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Strategies & Market Trends : The coming US dollar crisis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Box-By-The-Riviera™ who wrote (17638)	2/14/2009 9:38:31 AM
From: axial	4 Recommendations Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71456

It seems that nobody - not even those who caused this global crisis - really knows what's going on. Not one "guru" has been consistently correct. Right now everybody's preoccupied with baling out the boat - but nobody knows where the boat is going. Globally, enormous stimulus is being applied, but nobody knows if that's a cure. Maybe it just prolongs the course of a fatal disease called fiat money, complicated by a bout of interventionist economics that will only make things worse. There are conspiracy theories everywhere, and once again public trust in banks and governments is evaporating. "Status quo" means "corrupt" but everybody's afraid to leave the dangers in status quo, for the dangers in something different. "The devil you know..." Everybody's got an opinion. Everybody's doctor enough to know we're sick, doctor enough to keep us on life support, but not doctor enough for the cure. Maybe Bernanke's got the cure, but his treatment (and that of the whole world) is grounded in interventionist economics, fiat money, and analysis of events 80 years ago. His is one view among many - and there are still conflicting views about the causes and cures of the Great Depression. Last year, it was posted that historians and economists will be writing about these events 50 years from now. This crisis has geopolitical, cultural, socioeconomic and historical dimensions. Maybe there is no cure, and finally the Austrian school of economics will have its day. Maybe not. Nobody knows. Observations are not necessarily facts, facts are not necessarily truth. Economics is a construct, an artifice we use to explain how and why mankind conducts transactions. It isn't reality; it's an attempt to explain reality. Right now, it's not explaining enough to tell us what to do. Even if we "survive" this crisis, there's no guarantee that we'll like the consequences of survival. Perhaps we're approaching the Malthusian limits of conventional economics and capitalism: maybe we need a complete paradigm shift. The most obvious failure was simple prudence. There were warnings. We didn't listen, we didn't act. They didn't listen, they didn't act. Now we see there's no Promised Land, and no savior to lead us there. Guru wanted: must be authentic. False prophets not eligible. Applicants will submit complete summary of past predictions. Jim