The American Economy: Vapor without Value
My effort here has been to point out that we are creating a fraudulent environment, much like an embezzler, that requires more fraud and more lies each time to cover up the last fraud and the prior lies. Our economy is now one which runs on boom and bust and cannot run any other way unless fundamental changes are made in the paradigm of American politics, econometrics and economics.
This morning, Paul Farrel wrote an article that is precisely on point, in explaining the bust we had in the 1990’s, explaining the bust we are having now, and explaining the next bust which is already in the making.
The only thing I would add is that I think the policy makers are going to try the same thing again right now to “bail out” the current economic collapse.
If you want to protect your wealth, your retirement, your nest egg your rainy day fund, read this carefully and start thinking about it.
The American economy is now a house of cards trading in vapor that is “rated” with value. There isn’t enough real “money” in existence that will bail us out of the funny “money” that has been created. A major shift in our perspective must occur, and it starts with telling the truth. Here, reprinted from this morning, is the best summary of the unvarnished truth that I have found.
PAUL B. FARRELL
A mind-blowing machine
In America, land of the bubbles, the next pop will be the biggest
By Paul B. Farrell, MarketWatch
Last update: 7:32 p.m. EST Jan. 28, 2008
ARROYO GRANDE, Calif. (MarketWatch) — Three cheers! Wall Street’s got a new rally song: “I’m dreaming dreams, I’m scheming schemes, I’m building castles high.”
Actually it’s the 1919 tune that launched the roaring run-up to the ‘29 crash and the Great Depression. Remember the lyrics: “I’m forever blowing bubbles. Pretty bubbles in the air. They fly so high, nearly reach the sky. Then like my dreams they fade and die.”
And it still fits today! Listen to venture capitalist Eric Janszen’s scary new paradigm in “The Next Bubble,” a Harper’s Magazine report: “That the Internet and the housing hyperinflations transpired within a period of 10 years, each creating trillions of fake wealth, is, I believe, only the beginning.”
Translation: The next bubble is already expanding. Now listen very closely as Janszen makes the single most dangerous prediction of 2008: “There will and must be many more such booms, for without them the United States can no longer function. The bubble cycle has replaced the business cycle.”
After the collapse of the 1990s dot-com bubble we laughed at all the hype they had spewed: “This time it’s different.” “New paradigm.” “New economy that only went up.”
Well, stop laughing: The new, new came true, says Janszen. Seriously, the economy and the stock market can no longer function without an ever increasing series of bubbles, one after another, rapidly expanding then bursting, with all the manic trading, risk, uncertainty, hypervolatility and distortions that come with it.
Janszen traces bubbles through history: From the 1720’s South Sea Bubble to the housing-subprime bubble. Bubbles are accelerating, becoming more frequent, a frenzy feeding on itself: “Nowadays we barely pause between such bouts of insanity. The dot-com crash of the early 2000s should have been followed by decades of soul-searching; instead, even before the old bubble fully deflated, a new mania began to take place.”
What’s so scary is not that the subprime bubble was happening so fast on the heels of the dot-com bubble, not that the pundits, the public and the policy makers all appeared to be ignoring it. What’s really scary is that our best and brightest leaders in Washington, Wall Street and Corporate America wanted to create a bubble! They even threw jet fuel on this raging fire with cheap money, favorable taxes and minimal oversight.
Of course the Treasury and the Fed will never admit it, but they saw the housing bubble as a healthy economic necessity in their warped ideology! In their myopic minds, the housing bubble was the messiah “saving” America from a big, bad bear/recession.
Publicly they denied the bubble’s toxicity, dismissing it as “regional froth.” Privately, they conspired to create a massive new bubble driving America deep into debt.
‘New economy’ morphs into out-of-control robot
This new ideology is extremely dangerous: It assumes the American economy can no longer be managed by politicians or Wall Street quants. The “new economy” has a life of its own, a “Terminator” from a dark future, an “I, Robot” from Asimov’s sci-fi world.
Yes, our economy has become a self-sustaining “bubble-blowing machine” inventing new bubbles at warp-speed even before the last is buried, in endless reincarnations of Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” cycles.
What’s next? More asset-backed bubbles. The dot-com ’90s created $7 trillion in market value. The housing boom created $12 trillion in “fake wealth.” Janszen predicts the next great bubble will be a $20 trillion “alternative energy” bubble. In fact, Wall Street’s already hustling biofuels, solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal and hydroelectric as the new alternative energies destined to replace oil, gas and coal in this next new economy.
Timing? The new “alternative energies” bubble will last about 8 years, from a 2005 launch till a peak around 2013, when it will “creatively destruct,” when all possible “fake wealth” is squeezed out, when investors wise up to the scam, when that new bubble pops.
In his finale, Janszen admits that when the “alternative energy” bubble finally self-destructs around 2013, “we will be left to mop up after yet another devastated industry,” while Wall Street “will already be engineering its next opportunity.”
But be warned: Even before we near the end of the “alternative energy” bubble, the law of unintended consequences could trigger a meltdown, not of the bubble but of the “bubble-making machine” itself! The machine will implode, taking down Wall Street, Washington, Corporate America … and with it, the “new economy,” the “new paradigm” and the “bubble-making machine!” (e.s.)
‘Black Swan’ self-destructs ’shadow banking’ derivatives
The trigger? A “black swan” off the radar and invisible to the quants managing the world’s derivatives.
The brilliant supertrader and risk manager Nassim Nicholas Taleb says a “black swan” is an extremely rare, improbable event (like 9/11) that cannot be predicted, yet has catastrophic impact. Black swans are events outside the vision, experience and technology of the world’s derivative traders’ geniuses.
What will the black swan destroy? How about the derivatives market that spreads so far beyond subprime loan obligations.
Pimco’s Bill Gross warns that $500 trillion of derivatives are hiding in a “shadow banking system” that “craftily dodges the reserve requirements of traditional institutions and promotes a chain letter, pyramid scheme of leverage … with no requirements to hold reserves against a significant ‘black swan’ run that might break them.”
Derivatives have become a renegade army of “I, Robots.” “According to the Bank for International Settlements … total derivatives amount to over $500 trillion, many of them finding their way onto the balance sheets of SIVs, CDOs and other conduits of their ilk comprising the Frankensteinian levered body of shadow banks.”
Shadowy? Pyramid schemes? Frankenstein? Terminator? Black swan: Gross paints a much darker future than Janszen: “The last two decades alone have witnessed pyramid schemes involving savings and loans/junk bonds, the small investor/dot-coms, and now global bonds/subprimes … in each and every case the originator of a surefire ‘can’t miss’ concept collected huge premiums from a willing investment public, only to see the pyramid collapse either of its own merits or from the lack of additional gullible investors. There will be more to come, much like a regular university that welcomes a never-ending stream of new ’students’ who pay annual ‘tuition’ to be ‘educated.’”
Higher truth
Never-ending: Gross and Janszen agree on that. But they’re both wrong. The biggest low in Janszen’s argument: “Given the current state of our economy, the only thing worse than a new bubble is its absence.”
Wrong, wrong, wrong! Remember, this new paradigm assumes that the only way the American economy can exist in the future is if Wall Street’s greedy “bubble-blowing machine” keeps feeding on itself, creating an endless, accelerating succession of ever-bigger bubbles.
Folks, that’s one of the dumbest economic theories ever, silly “new age” magical-thinking touted as a scientific basis for the new self-indulgent ideology of Wall Street, Washington and Corporate America.
There’s a higher truth: The best (not worst) strategy would be to let the “bubble-blowing machine” implode, live with the absence of a new bubble for a while, then quietly step back and reassess our unsustainable “growth-at-all-costs” economic policies that are secretly designed to benefit the self-interests of Wall Street’s insiders who profit by endlessly blowing bubble after bubble … after bubble … after ...(e.s.)
Brave words from someone who isn’t afraid to challenge the conventional wisdom folks. Listen closely to what he says.
