Our assertion here yesterday that stock-market bulls have bought into an epic swindle elicited some spirited discussion in the Rick’s Picks forum. We remain dumbfounded by the fact that there are otherwise intelligent people out there — Fred Hapgood, old friend, are you listening? — who think the economy will somehow extricate itself from the morass without our suffering a period of misery equal in severity to the Great Depression. How could anyone believe that the Ponzi scheme being perpetrated by The Government is anything but a brazen deception worthy of Goebbels? Here’s a post from “DG” that throws cold water on some of the fantasies and delusions that so far have helped keep The System nominally afloat:
“Reading the comments in the forum yesterday, I was struck by the nonsense of a comment stating that there was no fraud. Seriously? The real estate boom was not fraudulent, when it is documented that there were fraudulent loans creating fraudulent buyers offering fraudulent prices? Doesn’t that indicate fraudulent price discovery? Isn’t the real estate collapse documenting this? (More than 7 million homes in some state of ‘off-the-market-yet-for-sale’ price discovery?) The credit-crisis duct-tape repair job is not fraudulent when you take from taxpayers, to ‘kinda make whole,’ the same buyers who created the aforementioned fraud?
“Does the bottomless pit of Fannie Mae seem a bit odd? It seems like a house on fire, where they just keep coming with fresh wood from the mill to pile on and destroy more capital. Public pensions? How can someone who for 30 years contributes 8% of an average $50,000 income (for a $120,000 total) realistically expect to spend the following 30 years extracting $80,000 a year? These are better returns than Bernie Madoff offered. (Don’t tweak me on my numbers – they are close enough, and many are far worse.) Not at all possible. (And yet, pensioners somehow think this is more ‘real’ than Social Security.) It is fraud from the beginning, just not stated. Social Security never penciled, which is why it rose from a 1% tax to 15% over 70 years. And it still doesn’t pencil. We could continue for quite a while here (Medicare and Medicare Part D, for example) – the numbers are in the significant fraction of a quadrillion dollars.
Bernanke’s Fraudulent Numbers
“To state that PEs are healthy is silly. That is what Bernanke said over and over about housing 2005-7. YouTube-it and imagine him in a dunce cap. Sure, there were numbers that supported his thesis, but the numbers were based on fraud, which makes the entire argument fraudulent. The dollar is a debt instrument which supports all of these frauds. Either the frauds all get called out and they collapse, or the dollar does it for them. Either way, it is going to be horrible for us Americans. Dow 15000? In what currency and how many barrels of oil will that buy? It simply cannot pencil without a huge haircut in currency devaluation.
“I think the hardest part for all of us is accepting the timing of this slow-motion crisis. History shows that these events take decades to build up and go on long enough for the naysayers to be pronounced wrong because their forecasts of doom have been disproven by time — and then they are right in a blink!. Either you were on the right side, or not, with very little if any time to change. We’ve been warned. HFT has shown us how much time you will have via the ‘flash crash.’ Nuts!”
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Don’t even place your bets on this one, because this is about a change in consciousness, it does not even involve money.