Running Around Armed To The Teeth And In A Very Bad Mood
"...And when prices rise so high that us proletariat trash can no longer afford to eat or pay the rent, this is typically when the course of civilization is suddenly altered. And perhaps that is why the ownership of guns is always under attack by the forces of the Left, which love to remove barriers to total government control. And if there is one thing that the government wants to control, it is crowds of us unthinking, uneducated, ill-tempered, bankrupt, starving bozos, like me and you, well, maybe not you since you are so sophisticated and wealthy, but me anyway, running around armed to the teeth and in a very bad mood, being angry about what the government weenies have done to us..."
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The Mogambo Guru
St. Petersburg, Florida - As usual, we start off by taking a nervous look at the things that are going to kill us, like the condemned prisoner who morbidly looks out of the window of his cell to watch the scaffold being built that will be used to hang him, and we note that the Treasury is still issuing debt at the rate of about $52 billion per month, and therefore about five hundred bucks a month is added to the burden of every lunchbox-toting private-sector job-holder in the country. Five hundred bucks a month! Each! PER MONTH!
- Now that bonds have collapsed in price and the chumps of the world have taken a big bath on U.S. debt, perhaps they will use it as a learning experience. It seems natural that if you are money manager and are now underwater on American debt, any debt, acquired over the last year, that you would sit back, scratch your chin and say, "Hmmm. Maybe old Mogambo was right after all; I AM an idiot, and that is why I lost all this money for my clients." But, naahhh, probably not.
But the moneyed people, whose money these money manager guys are losing with their massive wrong-way bets on interest rates, have almost certainly learned something. And if I know anything at all, it is that people with money have a real poor sense of humor when they are handed big losses and end up with less money than they had going into this thing.
- Michael Checkan, President of Asset Strategies International, Inc, writes, "Silver's price is close to a 5,000-year inflation-adjusted low. Over 90% of all the silver that's been mined in the past 5,000 years has been used up by industry. Today, the world's silver inventories are at the lowest point in 200 years. At the same time, demand for silver is greater than ever. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that 2002 marked the 14th straight year in which silver was produced at a significant deficit to demand!"
Now, I don't know about you, but when something is selling for a price that is the lowest in 5,000 years, at the same time that there is a supply-deficit that has lasted fourteen years in a row, little bells go off - ding ding ding - in the part of my brain that I use for greed. Of course, this is the same part of my brain that I use to detect brownies and cake in the environment, but since I have already investigated that happy possibility and was sorely disappointed, then I turn morosely to the idea that perhaps 5,000 years from now the price of silver will be even lower than it is now, and that clueless investment weenies like me will be writing that silver is at the lowest price in 10,000 years.
But being naturally suspicious and paranoid, there is something pretty weird about this whole precious metals complex that I have difficulty understanding, and is so out of sync with reality as we know it, and instead of enumerating all the places where it is out of sync, I will sum up by saying that it is out of sync with the entirety of the A-through-Z history of markets, metals and mankind.
In Any Event, The Swiss Will Get Burned
- The Swiss, who are relative newcomers to the area of currency debasement and acting like idiotic, brain-damaged children, are making up for lost time by continuing to drive their currency in to the toilet by the expedient of printing up humongously more currency, sorta like we are doing and the Japanese are doing and the Germans are doing and the French are doing and Canadians are doing and the Chinese are doing and like every other freaking country on the freaking planet is doing as far as I can tell. It's just that when you line everybody up according to size, then somebody has to be the Numero Uno on the list, and right now the Swiss are it.
I cannot remember the last time that I read that any country was expanding the narrowest measure of their money supply by 24% percent in some heroic-yet-suicidal effort to keep their currency from appreciating against the damn dollar and the Euro, but the Swiss are doing it right now. Predictably, inflation in Switzerland is rising. Last year it was the Australians who were the poster-children for money supply madness. Now their inflation rate is rising, too.
So, how is the USA doing as concerns the money supply? Well, lately it seems to be cooling off, but the trend has been running about 7% annually, which is about 500% faster than the economy has been growing. And, of course, that means that inflation is sure to come tootling down the expressway to a price tag near you. Bet on it.
And the amazing thing to me is the almost complete lack of concern, especially when it is within recent memory that the Gnomes of Zurich were supposedly such economic and financial hotshots and everybody went "Ooohhh! Ahhhh!" and nodded their heads in solemn agreement whenever the Swiss had something to say about money. But not anymore. It is almost like all the economic-hotshots around the globe, who can usually be counted on to prance and preen and run their mouths about how educated and smart they are, are completely unaware of what is going to happen to generalized, aggregate prices in just a little while, measured in a few days or weeks or months, as all this huge freaking global oversupply of money works its evil, horrible way into rising prices.
And when prices rise so high that us proletariat trash can no longer afford to eat or pay the rent, this is typically when the course of civilization is suddenly altered. And perhaps that is why the ownership of guns is always under attack by the forces of the Left, which love to remove barriers to total government control. And if there is one thing that the government wants to control, it is crowds of us unthinking, uneducated, ill-tempered, bankrupt, starving bozos, like me and you, well, maybe not you since you are so sophisticated and wealthy, but me anyway, running around armed to the teeth and in a very bad mood, being angry about what the government weenies have done to us.
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