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Strategies & Market Trends : The Epic American Credit and Bond Bubble Laboratory -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: benwood who wrote (92601)	3/21/2008 4:41:14 PM
From: Mike Johnston	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 110194

Your comments are right on the money. Sadly, the US is now a semi-socialist, centrally planned economy. The line has been crossed. FED and the government is now a main economic actor who will determine future winners and losers in the economy. Corrupt central bank, total lack of transparency both at the Fed and on a corporate level, lack of honest accounting, lack of honest economic statistics, economic propaganda and cheerleading, corrupt media, excessive issuance of money, corruption, massive government spending, artificially low interest rates and high inflation, fraudulent bailouts and covert operations, reduction in individual freedoms, these are all hallmarks of a socialist economy. If things continue this way, full blown socialism will emerge, with limited private property rights, government financed housing, and nationalization of certain industries. In fact, even I am amazed how close we are to getting there, with rising calls for direct purchases of houses by the government. De facto nationalization of the banking system is not that far fetched anymore.

To: benwood who wrote (92601)	3/21/2008 9:56:49 PM
From: Oblomov	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 110194

>>I can't imagine anybody made money investing in the old USSR (from within) and I expect that reality to dawn on Americans, perhaps too late, Andrei Navrozov daringly escaped the Soviet Union in the late 70s and came to the US, that shining city on the hill, beacon of liberty to the world. He found a home in academia and publishing. By the early 90s he concluded that the US was arriving at the same destination as the USSR, but by vastly different means. The nomenklatura made bundles of money in the old USSR, just as the new nomenklatura in Russia is becoming astoundingly wealthy. The Nazis in Germany and corporatists in Italy made a bargain with industry: the state would suppress the trade unions in exchange for "co-operation". The shareholders of Krupp and IG Farben did well until the post-war reprisal by the Allied victors stripped them of their wealth. In 1936, the Italian social critic Gaetano Salvemini (with Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto, essential reading for our age, IMO) observed, "it is the state, i.e., the taxpayer, who has become responsible to private enterprise. In Fascist Italy the state pays for the blunders of private enterprise." And today, in the US, that closing world we once called free, how many industries receive tax abatements, TIFs, tax credits, or outright subsidies from one governmental entity or another? The insights we have gleaned from the failed authoritarian states of the past are that we must put everyone on the dole queue, and save our bullets for foreigners.