Category Archives: Kleptocracy

Survivalists For Nationalization: What’s Up With the Atlantic?

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From The Altantic, May 2009:

“[Cody] Lundin is not a racist; in fact, he’s an Obama supporter, and he resents the racist associations attached to survivalism. Nor does he wish for the grid to go down. He says he enjoys electricity and indoor plumbing. He tends to think, though, that civilization is a thin film, and that in times of economic distress, it’s smart to be prepared for the day when Safeway runs out of milk. “This isn’t something I hope for. But what if the illusion does really crumble, and we have to move as a society to something else?”

I asked Cody how he invests his money. “I don’t believe in the intangible economy; I believe in the tangible economy. When I have extra money, I buy tools, food, or land. I like to be able to see what I’m buying. And I really don’t like debt, so I’d rather not have certain things than be in debt to anyone. I just feel better knowing that I don’t owe money, and I feel good knowing that I can take care of myself. That’s the American way, to be able to be self-reliant.”

For the record, I don’t think the grid is buckling under the weight of consumer debt or the mistakes of AIG. But we’re in a strange moment in American history when a mouse-eating barefoot survivalist in the mountains of Arizona makes more sense than the chief investment strategist of Merrill Lynch.”

and

“Unconventionality makes me nervous, but less so than conformity. I’m finished with conformity. In picking an adviser, I’m also looking for someone who is unleveraged; someone who is putting his own money into the investments he’s recommending; and someone who can explain to me in a few sentences, in language easily understood by earthlings, his philosophy of investing….”

  Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic, May 2009

 My Comment

My, my.  Survivalism is finding its way into the stodgy halls of the establishment. A genuinely truthful, even humble, piece by Jeffrey Goldberg. Note: I don’t know if it adds to the surprise that Goldberg supported the Iraq war in 2002.

Of course, there’s the mandatory and utterly gratuitous swipe at the racism and anti-Semitism of survivalists (you’d think survivalists were the only racists of any kind around).**

But we’re not picky about the dawning of good sense.

We’ll take it wherever it comes, whenever, and however.

But then, we read what seems to the companion piece to the one above, The Quiet Coup, by Siimon Johnson, a former economist at the IMF. Johnson writes correctly, but rather belatedly, that the country has been taken over by what he gingerly terms ‘American oligarchs.’

Well, substance-wise this is somewhat tardy, now  that the horse – indeed a whole team of horses – has fled the barn.

And style-wise, we much prefer the earthier feel of  ‘bankster’ or ‘mobster’  to ‘oligarch.’

But it’s what Simon Johnson tells us to do in this piece that sets off our b-s detector.

Simon sez nationalize.

We’ve heard this before, from every economist in town. And the public said, thank you very much, but no.

But here it is again. Nationalization is obviously something the establishment badly wants.

[I say establishment, because that’s exactly who’s pushing it].

And that makes me have second thoughts about the Goldberg piece. Much as I like it, I begin to wonder about it…what end is it being put to?

Co-opting exactly the same mood (libertarian and survivalist) and the same economic argument (impending disaster) that characterized “Mobs, Messiahs and Markets” (down to citing behavioral economics and Kahneman) the Atlantic seems to be pushing an establishment big-government solution that’s directly opposite the libertarian small-government solution we advocate in the book.

That is, using the same arguments, The Atlantic gets to another place.

The Atlantic wants more of the same (big-government and nationalization)

Libertarians want change (non-intervention and self-reliance).

Libertarians read the Goldberg piece and go all warm and fuzzy, hoping the establishment is about to come around.

Still warm and fuzzy, we read the other piece and begin to give the argument a second thought. Maybe it’s not so bad, we mutter…

Maybe we should rethink some of our criticism…

Maybe they only mean some stop-gap measure..Maybe, in that next piece of mine I’ll tone down some of the rhetoric against nationalization….

We tone it down…

The naive undecided reader reads the libertarian blog and the mainstream press and likes what he reads.  He sees two similar sounding arguments and recalls only the similarities. He forgets the differing conclusions. He starts to think the press can be trustedl. He hears the same solution touted all over the networks and begins to see no other way out but nationalization….

You see how it works?

**I’m philosophically a survivalist, but a bourgeois, urban, cosmopolitan one…….. more inclined to subsist on green drink powder than wild mice..

Bob Zoellick’s A Two-Bit Bore

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A piece I wrote on Zoellick at MWC News :

April 2, 2009

Bob Zoellick is really, really sorry for poor people in Asia, who are really, really going to be hurt the most by a slow-down in global trade.

That’s what he told a Thomson Reuters Newsmaker ahead of the G20 meeting in London on April 1.  According to Bobby Z, the global economy is going to contract by 1.7 percent this year, compared to growing by 1.9 percent last year.

He didn’t define growth.

He’s not suggesting that a decline in the velocity of derivative hot-potato is a decline in growth, is he? I hope not.

But he did define poverty.  A buck twenty-five a day, he says.

Well, here’s what. A buck twenty-five in India is about sixty rupees. Which will buy you enough to eat for a day in India. Which is all that matters to a poor Indian.

That makes a poor Indian better off than a derivative big-shot in Manhattan, at the end of the day. He won’t be broke….. with other people’ money.  Or, in the red…. up to infinity.

And that’s where you, me, and Bobby Z are now, after several trillion bucks.

I’ll take a buck-fifty in an Indian village, any day.

Maybe we need a new definition of poverty. Or, we need a new president of the World Bank.

Not yet another axe-man from the Sachs men.

Especially one who’s gone in and out of Treasury, the Department of State, and practically every US trade delegation in the last twenty years like a cheap suit through a Chinese laundromat and was –  get this – an executive vice-president at none other than Fannie Mae.

That would be just around the time (1993-1997) they were shoving every one with a pulse (and many without) into subsidized housing.

Who else would we want cleaning up the nuclear fall-out from the housing bubble, if not one of the leading bubble-heads around, right?

Besides advising Enron on finance and screaming for war in Iraq, I don’t know if you could come up with a more radioactive resume than that.

Oh, that’s right, Zoellick’s got those two wrapped up, as well.

(Wiki: Zoellick signed the January 26, 1998 letter to President Bill Clinton from PNAC that advocated war against Iraq. During 1999, Zoellick served on a panel that offered Enron executives briefings on economic and political issues.)

What a busy fellow. Quite the boy wonder.

And oh – look. He’s into fancy innovations too.  He’s the guy who’s been shoving genetically-modified food down European gullets, like it or not.

(The”Big Five” biotech companies–Monsanto, Dupont, Syngenta, Dow Chemical, and Aventis–control 937 out of 1085 biotech patents).

And he’s shown he can shove it down Asian gullets too.

He’ll do anything to get rid of poverty, will our Bobby, even if it means getting rid of the poor. From high-tech food to high-tech finance, Zoellick’s a big believer in force-feeding.

Now he wants the G-20 to endorse a new $50 billion Global Trade Liquidity Programme (translated from the Higher Financialeze that reads Got To Love These Pigs), which combines a billion from the World Bank with “financing from governments and regional development banks,” which gets “leveraged by a risk-sharing arrangement with major private sector partners.”

We hate to bring cold logic into such a touchy-feely, lovey-dovey arrangement, but does “risk-sharing” mean the private-sector partners could go broke too?

Or, at least, get a fatal SIV? Because that’s what sharing risk usually means. (Maybe we need a needle-exchange program for credit-heads, but that’s another story).

And all of this risk-sharing is just to help the poor in Asia out? It brings a tear to our cynical eye, Bobby.

Such sharing. Why, it’s chummier than anything since David and Jonathan, this private-public partnership.

Oh, that’s right. Tim Geithner came up with that brainwave recently too. (I guess that’s what being a Goldman alum does for you. It gives you the same sort of brainwaves).

And who would they be, these generous Fezziwigs of Finance, these Monetary Mother Theresas?

Standard Chartered, Standard Bank, and Rabobank, we hear. Rabobank? We feel a brainwave coming on ourselves. Wasn’t Rabobank one of AIG’s needle sharers…er…counterparties?

And doesn’t that mean that, one way or other, the Fed has already done one of their hot little private-public lapdances with Rabobank?

I mean, how many private-public partnerships do you get to go through before people start calling you.. you know….a two-bit bore..

Psy-Op Central: Financial War Games In DC

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In the news today, via Politico, this:

 “The Pentagon sponsored a first-of-its-kind war game last month focused not on bullets and bombs — but on how hostile nations might seek to cripple the U.S. economy, a scenario made all the more real by the global financial crisis.

The two-day event near Ft. Meade, Maryland, had all the earmarks of a regular war game. Participants sat along a V-shaped set of desks beneath an enormous wall of video monitors displaying economic data, according to the accounts of three participants.

“It felt a little bit like Dr. Strangelove,” one person who was at the previously undisclosed exercise told POLITICO.

But instead of military brass plotting America’s defense, it was hedge-fund managers, professors and executives from at least one investment bank, UBS – all invited by the Pentagon to play out global scenarios that could shift the balance of power between the world’s leading economies….”

Thanks to the excellent Justin Raimondo, one of the real heavy-weights of  anti-spin commentary, for the lead.

How To Become An American Billionaire

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In the news at Yahoo Finance, these are the characteristics of a sample group of billionaires:

*Billionaire Parents Had Math-Related Careers

Math prowess is ofter inherited. Engineer, accountant and small-business owner predominated among the professions followed by those billionaire parents whom the study could track down.

* Billionaires had September Birthdays

Of the 380 self-made American tycoons on Forbes list of the World’s Billionaires over the last three years, the most (42) were born in September.

*Billionaires Dropped Out and Tuned In….To Tech Success

More than 20% of self-made billionaires on the latest list of the World’s Billionaires dropped out and became tech tycoons – including Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell, Larry Ellison, (Oracle) and Theodore Waitt (Gateway).

*Skull and Bones

Many billionaires were members of Skull and Bones, the secret society to which John Kerry and George W. Bush belonged. They include hedge-fund manager Edward Lampert, Blackstone co-founder Steven Schwarzman and FedEx founder Frederick Smith.

*Goldman Sachs

Of 68 self-made American finance billionaires, at least eight come out of Goldman Sachs, especially: its “risk arbitrage” unit where Edward Lampert, Daniel Och, Tom Steyer and Richard Perry started out.

My Comment

This is the kind of news article that deserves deconstructing. Apparently, the way to the greatest wealth in the US is through an early start, a good head for figures, and a network of the most politically well–connected people around, i.e., through insider contacts. If that’s so, it portends ill for real capitalism.

I have no idea what the September birthdays mean….

AIG Is A Criminal Scam (Update)

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Karl Denninger quotes AIG investigators:

“In fact, our investigation suggests that by the time AIG had entered the CDS fray in a serious way more than five years ago, the firm was already doomed. No longer able to prop up its earnings using reinsurance because of growing scrutiny from state insurance regulators and federal law enforcement agencies, AIG’s foray into CDS was really the grand finale. AIG was a Ponzi scheme plain and simple, yet the Obama Administration still thinks of AIG as a real company that simply took excessive risks. No, to us what the fraud Bernard Madoff is to individual investors, AIG is to the global financial community.As with the phony reinsurance contracts that AIG and other insurers wrote for decades, when AIG wrote hundreds of billions of dollars in CDS contracts, neither AIG nor the counterparties believed that the CDS would ever be paid. Indeed, one source with personal knowledge of the matter suggests that there may be emails and actual side letters between AIG and its counterparties that could prove conclusively that AIG never intended to pay out on any of its CDS contracts.

(Karl Denninger talking) Read that folks. Then read it again. Then read it AGAIN. More excerpts:

There are two basic problems with side letters. First, they are a criminal act, a fraud that usually carries the full weight of an “A” felony in many jurisdictions. Second, once the side letter is discovered by a persistent auditor or regulator examining the buyer of protection, the transaction becomes worthless. You paid $6 million to AIG to shift risk via the reinsurance, but the side letter makes clear that the transaction is a fraud and you lose any benefit that the apparent risk shifting might have provided.

(Denninger) And finally, the last nail in the coffin:

The key point is that neither the public, the Fed nor the Treasury seem to understand is that the CDS contracts written by AIG with these various non-insurers around the world were shams – with no correlation between “fees” paid and the risk assumed. These were not valid contracts as Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, Treasury Secretary Geithner and Economic policy guru Larry Summers claim, but rather acts of criminal fraud meant to manipulate the capital positions and earnings of financial companies around the world.

Indeed, our sources as well as press reports suggest that the CDS contracts written by AIG may have included side letters, often in the form of emails rather than formal letters, that essentially violated the ISDA agreements and show that the true, economic reality of these contracts was fraud plain and simple. Unfortunately, by not moving to seize AIG immediately last year when the scandal broke, the Fed and Treasury may have given the AIG managers time to destroy much of the evidence of criminal wrongdoing.

Only when we understand how AIG came to be involved in CDS and the fact that this seemingly illegal activity was simply an extension of the reinsurance/side letter shell game scam that AIG, Gen Re and others conducted for many years before will we understand what needs to be done with AIG, namely liquidation. Seen in this context, the payments made to AIG by the Fed and Treasury, which were then passed-through to dealers such as Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS), can only be viewed as an illegal taking that must be reversed once the US Trustee for the Federal Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York is in control of AIG’s operations….”

That’s a post by Karl Denninger, citing comments by AIG investigators

My Comment

Well.. finally some people are catching on. It’s ALL a scam, folks. One gigantic ball of criminality. Told you so.

All this high falutin’ stuff about who’s going to fix what when is nothing more than jive talk to cover up for crime. I’ve always said that.   Here in June 2006, here in July 2006   On September 19 2008 and  September 30, 2008  and this year again,  and again and again.

These folks live in each other’s pockets, buy each other’s businesses, swap each other’s debts…. and crimes…..  We have a mafia in power. All this talk about fixing this and fixing that is beside the point…and misleading. There’s a fix alright. It’s the fix cooked up by the regulators, the bankers, and the politicians.

What we really need now is the FBI busting in and handcuffing people and dragging them off to sticky little jail cells where they can be subjected to all forms of inquiry within the law.

We’ve been saying this till our throat hurts.

But, of course, we weren’t the right sort (well-connected Wall Street money manager), and no one paid any attention…and now it’s a bit late. The paper trail has probably gone cold.

But atta boy, anyway, Karl.

Update: Apparently, this post confused a number of people.

James Klicker writes to let me know that Ritholz’s post is what Denninger is riffing off.

Let me clarify. The post above is Karl Denninger’s commentary on a post by Barry Ritholz (of The Big Picture).  However,  my interest was not in the fact of AIG’s criminality (Ritholz’s post), but in Denninger’s forthright reaction.

Compare it to the wussy cover-up for AIG’s chief executives, especially Hank Greenberg, which a lot of people seem to favor.

AIG’s criminality has been known for a long time. I wrote about it on September 19, 2008, purely on what I’d gathered from skimming off-shore newsletters, which had been documenting the criminality in the company since the 1980s. My interest is less in AIG’s criminality (which is so obvious you’d have to be wilfully blind not to notice) but why it is that so many people rushed to claim niceties of contract law for a company whose contracts were obviously fraudulent to begin with. Sounds like the usual media deflection…

Hedge Funds Reap Billions From Calling Market Right

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“With a combined $2 trillion under management, the hedge fund industry is coming off its richest year ever — a feat all the more remarkable given the billions of dollars of losses suffered by major Wall Street banks.

In recent months, however, scores of hedge funds have quietly died or spectacularly imploded, wracked by bad investments, excess borrowing or leverage, and client redemptions — or a combination of those events.

“To some degree it’s a very gigantic version of Las Vegas,” said Gary Burtless, an economist at the Brookings Institution.

As Alpha’s list shows, managers who reap big gains one year can lose the next.

Edward Lampert, the founder of ESL Investments and a member of the 2007 Alpha list, was absent this year. His fund fell 27 percent last year, according to Alpha. About 60 percent of ESL’s equity portfolio is invested in Sears, whose shares plunged 40 percent last year. ESL is also a major holder of Citigroup, whose abysmal performance matched that of Sears.

A manager who ranked high in the 2007 list and fell off in 2008 was James Pallotta of the Tudor Investment Corporation, who was 17th last year and earned $300 million. Mr. Pallotta’s $5.7 billion Raptor Global Fund fell almost 8 percent last year, according to Alpha.

A few who did not make the cut still made buckets of money. Bruce Kovner of Caxton Associates and Barry Rosenstein at Jana Partners didn’t make the top 50. But Mr. Kovner earned $100 million, and Mr. Rothstein earned $170 million, according to Alpha. Spokesmen for the hedge fund managers either declined to comment on Tuesday or could not be reached.

Since 1913, the United States witnessed only one other year of such unequal wealth distribution — 1928, the year before the stock market crashed, according to Jared Bernstein, a senior fellow at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. Such inequality is likely to impede an economic recovery, he said.”

More at the New York Times.

Comment

Inequality in a free market is the result (among other things, of course) of  different levels of competence and of capitalization. It’s not the essential problem.  If it’s increased tremendously, it’s because we’ve also been fiddling with the market tremendously, ostensibly to make things better, but with the opposite result.

But the crash has now given a lot of people a platform to vent.

The very people who called the market wrong (Citi, Goldman and their buddies in the regulatory business) are going to blame their incompetence on lack of regulation…. and make successful managers  pay a price. (Note that it was Goldman and Citi managers in government who helped pushed many deregulatory initiatives and changes in leverage requirements, in the first place).

I’m all for transparency, following the rules, and proper regulation.

But let’s face it.  Where we are now, more regulation isn’t going to protect the little guy or a small business from fraud. The little guys are already crushed by rules and regulations….and they’re still being defrauded. It’s just going to give one set of  big money managers yet another weapon they can use against another set of big managers. And since the guys who didn’t lose are obviously smarter than the losers, what makes anyone think they’re going to sit around and become targets?

The only reason we have such monster financial firms, anyway, is because of laws that enabled the growth of monopolies….and because we keep depreciating the cost of money through interest-rate manipulation.

Madoff’s Swiss Account

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“In the case of the Fulds, it might not be that challenging because the transfer was made after Lehman’s collapse already occurred, and the home “was obviously sold for well below fair-market value,” said Roccy DeFrancesco, an asset protection attorney and founder of the Wealth Preservation Institute in St. Joseph, Mich. “On the surface, that would seem to have all the signs of a fraudulent transfer,” he said. The Madoffs, however, present a much more challenging scenario: Many of the major assets that are currently in Ms. Madoff’s name, including three residencies in the United States and France worth a combined $19 million — were purchased directly by Ms. Madoff years ago, according to court documents.

She bought the New York penthouse in 1984, according to a financial statement Mr. Madoff submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission that was disclosed earlier this month. Ms. Madoff also ponied up for the family’s $11 million mansion in Palm Beach , Fla. , in 1994, and then she bought a $1 million home in France ‘s Cap d’Antibes in 2000 or 2001, according to court documents. The Madoffs’ $3 million home in Montauk, N.Y., was jointly purchased by the couple in 1979.

Given the timing of these purchases, the assets may now be considered “old and cold,” or off-limits to Mr. Madoff’s victims, noted Mr. Rothschild.

Mr. Madoff, when he entered his guilty plea this month, said that “to the best of my recollection, my fraud began in the early 1990s.”

More at Investment News.com

Comment:

Oh well, that takes care of that. We’ll just have to take the gentleman’s word for it.

The game started in the 1990s, eh? In the beginning he said the game began only in 2005. Now, it’s aged by 15 years. A few more months and we’ll find the truth out. It probably began 15 years before that. Prosecutors have already said it began in the 1980s,  – which sounds much more likely.

Thieving Theocrats: The Righteous Left-Wing Press Steals From Its Own

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“The April 21, 2005 issue of the LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS carried a lead article titled ‘Blood for Oil?’

The paper is attributed to a group of writers and activists – Iain Boal, T.J. Clark, Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts – who identify themselves by the collective name ‘Retort.’ In their article, the authors advance a supposedly new explanation for the wars in the Middle East.

Much of their explanation – including both theory and fact – is plagiarized. It is cut and pasted, almost ‘as is,’ from our own work. The primary source is ‘The Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition,’ a 71 page chapter in our book THE GLOBAL POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ISRAEL (Pluto 2002). The authors also seem inspired, incognito, by our more recent papers, including ‘It’s All About Oil’ (2003), ‘Clash of Civilization or Capital Accumulation?’ (2004), ‘Beyond Neoliberalism’ (2004) and ‘Dominant Capital and the New Wars’ (2004).

In their paper, the Retort group credits us for having coined the term ‘Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition’ – but dismiss our ‘precise calibration of the oil/war nexus’ as ‘perfunctory.’ This dismissal does not prevent them from freely appropriating, wholesale fashion, our concepts, ideas and theories – including, among others, the ‘era of free flow,’ the ‘era of limited flow,’ ‘energy conflicts,’ the ‘commercialization of arms exports,’ the ‘politicization of oil’ and the critique of the ‘scarcity thesis.’ Nowhere in their article do the authors mention the source of these concepts, ideas and theories…..”

More at the website of Nitzan and Bichler.

The theocrats I refer to in my post title are the leftist ideologues (state socialists) who never met a fact they couldn’t twist into a socialist pretzel.

 

Gold Above 940

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Wow. Bernanke opens his mouth and the dollar sinks to 84.5.

Can’t he read a RED STOP sign?

And this weird thing here: I saw a  piece on bond yields and when I looked it up on yahoo, it’d been removed.

/cnnm/090318/031809_credit_market.html http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/ynews_bs262‘

Here’s  the URL for the original site:

CMWire – The Capital Markets Newswire

But when I looked through Capital Markets wire just now I couldn’t find it.

Here’s a copy of  the google search result for the piece:

Mar 18, 2009 … Yields plummeted by the widest margin since 1987. … 14:41 AIG chief asks execs to return bonuses» CNN.com. AIG chief Edward Liddy told lawmakers ….. (

Corrects the headline to reflect that Treasury yields plunged). …
cmwire.com/ – 39 minutes ago – Similar pages –

(http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=yields+plunge+1987+cnn&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&oq=)

Update:

OK – I found the piece. It’s by Deborah Levine and I found it at Market Watch.

I think the original wire report on CMWire and Yahoo might have been taken off to make the headline look less alarming, so that the reference to 1987 didn’t spook stock investors – the media’s target patsies.

You can see that the article now reads – “Treasury prices soared Wednesday, sending yields plummeting….”

The powers that be want to keep the poor Dow’s chin up at least for today before the big bad short sellers come out in droves…

“Treasury prices soared Wednesday, sending yields plummeting by the largest amount since 1987 after the Federal Reserve surprised bond investors by saying it would buy $300 billion in longer-term Treasury securities over the next six months.”

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/treasurys-soar-after-fed-says/story.aspx?guid={7DB91E8A-FD87-4BD4-9296-3C6EA402C920}&tool=1&dist=bigcharts&

Meanwhile here are the details at Bloomberg  on the FOMC decision:

” This Wednesday, the Federal Open Market Committee of the United States’ Federal Reserve made a unanimous decision to keep the Fed Funds rate unchanged at the 0.25% to 0% range. The rate decision was not a surprise for a good number of investors since the Federal Reserve stated clearly on its last FOMC statement that “economic conditions are likely to warrant exceptionally low levels of the federal funds rate for some time”. Even so, today’s FOMC statement sounded a bit more dovish than expected, not reflecting the positive performance of the U.S. stock, bond and credit markets over the last two weeks. The Federal Reserve said “it sees some risk that inflation could persist for a time below rates that best foster economic growth and price stability in the longer term”. In addition,  “to help improve conditions in private credit markets, the Committee decided to purchase up to $300 billion of longer-term Treasury securities over the next six months.” So once gain, the Fed said it will employ all available tools to promote the resumption of sustainable economic growth and this makes us believe that the Fed will continue to purchase large quantities of agency debt and mortgage-backed securities to provide support to the mortgage and housing markets. In other words, the Fed will use quantitative easing. Currency traders reacted very negatively to the FOMC statement driving the U.S. dollar lower against the world’s most heavily traded currencies.”

 Comment:

What are they doing? Blowing smoke in everyone’s eyes pretending they see deflation in store in order to throw everyone off the inflationary scent?  Hoping meanwhile that gold doesn’t pop up too much and give the game away before they finish the next mighty round of mortgage hot potato? (Most plausible scenario).

Or, are they really terrified of having so destroyed the capital base of the economy that they think something, anything (maybe another financial instrument’s been discovered we haven’t heard about)  has to be done. And since all they have is a printing press., well why not use it? Off with the heads of the middle class, the thrifty, the savers, those who have no debt, the creditors!  (Also plausible, though probably only if combined with the theory above).

There’s a third option, but I’ll explore that in another post.

And why is Bill Gross pumping this whole business to the public?

“You want to continue to buy what the government will buy,” Pimco’s Bill Gross told CNBC.

From now on, it will be Pimpco to me. Sorry.