The Daily Reckoning Weekend Edition
Saturday, May 21, 2011
Buenos Aires, Argentina
-------------------------------------------------------
-------------------------------------------------------
Is This The Last Stock You'll Ever Need?
This one tiny stock could be the last one you'll ever need. You're about to see a story so shocking and hidden - it could rival the great wealth creations in history.
Get all the details - right here - before midnight Monday, May 30.
-------------------------------------------------------
Joel Bowman, checking in from Heaven, Hell or somewhere in between...
If you're reading this issue from the comfort of your own home, here on earth, Heaven's Day of Reckoning has not yet come to pass. The sun has risen and - to the ignominious consternation of Rapturesayers the world over, we would imagine - our random, rocky orb continues to hurtle around it.
Or, perhaps they have The Daily Reckoning (and an Internet connection) in Heaven, and you're actually reading this atop a fluffy cloud, the Twelve Disciples looking over your shoulder and Mother Theresa helpfully correcting our ungodly grammatical errors (but not judging us for having committed them). Who are we to say?
Alternatively, this weekend's issue might simply have arrived in your inbox earlier than usual...and maybe the Rapture is not scheduled until later this afternoon. If this is the case, true doomsday enthusiasts may wish to take advantage of one, or both, of these helpful services we came across earlier in the week...
The first, called simply, though unapologetically, "You've Been Left Behind," offers a post-Rapture line of communication for paradise-bound Christians who wish, for whatever reason, to contact their heathen, earth-shackled brethren. Seriously, can you imagine a better time to send an "I told you so!" email?
According to Wired magazine, "For just $40 a year, believers can arrange for up to 62 people to get a final message exactly six days after the Rapture, that day when - according to Christian end times dogma - Christians will be swept up to heaven, while doubters are left behind to suffer seven years of Tribulation under a global government headed by the Antichrist.
"You've Been Left Behind gives you one last opportunity to reach your lost family and friends for Christ," explains the company's website, which is purportedly run "by Christians, for Christians."
According to Wired, "The domain name is registered through an anonymous proxy service, presumably to protect the proprietors from the Forces of Darkness, and not because they're up to anything shady. The e-mails will be triggered when three of the site's five Christian staffers 'scattered around the US' fail to log in for six days in a row - a system that incorporates a nice margin of safety, should two of the proprietors turn out to be unrepentant sinners or atheists."
So, that's your "you should have listened to me" email taken care of. And, presumably, God already has you taken care of. (We imagine He has a pretty sweet pad up there, and, if English writer Sidney Smith is correct in his picture of the afterlife, you'll be too busy "eating foie gras to the sound of trumpets" to care about much else anyway.)
But what about your beloved pets? What is to become of them? Ah, glad you asked.
That's where Eternal Earth-Bound Pets, USA, comes in. Bart Centre, a New Hampshire atheist, author and entrepreneur, began the after hours pet care service back in 2009. According to the company's website, it's "The next best thing to pet salvation in a Post Rapture World."
Umm...can we get a "Halleluiah!"?
As The Wall Street Journal explains, "For a 10-year policy that costs $135, he [Centre] and his band of atheists promise to come to their [true believers'] homes after the Rapture, collect their pets and care for them. He says his 259 clients tend to be devout believers over the age of 40 'who love their pets and are sincerely concerned for what will happen to them.'"
Mr. Centre carefully screens all job applicants, making sure they are both animal lovers and, perhaps more importantly, not Jesus lovers.
"These are people not likely to be Raptured under any circumstances," Mr. Centre toldThe Washington Post.
Continued the paper: "After a background check, each rescuer must satisfy Centre by blaspheming in accordance with Mark 3:29, the part of the New Testament that reads: 'But he that shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost hath never forgiveness, but is in danger of eternal damnation.'"
"We leave it up to the imagination of the rescuer to come up with a blasphemy that would be offensive to a Holy Spirit," explained Centre, adding, "if there were one."
Needless to say, this service is not for everyone. Some believers, for instance, are convinced their pooches will be whisked away alongside their God-fearing/-believing owners. Others reckon they'll be left behind, due in no small part to their distinct lack of a soul. Either way, animals didn't fair too well in The Great Flood, so it might be better to just err on the side of caution with this one. No matter how quickly Fido learned to sit and to stay, he probably still doesn't grasp the subtlety of, say, Pascal's Wager. That's not likely to change by rapture-o'clock this afternoon.
Of course, your editors have no idea what Heaven or Hell look like, or whether they even exist. And, more germane to the usual theme of this publication, we certainly don't know what unemployment figures might look like in a post-Rapture economic landscape, or what might happen to Greek or US bond yields. Presumably things would change - the size of the available, earthly workforce, for example - but we can only guess as to how. Truth be told, we have enough trouble just making heads or tails of events in this world, never mind the next one.
Not that looking to the skies helps clarify much of anything, either. And so, on the off chance that the weekend passes us by without any hint of celestial intervention, we might be inclined to continue our pursuit of more earthy temptations...like the temptation to snatch up some dirt cheap silver.
In this week's feature column - or rather, "feature interview" - Jeff Clark talks to Andy Schectman of Miles Franklin about the value of "junk" metal. For the full column, simply click here: Don't Worry About Silver
-------------------------------------------------------
External Advertisement
Follow the Leaders to Perfect Silver Eagles
Collectors lead the way when they head toward the highest-quality silver they can find. Smart buyers follow suit - to the 2011 25th Anniversary Silver Eagle. Graded in MS70, which means absolute, flawless perfection.
Each Silver Eagle is from the first 30 days of release...exactly what collectors covet.
Get this special offer today!
-------------------------------------------------------ALSO THIS WEEK in The Daily Reckoning...
In an Undercollateralized World
By Frederick Sheehan
North Weymouth, Massachusetts
The world is undercollateralized. This is the single most important feature of the 2011 economy. Sixty years ago, if assets were worth less than loans, it was possible to work our way into the black. In 1950, 59% of US corporate profits were from manufacturing; 9% were from finance. The roles of manufacturing and finance have reversed. Thus, we witness the desperate attempts to forestall what cannot be prevented. Yet, the world must deleverage. Banks must write off loans. Loans to bankrupt developers and companies must be called. Living standards must fall.
Taking Control of Your IRA
By Simon Black
Following in the footsteps of a rather ignominious list of nations like Argentina and Hungary, the government of Ireland is set to take its 'fair share' of private retirement funds. Drowning in debt and faced with unrealistic, ridiculously unpopular austerity measures, the government has announced that it will now tax private pension savings in order to raise 470 million euros (roughly $675 million) per year...a lot of money in a country of only 4.4 million people.
Storm Warning
An Interview with Addison Wiggin
"Actually the thing that has been most surprising to me has been the willingness with which politicians in Washington have abandoned the very causes and ideas that led us to be a prosperous society in the first place. I suspected they would do it all along, but just to give you an anecdote in August of 2008 right before the last presidential election, we premiered I.O.U.S.A. This was before stimulus and bailouts, before trillion-dollar deficits."
Storm Warning - Part II
An Interview with Addison Wiggin
"When you look at monetary history - or even the history of empires as we did inEmpire of Debt - every 50, 60, 70 years there's a major shift in the reserve currency of the world, in the dominant financial structure of the world, and we're coming up on that now..."
-------------------------------------------------------
The book the US Congress never wanted you to see...
Ron Paul's "Lost" Gold Bible
Buried away in secret since late in the last century, this 200-page guide shows you:
We're spreading the word... Click here to find out more.
-------------------------------------------------------
The Weekly Endnote: And now some reader mail, for the few of us who are left here on earth...
First up, this one from Reckoner Sven:
"Bill, I find your remarks about 'The Future of Mankind' fascinating and well founded. The long waves based on major developments in technology have been explored by many, but your comments and conclusions on energy in developed economies are particularly well put.
"What aggravates the issue, I believe, is that swings around equilibriums tend to overshoot the median. The benefits from cheap energy, driving the profit side in the P&L accounts of developed Western nations and Japan, have been overstated and resulted in giant holes in the balance sheets of these nations. As we know, huge unfunded or underfunded pension liabilities and medical och social security costs, are kept outside the balance sheets of many developed nations.
"To this should be added giant amounts for costs of deferred infrastructure repairs. I believe that these neglects are general in the affairs of most of the developed nations and represent a huge liability in their balance sheets.
"Add to this the accumulated deficits in the balance sheets of these nations and you are looking at a situation where, if comparing nations to common businesses, they would long since have faced bankruptcy and their leaders would face criminal charges for faulty bookkeeping and most likely fraud.
"All this supports your argument that average future growth in the economies of the developed nations will be low. In addition to this a large share of any growth will be needed to fill the holes of unrecorded liabilities.
"I thoroughly enjoy The Daily Reckoning and you writing in particular. It is always eye opening and presented in a tongue-in-cheek style that greatly appeals to me."
And here's one from Reckoner JW:
"Aloha Joel,
"I always enjoy the Reckoning. [Thanks!]
"It seems to me that natural gas is, excuse the pun, 'the natural' replacement for oil as cheap energy for the next few decades.
"Natural gas is abundant, cheap, and the infrastructure to move it around in the US via pipelines is already widely in place.
"If Bill's thesis is correct about growth related to the availability of cheap energy, it would seem that as a society, making the investment in the relatively modest incremental cost to convert electrical power generation to natural gas, and automobiles to run on liquefied natural gas, would pay off handsomely in decades of additional growth and prosperity based on cheap energy.
"So, my questions are: Why isn't this obvious to everyone, and why aren't we doing it?"
And finally, this one from Reckoner Shubin:
"In consuming energy and resources produced by the extractive industries, it was really only a matter of time until our species bumped up against logistical limitations. Humans have failed to optimize their resource usage, so now they will be forced to find more effective and efficient approaches. This is no bad thing, just another expression of Darwinian selection.
"Those who innovate and make decisions practically, will prosper. Change is the only constant, but most humans hate change, so no problem is addressed until it becomes a crisis. As you observed, the crisis is upon us.
"We've had abundant evidence of the effectiveness of pragmatic energy usage, right in front of us for a long time. Consider this: without their nuclear-powered electric grid, would France even exist as a country right now, considering their delusional approach to many other problems?
"It is indeed time to leave, to live in a nation with an upward trajectory (not France, either). No need for the last one out to turn off the lights: with deficient domestic energy production, decaying infrastructure, and no nuclear approvals pending, the lights will turn themselves off."
---
Thanks to all those who wrote in with thoughts and ideas. We'll be back next week with more of our own.
Enjoy your weekend...and, for the Raptured, Godspeed!
Cheers,
Joel Bowman
Managing Editor
The Daily Reckoning
Saturday, 21 May 2011
Posts
