January 15, 2015
By:
The Mogambo Guru
I have a lot on my mind as I nervously sweep the nighttime perimeter with
my periscope, thinking troubled thoughts and imagining monsters lurking in
the dark, or government agents of one kind or another, hiding in the gloom
behind Rick’s garbage cans, or perhaps zombies, or space creatures, or
something where a .50 caliber, belt-fed, water-cooled machinegun at the
ready would come in so, so, SO handy that nobody would ever again DARE say
“Why do think you need to buy a machinegun, and why are you always buying
gold and silver in fear of the Federal Reserve’s insane monetary policies,
like some crazy old man, when the kids need new shoes?”
In my pathetic defense, it is cold and lonely inside the Mogambo Man Cave
Bunker (MMCB), and yet watching all the porn in the world, on all the TVs
in the world, and eating all the yummy burrito el grande supremos and
cold, cold beer in the world is not NEARLY enough to calm an angry,
outraged old man, terrified at the sheer level of despicable lies being
told by the federal government, which is not to even mention the colossal
corruptions, the sheer number of criminals and crimes, and the
unbelievable stupidities in all the rest of the economy, and in the world,
all now overlapping in an ugly, stinking, giant web of willful ignorance,
extortion and deceit, grown dense and deadly through the decades, which is
bad enough without being a long, run-on sentence, only to end with a
pointless, gratuitous alliteration.
My trigger finger spasms reflexively, and I glance nervously at the safety
switch so that we would not have another episode of old man Parker going
ballistic just because a couple of his stupid garbage cans accidentally
got a little shot up. One time. A long time ago.
Anyway, standing there, ever at the ready, my finger on the trigger, I am
getting angrier and angrier at the terrible tragedy that is to befall the
United States because we were so completely stupid as to be beguiled by
the Keynesian economic insanity of the government selling trillions upon
trillions of dollars’ worth of new debt, having the Federal Reserve create
the cash and credit necessary to buy it all, and the government spending
the new cash! In-freaking-sane!
Now, I am obviously in highly-defensive mode, in anticipation of even more
of the same monetary and fiscal nightmares that got us here, where sheer
desperation and panic reign as the bloated, malignant, insanely
overvalued, over-indebted, gigantic government-centric economy both
explodes and implodes, where the weight of the explosion of inflationary
suffering will fall like a wet bag of cement (“plop!”) on the poor and
what remains of the middle class, who will both rise up in a sudden fury,
exclaiming “The Mighty, Mighty Mogambo (MMM) was right about the Federal
Reserve being evil, yet we mocked him just because he is insufferable, and
has the table manners of a pig!
To the Federal Reserve then, baying vengeful mob! Let us throw the
evil Keynesian malefactors in prison, and thus stop the insane inflation
in the money supply, which leads to inflation in prices and inflation in
debt, which are currently kicking our butts, and also to a deflationary
bust with its attendant unemployment because nobody is spending money.”
Sure enough, John Williams at ShadowStats.com calculates unemployment the
classical way that it has always been calculated until the Clinton
administration, when things starting to get weird in that “I’m lying right
to your face” kind of way. He figures the real unemployment rate is
running about 23 percent! Yikes!
And it is not going to get better in that regard anytime soon, as Tony
Sagami at Mauldin Economics is, like me, alarmed that ISM
Non-Manufacturing (Services Sector) fell, and
“Moreover, the services
index has dropped three out of the last four months and saw the largest
one-month fall in six years!”
Plus, there is more bad news, in that construction spending fell, prices
paid fell, new orders fell, supplier deliveries fell, production fell, and
order backlogs fell.
But strange, terrible things are happening behind the screen, as the
monetary base, after a rather longish spell of relative quiescence,
suddenly jumped an astonishing $303 billion, which is a whopping 8.1% of
the entire $3,759 billion monetary base of the entire economy of the
United States!
And, of course, the money supply is still chugging along at a 5% rate of
growth, but which may be slowing.
And for those whose Junior Mogambo Ranger (JMR) credentials dictate sheer
horror at the prospect of inflation in consumer prices, times are indeed
hard. According to the lying
government scumbags at the Labor Department (a location which only
differentiates them from the lying scumbags in the rest of the government,
the lickspittle press and the sycophantic education system, upon all of
whom I heap the Scornful Disdain Of The Mogambo (SDOTM)), their new
inflation report shows that everything is peachy, peachy, peachy, as far
as rises in prices is concerned, and if you think otherwise just because
you are paying more for things, then you are crazy to believe your own
lying eyes, and you are probably buying gold and silver against the
inflationary/deflationary collapse caused by the evil Federal Reserve
creating so much excess money and credit, just like the rest of your
hateful JMR friends.
Looking at the numbers in the report for inflation over the full year, we
note with predictable horror and a lot of screaming and gnashing of teeth
in outrage, that price inflation in “food” was a horrifying 3.4% for the
year, that “food at home” was up a whopping 3.7%, and “food away from
home” was up 3.0%. So no
matter where you eat, it costs more.
Even worse, electricity was up 3.1 percent, energy services up 3.7
percent, shelter up 2.9 percent, and medical care up 2.4 percent.
In short, the stuff you need to stay alive cost more.
And it is coming at a time when the average inflation-adjusted
income (using the statistics of a lying government) is lower than it was
in 2007, commonly acknowledged as the start of the recession.
Eight years in a row of higher and higher prices, and eight years of lower
and lower incomes! Wonderful. Just freaking wonderful. You can almost
taste the sarcasm.
Not only that, but corporations are trying to cover up falling revenues by
lying with their accounting practices, in that they are reporting
recurring expenses (like executive compensation, bonuses, employee pension
contributions, etc.) as extraordinary expenses, so that they can say “We
would have done very, very well, if it wasn’t for these unexpected
expenses we had, and so that is why our overvalued stock is not so
overvalued at a lofty P/E of 19, and why we, as lying, conceited, greedy
executives, deserve the big bonuses we award ourselves.”
In short, I conclude everything is a mess because there is no escaping the
fact that total current U.S. debt, including governments’ debts, business
debt and private debt, is over $60 trillion, in an economy that has a GDP
(the total price of every bit of goods and services produced by the
economy in an entire year) of $17 trillion. Consumer debt has never been
higher. Margin debt in brokerage accounts is in the stratosphere. There
are more businesses going out of business than there are businesses going
into business. (Actually, business deaths had been sort of low and steady
since at least 1977, and while business births have always outnumbered
business deaths, births have been gradually declining all this time, until
now, when there are, for the first time, more business deaths than
births).
I can see by your face that you are as frightened as I.
“So, Fabulous And Wonderful Mogambo (FAWM),” you fearfully ask,
your breath coming in ragged gasps, your face a frozen mask of icy terror,
“is there nothing we can do?”
To this I smile benignly, and cheerfully reply “How happily apropos you
should address me as Fabulous And Wonderful Mogambo (FAWM), because there
is something you can do to save yourself, and I know what it is!
And I’m going to tell you! For free! I mean, how fabulous and
wonderful is THAT?”
So hold onto your hats, because here it is. The fabulous and wonderful
thing to do is the same thing that other people have always done to
successfully escape the economic calamity, and have always done over the
last 2,500 unbroken years full of dirtball governments borrowing
themselves into bankruptcy: They bought gold and silver, the ultimate
money and asset.