Wednesday, January 25, 2012

What Have We Learned In the Past 13 Years?

"We have learned nothing since 1999 except the Central State and Central Bank will intervene in the market to bend price and risk to serve the Status Quo.

...This is not a popular concept in America at this point in its history, when monumental errors are denied, excused, rationalized or quickly absolved by those who committed them.

What exactly has America learned since January 1, 1999, 13 years that included two stupendous financial/credit bubbles, two hot wars and an explosion in public and private debt?

...1. We've learned that the way to "repair" the catastrophic damage of a financial bubble bursting is to inflate another financial bubble in another asset class.

2. Systemic incentives will be put in place for everyone to speculate in the new bubble, with two important caveats: the Financial and Political Elites will get to play the game with moral hazard, i.e. their gains will be private and their losses socialized, and second, these Elites will not be governed by the rule of law; blatant systemic fraud and embezzlement will be ignored or forgiven.

In other words, some are more equal than others when it comes to the founding precept "everyone is equal before the law."

3. The Central Bank (the private Federal Reserve in the U.S.) will sacrifice purchasing power to lower interest rates and flood the economy with liquidity, i.e. nearly-free money for Power Elite speculation and leverage to inflate the new asset/credit bubble.

4. The Central State will address all post-bubble problems by borrowing and squandering trillions of dollars to prop up the Status Quo and transfer Financial Elite losses to the public/taxpayers.

...To create the perception that the Power Elites have actually solved the structural issues rather than just paper them over, then minor "reforms" will be passed that tweak the parameters of the Status Quo without actually changing the power structure: who owns most of the national wealth and income stream, and who controls the political process that diverts an increasing share of the national income stream to State fiefdoms and corporate cartels.

...We as a nation have learned how to cheat, and now we think that learning how to cheat [to] create the perception that we've actually learned something can be substituted for making the necessary sacrifices...

...Thirteen years of cheating have created a dangerous confidence that we can keep cheating by controlling the market forever.

The problem for the Central State and Central Bank is that socializing the market via cloaked intervention is qualitatively no different than direct command-economy control as practiced by the former Soviet Union...

In the U.S., the market has been manipulated and suppressed...

...What we have learned in the past 13 years is the market can be suppressed and controlled forever by a dominant State and Central Bank.

But markets cannot be suppressed forever, any more than risk can be eradicated..."

Charles

1 comment:

Ranch Chimp said...

We learned that our political representation are mostly all full of it and overpaid by lobbyist's : )

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