This was fantastic!
I still believe we’re closer to Brabant Antwerp after the mobs of French Revolutionaries sacked the city-state.
Antwerp never recovered. Rapid decline took 16 years of French revolutionaries’ occupation. The entire entrepreneurial class fled, never to return except to resell goods at retail to the dwindling remaining population.
Our own NASDAQ died in Y2K at the 4700 level. Nine years later it’s less than half that. You would have been a lot better off investing in CDs than NASDAQ.
Howard is simply great. IN DA TANNNNKKKK!!!
politicians in Japan and in America are responsible. Neither want to take the hit. So they desperately find any stupid way out that they can, and call shite gold.
We need a cessation of corporate tax, death ta and capital gains, ,to ramp up the US economy.. Obama and his shite heads are going in a diametrically opposed directions, a bunch of whining shiteheads to their proverbial slaughter.
What a bunch of dumb a$$es.America knows now. The socialists are all in a rush to get their population control legislation through so they can soak us of all of our savings and retirement, when monetizing the national debt fails , as it will. That is their plan “B”.
I predict that these idiots will be turned out in the next election cycle, in both parties. We want Reaganomics back, and we want the greediest bunch of all gone , the politicians in Washinigton, those who do not want to reduce the size of government and cut our taxes completely.
The problem, as I see it, and I’m not talking about the out of control money printing....is the process by which there will dawn in the recognition of basically every person with functioning neurons what is to come. There won’t be much that the late-awakeners will be able to do, in fact, there is little that the early suspectors can or will be able to do.
Imagine you are on the Titanic, and I only use that example because people are familiar with it, and I don’t mean to be overly dramatic...even though the outcome *WILL* be dramatic; albeit...slow-motion dramatic.
You’re sailing along. Nobody imagines anything can go wrong, all is copacetic. At time “0”, the ship hits the iceberg, two junior officers on the bridge hear the crunch, assess the damage, and gradually realize the ship is going to sink.
15 and 30 minutes later, all the officers know.
1 hour later, 8% of the passengers know.
(and I am obviously just making up these numbers)
2 hours later, 20% of the passengers know.
By the time the lifeboats are cranked out, 80+% of the passengers know.
At every stage of increased awareness, there is an increased panic level until the hull is pointing up out of the water at an angle. Still, a very large proportion of psgrs cannot even imagine this could be happening, even as they see it with their own eyes.
I wonder what life will be like then. I am not optimistic that 10% of the 50% who voted 0bama in and thought their “ship” had come in will not go completely animal.
Calls for a new tagline.
He has a savagely good point. The most important parallels between the Japanese situation and the US situation:
1. The BOJ did QE - at the advice of people from our Federal Reserve (Greenspan).
2. They ran HUGE deficits, and in the process went from one of the world’s largest creditor countries to one of the world’s largest debtor nations. Japan’s national debt is now unsustainable, both for fiscal as well as demographic reasons.
3. The money went into the Japanese banks, which should have been broken up. There, like here, huge amounts of money were poured into the banks to keep them solvent - with no accountability, no change in structure, nothing. And as a result, the bailout money ran down ratholes.
4. The bailouts helped spawn the US bubble by means of the Yen carry trade. The Fed’s ZIRP is even now blowing up an equity bubble, and the price premium of US Treasury debt is unsustainable in the face of the unrelenting supply.
In Japan, just as here in the US now, the central bank warped the yield curve to create a situation of absurd profit for the banks (ie, a zero short term rate, so ergo, the yield curve is by definition “steep” because the long term rates never go to zero). The idea was then (as we’re doing now) that they’d relax the accounting standards to allow the bankers to carry around dubious loans and use profits from the manipulated yield curve to underwrite losses on bad debt.
The problem with this idea, then as now, was that the analysts and wonk types seriously underestimated the amount of bad debt that the banks had. It took more than a decade for the bad debt to finish coming to the surface, and in the meantime, people lost confidence in both the bankers and the political leaders, which led up to the election we saw in August of this year.
There’s only so many lies, obfuscations and only so much thimblerigging that the public will stand out of bankers. The patience in Japan was probably more prolonged than the patience here will be, owing to cultural differences.