Saturday, November 07, 2009

When Financial Chickens come home to roost

Takuan Seiyo has a long rant.
[...] The Nobel-laureate in economics Gary Becker linked the financial travails of Argentina in the mid-1990s to government spending at more than 30% of GDP. The Swiss economist Peter Bernholz has linked hyperinflation triggers to government deficits exceeding 40% of expenditures. But government spending in Obamerica is 45% of GDP, and its deficit stands at 43.3%. Peronism has acquired a permanent perch in Washington, DC.

But there is more. In a long chain of catastrophic errors and intentional malpractice since the days of Lyndon Johnson, America’s ruling elite of both parties has run up an unpayable debt to its own retirees, to its bondholders, its foreign creditors. Having designed to turn the country into a banana republic demographically, the Club of Crooks and Loons has turned it into a banana republic fiscally too.

[...]

A freefalling dollar cannot help by increasing exports, when you have off-shored your manufacturing, and your main industries are predatory lawsuits, selling shoddy American housing to Salvadorians with faked mortgages, and marketing financial weapons of mass destruction worldwide. And a falling dollar is not a good inducement for the world to keep buying dollar-denominated U.S. debt. The cessation of that buying has such dire consequences to the United States that Chinese strategists have named them “the nuclear option.”

The American people can’t do anything about it either, except mailing tea bags to the crooks and loons who govern them. Their only electoral choice is between the party of demented progressives, and the party of progressive dementia.

[...]

We are ruled by lying clowns, forever trying to postpone the moment of truth. To the next election cycle, next government, next century. They have been destroying the West year by year for 55 years now by mismanaging government finances in order to bribe voters or to buy feel-good, do-good euphoria for their Body Snatcher vanguard. As the deficits grow, productive citizens are taxed up to double the 1/3 ratio of medieval serfs, more money printing and government borrowing is necessary, the value of money erodes and moral hazard gnaws at the foundation.

The government then cooks up “solutions” to the problems it created in the first place through its overspending, incompetence or corruption. The “solutions” camouflage the damage for a while longer and prolong the comforting illusion, just like the frantic “stimulus” to stave off a corrective deflationary depression now -- at a cost of devaluation or hyperinflation later. The “solutions” are often written up in 2000-page bills that nobody reads until their rot crawls out in litigation and 15-figure costs overruns years later.

All such “solutions” just multiply the damage and roll it forward so that the “crack-up boom” (4) boom now but crack up in the future, on somebody else’s watch.

But the future has arrived. It’s piled up all around us in heaps of diversity-enriching primitives from failed cultures bearing European and American passports, or silos full of mad mullahs and NorKor nightmare leprechauns thumbing their noses at the white castrati. It’s in the 24/7 stream of rotten mass culture that the harlots of Nineveh might envy, and in mountains of unnecessary junk purchased with nonexistent money. It’s in the giant vaults full of flimsy dollars worth 2% of their value in 1913, bloated deficits of generations of venal politicians raining borrowed currency onto client voters, and enormous industrial landscapes in China pumping out products that the now-crazed West once made at home and better.

The future is here. It can no longer be rolled over but maybe for a year with respect to Iran, three years with respect to hyperinflation, fifteen years with respect to the reconquest of the West by Muhammad and Montezuma. A delay just long enough for the misruling clowns to cash in their Goldman Sachs stock options, pass veto-proof immunity laws, declare national emergencies, and build for themselves impenetrable bunkers with landing strips in Andorra or Aruba.

[...]

The collapse is by no means over. The Bank for International Settlements estimates the banksters’ total derivative losses at $4.1 trillion. But this is, as such things always are, just a calming nostrum for frayed nerves. In case of a Black Swan event, which such estimates never take under consideration, the $4.1 trillion figure is probably too optimistic by a good-sized fraction of a quadrillion. But what’s a quadrillion or two between friends.

People forget that Adam Smith was not an economist but a moral philosopher. Before he wrote The Wealth of Nations, he had written The Theory of Moral Sentiments. The free market is no place for cutthroats and purse snatchers. [...]

There is a lot more, more financial stuff with links and footnotes... but it's long and rambling, and interspersed with rants about other things.


Related Links:

Has US Currency already "collapsed"?

The euro and the yen have surpassed the dollar as the favored currency by central banks

The Argentina example: are we heading there?

Utopian Socialism and the damage it inflicts

     

No comments: