Monday, March 5, 2012

Circling the Drain...

Greetings good citizen,

I, er, ‘assume’ that most of my readers also keep abreast of other sites that follow the ongoing, er, ‘collapse’ of our civilization.

Not to make anyone nervous (although you should be) but Mr. Panzer of Financial Armageddon Fame (both the book and the website) has been making some really hard hitting points lately

Like today’s offering:

Q: How does it end?

A: At some point confidence is lost, and people don't want to own the (Treasury) paper. I mean why in the world, when the inflation rate has been 2.5 percent for the last 15 years, would you want to own a five-year note today at 80 basis points (0.8 percent)?
If the central banks ever stop buying, or actually begin to reduce their totally bloated, abnormal, freakishly large balance sheets, all of these speculators are going to sell their bonds in a heartbeat.

That's what happened in Greece.

Here's the heart of the matter. The Fed is a patsy. It is a pathetic dependent of the big Wall Street banks, traders and hedge funds. Everything (it does) is designed to keep this rickety structure from unwinding. If you had a (former Fed Chairman) Paul Volcker running the Fed today 7/8— utterly fearless and independent and willing to scare the hell out of the market any day of the week — you wouldn't have half, you wouldn't have 95 percent, of the speculative positions today.

He has also been vocal about lying government statistics that provide a highly optimistic picture that doesn’t bear any resemblance to reality…

Which is to point out what you have known all along, you can’t make accurate decisions without reliable information.

The part that should really piss you off is how the government has been ‘covering up’ the growing ‘economic desert’ by manipulating the employment numbers.

The ‘not in the workforce’ numbers are PURE FICTION for two reasons, one is they are way too LOW, there are MORE unemployed than the official figures recognize and the second part is the factor they use to classify the long term unemployed as ‘discouraged’.

Somehow, you are supposed to believe that these people , if they ‘persisted’ would eventually find jobs that don’t exist!

There’s no magic that the number of ‘discouraged workers’ has skyrocketed since they first started keeping track back in the mid 90’s…

Here’s another tidbit from Mr. Panzer’s article:

Q: But the unemployment rate is falling and companies in the Standard & Poor's 500 are making more money than ever.

A: That's very short-term. Look at the data that really counts. The 131.7 million (jobs in November) was first achieved in February 2000. That number has gone nowhere for 12 years.

Another measure is the rate of investment in new plant and equipment. There is no sustained net investment in our economy. The rate of growth since 2000 (in what the Commerce Department calls non-residential fixed investment) has been 0.8 percent — hardly measurable.

(Non-residential fixed investment is the money put into office buildings, factories, software and other equipment.)

We're stalled, stuck.

The size of the workforce has actually been shrinking but they managed to ‘stabilize it around 131 million (to avoid panic…)

Weirdly, since few people are ‘aware’ of how many workers we ‘should have’ [roughly north of 211 million] nobody seems to notice that the size of the workforce has ‘stagnated’ while the population continues to grow in leaps and bounds…(more or less.)

Worse, Mr. Williams of SGS reports:
No. 421: GDP Revision, January PCE Deflator and Durable Goods Orders 
March 1st, 2012

GDP Revision Was Little More than Statistical Noise, Yet 4th-Quarter No Longer Is Comparable with Prior Periods

Income Revised to Show Ongoing Surging Salaries and Wages of “Unknown” Nature

Fed’s Inflation Target (PCE Deflator) Is A Poorly Regurgitated CPI Measure

Durable Goods Orders Fell Net of Plunging Aircraft Orders 

Imagine yourself on a sinking ship THOUSANDS of miles from land and ask yourself, “How long can I ‘tread water’?”

Because despite all of the ‘Happy Talk’ good citizen, this sum bitch is goin’ down!

What will absolutely shock you is how quickly money turns to shit. Yesterday you had something that at least resembled ‘purchasing power’, today you got zip!

Inexplicably, yesterday’s one dollar item is today’s, (er, this morning’s) ten dollar item, it will be this afternoon’s twenty dollar item and it will be out of stock (and priced out of sight) by sundown…

The ridiculous news will be that the ‘out of stock condition’ is a permanent one.

Sadly, skulking off in the night isn’t going to be an option unless you think through quite carefully ahead of time.

Once things start to fall apart it is going to get mighty dangerous faster than you would believe was possible. If you aren’t mentally prepared to kill as necessary, it is unlikely you will survive for long.

The hard choice will be when to kill and when not to kill and you only have a heartbeat to make a choice…while it is cruel (it is also wiser) to ‘err to caution’.

Remember, you only get to ‘choose wrong’ once!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

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