Thursday, May 5, 2011

Until the roof caves in...

Greetings good citizen,

Not only did the stock markets bleed from the eyesockets today but the price of a barrel of oil dropped under a hundred dollars a barrel for the first time in months!

In another ‘bizarre’ reversal, gold and silver fell while the dollar rose!

Understand, there is no LOGICAL reason for this sudden shift in ‘values’.

Worse, it is illustrative of something far more disturbing that many suspected but couldn’t quite prove. Those whose fortunes are measured by their equity holdings know the score, it is people who only dabble in stocks that remain ignorant.

What is it that the dabblers suspect and the super rich know?

That equity prices are set on a ‘because I said so’ basis. That’s how Wall Street is able to keep commerce on a short leash.

Did your stock ‘beat expectations’ last quarter…was anyone more surprised to hear this than you?

Well, I’ve got bad news good citizen. The world continuously strives for balance, often resulting in what’s good for some proving to be bad for a whole lot of other people.

Don’t look now but we passed the ‘tipping point’ a couple of years ago.

When the ‘scales’ of justice rebalance themselves there will be a hellacious number of dead people on both sides.

How ironic is it that for every one who meets their deserved fate, two will not deserve the wretched end they will ultimately suffer…

While it may not look like it today’s piece is a ‘two-parter’, I pulled the first article this morning before being sidetracked for the better part of the day and before the markets closed.

We begin today’s oddesy with a dire warning about the true stakes of the delayed action to raise the Federal debt ceiling.

Many Republicans dismiss these warnings. They argue that the government could maintain the confidence of investors by prioritizing interest payments. There is ample revenue to make those payments, and the Republicans — also backed by economists and financial experts — say investors would not punish the government for failing to fulfill other financial obligations. [Let us not forget just who caused this crisis with their ‘wrongheadedness’…not that the Democrats put up a fight over the poor policy decisions the ‘party of (bad) ideas’ implemented.]

“I think the important thing to do would be to make it clear to markets that the government is not going to default on its debt,” said Senator Patrick Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, whose bill assigns priority to interest payments. “It would be easy, I think, to make it clear to the markets that they don’t have to worry about this.”

Treasury officials respond that the failure to pay any obligations would set off a crisis.

“What participant in the market would want to buy our debt as we are defaulting on other obligations?” asked Ms. Miller. “I think the markets would be completely spooked.”

How disturbing is it good citizen to see poiticians with a firm grip of the situation only to have legislation that defies all logic pass through both houses with a ‘filibuster proof’ margin?

Which begs the question ‘has ‘common sense’ become so rare that it can no longer be possessed by a majority in government?

I’d opine that much misunderstood and over-rated ‘common sense’ isn’t particularly ‘common’ at all. I further posit that it is totally absent from the decision-making process throughout our entire society.

But that’s just me passing judgement on our ‘self-appointed’ leaders.

You know, the ones the people we elect to public office take their marching orders from, those boobs!

Well, this playing ‘chicken’ with the world’s largest economy isn’t going to end well.

IF we raise the debt limit (like we did TWICE for GW) AND the money is ‘squandered’ on ‘payola’ for cronies via wars of choice, what’s the point?

People miss the ‘real danger’ of this budget Kabuki Dance.

Once they stop ‘pretending’ to care about paying us, the next step is to stop pretending to care if there are enough resources to go around.

This next story Crude Oil Falls Below $100 a Barrel is as ‘unlikely’ as it is implausible…

After four months of surging higher, oil prices plummeted by almost 9 percent as traders worried that American drivers were beginning to balk at paying nearly $4 a gallon of gasoline. [Beginning? WTF!]

Energy specialists had a variety of explanations for the drop, including Thursday’s weak employment data and a strengthening dollar that tends to make all dollar-denominated commodities cheaper in dollars and more expensive for holders of other currencies. [snip]

Mr. Kloza predicted that the price of a regular gallon of gasoline would drop about a quarter by Memorial Day to $3.75, and gasoline could drop as low as $3.50 a gallon later in the summer. Other analysts said oil prices would continue to decline in the coming days.

While is would be ‘politically savvy’ to ‘back off’ on the price of energy over the warm summer months (people are more inclined to fight when the weather is less of a factor.)

I somehow think Mr. Klonza is ‘irrationally optimistic’ in thinking oil prices will remain low.

We have already passed ‘peak oil’, ALL of the world’s oil fields are in decline and demand continues to rise due to ‘faux prosperity’ in the nations that won the global race to the bottom.

The economies of the world’s most populous nations are, er, ‘severely’ imbalanced.

Soon, when the resource wars start in earnest, these ‘too big to save’ population concentrations will, er, ‘collapse’, taking with them the productive capacity of the modern world.

How’s THAT for ‘short sighted’?

More ironic is how rapidly escalating energy prices will cause a similar, er, ‘disruption’ in international shipping?

Could these idiots really be THAT stupid?

Apparently so, good citizen, apparently so.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

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