Ball of Confusion

Greetings good citizen,

Sometimes it is near impossible to make sense of it all. Worse, it has been our experience that when the water becomes too muddy, something else is going on.

The pundits today were claiming the outbreak of Swine Flu is what brought the markets down…the CDC declaring a ‘level four event’ spooked investors (who regularly shrug off downright dismal earning reports.)

Once again we find ourselves in ‘Bizarro world’ with diametrically opposed reports of gloom and salvation competing for our attention.

So we have to don our special ‘read between the lines’ glasses to guess what they are trying to camouflage now?

There are so many balls in play right now it’s near impossible to follow them all.

Like revelations that the ‘stress tests’ conditions to evaluate the banking sector are the same conditions that exist today (meaning that if conditions deteriorate even a little from what they are already, the stress tests will be ‘invalid’.)

Then we have Speaker Pelosi’s um, ‘intent’ to create a new Pecora commission, but we have no details as to who the new star investigator would be…

Or China’s surprising accumulation of gold bullion…

Or rumors the former Treasury Secretary, Hank Paulson, is under investigation for securities fraud…

Then, of course, we have the ‘pandemic’ with an earthquake thrown in on top!

And these stories barely scratch the surface of what is really happening in the ‘real world’.

You have to do a little digging to piece together what’s going on in the world most of us live in.

Since the consumer is still ‘tapped out’ nobody is investing in new ventures because it is impossible to craft a realistic business plan that doesn’t involve customers.

No new ventures means no new jobs.

No new jobs means existing ventures can’t expand their market share so they continue to cut their workforce in the face of stagnant demand.

But wait, it gets worse!

The ‘balanced budget requirements’ faced by most state and local governments are forcing program cuts just as demand for social services are increasing.

Now the people that are supposed to help you when you get in a bind are being laid off…

Not that you’ll be able to qualify for what are rapidly becoming a diminishing pool of benefits.

Oh, did I mention it gets even worse?

Meanwhile, back at the ‘Money Tree’…

Rather than funding the depleted resources of state and local relief agencies, our Federal government is focused on funding ‘too big to fail’ private enterprises.

To the tune of 12 plus Trillion dollars, that’s a lot of ‘meals on wheels’ good citizen.

Let’s not forget that the ‘interest’ the government charges the banks is zero…so where is your ‘zero interest’ loan?

If we leave that aside we find a different, more disturbing problem…Weimar Republic style inflation.

The government is creating ‘money’ at a breakneck pace to cover the banking sector’s gambling losses, ignoring the ‘real world’ precedent that if you are stupid enough to make a bet with someone that can’t pay, it’s not the government/public’s problem but yours!

Understand that neither the housing market nor the stock market will ‘recover’ in value because they were grossly overvalued in the first place.

If you can’t live on your paycheck its not your employer’s problem, it’s yours!

If you go to a casino and bet your house on double zero and lose, do you expect the taxpayer to make you whole?

You can if you’re an investment banker!

And surprisingly enough, it’s not because you can threaten to destroy the global banking system, its because you have gambled with the wealth of ‘the people that matter’, you’re really holding a gun to the heads of the ‘investor class’…they go down if you go down!

Puts the whole mess in a different light, doesn’t it?

That is the ‘hell of it all’ good citizen, people are suffering (more so than usual) to keep the filthy rich from taking their lumps like the rest of have to.

The picture is black and getting blacker. Who will make the rich their million-dollar hamburger when there aren’t any farms, much less any restaurants?

Understand good citizen that those trillions of dollars aren’t vanishing…they will eventually end up in somebody’s pocket…but money that doesn’t circulate creates a whole new set of problems.

Or should I say when those trillions start chasing a badly depleted supply of goods, a supply that can’t be replenished because the producers went bankrupt…

Simply put good citizen, today GM, tomorrow, Safeway!

All so a few can be rich.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner