One thing we know for certain - as soon as this shit show melts down under the weight of its own greed and corruption, the buffoons in leadership will come rushing in to find the fastest and easiest way to patch this collapsed ponzi back together, to get back to the status quo by whatever means possible...
Oh wait - that was 2008, and this is 2013...
So first they will have to deal with the mob amassing at their doorstep, enraged at the leadership buffoons for having done nothing in the interim to reduce risks and hold Wall Street accountable. These thought "dealers" running this fiasco will have to also atone for the fact that since 2008, their wealth and incomes have improved, while the wealth, incomes and job prospects of the majority have steadily deteriorated. But those at the top would have no knowledge about that bifurcation, since they control the medium and hence they control the message. Anyone, regardless of credentials, who says with a straight face that this strategy of artificially inflating asset prices using newly printed money won't create an even larger collapse than the one in 2008 - is lying. This "strategy" is unprecedented. Even Bernanke admitted it could have "unintended consequences". Worse yet, the people most likely to know where this could lead, are those at the top of the pyramid, who have a vested interest in propagating the status quo as long as possible. Which is just a long way of saying that the vast majority of financial commentators at this moment are outright delusional. Even those who wrote books about and otherwise predicted the events of 2008 are too bought in to the current world order to consider a final collapse of the global Ponzi.
Another One For the History Books
Another One For the History Books
Getting back to the point of this blog post, the people at the top of this fantasy pyramid have abdicated all responsibility and accountability for their country and have now turned the political system into a totally dysfunctional zero sum game of brinkmanship. Historians will debate the exact moment when taking the easiest path possible became the overriding order of the day; however, 40 years ago when organic U.S. growth came to a screeching halt due to rising foreign competition, is the most likely point of origin. Nixon took the U.S. off of the gold standard at around that same time, which paved the way for history's largest monetary expansion, without comparison. Then, Reagan and the Neocons came along in the '80s, bringing Supply Side Economics - the retarded delusion that lowering tax rates won't cause massive deficits. When Reagan took office the U.S. debt was $1 trillion. A decade later it was $3 trillion. So George Bush Senior was right when he called Supply Side Economics "Voodoo Economics", however that didn't stop his own son from using it as an excuse to bankrupt the country. The Social Security and Medicare funding debate also began in that Reagan era as well. At that time, those programs were in surplus because the Baby Boomers were in peak employment. So the politicians in the '80s said the surplus was a "rainy day fund". And of course, soon it was "raining" every day. That morally bankrupt farce led to the next bigger farce which was including Social Security and Medicare tax flows in general revenues and pretending that the budget was 'balanced'. That chicanery started in the '90s during Clinton's Administration. You get the idea - this trend towards abdicating responsibility has been going on for quite some time, leading to the current era in which society and politics have devolved into an infantile state in which plundering the children and grandchildren is only a question of how many generations down the line to bankrupt.
And don't get me started on the outsourcing binge - handing jobs and entire industries to other countries. Suffice to say, this entire asinine talk of a 47% is a false dichotomy. These "47%" are the people Romney labelled as the net takers from the system, despite the fact that the U.S. social safety net is the least generous of any developed nation. The fact is that there has always been forced responsibility and accountability at the bottom of the pyramid. That's what poverty does - it forces people to live within their means, or perish. The false dichotomy results from the fact that many who now still have jobs and deride the 47% as takers, see no connection between their own actions that contributed to the laying off of these 47%, nor do they realize they could very well end up a part of the "67%" on the way to the "87%". The fact is, that the lack of accountability and responsibility grows commensurately towards the top of the pyramid, where the robber barons of today have abdicated all responsibility for their country or anyone else except themselves. They have no sense of "noblesse oblige", to leave their country in a better state than they found it. Quite the opposite, today's Plutocratic Romney class have no intention to improve their country, because they made their wealth by liquidating the assets that prior generations going back to 1776, had built.
So, I am not interested in all of the books and bullshit that will emanate from this next inevitable collapse, telling us yet more phony, second derivative reasons for why the "system" failed. You know the ones - "if only we hadn't changed these few banking regulations none of this would have ever happened"...The reality is that this has all been strictly about a lack of responsibility and accountability on the part of the people who gained the most from this pyramid scheme, euphemistically known as "the economy".
It's a cautionary tale of what happens when greed is taken to its ultimate self-cannibalizing extreme.
End of book.
