"News that's not known, or not known enough."
Helen & Harry Highwater's cranky weblog of news and opinion.
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"News that's not known, or not known enough." Helen & Harry Highwater's cranky weblog of news and opinion. |
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A bull market in schadenfreude
The 21st Century American Economy may rightly be categorized as a Bubble Economy. There is always a booming speculation somewhere, and it is all based on credit And so it is now, with the bursting of the American real estate bubble and the bonfire of paper wealth. The newest bubble, aside from oil and gold, is Schadenfreude. You don't hear it much on CNBC or MSNBC, but the average person is delighted when informed of the horrors befalling their corporate tormentors. It is glorious to see bankers and financiers forced to beg for scraps. Payback is a bitch! And this isn't just any payback. This is Payback With Compounded Interest. The same corporations having their lunches eaten now are the ones who schemed to create the internet stock bubble and Enron debacles Thanks to the Bush Regime, there was very little prosecution after the first stock market crash of the 21st century; these Masters of the Universe believed, for a time, that they had gotten off scott-free. Therefore they returned to their lairs and dens of equity and created new schemes a hundred times bigger than the internet and Enron! Curiously, it seems that every time you see a massive, trillion dollar fraud the articles of incorporation on which these White Collar Crimes are based are located offshore, in the Bahamas or Cayman Islands. So it was back in the Enron days, and so it is now, with "off balance sheet entities" creating paper in which shares could be peddled.
This time, however, "they" have really outdone themselves. The pool of vomited up phony paper is so big that the Masters of the Universe are drowning in it. It is a black hole at the center of our financial galaxy swallowing up everyone and everything it touches! The Masters of the Universe, who are the megacorps of Wall Street and the megabanks Hence the newest bubble: Schadenfreude. It is almost worth it to have our dollars devalued and our economy go into a stark recession just so that we can see these evil bastards undone by their own schemes! May it be that many of them will learn of the joys of incarceration at facilities owned by the corporate jailer, Correction Corporation of America (CCA). Recently we learned that one in one hundred Americans is in jail or prison, millions for non-violent, victimless crimes. With any luck, and if my fellow Americans are pointed in the right direction, CCA will, in the future, have many thousands of new "clients". For if the Masters of the Universe are not punished this time, what is the use of Law itself?
P.S. A lady friend dropped by yesterday. She is one of those scary-smart women with boundless energy and infinite cunning and wisdom. To paraphrase Robert Heinlein, if you dropped two of these women into a crater on the Moon, they would get rich selling each other rocks. She asked me if I thought gold and oil would be headed higher. My response: don't worry about what is going to go up, start thinking about what is going to go down. Right now it is possible to buy a house in a place like Detroit for $500. In the near future the fact that the price of the dollar is low in relation to gold or the Euro won't matter as much as the fire-sale dollar prices of "things" in America. People willing to work, to invest a few bucks, and to move to places where opportunity is knocking will be able to earn decent profits.
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