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The Daily Reckoning | Wednesday, September 5, 2012 Real time commerce: the most overlooked force in the universe? The brushstrokes of a new and slowly emerging oeuvre d’art, Plus, Bill Bonner on mobs, messiahs, markets...and plenty more... ------------------------------------------------------- External Advertisement This Makes the Fiscal Cliff Look Like a Picnic While the mainstream media warns you of the coming fiscal cliff, this other hidden economic catastrophe may be 100 times worse. Expose the evidence Washington, D.C. and other world governments want to keep from you. Click here to learn the truth.   Quote of the Day... “Deception works best...when the person doing the deceiving is fool enough to be deceived, too; that is, when he believes his own lies. That is why incompetent leaders — who are naïve enough to fall for their own guff — are such a danger to civilized life. If they are modern leaders, they must also delude themselves into thinking they know how to make the world a better place. Invariably, the answers they propose to problems are ones that bubble up from their own vanity, the essence of which is to make the rest of the world look just like them!” — Bill Bonner, Mobs, Messiahs and Markets Eric Fry, paying homage to Agora’s founder from Laguna Beach, California...   Eric Fry “Where’s Bill?”  That’s a question that has been popping up in our email inbox lately. Regular readers of The Daily Reckoning want to know why Bill Bonner’s contributions have become much less regular. The answer is simple: He’s busy...busy writing a new book. And since all writing and no play makes Bill a dull boy, he is contributing less frequently to The Daily Reckoning. But the insights he is contributing will become — in aggregate — his next book. They are the brushstrokes of a slowly emerging oeuvre d’art. And while we may have to wait a while to see the finished canvass, the brushstrokes themselves deliver colorful insights. In case you missed the first three installments from Bill’s upcoming book, you can check any or all of them out here: Too Much of a Good Thing Too Much of a Good Thing, Continued... Too Much of a Good Thing, Part III What will these brushstrokes become? Too soon to tell. But chances are; the style and content of Bill’s next book will be as engaging as his last. If you have not had the pleasure of reading Mobs, Messiahs and Markets, you may want to stop denying yourself the pleasure, as it is neither fattening nor sinful.   Amazing... But True! Tobacco is being resurrected — making it the profit opportunity of the decade. It turns out that one man’s quest to help people quit smoking has led to what could be the most important “accidental” health discovery since penicillin.  And for you — it could be the biggest potential “profit bonanza” since Pfizer accidentally discovered Viagra.  Discovered by accident: A chemical compound in tobacco that doctors are now recommending to slow aging! BUT because Wall Street inexplicably thinks the biotech firm that owns the patent — and is already selling this miracle product without a prescription — is a nasty, dirty tobacco company, you still have a little time to load up before the truth is finally revealed! Learn more about this amazing opportunity right now, right here. The Daily Reckoning Presents Seeing The World Through Bonner’s Eyes By Jeffrey Tucker, Executive Editor, Laissez Faire Books   Mobs, Messiahs and Markets lifts the fog spread by governments and mainstream media so that we can all see reality for what it is. Written with expert editorial help from Lila Rajiva, the book covers in great detail the transformative decade from the late ’90s to the late 2000s, and therefore chronicles everything crucial to understanding the world as it is today: the digital revolution, the rise of the police state, the move from boom to bust, the end of American economic supremacy, the expansion of imperial violence. Several points stand out here about Bonner the man, who (to my mind) doesn’t get the vast credit he deserves as one of the most articulate and insightful public intellectuals of our time. He is neither political agitator nor walled-off professor, but his writing tells you more about politics, economics, culture and trends than you are likely to find in any rally or classroom. He has his eye on the issues that matter, and a value system (he loves liberty and loathes despotism) that shatters political conventions. As for his influence as a thinker, a whole generation or two of investors, intellectuals, journalists and citizens of the world have been raised on his writings. They are compelling not because they are ideologically driven or splashy, but because they are independent-minded and infused with vast knowledge of history and philosophy and take a perspective that disregards the opinion cartel. That is to say, they are eye-opening and provide a completely different look at the world. As a stylist, he is legendary. I would put his writings on public affairs in the same class with other famed stylists like Frédéric Bastiat, Mark Twain, H.L. Mencken and Joseph Sobran. There is a curse that comes with that status. It means that hardly anyone has the competence to write about their work, because the attempt can’t come anywhere close to matching the virtuosity of the subject’s own prose. To put it plainly, writing about Bonner is intimidating because reading Bonner is always a better use of time. I feel that same sense just writing about this book. Nothing I can say will be as clear, precise and downright interesting as what Bonner himself writes. So just to give you a quick idea, here is Bonner on fake news during wartime throughout the Iraq conflict: Fake news is not news at all. It’s old news. Storyboarding does to the news what waterboarding does to prisoners — it persuades it to say what you want to hear. Hoodwinking the enemy on a classical battlefield — which follows its own rules of engagement — is one thing. Bamboozling civilians in modern total warfare is rather different. And swindling the crowd cheering at home is something else altogether. By that standard, American chariot wheels have not just hit the ground. They have gone through it and are burrowing down into Hades. Storyboarding was directed not at the population in Iraq, which is supposed to be a born-again democracy now, anyway. It was aimed at the population back home in America.  Journalists who faked news stories were firing on this pathetic home crowd, making it impossible for the lumps to get even the tiniest scrap of real information about the war, even though they were being asked to give up their children for it. They thought they were volunteering to fight for the republic; they didn’t know they were signing up for the Aztec child sacrifice. My friends, that is not just great thinking; that is brilliant writing. Consumers of Bonner’s prose marvel day after day, ever since 1978 and especially since he went online in 1996, at his capacity to offer prose and analytics on an ongoing basis. Most of us struggle to write anything this good in a year; for Bonner, it is a daily thing. What to Expect in 2013... Between 2004-2007, Bill Bonner and Addison Wiggin did their best to alert their loyal readers to the dangers of the housing bubble well before the mainstream said anything about it. Well, today, they see something even worse looming just over the horizon. It’s not often our Reckoner-in-Chief agrees to appear on-screen, but this was just too important. Click here (or the image below) to see what they’re talking about now... Here is another sample of his writing and thinking, and this passage concerns the outrageous CEO salaries during the credit-drunk boom times of 2005: Top business leaders have become like sports heroes but without the talent. You need not have any real knowledge of the business you are getting into, or, as Bernie Ebbers demonstrated, any real knowledge about business of any sort. What will get you a job as a leader in the corporate world is the same thing that will get you a woman in the mating game — outsize confidence. Human life — apart from the obvious physical aspects — is largely about what scientists call “impression management.” A man with a good line of talk and a confident air about him gets almost anything he wants, and that includes the CEO job at a major US corporation... Then you may worry — what if the company doesn’t do well? Well, what if? Again, recent history shows us that you can fail miserably in Corporate America and still leave with a lot of money. On equality as proclaimed by the Founding Fathers: When Americans celebrate the birth of their nation, it bothers no one that the founders’ most-important insights are palpably untrue. People are born different. It is only before the law that they are equal, and then only if they have enough money for a good lawyer. Here is how that insight pertains to investing: What of the so-called level playing field of the investment markets? A fellow has been told that he has as much chance to make money from his investments as Warren Buffett and George Soros. In the abstract, it sounds as though it might be true. But if he drove his car based on abstract principles, he’d soon be dead. For investing as well as driving, it’s the precise details that matter. I’m toying with a theory why some of the best books of our time — this one among them — are written by people with an eye to investment opportunities and strategies. How is it that this commercial beat manages to unearth such spectacular insight, whereas thousands of dreary academic tomes languish and have no impact on the world at all? My theory is that this is because real-time commerce is the most overlooked force in the universe. Commerce even provides the test of the long-run merit of ideas: Ideas rooted in truth instantiate themselves in institutions and become part of history. Therefore, following the commercial thread through time means following meritorious ideas and the real ways in which people use them to live their lives. Yet because economic ignorance is so pervasive, especially in journalism and academia, few are in a position to follow this thread. They end up daydreaming about untruths for a living. This sets up an interesting irony. A writer like Bill Bonner can track and explain our world in a way that few tenured professors can or ever will. Of Mobs, Messiahs and Markets, the famed investor Marc Faber says it “is such an excellent book that if I had to name just one book investors should read, this is the one I would select.” I would actually go further to point out that its insights pertain not only to investment, but to the whole of life and, therefore, should be read by everyone who wants to see the world with new clarity. Jeffrey Tucker for The Daily Reckoning Joel’s Note: The handful of Reckoners who have not yet read — and indeed, reread — Bill’s last book will do themselves the favor of grabbing a copy here. And remember to stay tuned as Bill’s next work unfolds...right here in these very pages... ------------------------------------------------------- Here at The Daily Reckoning, we value your questions and comments. If you would like to send us a few thoughts of your own, please address them to your managing editor at joel@dailyreckoning.com