It's a new year. New opportunities. New ideas. New hope.
Or not.
This will be the year the other shoe dropped.
A decade of living on borrowed time will catch up with the market, and the country. Having dismantled the constitution, and flouted international law, as well as every predicate of responsible fiscal behavior, the US embarks on a year where ugly chickens come home to roost.
Gold surges as the dollar loses against hard assets. Oil might as well be priced in 1930's Deutschemarks. The SEC is blind deaf and dumb. The US media makes Pravda look like Woodward and Bernstein.
How much sillier, or rather, frightening, can this get?
We have long been a Xenophobic gang of spoiled children, who gladly trade hard won freedoms for gadgets and empty promises of protection or comfort. What is different this time is that there has been literally no brake applied to the wholesale looting of the national net worth, via market manipulation, central banking thievery, colonialism, and derivative instrument Russian roulette.
Contrast 2008 with the late 80's, when Milken's innovation of the junk bond - precarious high-yielding corporate debt of questionable value and pedigree - led to a systemic disaster for the S&Ls, as Wall Street used the vehicle to stuff the financial channels and fatten its coffers at the expense of the taxpayer. Replace the word "junk" with "MBS", and think Fed bailout, and you see the same card trick. Garbage assets packaged in silly ways, and sold by the billions of dollars worth so 200 guys could get outsized commissions.
The only thing that's different that I can see this time around is that the regulator is so badly and obviously compromised and useless, and the numbers are so much larger. Although the S&L regulator after Ed Gray departed was equally compromised and ineffective, however not as overtly bent. But this time makes the S&L fiasco look like a teardropper worth of damage. It's not good.
This will be the year where the poop hits the spinning blades, and recklessness and its consequences define the experience of multiple generations.
Never before has it been so clear that the cops are corrupt, the media is a propaganda tool for elite rich special interests, and that money buys both privilege and insulation from consequence. Exactly as it did in the 1920's. That didn't end well.
So the start of a new year. My prediction is that gold goes through the roof, the dollar declines another 15% or so against most currencies, houses built from matchsticks and cardboard turn out not to be worth millions, and the baldfaced obviousness of the crookery becomes unabashed.
We shall see if I am right. Hope not.
And this is me at my most optimistic.
It's been a long 4 years for me of commenting on the antics of the worst of the worst. I think the most alarming part about this is not how prevalent the crookery is, but rather how ambivalent the populace is to the idea that it is being systematically screwed in ways from which it has no hope of ever recovering. It believes it lives in a relatively safe society, despite unprecedented levels of violence and thievery. It believes its lifestyle is superior, despite record levels of every sort of ill. The population is morbidly obese, neurotic and depressed, ignorant of the fundamentals that drive its future, and as easily distracted as a three year old. Johnny can't read, and in fact isn't much interested in doing so. Government, which is horrible at everything it lays its hand upon running, is increasingly in charge of running everything, and in controlling the population, treating people as objects and cyphers and digets, rather than sovereign individual owners of the system to which it answers - and the population is just shrugging its shoulders and accepting growing fascism as an OK and inevitable cost to protect it against boogiemen. Our currency is rapidly becoming as valuable as toilet paper. Our ability to think critically is nill, and we are all pretending that we might be wrong about what our senses clearly tell us is real. And a climate of fear is the mechanism wherein bad men of conspicuous mundanity wind up controlling the show, as well as our society.
I'd love to limit my commentary to the market, and the evil therein that men do. But sometimes, it's just too obvious that a tsunami of consequences this way rushes, and that the days of hoping to climb to higher ground ahead of it are long gone, traded for bitter bromides of hollow worth.
Ho ho ho. Belatedly so.