blog.arithm

Literally.

More interesting diagrams at geke.us.

Excellent.

Though I do find it interesting that many folks continue to insist on referring to the Obama administration as “failed”. The appropriate term, as has been apparent for the last year at least, should probably be “complicit”.

Quick vid of more folks getting ready for a Brave New America.

Fucking bingo. The Bought Congress, and the enabling Bought Supreme Court, have got to go.

And of course Ratigan seems to not see the whole Bought President problem.

First, some background music for your listening pleasure.

So Moody’s has downgraded U.S. debt. Of course, as Peter Schiff points out, this is probably only because they boxed themselves in via previous statements. Other ratings agencies are still mum, although that’s certain to change in the very near future.

At any rate, this particular signpost on the road to economic hell is, in my opinion, pretty clear. Inflation Ahead. The recent debt ceiling increase (charade that it was) brought no meaningful cuts. Instead, Tea Party resistance, blown up to crisis status by rank-and-file Republicrats, resulted in entitlement armageddon fear mongering — with virtually no discussion of reigning in out-of-control empire-ism — and was ultimately leveraged to introduce a dangerous precedent in the form of “Super Congress”.

Although austerity is threatened when expedient, Congress has no real political stomach for budgetary restraint and therefore will continue spending until the dollar ponzi collapses. Some argue that this was the intent all along. True or not, Super Congress makes it even easier to quickly bypass resistance and continue the charade.

When it becomes clear to all that ongoing Federal Reserve clownsmanship is ravaging the value of the dollar, we will be faced with some kind of collapse. This will most likely come in the form of global hyperinflationary panic as investors and, well.. everyone, try to buy anything and everything that stand a chance of preserving value. If this happens, the U.S. could experience social unrest similar to that endured by Argentina in the late ’90s. (Again, Super Congress could play a role here quickly rubber stamping draconian laws in attempt at population control.) The value of physical metals against national currencies will skyrocket.

I am now thoroughly convinced that precious metals are one of the few assets classes that will be remain buoyant when the gathering debt tsunami finally swamps global economies. And while I hope I am wrong, to friends of this blog: I urge you to prepare. Get physical. Investment in a small cache of precious metals, gold and silver, could be a real lifesaver in the event of a widespread paper asset meltburndown.

I’m sure Olivia Newton-John would agree.

And, by the way, since the big banks don’t have to pay for their debts, why should the little guy?

I don’t like to post VisionVictory’s stuff because of his (former?) association with Jonathan Lebed, but this is worth a watch.

As I alluded last December, things are starting to heat up.  Or maybe melt up. Either way, it’s time for a rant.

When I started looking into the whole Colonel-Klink-Says-All-Your-Bank-Belong-To-Us thing back in 2008, I don’t think I expected that I would ever get to a point where this stuff would make sense to me. And yet here we are, 2011, and a mere moment of WTF has blossomed into a daily obsession.  Gold, inflation, and unemployment are up. Way up.  The dollar is going down, possibly for the count.  So, in some very broad and potentially dyslexic brush strokes, here is my tinfoil hat outline of what I think got us here.

Our current version of the crises began back in 2007, just as the U.S. real estate market was beginning to dip.  This dip occurred after years of the dipshit Bush administration pushing for a so-called “ownership society,” essentially encouraging a fraudulent mortgage market, because, like, who in their right mind would believe that real estate could ever lose value? Right?  But really the whole ownership society nonsense was undertaken simply as a way to promote a housing bubble as well as to prop-up the feel-good illusion of wealth (along with Larry Summers’ career).  The housing bubble was originally inflated by Maestro Greenspan so that we wouldn’t have to feel the post-bubble hangover of the Dot Com years.  Aaand the slow motion Dot Com train wreck was the result of irrational exuberance generated by the sudden and untapped ability of entrepreneurs to sell, for example, designer pet condoms to anyone in the world day or night… all thanks to wonders introduced by Dr. Al Gore and his newfangled informational superhighway.

The problem with where we are now is that some quasi-corporate-governmental entities, by which I specifically mean Colonel Paulson and his goddamn pet vampire squid at America Inc., had invented a way to proffer “ownership” on the cheap, to anyone, no questions asked.  Sort of like the American Dream meets American Idol with only one judge, Paula Abdul, telling everyone they’re beautiful and, oh, by the way, here’s a freaking house.  Not surprisingly, people believed they were beautiful.  And they took the freaking houses.  And suddenly everyone was getting rich and unicorns were flying through the skies shooting adjustable rate rainbow happiness from their butts.

This is how the market came to be flooded with Frankensteinian credit default swaps:  Bad mortgages sliced, diced, mislabeled, and bandied around the financial world as prime chuck happy unicorn meat.

Anyway, back to 2007.  After almost a decade of real estate spiking at around 20% annual growth, suddenly the market begins to implode, rates go up, and many folks can’t repay their loans.  Soon it becomes apparent that the prime chuck was subprime after all.  Lehman Brothers fails.  And then Bear Stearns is about to go under.  And then the government steps in making a big fuss about AIG also being in trouble and the fact that, Holy Mother of God, global businesses need their insurance so we’ve got to make sure that AIG is stable and oh by the way JP Morgan is going to acquire Bear Stearns so don’t worry about that cause we fixed it ‘k thanks bai.

Fast forward to “The Year of Recovery” 2010.  Ben “The” Bernanke makes a number of somber appearances and talks about how he is 100% sure that he can “fix” the economy.  Most Americans, however, slowly become aware that the U.S. government is going to do it’s damnedest to simply print it’s way out of the mess.  The Obama administration obliges by pushing the deficit towards critical mass, in part by transferring a ridiculous amount of wealth to — what’s this? — the insurance industry.

At this point, one would think the American government had paid for enough insurance to protect us from catastrophic economic collapse.

But massive inflation is an elegant solution in it’s own sinister way:  If the U.S. can devalue it’s currency just enough… then it’s real debts become manageable, imports become expensive, Americans start consuming at home, a domestic recovery begins (well, maybe) and the rest of the world gets stiffed with a devalued reserve currency. If the U.S. can somehow hang on to reserve currency status during all of this, problem solved.

Or, maybe, problem transferred. Again. For now the real problem is that the US is not just upchucking greenbacks off in a corner of rural America somewhere; in reality it’s rampaging around projectile inflating all over the entire fricking world. Trillions of virtual Reserve dollars leaked into global commodities pushing up prices and edging entire nations into poverty.

So by unleashing a tsunami of “credit,” the Fed is damning the world to guns for want of butter.

And why? Because the “Too Big To Fails” have already failed.

Five banks account for 95% of the unicorn meat. The same organizations that logged record bonuses in the wake of the TARP hold up.

Notice that guy at the front of the cart? JP Morgan. The one holding the biggest sack of sub prime. The one who quietly acquired Bear Stearns. It’s clear now that JP Morgan, and Bear Stearns before it, has been manipulating the price of precious metals for decades; in part, most likely, to prop up the dollar. If Bear Stearns were out-and-out allowed to fail, the jig could have been up in 2008.

But it wasn’t up, and in 2011 we’re still jigged. So for now, inflation, no matter the cost, to cover up decades of theft and corruption, to keep a failing debt-based global financial gravy train rolling, even off the rails, as long as possible, is the order of the day.

Someday, however, the system will fail. It will fail everywhere. What we’re seeing now is just the beginning.

Let’s just hope there’s enough unicorn to go around.

On multiple levels.

Very interesting interview with Jim Rickards yesterday over at King World News. After glossing over the four-year-old news of Alan Greenspan supporting a gold standard, etc., etc., Jim chimes in on the World Economic Forum’s recent proposal that what the world needs, really, is just another hundred trillion dollars of debt. Digging into the bowsels of the 80+ page document, Jim translates the discussion of “credit” inflation and “enforced accountability” for what it really is: global debt creation, coercive monitoring, and global governance. Should make for some lively seminars at Davos.

Contributors to the proposal, reading like a roll call from the School of Conspiracy, include such upstanding organizations as J.P. Morgan, Shell Oil, Deutschbank, Rothschild and Co., Yale University Bank for International Settlements, The International Monetary Fund, and so on.

On the upside, I suspect we the world can just ask Zimbabwe to spot us.

We’re good for it.