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Project X, Revealed!
You’ve heard Addison mention his super secretive “Project X...”
“The project is unlike anything we’ve done before,” he’s explained. “It’s not a newsletter, book, documentary or conference.”
“Instead, it’s a radical new way to help you develop the power and confidence to build lasting wealth.”
Now...for the first time...he’s finally given me the “green light” to share Project X with you.
Click here to discover what Addison’s been keeping a secret for so long...
Briefly from Buenos Aires, Argentina...Joel Bowman
There’s a big fight on this weekend, Fellow Reckoner. Actually, there are many, many big fights raging today. Bill explains in this week’s feature essay.
Let’s get to it...
[This essay first appeared in these pages on Tuesday, November 15, 2011]The Daily Reckoning Presents Goldman to the Rescue!
More pieces are coming together. Day by day, the puzzle takes shape. Not a pretty picture.Bill Bonner
An epic battle is taking place. Between the forces of...
..inflation and deflation
..growth and depression
..credit expansion and credit destruction
..centralization and de-centralization
..politics and markets
..managed paper money and gold
..managed capitalism and the real thing
..control and wealth
..bull and bear
..greed and fear
..zombies and real working people.
Yes, dear reader, it’s quite a fight. Better than Frazier vs. Ali. And who’s gonna win?
Europe faces its “toughest hour since WWII,” says Angela Merkel. What does she propose? More centralization. Centralization got Europe into this mess — harmonizing interest rates so that the Greeks and Italians could borrow more. And now, more centralization, she believes, will get it out.
Europe is taking no chances. This debt problem is a slugger. What to do about it?
Who knows more about debt problems than anyone else? The people who cause them, of course. So, under great pressure from the centralized European authorities, Greece got rid of its Papandreou, after the man had the gall to suggest letting democracy work. He wanted the people to vote on further austerity measures. It replaced him with Papademos...a guy who won’t make the mistake of deferring to the masses. After all, he was vice-president of the European Central Bank for years. And he taught at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
Meanwhile, Italy too has been forced to get rid of its popular, but difficult to control, elected leader — Silvio Berlusconi. It has put in a company man. Yes, a company man. What company? Goldman Sachs, of course. The new fellow, Mario Monti is an ex-Goldman guy. And so is the new fellow at the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi. Monti was also an EU commissioner. Draghi ran the Bank of Italy as the nation built up one of the world’s biggest piles of debt. Then, when Italy’s cost of borrowing shot over 7%, in came Monti and Draghi.
It is almost as if they planned it that way. Who’s the biggest seller of debt on the planet? We don’t know...but Goldman Sachs has to be up in the rankings somewhere. You’ll recall it was Goldman that helped Greece structure its debt so that it could abide by the letter of its treaty engagements with Europe but totally thumb its nose at the spirit of it.
And now the debt has blown up...and the Goldman boys are on the job, managing the mess they were so instrumental in creating.
What’s their solution? Oh come on...dear reader, you should know how this works by now. They propose more centralization, more management, more paper money, more debt, more inflation, more of everything you see on the right hand of our column above.
In other words, they believe that they know better than the people...or the market. They believe that their sanitized, homogenized, pasteurized Capitalism-in-a-Can works better than the real thing. Besides, they have a reason to believe it. This claptrap is the source of their power, status and money. Who knows, maybe their wives married them because of it.
Rather than renounce the program on which their reputations, careers and fortunes depend, they try to shore it up. They open up the can and see what they can use. They promise to reform the system, not reject it.
But every reform — unless it merely dismantles one of their previous reforms — is a manipulation...a price fix...and a scam. For example, they are proposing tax incentives to employers who hire youths and women. Good idea? Why not just drop some of the regulations and taxes that make it so expensive to hire youths and women in the first place? Nope. Then, they’d be giving up control. They’d be letting market forces decide who gets what.
Here’s another proposed reform, as reported in The Financial Times: “Wider social safety net to help those made redundant (laid off) and encourage labor mobility.” Typical rubbish. Spread a wider safety net and you discourage people from doing the hard work of finding new careers. But here’s one that will be popular with the managers: a “crackdown on tax evasion.” Are you kidding? Tax evasion is the only thing that keeps these economies going. People prevent their government from squandering their money. They spend it themselves. But the new Goldman guys won’t like it. They’ll want to get their hands on as much of that ‘black money’ as possible.
Meanwhile, what’s going on in the USA? Alas, the US economy is the hands of the same sort of people. The people who caused the mess...who did not see it coming...and who have not had a clue what to do about it. They’re still running US economic policy. These illustrious incompetents — such as Larry Summers of Obama’s National Economic Council and Tim Geithner, his Treasury Secretary — have proven that they wouldn’t know a Great Correction if it bit them on the behind...
So, they just keep adding more debt, more spending, more management, more ‘reform’ measures, and more centralization.
Ultimately, the elite managers of Europe and America all went to the same schools (Harvard, Yale, MIT...)...all read the same newspapers and magazines (The Financial Times and The Economist)...all worship the same gods (money and power)...all speak the same language (mid- Atlantic English)...and all want to control the world.
So far, they seem to be making great progress towards their objectives. They stuff the world with debt. It blows up. Then, they push out democratically-elected leaders...gain new power and authority...and take charge of the rescue.
Regards,
Bill Bonner
for The Daily Reckoning$1.82 Stock About To Make History!
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Click here for the full details.ALSO THIS WEEK in The Daily Reckoning... Penn State Pricks the Student Loan Bubble
By Byron King
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
A month ago, at an investment conference in Baltimore, my colleague Eric Fry asked if I think there’s another “bubble” out there that’s going to pop. My reply was that I believe the “education” bubble is destined for doom. It’ll be just one more thing to smack down the US economy, and makes for another reason — as if we need more — to hold precious metals as portfolio protection.
The Difference Between OWS and Anti-Vietnam Protests
By Jeffrey Tucker
The Occupy protesters imagine that they stand in a great tradition of American radicalism, willing to stand up to the man and risk arrest in order to achieve their goals. The most obvious case of such a mass movement would be the anti-war protests of the 1960s. They started small and grew and grew until they became mainstream and actually affected a dramatic policy change. The US military pulled out of Vietnam, implicitly conceding defeat and mourning the long history of calamity.
Freedom: The New and Future Experiment
By Joel Bowman
Buenos Aires, Argentina
How many people, we wonder, would feel compelled to battle on foreign lands, the whereabouts of which were heretofore unknown to them, to slay “the enemy,” to lay waste to husbands, fathers and brothers they have never before met, to Napalm fields, Agent Orange crops, to litter terrain afar with landmines, if they didn’t believe the patriotic claptrap with which their State ceaselessly indoctrinates them?
Center Can’t Hold
By Bill Bonner
Baltimore, Maryland
Italy seems to have gone too far. Its 10-year bonds yields are back over 7%. It is “the beginning of the end” say analysts.
But the end of what?
When the going is good people have little patience for questions. They are too busy, earning and spending, buying and selling, and getting where they are going. But then comes a major turnaround, all of a sudden, and they develop the deep torments of a retarded poet in an unhappy marriage.
Saturday, 19 November 2011
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