I have been reading ZeroHedge for a while now. But I have a feeling that it is going to go the way of Mike Shedlock and the other financial porn sites. They just get kind of stale and shrill after a little while.
Folks, the money is gone. I would argue that it was never there in the first place. We set up an economy based on getting rid of as many jobs as we could and then buying cheap crap from Wal-Mart. All of the little IOU's were shuffled around for a while (a while in this case being 10-15 years) and wound up in the rich fuckers pockets.
So, we have dismantled our factories and sent the factories and their attendant jobs to China. We lowered the interest rates to as low or lower than they have ever been before, and then went off on an incredible hallucination that a house is a store of wealth rather than the huge money suck that they are in real life.
So here we sit, with an economy built on Excel pilots and Human Resource administrators. From the best that I can see, for every job that we have producing something of value, we have three parasitic jobs grafted onto it. Now, the guys with the money are starting to figure out that we are well and truly fucked and are killing off even more jobs.
I cannot see an easy way out of this. We have to take the long time and hardship necessary to bring us out of the mess. It is going to take thirty years, cuz that is how long ago we swallowed Ronald reagan and Milton Friedman's line of bullshit and started deconstructing the edifice.
I guess that what we are doing now is beginning the process of implementing a salvage culture. We spent the first two hundred years putting together a political/economic edifice that was the envy of the world's history. Then Ronnie and Miltie came around and convinced us that we would be happier if we dismantled the whole thing and let them and their friends get rich.
We are pretty much half finished with the dismemberment of our society. We have allowed the rich to create their Versailles and their corps of Intendants to protect their privilege. We now are on the cusp of the last step of the process.
It is just a bummer that the recent building constructed are of such shoddy quality. Their materials would not be preferred for constructing the future.
1 comment:
I am not sure why everyone is so sure modern construction materials are inferior. Compare a modern building to ALL the building built 50 years ago: not the handful still standing. Cheaply built modern building are no worse than the cheaply build building of earlier times. If older building look better by comparison today, it is simply a matter of survival bias: all the crapy old buildings have already fallen down.
I agree with Mish as well. But I don't get a lot of warm and fuzzies from him. A typical person working in a system which stands upon an enormous investment of infrastructure, but feels he has done it all on his own (a.k.a. and unreflective libertarian).
I think your statement about how it was never really there is very much on. We borrowed toward a future prosperity that is unlikely to come.
Post a Comment