Bill Bonner, back in London:
*** The price of gold rose to $425 yesterday. Oil rose to a
new record high. And the dollar fell to an eight-month low against the euro, at $1.26.
You would think that these are signs of "inflation." But apparently not. Or if so, the bond vigilantes don't see it.
Bonds rose again yesterday.
How could this be? Our guess remains: The economy is
weakening, not strengthening. Deflationary pressures - from
China, from aging populations, from debt - are overwhelming
the attempts to reflate the economy. The United States
sinks into a long, slow, softish slump...
*** Americans in Europe - along with the Europeans
themselves - are overwhelmingly opposed to George Bush. We
ran into one of them on the train from London:
"These neocons are bad, bad news," said our friend, who had
seen the BBC documentary on Wednesday night. "They don't
seem to mind lying in order to get their way. They think
they are the guardians of Western civilization... and that
the nation needs to be rallied behind some great cause...
so they think lying is just fine if it is for such a good cause. And they think they can invent a great cause to get behind.
"I was surprised how Rumsfeld and his gang lied about
Soviet weapons back in the '70s. The neocons had set up a special commission to prove that the Soviet Union was a much bigger threat than the CIA, and the Pentagon believed.
And they came up with a report that seemed to prove it. But
the CIA told them that every one of the major points was a
lie. I liked that part... the CIA knew they were lies,
because they had made them up themselves. The Soviets
weren't planning at attack on the United States at all. The
Soviet Union was falling apart. The CIA and Kissinger were
right: All we had to do was to sit tight.
"But Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz either believed the lies or
found them useful... and then, even after they knew they
were lies, they used them to mislead Reagan and the entire nation. And even now, nobody seems to care that we spent billions on weapons we didn't need... and that this whole 'evil empire' stuff was based on lies. Not that the Soviets
weren't evil. But they weren't the only evil in the world.
The United States makes mistakes too. And it has evil
people in high places from time to time... "
Bad news: This year -- and for many, many more to come --
your ballot may as well be a piece of toilet paper!
It doesn't matter who eventually buys this election... the country is destined to go bust no matter who sits in the Oval Office. |
