Disaster

We’ve railed at traders and speculators recently for their arrogant and sometimes breathtaking stupidity in failing to discount an onslaught of world-shattering news. If the dolts, rubes, bozos and mountebanks who have kept stocks afloat even remotely understood what has been going on in this world, we wrote here recently, the Dow Industrials would plummet 6000 points in mere days.  And the news has been grave, indeed.  America’s wholly imagined economic recovery died for good on Friday with the release of shocking retail figures for May. Household incomes have been falling, consumer credit imploding, M3 plummeting, and now it turns out that corporations have allowed $1.8 trillion to sit idle in low-yielding bank accounts, hastening the economy's deflationary collapse and the onset of a Second Great Depression. We face the impossible task of getting out from beneath $130 Trillion of debt and liabilities amassed by government at all levels. The nation is adrift under a weak president whose radical politics have sharply divided the voters. Iran and Turkey (a NATO member!) have declared war on Israel, sending warships to run the Gaza blockade. Europe’s financial house of cards is within months, or even weeks, of total collapse.  The jihadists may be turning the tide against U.S. and British forces in Afghanistan. Unfortunately the list does not end there. For in fact, there is one crisis that greatly overshadows all of them:  the seabed irruption in the Gulf of Mexico. We won’t even pretend any longer that there is a market “angle” to this story.  In fact, the markets are a side show, and politics a droll burlesque, in comparison to the geophysical dreadnought taking shape in the Gulf.  Because it could eventually threaten all life on this planet, there may be no “investable issues” here. Seabed Fissures The problem is no longer a leak or a spill, you see,