Thursday, August 11, 2011

There’s A Lot Less Real Money Out There


James Howard Kunstler

A while back, I made a prediction that something bad was going to happen before the end of 2011. I think the recent stock market plunge qualifies as “something bad.” Where have all the trillions of dollars gone from the stock market? I think Wall Street is up to its old tricks and harvested the public’s hard earned 401-K money—again. The stock market has been an awful place for the “buy and hold” investor to park his money for the past 11 years........
A waterfall of woe broke over all the realms of money last week – including especially the realm where we determine just what money is supposed to mean – and a lot of folks barely made it to a rooftop, or a floating log, or some scrap of high ground, where they sit wet and shivering, expecting to get slammed again. The torrent of events is still flowing and there are countless dangerous objects bobbing in it.........
Europe is telling itself one cockamamie story after another. We’ve got a rescue fund! Only it has no money! But we will bail out Italy nonetheless! But Italy is too big to bail out – and we tried stuffing it under the carpet, but there’s no more room with Greece, Ireland, and Portugal already suffocating in there. The whole G-20 is yakking on the phone as I write, hatching fresh cockamamie stories...........
Everybody is broke now: national treasuries, giant banks, pension funds, insurance companies. The wonder so far is that credit default swaps have not yet been triggered by interest rate changes or some other silly shit, but when that comes to pass there is no way the counterparties can settle their contracts. Ruin will thunder through the financial system like winged death. Everybody is broke and there’s a lot less real “money” (whatever it is) out there............
There is a welling recognition that the dice have been cast and the world has rolled snake eyes. The casino is on fire and a flash flood is boiling down the strip. It’s no fun running to the exits only to find the revolving doors already eyeball deep in dirty water. America gibbers to itself but nobody has a clue. I’ll try to help: this is a compressive financial and economic contraction (one is money, the other is activity). Late-summer storm that it is, it looks to be intensifying..........

5 comments:

  1. I was looking at the Live Traffic Feed and someone from 'Sembawang' visited this site. Sembawang is an area in the Northern-most portion of Singapore. I had to look it up. Anyway, I thought it was interesting. People from all over the world are looking for answers.

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  2. Ah... but you only say that since it is elsewhere from where you live? I'm sure that man is on his computer right now looking at the live traffic feed and thinking how weird it is that people from all over the world are looking for answers.

    :-)

    I thought of something quite similar to that. I notice when we hear of stories from places in Iran or Egypt, where maybe a man will do something horrible to a woman, we naturally get the sense they are some kind of barbarians or that behavior is the norm of each person there.

    Funny though, if they see something reported in their media about what an American did somewhere they must assume we are all very barbaric.

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  3. i like money ,haha. may you have more ,may you rich

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  4. much better site is the original one

    http://thecomingdepression.net/

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  5. before the floods come the hard rains.

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