the table. Even that measure does not adjust for the millions of people who are working but have had their hours and pay slashed, sometimes dramatically. By the U6 measure, unemployment isn't far from 18%, and is up in the low twenties in some cities. This is flirting with Great Depression territory, and our government and media needs to start being upfront about this. True, the U6 number is released every month, but it's the U3 that gets all the attention. A number that actually ticked down a tenth of a percent in July, even as 247,000 more Americans found themselves out of a job.


Let's start reporting honest numbers, using methods that would please a Teddy Roosevelt or Thomas Jefferson, and leave cold-hearted Marie, whose thoughtless inconsiderations have already been judged, to the ash heap of history where she belongs.

Saturday, August 29, 2009

McCain down the drain

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How often does one find himself critically positioned to effect history for the better? When the financial crisis exploded onto our attentions in 2008, John McCain was so positioned.

Hank Paulson wanted 700 billion dollars to prop up failure. To bailout the very bankster crooks who got us into this mess. All eyes were on McCain as he suspended his Sarah-rejuvenated campaign. Now was his chance to do the very kind of thing he had done throughout his career - take the maverick position against monumental waste and unfairness. Instead, he goes to Washington, sheepishly says "aye," and so co-opened the floodgates to Bailout Nation. As we began a course of not addressing the fundamental imbalances in the economy, but trying to ponzi scheme our way out of it. This time generational in scope - robbing future generations to prop up and bailout Modern Banking Nobility. Feudal lords of our land and coin, who through decades of psychological trickery have positioned their foot upon the American neck.

Not only was a "no" the right thing to do, but politically it would have been perfect. Who cares if a legacy-panicked George Bush was for it, W was a pimple in the polls anyway by that point. And Obama's whole campaign was about gluing Bush and McCain at the hip. And yet a McCain "no" would have left Barack Obama on the side of George Bush! Defending the absolutely indefensible. And Bailout Nation would then be Obama's albatross.

But at that critical juncture, when everyone was shell-shocked, looking for leadership, looking for someone to stand up and say "no way!" to the sick raping of the American people and lavish rewards to their rapists, and McCain was uniquely positioned to be that person, he tosses it all away. He had first and ten, and chose to punt! He had his chance to turn the tables on those money-changing rapscallions, and cast them clean out of our once sound Temple. Instead he invited them over for tea.

That was your chance Senator. Thanks for nothing, and enjoy Bailout Nation.

Thursday, August 27, 2009

Predictions 9/1/2009 - 3/1/2010

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I want to get these on the record now, calling them like I see them.

1. The American economy will recover nicely. The only problem though, is that the American economy is no longer here - we shipped it over to India and China. The fairytale fiasco we have left here will fall off a cliff. Bubble Blowing Ben Bernanke will ponzi around funny-money, keeping the GDP and markets puffed up for a bit, but the whole ponzinomics shell-game will fall on our heads. Look for a big stock market drop by mid-October and food riots by Christmas. Christmas sales will be the worst on record.

2. Very long, bitingly cold Winter in the East. At least 2 big Noreasters. This will make the swine flu particularly bad in the East. It will be bad nationwide, but nothing like 1918. Still, it will make the upcoming flu season about 3 times as deadly.

3. There will be no healthcare bill. We're due for a national "Oops" moment, when it falls on our heads that we're quarreling about healthcare with another Great Depression unfolding all around us. Healthcare will get put on hold.

4. The world will "decouple" from the US. A new world currency will be formed. The US, Britain will have a severe depression, Japan and Russia will a severe recession , Canada, Australia, Germany and France will have a medium-sized recessions, China and India will slow somewhat but maintain growth by expanding their domestic economies. The dollar will be in crisis, near worthless.

5. Widespread civil unrest will take place the second half of 2010 and accelerate in 2011, the next 6 months will lay the groundwork.

6. Look for a Republican "walkout" on Barack Obama at the Jan 20, 2010 State of the Union speech. This will be drummed up as racism by the media, and a cultural explosion will ensue.

Sunday, August 23, 2009

Of pubes and radio

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When I was 15ish, me and a friend would get stoned in this room off his bedroom called "The Studio." His dad owned an advertising agency, and the room was filled with cool surplus AV equipment.


On one such occasion, my friend brought the little rug that was in front of the desk, up on the desk and started inspecting it for pubes. He was in bliss, and it was a very funny occasion as he would pluck off pubes and separate them into little piles by name. There was the Linda pile, and the Denise pile, and I forget all who else pile. All the victims of his sexcapades since the last vacuuming were diagnosed and sorted. My friend preferred diversity, so there was a wide array of colors, lengths and thickness to aid the sorting process. Looking back now, it's a good thing for him that all his girlfriends weren't Chinese, or it would have been a very long afternoon, but I digress. But it was a funny thing for two stoned 15 year-olds to be doing.


Except deep down inside I was hurting. Because I had no rug with pubes. Well, my own. The dog's. And perhaps some renegade pube that blew in from another room, but that was about it. And I was embarrassed that this exercise in pube identification was the closest I had come to a real life pube other than the afore mentioned.


But this post is not about pubes, or my friend, or childhood wishes unfulfilled, or any of that, it's about me wanting to do a little night radio show. So far it seems like anything but that, but I'm getting there.


In my 20's I started getting a little bit of confidence, and the "I can do it too" thought started to crystallize within me. My niece was dating a very bight British engineer named Simon. I liked Simon, and we frequently chatted about events of the day whenever he'd visit with my niece at various occasions. But I found many of Simon's insights and opinion on certain subjects to be not as well-formed as my own. Around this time is when I started to grasp that engineers, mathematicians, chemists, you name it, don't have to be these "smart people" I need only gawk at, but I too could be one of those people. So I began school, and 6 years later (now near 30) I received my master's degree in mathematical statistics, a field I have now been working in for 16 years. So I did reach a point in life where I did not just have to live vicariously off of someone else's pubes, but started to get a few of my own.


Now I find myself at another "me too" moment in life. I'd really like to get my voice out there. I have a great gift of gab and grasp of issues that can stir people up in a conservative/populist kind of way. I'd love a little radio show, but radio is something only "other people" do.


But pubes and college degrees and careers were something that only "other people" did, yet over the years I've come to have my own fill of these things. With pubes I mean my own of course, but hey, a fill is a fill. But life keeps going, and after one meal we find ourselves hungry yet again.


And I know that if I step up to the plate, I can always be one of those "other people" myself. But part of me thinks radio might be a stretch too far, and doubt can be a killer. Is radio something I can really do, or is it just more of someone else's pubes? Is this whole quest a pube too far?


I need some inspiration. Perhaps I should call Simon, or maybe go back to The Studio and get stoned. Maybe there's even a time-forgotten fossilized pube or two still laying around to remind me from whence I came, and how far I've traveled.

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Oh Soviets, we hardly knew ye

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When they were called Mujahideen, we idolized and romanticised them. Rugged, well leathered Afghan resistance fighters, coming down from the mountains to bloody the Soviets, then like gear-laden-billy-goats they'd retreat back up the slopes into the mysterious tough-as-iron world from which they were forged

Heck, we even had America's #1 beefy-bone-head, Sylvester Stallone cast them as freedom-loving brave-hearts in the shamefully overlooked by the Academy masterpiece, Rambo III. But that these same Mujahideen would form the core of the Taliban, that they were Shariaists who represented a brutal shudder-inducing theocracy was something we absolutely did not know.

And shame on us for not knowing it. And we must never forget the lessons of not knowing it - that the world is full of ironies we don't understand. All we wanted, me too at the time, was for the Soviets to get bloodied. We couldn't see past the Cold War. So Carter started arming the Mujahideen and Reagan accelerated it. Then the world sat back aghast (and this even before 911) at what the Taliban actually were. We watched them blow up 1,500 tear-old carvings to Buddha, literally destroying irreplaceable national and world treasures because it supposedly went against their religious creeds. Women were not allowed to be educated and religious death squads were formed, enforcing Sharia law with an iron fist.

Now it wasn't the Taliban directly that perpetrated 911, but they welcomed Bin laden and his terrorist camps into the country with open arms. And we're left with the supreme irony that a Soviet-style Communist Afghanistan would have actually been more in our national interest than was the post-Soviet Taliban. One take-away from this is that we really don't always know what our national interest is at the time, although we think we do. Another is that we don't understand foreign people, their societal factions, their cultural and religious institutions and proclivities the way we think we do.

This lesson was solidified further in Iraq. Which, by the way, I actually thought we were going to just knock off Saddam Hussein and leave. Not caring what they did next, but just making it clear that governments who may do us harm will get harm done to them first. When it became clear we were actually going to stay to build a Jeffersonian democracy, then we began to understand what we didn't understand. For instance, there never was 1 Iraq, there were 3 Iraqs. The Kurdish north, Sunni center and Shiite south. Apparently, Saddam permitted opposition Shiite clerics to exist. I would have just though he would have had them all killed. But there they were, El-Sadr and the like. What a mess.

I'm tired of these parts of the world. We only need to do what we need to do, both home and abroad, to keep crazies from flying planes into buildings. Let's do no more, and never get caught not knowing what we don't know ever again.

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Turn down the noise, I can't hear myself implode!

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Imagine a room with 10 radios blaring, each tuned to a different station. If one station was more important than the others, you would need the extraneous stations tuned off so you could listen to the important one. When they're all playing, it's just gibberish.


Such is the state of our nation today, too many noisy and pointless programs playing all at once. All that matters is the economy. there is no recovery, and there are no green shoots.


The stock market has been puffed up by TARP funds the banks are laundering in through the back door. Money borrowed from future generations to cover bank losses, snuck into the market through the back door. This is Bernanke's Generational Ponzi Scheme - the idea was to recapitalize the banks, while a run-up in the market would induce media green-shoot-gasms that would seduce consumers into spreading wide their wallets.

Instead, the consumer is tapped out and didn't budge. The banks will be withdrawing from the market soon, parlaying 2 trillion into 3 trillion. The additional trillion plundered from your 401k contributions, as the system continues to siphon from the bottom and feed the gangsters at the top. And Don Bernanke sits in the big chair and is gets his ring kissed over the whole affair.


But by mid-October the market will be in free-fall. The commercial real estate, consumer debt, and bailout bubble that Bernanke blew up to hide the housing bubble will be popping in full force. Real unemployment will be near 20%, and though the news media will likely still be going over to Japan to import green shoots, the American people will be crushed.


This is the only radio station that should be playing. We'll never even get to healthcare. The economy will exploding before both Houses have a reconciled bill on the President's desk. And the nation will have one giant "Oops" moment, as we collectively realize that all this time we should have been talking about nothing else but the meltdown.


The idiotic channels that must be turned down so that we can hear ourselves implode are:


1. Healthcare, as mentioned.

2. The junk-science lunacy that is Global Warming.

3. The world ending in 2012.

4. The much ado over Obama's birth certificate.

5. Illegal immigration.

6. Antidepressants.

7. All things Karl Rove and Dick Cheney

8. All things GM

9. Every and all stories about Obama painted as The Joker.


I leave the door open for Swine Flu if it gets serious, Afghanistan and Gitmo. But only when our main station is in commercial.


Monday, August 17, 2009

Pac-President will gobble that co-op for breakfast

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The news media took a breather from finding green shoots in Japan today, to let us know that the Obama Administration would be willing to shift from a Public Option to a co-op on the upcoming healthcare legislation.


Everyone seemed to get briefly orgasmic over this new green shoot in the healthcare debate.


So let me see if I have this straight. Instead of a government option as a catch-all for the uninsured, we're going to take the uninsured - the homeless, the young adults, the unemployed - and have THEM administer their own co-op!


Isn't it obvious that this co-op would end up as a permanent ward of the government? And if it can't swim on it's own, do you think Obama would have any qualms about snatching it? If you do, I have 2 letters for you: G and M.


The chronically uninsured across America are not Dairy farmers in North Dakota, and Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) is smoking some of Bernanke's green shoots if he thinks a co-op administered by the uninsured, for the uninsured, has a prayer of working. It will be an endless drain on the government coffers, and Obama will gobble it up faster than Bill Clinton in his prime could do justice to a quarter-pounder.


Why isn't this thing passed by now? The Democrats have both houses, the White House, and 60 votes in the Senate. If they really had confidence in a plan that included the public option, and really were willing to take ownership of it, and thought it would work, they could pass it. Just go hard left in the House and push it through the Senate as a continuing resolution (only 50 votes required). If they really thought it would work, then why not take ownership? They don't need Republicans, Blue Dogs, or folks like Arlen Spectool who doesn't know who he is.

Sunday, August 16, 2009

What Solomon wanted

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I see this story on MSNBC that people are continuing in large numbers to go listen to the "prosperity gospel."

The answer to their idiocy is here:

In Gibeon the LORD appeared to Solomon in a dream by night: and God said, Ask what I shall give thee.

- 1 Kings 3:5

Give therefore thy servant an understanding heart to judge thy people, that I may discern between good and bad: for who is able to judge this thy so great a people?

- 1 Kings 3:9

But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.

- Matthew 6:33

Saturday, August 15, 2009

What we're not getting from the media, is killing us

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OK so imagine, it's 1985. The economy is going gangbusters. And Charles Kuralt of CBS News comes on the tube for one of his "human interest" stories.

He finds "Gus from Huston" living under a bridge. And in his sweet and wistfully somber tone, Charles tells us about old Gus. Playing his harmonica, collecting his bottles, passing the hot and humid Houston Summer days away, remembering the old days and thinking about what he could have become. Then, as we're all softly serenaded by Gus' bluesy harmonica, the piece ends with good ol' Gus slowly wheeling his shopping cart full of lost dreams away into the sunset.

Now back in '85, as a 22 year-old strong buck, enjoying the fruits America had to offer, I would think to myself. "How useless! America is going gangbuster boom, and leave it to the Liberals at CBS News to always find someone left out, and feature him in their human interest pieces." I was disgusted at how on one hand America was in Glorious Morning, and yet the media always insisted on making sure that, 10 times a day, we never forgot there was someone left behind.

But now I understand, that if nothing else, these pieces were importantly cathartic. We at least never forgot that there are so many flavors of people in this world. And not all were able to partake in our boom. Some didn't have the education, the background, or the wherewithal to join our party. While we boomed the good boom, some got left behind, and remembering them was indeed the Christian thing to do.

To be sure, the news media went overboard with it. Because Reagan was President, it got to the point where you'd think all of America was homeless. Stories about the newly discovered homeless were everywhere. Time, Newsweek, CNN, CBS, TV Guide, Modern Maturity, you name it. During the Reagan years, for every story about the boom that was lifting up 99% of us, there were 5 stories about the 1% of us that were not-so-lucky and left out. But at least our valves were depressurized. Those who felt the empathetic sting of their fellow citizens being left behind had an outlet. Times 10.

But now the pressure is building and it has nowhere to go. Seems these days everybody knows someone who has been unemployed for at least 6 months or more. Foreclosures are at record historic levels. Long-term unemployment is worse than at any time since the Great Depression. Personal bankruptcies are through the roof. People in huge numbers are under employed, forced to settle for meager, benefitless part-time work at record rates.

And yet we don't get a single human interest story to help us blow off steam, because Obama is President. The news media has their guy in, so everything must be "green shoots." And it's zapping the American Spirit. Nothing zaps the spirit more than to not be empathized with. Recently I saw a story that looked like it might be about displaced people during the housing crisis, but it was about this lady who found an unusual job "house-sitting" multi-million dollar homes so that they looked lived in. She gushed about how much she enjoyed that unusual lifestyle, and how it was a "hidden green shoot" that is only now gloriously possible because of the state of the economy.

The American people so desperately want their pain to be felt, but they can't have it felt because Barack Obama is President. Feeling their pain would mean that all is not well. All is not well could be interpreted as Barack Obama doing something wrong. And Barack Obama doing something wrong goes completely against the narrative that the news media has created. Barack Obama is our great savior, and the news media will not permit anything to go against that narrative.

And so this is creating pressure that is not being released. As what the American people feel and experience every day on the ground gets worse and worse, and the news media sticks to their guns and proclaims that things are getting better and better. Thousands upon endless thousands of human interest stories about evictions, destitution, increasing hunger, are out there and growing larger by the day. Never have we needed them told more than we do now. But we can't have them told, because Barack Obama is President.

The top is about to blow off.

Friday, August 14, 2009

That which does more, costs more

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For the last few years, we've been having a national freakout over the "rising cost" of healthcare.


And the underlying assumption, without even questioning it, has been that rising healthcare costs are a bad thing. But is that true?


Say for instance, in 1950, you were told you had leukemia. The treatment for it at that time would be to take 2 aspirin and go home and make out your will. Today, you'll get hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of treatment, and you have a good chance of living 5 or more years.


So when something goes up only with inflation, the cost is essentially static. So why would we expect the cost of leukemia treatment to remain static since 1950, when it does so much more for us now than it did then?


And everyone is carping over the fact that healthcare has risen to 16% of our economy. But it's just assumed this is a bad thing, but is it? Imagine if healthcare advances to the point where we all live to 200. This may involve not just hip replacement, but perhaps new organs grown in the lab, and a whole host of other advances. So what would be the problem, if by then, healthcare was 50% of the economy? It would be a bigger economy, since so many people would stay healthy for so much longer. Of course living to 200 would require medical equipment manufacturers, skilled doctors, pharmaceutical resources etc. and the jobs that come with it. It would be 50% of our economy, but that would be a good thing!


Healthcare has risen so much more than inflation, because it has delivered so much more to us, and continues to deliver at a rate that outpaces inflation. Two aspirin and a will requires fewer resources than years of lab tests, drug administrations, radiation treatments and the like. But our economy has grown over the years, and 16% of a larger economy with more people living longer and healthier should induce a hearty amen, not a national freakout.


So let it be 50% of an even larger economy with even more people living longer and healthier! Let it be 75% of our economy if we all live to 300!


Yes, we have some problems - fair access, pre-existing conditions, families in debt up to their eyeballs when dad gets sick, paperwork galore and many others. Admittedly we have some problems, and they are not easy. But we'll never get anywhere if we can't sort out what shouldn't happen from what is natural to happen. And it's just accepted as axiom that rising healthcare costs is a bad thing, when rising healthcare costs is literally no more than the natural by-product of healthcare doing more and more to service an increasingly older and healthier population.


Meanwhile we have the 500 pound gorillas of the economy and terrorism waiting to throw us around the room like a piece of Samsonite, and Obama is not hosting a single town hall about those issues. Our leadership is blind, and we're following it, with our newly replaced hips, right into a ditch.

Thursday, August 13, 2009

Colonel Obama, you look marvelous in those Gucci sunglasses!

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Took me a while to figure out how to understand the man. I puzzled on it for a couple months, then it all came clear. Barack Obama is a Thirdworldist. And when I learned to shine his light through that prism, I found I can split his colors in a way that never fails me.

The man strives to foist on us as much of the Third World as he can get away with. And when I started picturing a tackily over-decorated colonel in mirrored sunglasses, heading a Latin American junta, the real Barack Obama tuned in with complete clarity.

A Latin American Colonel in Mirrored Sunglasses will want to:

1. Do everything possible to make criminals out of the last leadership, while publicly saying it ain't so. Come as close as possible to hauling the previous government in front show tribunals. When this cannot be done physically, then at least cement them as criminals in the tribunals of our minds. The point being, Third World Colonels in Mirrored Sunglasses must always live in a perpetual state of reminding the people that outlaws populated the last regime. This must be said again and again, so many times, that the public (at least in the Colonel's mind) will thank their lucky stars that finally they have a moral, ethical and spiritual super-being occupying the Office of El Presidente.

2. Work to make the United States just another nation, continually floundering around in search of an identity. One that needs to shut it's mouth and hear from all the poor peoples it has oppressed over the ages. Open mouth only to apologize, the age of speaking is over.

3. Do everything possible to debase the US currency. Equalize everyone by making the cash of the rich worthless, and everybody else's along with it. The more worthless the cash, the more important the Colonel.

4. Make at least 20% of the nation unemployed. The nation must muddle through the muck of stifling, nutty and arbitrary regulations administrated by an army of bureaucrats reporting up to El Presidente.

5. Have a squad of brownshirts working the streets. These thugs, disguised as democratists and get-out-the-voters, are really there to make sure all ground operations go to the Colonel's liking, and that the public understands that the Colonel has lots of boots on the ground.

6. Perpetually gin up a crisis such that right now is the only opportunity there will ever be to act. Whatever the emergency measure, don't sweat the details - you must put aside all doubt and trust the Colonel.

7. Have a state run press that under all circumstances continually drumbeats about how things are getting "better and better." Whole new definitions of "good" and "progress" must be conjured. The main mission of this press is to hypnotize the people into supplanting what they see and experience in their everyday lives with the happy-smiley-truth that the Colonel supplies.

And yes, the Colonel is stylish. He always looks fabulous in those Guccis. You can't afford a pair, but down the street there are some Chinese knock-offs that you may be able to get your hands on for a few Canadian tourist dollars and a couple gasoline ration coupons.

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

If California fell into the ocean

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If California fell into the ocean, it would cause the national unemployment rate to go down, since California's unemployment is higher than the national average.

The AP would immediately report this as a green shoot. Proof that the Stimulus is working.

What I should have told Mom

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"There is a silver lining to this report card Mom. Most of my grades were better than expected. I'm continuing to flunk trig, but at a slower rate. My bad grades are starting to bottom out. Most teachers surveyed think I'll do better next semester."

Bubble Blowing Ponzi Schemers

The position of Chairman of the Federal Reserve does not violate the letter of the Constitution. But no position in the history of this country has ever done more harm to the Spirit of the Constitution.

One unelected person, with the single-handed ability to sink this country.

Alan Greenspan was fawned over by the financial elite as some sort of subtle sage. When he was never anything more than a fork-tonged rascal. And this rascal shrimp just about sunk us. One man, bending over backwards to insure that the economy blew up a housing and credit bubble so large, that when it burst the shock wave shattered our collective spleens. And now we're reaping the karmic benefits of years of idolatry heaped upon this little rascal, a man who not enough bad things can be said about. Whole websites are devoted to exposing the damage that man caused, and except for the ones that are anti Semitic hate sites - Peace be upon them.

And his successor, Bubble Blowing Ben Bernanke is just as bad. A man engineering a Generational Ponzi Scheme with the markets. Borrowing trillions from future generations in the form of TARP, so that with a wink and a nod, the banks are now laundering that TARP money into the markets through the back door.

The cabal is completed by the media elite, who have masturbated themselves into multiple green-shoot-gasms over it all, hoping to similarly arouse the public.

But the way it's going to explode again isn't even funny. And now, every left-leaning economist, and not a one predicted the bubble bursting to begin with, is saying the recession is over. When in fact it might be, but only because the depression is beginning. They were all wrong then, and they're all wrong now.

After the mess, after the coming food riots (which should begin around Christmas), after the people take to the streets and this crew in Washington has to be disassembled by the American people's bare hands - after all that, we can not allow this position of Chairman of the Federal Reserve to exist. Interest rates will have to be calculated by some formula that takes into account money supply, inflation, GDP, some sort of scientific guesstimate on what the correct rate should be. We need to take it out of the hands of these "subtle geniuses," and get these subtle geniuses forever out of our face. Because they are not geniuses at all, they are some of the most dangerous and damaging people this country has ever seen.

Monday, August 10, 2009

Scared little boys in expensive suits

Why can't we get a number anymore? Just a simple, straightforward, friggin number.

So someone asks you, "What percentage of your money is disposable income?" And you go through the calculations. You know you have about $1,000 in total, but $900 is obligated, so you calculate that $100/$1,000 = 10% of your money is disposable income.

But then you say, "Wait, I owe $75 to Chuck, but I don't really have to pay him until next month." So you decide to do something sneaky - instead of shifting that $75 over to disposable income, you remove it from the denominator.

So now your disposable income in terms of percentage magically grows to $100/$925 = 10.8%. You just grew your percent disposable income by dropping out the $75 you owe to Chuck.

The Labor Bureau reported that we lost yet another big chunk of jobs in July - 247,000 of them. Less people working. But the unemployment rate went down! Why? Because like your Chuck Shenanigans, they tinkered with the denominator. They "dropped out" hundreds of thousands of people who have had their unemployment insurance run out, and are so discouraged they stopped looking for work. That's how they did it! They changed the labor base. And the news media starts jumping up and down going "green shoots green shoots!"

But think about this just for a second. This green shoot was reliant on despair! It literally required the destitution and despair of hundreds of thousand of people for this "green shoot" to pop up. What kind of a green shoot is that!

But this is where we are these days. We can't get a simple, honest, straightforward number anymore from our government. Then after this green-shoot-of-despair, the stock market rallies on the "good news!" But (see my post of Aug 9) the market is a ponzi scheme, being fueled by TARP funds the banks are laundering in through the back door. So we have a not-real market going up on not-real good news.

So who will get the bill when this next bubble bursts? You will, you and your children. But what will land down on your head will be so much more than government and Wall Street debt, it will be Government and Wall Street Shame. The absolute shameful behavior of not being able to tell the truth. So afraid they are of losing their positions and their power and their authority, as if they're going to live forever.

There comes a time when citizens take to the streets and tear down governments and institutions with their bare hands. Are we there yet? Not yet, I don't think. History books tell us that the people revolt when they are not fed bread. I suspect it's more likely that they were sick of being fed lies.

And lies and more lies are what we are getting, dished up cold, by scared little boys in expensive suits.

Sunday, August 9, 2009

America: We wanted a new drug, and we found it!

Flat screen TVs are the cocaine, China is the supplier and Walmart is the pusher.

If we start with the premise that every "real penny" in the economy theoretically traces itself back to some piece of production, then it is not rocket science to figure out that the producers will have all the real pennies. Manufacture a penny out of thin air, tracing itself back to only air, and that penny will become as useless as a Zimbabwean nickel.

And so we have the unholiest and unhealthiest alliance between two nations that we've seen since Hitler and Mussolini exchanged glow in the dark friendship rings.

Over the last decade, China produced like mad but it's citizens socked away 30% in savings. The US consumed like mad, socking away 0%. China is awash with real pennies. Like a good supplier, they then lent those pennies back to the hapless addicts. The addicts, having addictive personalities to begin with, then had a field day. Remember, these are real pennies, not fake pennies, so the addicts can essentially give them away for a time, and still have low interest rates and a decent valuation.

But the pennies have nowhere to go after a while, and sooner or later this structural imbalance must create a bubble in something. But what? Tulips? No, we already had the Great Tulip Crash of 1634 so we can't repeat that one:

http://www.investopedia.com/features/crashes/crashes2.asp

Always disheartening to find out your crash has been taken. So, what new to crash? Hey .. how about a stock bubble! No, we already did that one idiot, several times!

Then the addicts, always in search of a new high, get a brilliant idea. Somewhere around year 2000 one very smart Ivy League educated addict blurts "Hey .. how about houses .. they've pretty much went up only with inflation since 1950 .. let's start having them go up 3, 4, 5 times faster than inflation .. and let's give mortgages to everyone .. in fact let's insure through regulation that this happens .. and then we can use the houses as ATM machines dispensing Chinese pennies!"

And so the addicts are off to the races. Loading their Chinese financed houses with Chinese made flat screen TVs.

And so now that the addicts have gone bust, what are the flabbergasted Chinese suppliers going to do? They could stop lending us real pennies, but then the addicts will start manufacturing fake pennies out of thin air, and Chinese debt will become worthless, as their real pennies would be indistinguishable from the fake.

Will they even try this "tough love?" That assumes they even love us to begin with, generally speaking the drug supplier has little love for his customers. The solution would be for China to start consuming it's own goods. Each nation should save at 10%, the rest should be consumption. Had we done this, Alan Greenspan, the former Keeper of The Cost of Chinese Pennies would not have been able to shower them all over us so cheaply.

Next time, let's just exchange rings.

Stock market run-up is a Generational Ponzi Scheme


When will we get honest, when will we get real? Why do we let them do this to us?


This latest market run-up is not being driven by real productivity, it's being driven by trillions of dollars in TARP funds being pushed into the market (on Bernanke-greased-skids) through the back door. But TARP funds are borrowed.


What they want you to say is "Oh that Bernanke, he really fixed things, that Obama, he's really making things better." Now, do you have a child? Are you happy the market has gone up of late? Well, take a good look at that child - because he is paying for it. All they've done is borrowed trillions from the Chinese, shoved that over to the banks, and now the banks are laundering it into the markets. And now they want you to jump up and down yelling "green shoots!" But it's a ponzi scheme. The market run-up is fueled by debt!


Debt your kids are on the hook for. To prop up banks that should have failed, and to opiate you into thinking all is well. Everything we're getting these days from the government and Wall Street is gimmickry. This whole "Q2 Earnings Better Than Expected" rally we just saw is a sham. Revenues across the board to the Fortune 500 are in the drink. So all they did was throw so many people out onto the streets, cut so many costs, that they made their earnings look better on paper - by shrinking!


More opium for you. Are you feeling good yet?


I need to use an analogy here - and I apologize to any 700 pounders I may offend, but I need to borrow your fatness for a minute to make a point. Imagine someone who has a job, and has spent all their money eating themselves into 700 pounds. Now, that person loses his job. So a group of strategists meet in the den to figure out a strategy for him. Instead of prescribing a diet, to bring food consumption in line with new income, and make the man healthier to boot, they decide to go out and borrow several year's worth of food budget and continue to prop up the same old eating habits.


A simple analogy? Maybe, but this is exactly what the clowns at the Federal Reserve have done. They went out and borrowed or printed a mountain of cash to keep the 700 pounder at maximin weight. So now a heart attack or stroke looms even larger. The Financial Heart Attack we're now due is tremendous. This is just another money transfer scheme. After all this, after all we've suffered, you'd think that money transfer schemes are the last thing your government would be doing to you. No, they are the first thing your government is doing to you!