Sunday, May 22, 2011

Periodic reality check...

Greetings good citizen,

Every once in a while it is wise to preform a ‘Reality Check’ (personally) just to see if things are ‘as advertised’.

Most of you have, for quite some time, experienced the ‘where did THAT come from?’ phenomenon (and brushed if off thinking it was probably YOU who didn’t understand what was going on the first time.) But it keeps happening.

It’s like the ‘recovery’ where we hear that companies are flush with cash; but none of them are hiring. Worse, the company you work for is killing the ‘survivors’ of the last round of lay-offs, screaming for production while refusing to hire more help!

No wonder profits (and bonuses) are up, eh?

Naturally the massively ‘under-reported’ level of inflation only serves to make things look better than they actually are.

How fucking bizarre is it good citizen that 99% of the ‘improvement’ in retail sales comes from the spike in the price of energy?

How fucking stupid is it that the price of food and energy ‘don’t count’ when it comes to measuring inflation but it is okay to use these same figures when measuring gross retail sales?

WTF! (something you must exclaim at least a dozen times a day even if you are only paying minimum attention to the outlandish events that regularly unfold in the corporate owned media.)

What was that about a reality check?

Which is not to enter into a debate over who could make good use of one. Worse, there are dozens of sides to every story, so we can only wonder why the media keeps getting it consistently wrong?

In this particular instance we encounter a ‘battle of the pundits’ that, as close as anyone can tell, is totally divorced from ‘reality’.

Sustained Recovery in Housing Remains Elusive: Fannie Mae (HousingWire)

A sustained recovery in the housing sector remains elusive as distressed home sales continue to dominant a large part of the sector's activity, Fannie Mae said in its May 2011 Economic Outlook report.

Single-family homebuilding activity was weak in the first quarter, while housing starts and new home sales remained flat at already depressed levels, suggesting a state of optimism in the housing sector of the economy is difficult to maintain. [should we cap that observation with the caveat of ‘without looking like a raving lunatic’?]

The economy slowed dramatically in the first quarter, dipping to a growth rate of 1.8% from 3.1% in the final quarter of 2010. Despite that drop, Fannie Mae's long-term economic forecasts predict more than 3% growth in the next few years. [Funny how that ‘creative accounting’ prevents them (or anybody else) from getting an accurate picture of the economy, doesn’t it?]

Fannie's Chief Economist Doug Duncan said despite low prices, low interest rates and improving job numbers, consumer attitudes have yet to rebound in a way that turns the tide.

Since this is a ‘reality check’ I heard that last WTF! Escape from your trembling lips.

Since when did ‘attitude’ have anything to do with what’s in your checking account?

Or did we ‘miss the point’ again and the economist in question was referring to the employers’ attitude?

Nope, dummy specifically said ‘consumer attitude’…that means you and me.

Maybe we need to look at what ‘adjusts’ our ‘attitude’?

A big number one in the reality check department is the question that should be on every homebuyer’s mind…who is going to buy this dump from me when the time comes?

IF we are honest with ourselves, the ‘real estate market in this country is ‘finito’, there’s no such thing as Real Estate in Banana Republics.

Which is to say we would be STUPID to pay the bank nearly a million dollars for a property we will be unable to sell for less than half of what we paid for it.

That’s precisely what anybody currently holding a mortgage is looking at down the road, a dearth of buyers.

What you NEED TO get for your property is not what the ‘average person’ is paid, creating a ‘financing problem’ that is not the banks but YOURS!

But we would be remiss if we didn’t point out that real estate may soon be the least of our problems…

Ironically, thanks to ‘real estate’, the rest of the global economy is about to collapse.

"We now know that there has been a dramatic reversal in world central bank thinking, and instead of selling gold as they have been doing, world central banks, on balance, are buying gold. We know that China, Russian and many Asian countries are urgently increasing their gold-to-reserves ratio. [This ‘weird’ reversal is stupid on a grand scale, although we must remember that they are the only entity that can buy gold with ‘funny money’!]

Rising gold is also putting pressure on the silver shorts. I've heard that there is now more silver shorted on the COMEX than is available in physical silver.

A few weeks ago, shorting silver was considered a "no-brainer." In this business, if you run with the crowd, you're liable to get trampled to death...

But more powerful than anything else will be the trend of the stock market. If the bull market dies here or even if it corrects severely, the pressure will fall heavily on the administration and the Congress. [But this will somehow not effect Bobo’s chances of getting re-elected!]

For this reason, I expect the rest of the year 2011 to be 'wild and wooly.' I expect government lies and propaganda to reach a crescendo. I'm bracing myself for a parade of surprises. Politicians love power and perks. But to keep those two, they must also keep their jobs. Therefore, coming up, I expect an extreme in dirty politics and internecine political battles.

The year 2011 should wind up as a banner year for political and economic propaganda, all lies and bull-shit.”

Um, once the bottom drops out of the energy situation there won’t be any point in keep up ‘pretenses’, our skulking ‘masters’ will emerge from the shadows and seize control…and it will be ‘game on’.

So the ‘slap upside the head’ for most of us will come in how soon we will all be chasing down our next meal and beating it to death with a stick.

Taking the phrase ‘do or die’ to a whole new level.

No irony should be lost on the fact that for millenia, before commercial agriculture, this was the way things were.

It remains to be seen just how much ground we will lose when the proverbial collides with the rotating device.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

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