Dimwitted Yet Greedy: A Recipe For Success
January 8, 2014
By: The
Mogambo Guru
Unfortunately, angry dimwits like me don’t make a lot of money with which
to invest and be successful, all because the world is conspiring against
us, everybody hates us, and we have crappy jobs.
This does not mean that we are not also out to make a quick
mega-fortune without working, so as to immediately retire to a long,
glorious life of gluttonous-yet-overindulgent eccentricity.
So the task of learning to invest wisely the little money we make seems
monumentally difficult.
Stocks? Bonds? Cash? Who? What? Huh?
Admittedly, the seemingly Herculean task of understanding economics is
made slightly more palatable by knowing that reading one book, namely
Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson, is pretty much sufficient, or going to
one fabulous free website, namely Mises.org where one learns the glories
of the Austrian theory of economics, is plenty sufficient, too.
In a shameless plug, reading Economica Mogambo is an alternative, too.
Although a lot less refined but a whole lot less coherent, Economica
Mogambo contains mostly the same economic information, in one form or
another, but cleverly and obscurely disguised as random gibberish and
Stupid Mogambo Crap (SMC).
Fortunately, why try at all?
Elementary arithmetic shows conclusively that it is impossible for even a
slim majority of investors to make a profit over the long term, and so
with our luck we know we are screwed.
As for the impossibility of it all, I mean, where is the money going to
come from if everybody gets back more than they invested? How could such a
thing even be remotely possible?
In short, investing long-term is a known, provable loser for all but the
financial services industry, the taxing government and a pathetically
small minority of lucky investors.
In fact, I’m surprised that anyone invests money in stocks and bonds at
all: Long-term inflation in prices is always higher than the long-term
returns of any stock, bond or housing market, meaning that investors in
these markets ALL had losses in real (inflation-adjusted) dollar terms.
So, we invest for the long term to make a loss in buying power? Huh? So
I’m supposed to stop watching Gilligan’s Island on TV and instead read a
book to get THOSE dismal results?
Perhaps this is why you are uneasy. Worried. Nerves on edge, vexed by the
growing fear that you will spend your life in poverty and misery because
you are trapped in a weird Limbo Of Stupidity (LOS) as concerns matters
financial, as evidenced by never making enough money to start with,
idiotically spending too much, and saving too little, and/or getting
married and having kids, which makes EVERYTHING exponentially worse.
Perhaps to try and drown this dawning dread is why you drink too much
liquor. Or maybe why your paranoia makes you pack so much raw firepower,
but you are unwilling to give up either one despite knowing that armed
drunks usually fare very badly on the 6 o’clock news, especially one with
a belt-fed .30 caliber machinegun with a hair trigger and a laser-scope
that really isn’t that useful when that baby starts kicking and bucking,
making a hell of a racket, spewing out sheets of hot lead, shell cases
raining down like hail, and you are yelling “Yeehaw! I told you damned
kids to get off my damned lawn!”
“But,” you tearfully ask, lips quivering, “what are the alternatives to
stocks, bonds and real estate? You never hear of any! Tell us, Mighty
Manly Mogambo (MMM)! What can I, personally, do to save my Big Fat
Financial Butt (BFFB)?”
Worrying ABOUT your big butt is a lot better than worrying about how BIG
your butt is, and so I know you are scared enough to be absolutely
thrilled and delighted to know that (“May I have the envelope, please?”)
gold, silver and oil are the top three on the Top Three Top-Rated
Investments (TTTRI), as officially declared by the prestigious top-three
investment-ratings firm, The Mogambo Institute of Top Three Investment
Ratings (TMIOTTIR), a time-honored and completely honest and reliable
financial-rating firm that I just made up, right here, on the spot, for
some reason probably related to how I am Completely Freaked Out (CFO)
about the whole situation, or as some pathetic plea for attention and
respect that I don’t deserve and thus cannot get without making up
outrageous lies like that.
But regardless of whether I am entirely rational or if the Mogambo
Institute is just the start of another scam that will end badly with
recriminations all around, the reality is that gold, silver and oil are
Gigantic Freaking Bargains (GFBs), now that the horrid Federal Reserve is
in its seventh years of pumping out more than a trillion new dollars a
year, and central banks around the world are doing the same sad, silly,
stupid, suicidal thing!
They are GFBs as the federal government is deficit-spending more than a
trillion dollars a year, and has been for a decade!
Gold, silver and oil are GFBs now that the P/E of the Dow is at a pricey
20!
Now that the Total Outstanding Consumer Debt is higher than ever -- higher
than ever! -- at $3.076 trillion!
Now that the selfsame Total Outstanding Consumer Debt is increasing at 7.1
percent, growing at the fastest pace in over five years!
Now that the national debt is beyond $17 trillion!
And especially now that so many, many, many gazillions of dollars in
valuation have been lost in bonds, since bond prices fell 50% when the
interest rate on the 10-year T-bill doubled from 1.5 percent (on 7/12/12)
to 3 percent (on 12/26/13)! Poof! Half your investment is gone!
And, also “poof!” just like that, so too have the values of other bonds
around the world similarly dived as interest rates have risen.
Breathless, I pause at the total horror of unfolding tragic economic
events, my pulse racing, and my rat-like, beady, bloodshot eyes darting
from side to side, seeing enemies and dangers everywhere.
I mean, normally, from just a casual reading of classical economics, one
would have expected that the world would have fallen apart and collapsed
in flames, people burning the evil Federal Reserve to the ground for
causing all our problems by creating too much currency and credit, mobs
rioting in the streets, reports of pizza and beer shortages fueling the
growing social unrest, mayors and governors promising “quick action” on
the beer and pizza shortages, and gold and silver soaring in price, but
which are, individually and collectively, not.
Inquiring minds, as they say, want to know why.
The reason is simplicity itself: Now that all of everyone’s wealth is tied
up in stocks, bonds and real estate, the government has a very keen vested
interest in keeping these markets up, and their prices always rising.
Their reasoning is solid: That they figure that people losing most of
everything they have would put a real damper on spending, while rising
unadjusted asset values make them feel wealthier and, so the theory goes,
spend more.
And they have the idiotic assurances of Keynesian knotheads that that will
happen.
And with a $455 billion trade deficit, and lot of foreigner exporters want
it, too.
And guess what? It probably will! And for longer than you think!
Let’s get real: The stock market, the bond market and the housing markets
are manipulated by the government, and it’s no secret.
And nobody in their right mind remotely believes the government’s
statistics on inflation, or employment, or anything else anymore.
However, what WAS a secret is the news that ALL things are now legally
manipulated by the government! In the chilling words of Chris Powell, in
an essay at King World News about a court case against manipulating
corporate entities being thrown out, “By federal law, the Gold Exchange
Act of 1934 specifically authorizes the US government to rig not only the
gold market, but to rig any (financial) market surreptitiously through the
Exchange Stabilization Fund. If the CFTC has discovered that market
rigging is taking place because of US government policy, then according to
law there is nothing to be done about it.”
Yikes! Rigging every market in the USA is now officially, as determined by
an official federal judge in an actual case, to be perfectly legal because
the federal government passed laws to make it legal!!!!
Keen-eyed Junior Mogambo Rangers (JMRs) quickly turn their attention to my
use of four exclamation points as punctuation, which roughly translate as
“This is so bad that I think my heart has stopped beating, and I am pretty
sure I piddled in my pants I’m so scared!”
An argument about style can be made that it should have been FIVE
exclamation points to punctuate a sentence revealing a scam so horrifying,
so un-American, so un-Constitutional, so sleazy and so slimy, so foully
fraudulent and so criminally insane that it is guaranteed to destroy
everything it touches because it touches everything.
But I took one exclamation point away because of the comforting protection
of holding gold and silver, which by a happy coincidence are extremely
cheap right now because gold and silver are the very things that the
government is trying to suppress by keeping their prices artificially low!
And, of course, there is the inner peace and serenity of having enough
lethal firepower to light up the sky for miles around.
Gold. Silver. Oil. Just put your
little bit of money into three simple things. So simple.
So simple, and so guaranteed by 2,500 years of history, that one feels
moved to say, as intelligent people often do, and so should you, too,
“Whee! This investing stuff is easy!”