ECONOMIC BITS AND PIECES

POLITICAL CONSIDERATIONS DO NOT TAKE INTO ACCOUNT OUR ECONOMIC REALITIES............

The Obama administration and its congressional allies know that

the only real hope for regaining lost political ground in the 2012 elections is for the economy to rebound.

THE CURRENT ADMINISTRATION WILL DO WHATEVER IS NECESSARY IN THE SHORT TERM TO GET ELECTED AGAIN, REGARDLESS OF THE LONG TERM CONSEQUENCES. THIS IS HOW OUR COUNTRY IS RUN AND NOBODY DOES OR EVEN SAYS ANYTHING ABOUT IT. THIS IS A VERY STUPID WAY TO RUN THE LARGEST ECONOMY ON EARTH. POLITICAL OUTCOMES MEAN FAR MORE THAN LONGTERM ECONOMIC REALITIES. THIS IS IDIOTIC!

AN INTERESTING WAY TO LOOK AT THINGS.......

The world will soon wake up to the reality that everyone is broke and can collect nothing from the bankrupt, who are owed unlimited amounts by the insolvent, who are attempting to make late payments on a bank holiday in the wrong country, with an unacceptable currency, against defaulted collateral, which nobody is sure who holds title.

THAT'S ABOUT IT!

THIS IS GETTING RIDICULOUS...........

As the debts of advanced countries rise to levels not seen since the aftermath of World War II,

it's hard to know how much is too much. But it's easy to see that the risk of serious financial trouble is growing.

$10.2 trillion: The amount of money advanced-nation governments will need to borrow in 2011

Next year, fifteen major developed-country governments, including the U.S., Japan, the U.K., Spain and Greece, will have to raise some $10.2 trillion to repay maturing bonds and finance their budget deficits, according to estimates from the International Monetary Fund.

That's up 7% from this year, and equals 27% of their combined annual economic output.

Aside from Japan, which has a huge debt hangover from decades of anemic growth, the U.S. is the most extreme case. Next year, the U.S. government will have to find $4.2 trillion. That's 27.8% of its annual economic output, up from 26.5% this year. By comparison, crisis-addled Greece needs $69 billion, or 23.8% of its annual GDP.

There's reason to be concerned that governments' appetite for borrowing could ultimately push up interest rates, or worse.

The chances that investors will balk at lending to governments "remains high for advanced economies." That's a highly undesirable outcome —

picture a financial crisis in which governments can't step in to help, because government finances are the problem. We can't know how close we are to such an outcome, and the need to keep the recovery going would make cutting back now a risky move. Ultimately, though, we're heading in the wrong direction.

IGNORING REALITY IS WHAT WE DO BEST .................

Does anyone really want to hear that America is in decline? For decades, most of us have been raised to believe that the United States is "number one" and that anyone who doubts that fact is a "gloom and doomer" that should just pack up and move to "Russia" or "Iraq" or some other country where things are not nearly as good.

But does it do us or future generations any good to ignore the very serious signs of trouble that are erupting all around us?

The truth is that it is about time to wake up and admit how much trouble we are actually in.

The U.S. government is absolutely drowning in debt. The entire society is absolutely drowning in debt. We are being slaughtered in the arena of world trade, and every single month tens of billions of dollars (along with large numbers of factories and jobs) leave our shores for good.

Our infrastructure is failing, our kids are less educated and our incomes are going down.

We have very serious problems. At one time, the U.S. economy was so dominant that it was not even worth talking about who was in second place. That is no longer the case in 2010. Our forefathers handed us the greatest economic machine in history and we have allowed it to fall apart right in front of our eyes.

A national economic crisis of historic proportions is getting worse with each passing month, and yet most of our leaders seem to be asleep at the switch.

If we are not even willing to admit how bad things really are, then we are never going to have a chance to find the solutions that we need. The more time we waste pretending we can fix the things that need to be fixed with convenient false solutions or that the issues we face are not really that bad and will somehow miraculously just be overcome by American ingenuity then the longer it will take once we finally begin to deal realistically with our problems.

Surveying the economic landscape, it becomes apparent that the only bankable asset America has left is a reservoir of confidence in our country's role as the global economic leader. But confidence can be ephemeral.

Usually even a gradual erosion of credibility reaches a latent tipping point. When change comes, it does so with alarming speed.

We desperately need to change course as a nation.

　

SOMEBODY HAS TO GO TO JAIL............

As economists such as William Black and James Galbraith have repeatedly said, we cannot solve the economic crisis unless we throw the criminals who committed fraud in jail.

And Nobel prize winning economist George Akerlof has demonstrated that

failure to punish white collar criminals – and instead bailing them out- creates incentives for more economic crimes and further destruction of the economy in the future.

Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz just agreed.

This is a really important point to understand from the point of view of our society. The legal system is supposed to be the codification of our norms and beliefs, things that we need to make our system work. If the legal system is seen as exploitative, then confidence in our whole system starts eroding. And that's really the problem that's going on.

A lot of the predatory practices in automobile loans are going to be able to be continued. Why is it OK to engage in bad lending in automobiles and not in the mortgage market? Is there any principle? We all know the answer to that.

No, there's no principle. It's money. It's campaign contributions, lobbying, revolving door, all of those kinds of things. Our system is broken.

Yeah, we fine them, and what is the big lesson? Behave badly, and the government might take 5% or 10% of what you got in your ill-gotten gains, but you're still sitting home pretty with your several hundred million dollars that you have left over after paying fines that look very large by ordinary standards but look small compared to the amount that you've been able to cash in.

So the system is set so that even if you're caught, the penalty is just a small number relative to what you walk home with.

The fine is just a cost of doing business. The system is designed to actually encourage that kind of thing, even with the fines.

We ought to do what we did in the S&L crisis and actually put many of these guys in prison. These are not just white-collar crimes or little accidents. There were victims. That's the point. There were victims all over the world.

So do we have any confidence that these guys who got us into the mess have really changed their minds? Actually we have pretty good confidence that they have not. I've seen some speeches where they said, "Nothing was really wrong. We didn't get things quite right. But our understanding of the issues are pretty sound." If they think that, then we really are in a sorry mess.

THIEVES AND CRIMINALS NEED TO GO TO JAIL............

　

MORE ON THE CRIME OF THE CENTURY............

In 2005, we passed a bankruptcy reform.

It was a reform pushed by the banks. It was designed to allow them to make bad loans to people to who didn't understand what was going on, and then basically choke them. Squeeze them dry. And we should have called it, "the new indentured servitude law." Because that's what it is.

Let me just tell you how bad it is. I don't think Americans understand how bad it is. It becomes really very difficult for individuals to discharge their debt. The basic principle in the past in America was people should have the right for a fresh start. People make mistakes.

Especially when they're preyed upon. And so you should be able to start afresh again. Get a clean slate. Pay what you can and start again. Now if you do it over and over again that's a different thing. But at least when there are these lenders preying on you should be able to get a fresh start.

But the banks said, "No, no, you can't discharge your debt," or you can't discharge it very easily.

This is indentured servitude. And we criticize other countries for having indentured servitude of this kind, bonded labor.

But in America we instituted this in 2005 with almost no discussion of the consequences. But what it did was encourage the banks to engage in even worse lending practices.

DO YOU REALLY THINK THE BANKS DIDN'T SEE WHAT WAS COMING?

The banks want to pretend that they did not make bad loans. They don't want to deal with reality. The fact that they were very instrumental in changing the accounting standards, so that loans that are impaired where people are not paying back what they owe, are treated as if they are just as good as a well-performing mortgage.

So the whole strategy of the banks has been to hide the losses, muddle through and get the government to keep interest rates really low and have tax payers pay for the banks "mistakes"!

THE FEDs BUBBLE MACHINE IS HUMMING ALONG AGAIN......

At the FOMC meeting this week the Fed remained in panic mode and announced an aggressive program in which it will pour roughly $100 billion a month of additional liquidity into the financial system until next June.

And so t

he Federal Reserve has cranked up it's bubble-machine, pumping up opportunities as well as risk. In doing so it is on the wrong side of the economic cycle again, as it so often has been in the recent past, beginning to ease too late to prevent recessions, and then continuing to ease too long after recoveries are underway, creating bubbles and more economic havoc with each new round of their so called solutions.

The evidence that the Fed is again behind the curve could hardly be clearer.

So at this point, the additional liquidity the Fed has decided to pump into the financial system will surely go toward continuing the Fed's history of creating bubbles. Picking the location of those bubbles will probably be very profitable over the next year or two. The initial betting is that they'll be in commodities and emerging markets, and that bond prices will tumble.

YOU CERTAINLY CAN'T FIGHT THE FED. BY THE SAME LOGIC YOU CAN'T MISS UNDERSTANDING THAT WE ARE HEADED STRAIGHT FOR THE BIGGEST ECONOMIC CATASTROPHE OF ALL TIME.

ONLY ONE WAY OUT.............

To actually address the problems America is facing – versus just talking about them – would require the politicians to literally toss away the playbook. They'd have to be willing to turn their backs on the cries of their constituents and their corporate masters and then set about swinging a sharp ax here, there, and everywhere, and continue swinging until they had hacked 50% or more out of the federal budget.

In the process, they'd have to adopt a new monetary system that assures that never again can government outgrow a strictly limited role of core purposes, or spend more than the tax revenues it raises in supporting that limited role.

This is not a process that can be gently instituted over time… but must be done expeditiously, almost overnight, if it is to have any chance of making it through the political tangle of our quickly fading democracy.

Only then, only by effectively punching the "reset" button on the American experiment, will the country climb out of the crisis and regain its momentum toward a more prosperous future. There is no evidence we are headed in that direction whatsoever.

　

THE PURGE HAS BEGUN..........

Citibank became the latest lender to disclose that it faces legal challenges from investors demanding a refund on billions of dollars lost on bonds backed by faulty loans. On Friday, Citibank disclosed in a regulatory filling that Charles Schwab, the Federal Home Loan Banks of Chicago and Indianapolis and a hedge fund have filed lawsuits claiming the bank misled them when it sold bonds backed by pools of home mortgages.

The key issue: Who will take the losses for billions of dollars worth of failing mortgages written during the height of the housing boom?

Investors are pursuing several strategies, but they generally center on a promise made in the documents that created bonds backed by mortgages.

These so-called "representations and warranties" assured investors that certain underwriting standards would be followed. Yet underwriting was often lax during the boom years, with lapses including inflated appraisals, overstated incomes and false assurances that a borrower would live in the house he was buying.

THIS IS GOING TO COST BANKS A FORTUNE.

Sun Tzu's Principles

Learn to fight

Show the way

Do it right

Know the facts

Expect the worst

Seize the day

Burn the bridges

Do it better

Pull together

Keep them guessing

He who knows when he can fight and when he cannot, will be victorious.

Sun Tzu

WE ARE ONLY KIDDING OURSELVES.............

The leftist intellectual Irving Howe once wrote that

the liberal imagination is often constrained by what he called the "provincialism of the immediate" — the presumption that things as they exist today will continue on forever. That presumption is certainly evident in our public finances, as discussions about debt sustainability tend to focus on the burden imposed on "our children and grandchildren" while ignoring the potential for abrupt shifts in investor sentiment today. But the history of modern financial markets is characterized by sudden breaks and swings that cannot be reliably forecast. The current spike in demand for Treasury securities is itself an example of such a change, as it was precipitated by the sudden flow of money out of other investment options in the wake of the financial crisis. Today's historically low yields on Treasury securities should not inure American policymakers to unsustainable debt growth, or make them overconfident of their ability to anticipate and pre-empt a crisis.

The Treasury market's status as a safe haven is not an immutable feature of economic life: It is a function of institutional credibility that took generations to build, but that would take just a fraction of that time to destroy.

Were Treasury securities to lose their status as the global reserve asset of choice to gold, other commodities, or a different currency, the consequences for the American economy would be disastrous. Unlikely as such a scenario might seem at the moment, today's fiscal policies unquestionably increase the probability of its coming to pass.

CHANGE HAS CONSEQUENCES...........

In the House of Representatives, Republicans rule. In the Senate, the Democratic party held on by the skin of its teeth, but without a true, operational majority.

That means Congress is now officially OUT of the stimulus and bailout business.

It also means that many in Congress will be fighting to actually reduce government spending at every opportunity.

Most importantly, it means all the gas that was fueling the meager recovery of the past two years is no more.

NOW IT IS ALL UP TO THE FED.

THE BIG LIE CONTINUES TO EXPAND...........

This is it — the hot news that Wall Street was waiting for with bated breath.

Fed Chief Bernanke's going to buy another $600 billion in Treasury securities to pump liquidity into the economy.

But it's all one big, fat lie.

Here's why:

First, because the whole concept of "buying Treasuries" is a smokescreen. What Bernanke is really doing is running the money printing presses, and it's no secret. Even the emperor himself knows he has no clothes.

Second, because Bernanke also knows — all too well — that he's not truly pumping money INTO the U.S. economy. In reality, the U.S. economy is leaking like a sieve. So for all practical purposes, he's pumping the money OUT OF the U.S. economy — to countries overseas.

Third and most important, the "big number" — $600 billion — is meaningless. The Fed says quite bluntly that they will ...

"regularly review and adjust the program as needed to best foster maximum employment and price stability."

In other words, they'll blow right past the $600 billion mark whenever and however they darn please.

　

DEFINITIONS INVESTORS SHOULD DEFINITELY UNDERSTAND IN THE CURRENT ENVIRONMENT..........

Delude:

to mislead the mind or judgment of; deceive---His conceit deluded him into believing he was important.

Deceive:

to mislead by a false appearance or statement---They deceived the enemy by disguising the destroyer as a freighter.

Delusion:

a fixed false belief that is resistant to reason or confrontation with actual fact; a false belief or opinion: delusions of grandeur.

Illusion:

something that deceives by producing a false or misleading impression of reality.

　

THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN...............

Obama & Team know that the 2012 presidential campaign effectively started last Wednesday and that

voters will hold the president personally responsible for turning the economy around ... and that ANY FAILURE TO SLASH UNEMPLOYMENT WILL DOOM THEIR CHANCES in the next election!

But new spending bills are no longer a possibility. So that leaves the president with one and ONLY one weapon of last resort: The Federal Reserve.

That's why last Wednesdays Fed announcement — that it will print only $600 billion to buy Treasuries and other securities — is just a down payment. Merely a small tip compared to the truly big money-printing binge yet to come.

Look: In the world we just left behind, Congress and the Treasury Department led the charge on stimulus:

Congress passed spending bills.

The Treasury borrowed the money to pay for them.

The Fed's role was merely to buy Treasuries with newly-printed money in order to keep interest rates low.

Now, in the new world that has just dawned, the game has changed. Radically! Congress and the Treasury are on the sidelines. The responsibility for stimulating the economy now falls on the Fed ALONE.

OUR ECONOMY AND IT'S MANAGERS ARE BEING FORCED INTO AN EVER TIGHTENING CONE OF UNCERTAINTY THAT WILL END WITH A TRAGIC CRISIS OF ENORMOUS MAGNITUDE AND IMPACT.

BAD POLITICS.................

Yes, the Fed will use the money to buy treasuries and other securities. But ... Last time around, the Fed printed $1.7 trillion in new paper money, and it still wasn't enough.

Anyone who really believes that the Fed will only print a mere $600 billion this time around is missing the point. It will take many times that amount to buy Obama a second term! The bottom line ...

Every dollar you earn and own is about to be gutted of its value. The dollars the Fed has printed so far are ALREADY driving the price of essential everyday items much higher.

BAD POLICY MOTIVATED BY BAD POLITICS AND THE AGENDA OF THOSE IN POWER ONLY ENDS WITH ONE RESULT, ECONOMIC DISASTER. AMERICA IS ECONOMICALLY ILLITERATE AT BEST SO CONSENSUS THINKING ON THIS ISSUE IS COMPLETELY WORTHLESS AND THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA WORKS FOR THE HIGHEST BIDDER SPREADING THEIR FERTILIZER.

NO INFLATION?????

Since last July, margarine prices have risen 6 percent. Women's dresses are up 6 percent. Beer is up 6 percent. Milk prices have risen 6.5 percent. Candy is 13 percent more expensive. Butter is up 19 percent. Shoes are up a whopping 45 percent.

All in just over four months!

Now, with the Fed set to flood the world with unbacked paper dollars, it's time to get ready for even greater destruction of your buying power.

WITH EUROPE AND JAPAN RAISING RATES AND THE FED HELL BENT ON DESTROYING OUR ECONOMY HOW LONG WILL IT BE UNTIL FOREIGN INVESTORS LOSE FAITH IN OUR ECONOMY AND FLEE?

QE AND OIL.............

The Fed wants inflation and, lo and behold, it's getting it with the price of West Texas Intermediate and North Sea Brent up almost dollar last Wednesday and WTI up another dollar last Thursday, just shy of $86 per barrel. We are not yet at levels where the price is destroying demand but where is that level? The Fed wants to get America motoring but what we need to know is

how many dollars per gallon keeps Joe Citizen off the road. In the summer of 2008, the average price of gas in the U.S. hit $4 per gallon and it has been gently hovering just shy of $3 in recent months. We know that $4 per gallon was a hammer blow to energy demand.

The price of crude oil jumped $2.5 a barrel to $87. It is up 20% since markets first concluded in early September that 'QE2' was a done deal.

Consumers should prepare for another turn of events like the spring of 2008, when oil prices soared to $147 a barrel.

Rising energy prices directly translate into higher costs for farming, harvesting, transporting and processing foods. We are headed for an economic disaster.

OIL PRICES ARE GOING MUCH HIGHER. QE IS NOTHING BUT A GAMBLE, A ROLL OF THE DICE. IT IS NOT WISE POLICY. IT IS SIMPLY A LAST DITCH EFFORT BY DESPERATE MEN TO RIGHT OUR MISMANAGED ECONOMY. IT WILL LEAD TO ECONOMIC CATASTOPHE.

State and local finances are far worse than the mainstream realizes..........

Bond subsidies and transfers have allowed states to avoid making tough decisions. It won't last.

The threat posed by the state fiscal crisis in the U.S. is vastly underestimated and under-appreciated—because even today too few people understand how states have been managing their finances.

What investors fail to appreciate is that state bailouts have already begun.

Over 20% of California's debt issuance during 2009 and over 30% of its debt issuance in 2010 to date has been subsidized by the federal government in a program known as Build America Bonds. Under the program, the U.S. Treasury covers 35% of the interest paid by the bonds. Arguably, without this program the interest cost of bonds for some states would have already reached prohibitive levels.

California is not alone: Over 30% of Illinois's debt and over 40% of Nevada's debt issued since 2009 has also been subsidized with these bonds.

These states would have already reached some type of tipping point had the federal program not been in place.

Beyond debt subsidies, general federal government transfers to states now stand at the highest levels on record.

Traditionally, state revenues were primarily comprised of sales, personal and corporate income taxes. Over the years, however, federal government transfers have subsidized business-as-usual state spending not covered by state tax collections. Today, more than 28% of state funding comes from federal government transfers, the highest contribution on record.

These transfers have made states dependent on federal assistance. New York, for example, spent in excess of 250% of its tax receipts over the last decade. The largest 15 states by GDP spent on average over 220% of their tax receipts.

Clearly, states have been spending at unsustainable levels without facing immediate consequences due to federal transfer payments and other temporary factors.

At the same time, local governments now rely on state government transfers for 33% of their funding.

Thus, when a state finds itself in a financial bind, it has the option of saving itself before saving one of its local municipalities. Pennsylvania recently assisted the state capital, Harrisburg, in the form of a one-time "advance" payment—but there are hundreds of towns like Harrisburg that will also need assistance. These one-time fixes fail to address the real structural problems facing so many states and municipalities.

State budgets are likely to experience their second consecutive year with deficits of close to $200 billion. The root of the problem is simple: State governments have spent recklessly and unsustainably.

Rainy-day funds are depleted, pension-fund contributions are already at record lows, and almost all of the major federal government subsidy programs will run out in June 2011.

Until now, the states have been able to evade the need to rein in spending largely because the federal government enabled them to do so through record high federal allocations, and by creative accounting that put off funding well over a

trillion dollars of state-employee pension and other retirement obligations.

Most assume that the federal government will simply keep coming to the rescue of the states without appreciating the immensity of the cumulative state-budget gaps. I expect multiple municipal defaults to trigger indiscriminate selling bonds, which in turn will require an emergency federal response.

Does anyone really think the Federal government can afford this?

States need to make their own hard decisions and not attempt to kick the can any further down the road than they already have. This is another disaster already playing out that has been largely ignored by most.

How will taxpayers from fiscally conservative states like Texas or Nebraska feel about bailing out threadbare Illinois or California?

When you add up state and local pension liabilities, operating fund deficits and outstanding muni bonds, the bailout numbers become Fannie/Freddiesque. We're talking several trillion dollars up front, with no end in sight because states will use federal money to avoid the kinds of changes that would bring them back into a semblance of balance.

The size of this ongoing federal commitment will be obscured in the official announcements — as it is now — but analysts will see through the lies and publish real numbers.

So eventually the markets will understand that Washington, just a few years after nationalizing the mortgage market, has taken on another several trillion dollars of junk paper from the states.

The global markets, already worried about the viability of the dollar as a reserve asset, will really start to sweat.

The question is how they'll react to this latest assault on their collective balance sheet. Foreign central banks and risk-averse investors are starting to resemble battered spouses, putting up with pretty much anything from the US because they have nowhere else to go. But even this kind of pathological patience has to have a limit, and if a bailout of California and Illinois is the final straw, then the game changes from fiscal crisis to currency crisis.

　

CLASS WAR...........

The great unspoken two words of American political discourse are class war. The moral and political premise of the modern, post-World War II "American Century" is that the U.S. had overcome class divisions and struggle.

Everyone, or nearly everyone save the very poor and the very, very rich, was absorbed into a vast, undifferentiated middle class.

The fiction that America is a nation without class, a lie since its inception a half-century ago, gets more and more untenable as actual class struggle daily intensifies.

It's time to accept the simple yet profound fact that America is in the midst of class war – and the super-rich, the American sector of the global oligarchy, is winning.

Class struggle is being explicitly fought out in France and Britain. In France, it is expressed as mass and often-violent resistance, with blood on the streets. In the U.K., it's being imposed as a ruling class demand for austerity through huge public-sector layoffs, cuts in public services and little overt resistance. In Germany and the U.S., the mediating lubricants of legal niceties and political parties continue to contain and blunt direct class conflict.

Today, the promise of the American Century is fading and the rich are getting ever richer and the working middle classes are being ever more squeezed.

Today's robber barons know that the media matters and have effectively bought-off the popular opinion makers.

Stylishly groomed corporate executives and financiers, who are morally no better then slick thieves, have become celebrities. They are flattered on reality TV shows, praised on business programs and voyeuristically celebrated by the popular media. The American media knows better then bite the hand that feeds it.

SARAH PALIN IS AN IDIOT............

"We shouldn't be playing around with inflation. It's not for nothing Reagan called it "as violent as a mugger, as frightening as an armed robber, and as deadly as a hit man." The Fed's pump priming addiction has got our small businesses running scared, and our allies worried. The German finance minister called the Fed's proposals "clueless." When Germany, a country that knows a thing or two about the dangers of inflation, warns us to think again, maybe it's time for Chairman Bernanke to cease and desist. We don't want temporary, artificial economic growth bought at the expense of permanently higher inflation which will erode the value of our incomes and our savings. We want a stable dollar combined with real economic reform. It's the only way we can get our economy back on the right track."

-Sarah Palin

The most popular piece on the WSJ.com is "

Sarah Palin Takes Aim at Fed. " Given the policy wonkiness of the former Alaskan governor (?!?), one can only wonder who her writers are.

The Journal mentions in passing that Karl Rove

questioned her "gravitas." While Rove seemed to be calling her an intellectual lightweight, the article doesn't really really question the speech itself — or its reflection of Palin's belief system.

OUR PROBLEMS ARE SO SERIOUS AND MS. PALIN IS SO CLUELESS THAT SHE HAS NO BUSINESS NEAR POLITICS OR IMPORTANT ISSUES.

Matt Phillips of the WSJ's

Marketbeat blog is having none of it, pointing out the 3 major premises of her speech are factually incorrect:

"First off, Reagan's quote, delivered to a Republican fund raising event in October 1978 — according to the

Columbia Book of Quotations — came as inflation was hovering around double-digits.We've got a very different situation now, the consumer price index for all items minus food and energy rose 0.8% over the year to September, the lowest 12-month increase since March 1961, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said.

Second, Germany did indeed have a nasty battle with hyper inflation about 90 years ago in the Weimar Republic. But what's worrying Germany right now is not that their

good friends in the U.S.A. will soon be selling bundles of greenbacks by weight, rather it's that a cheaper dollar is a threat to their own all-important export sector. That's a legitimate concern for them. But do you really take advice on business strategy from your competitor?

Third, permanently high inflation could indeed erode the value of savings and incomes. But deflation — which is the bigger worry and the reason why the Fed recently announced it is warming up the electronic printing presses — has costs too. It means debts get tougher and tougher to pay off. Last,

keep in mind that inflation-scare mongerers have been wrong throughout the entire financial crisis."

Good stuff.

And over at

Real Time Economics, another WSJ blog, Sudeep Reddy (author of the Palin piece in the WSJ) points out that Palin's criticism of inflation is wrong — its been quite low this year at an average annual rate of 0.6%.

But why does it take a blog (or two) to call out the bullshit in her speech? Why doesn't the Journal point out how "this is factually incorrect, this is wrong, and this is nonsense.?"

NOISE AND DIMWITS LIKE SARAH PALIN HAVE MORE INFLUENCE IN OUR SOCIETY THAN THE TRUTH DOES. REALITY TV IS THE CORRECT VENUE FOR MS. PALIN.

THE SIGNS OF OUR TIMES...........

The signs are everywhere

that we are at the end times as given by Jesus when He foretold, for example, that it will be like the days of Noah's pre-Flood time and Lot's days in Sodom at the moment He will break in like a thief in the night on an unsuspecting world.

"Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come. But know this, that if the goodman of the house had known in what watch the thief would come, he would have watched, and would not have suffered his house to be broken up. Therefore be ye also ready: for in such an hour as ye think not the Son of man cometh" (Matt. 24: 42-44).

Socioeconomically, the end-times signals are prolific, with the whole world in economic distress. The 2008-2009 U.S. and international monetary crises were nothing short of earth-shaking. With the global financial structure intricately linked to the U.S. dollar and its economy, America's banking meltdown and all attendant to it suddenly had the western nations in panic. The panic is unabated, despite America throwing trillions of dollars that don't really exist into the fiscal fiasco.

Rioting in Greece, Spain, Italy, and other so-called "civilized" countries displayed in blatant fashion the economic turmoil. Rage over government-provided social services being withdrawn and jobs cut from government, along with unions losing their funding, caused--and continue to cause--withdrawal spasms like those suffered by addicts needing their heroin fixes.

The nations are in distress with perplexity, just as Jesus prophesied as recorded in Luke 21:25.

There is a call for a rearrangement of the economic order. It is just such an order that will serve Antichrist's dastardly regime as he sets about to enslave the world. His 666 numbers-and-mark system as found in Revelation 13:16-18 can be seen in the making in these very days in which we live.

People are lovers of themselves, boasters, proud. Children are disobedient to parents, with the assisted rebellion built in to the public school systems of America. We are a people–worldwide—who are unthankful and, certainly, unholy.

Isaiah and Daniel the prophets foretold that Israel would be involved in a peace process at the very end of things to come. Zechariah, many other prophets, and the Lord Jesus himself prophesied that Israel would be surrounded by and hated by all nations of earth at the time of the end. All of those developing prophecies regarding God's chosen people are front and center right now!

Russia is a brooding giant to Israel's north, and at every opportunity, Iran threatens the Jewish state with oblivion. These nations combine with Turkey and others to constitute a coalescing agglomerate that has the characteristics of the foretold Gog-Magog military machine of Ezekiel 38 and 39.

Russia's Vladimir Putin openly displays ambition that easily qualifies him as one who might aspire to be the Gog of the Ezekiel prophecies. Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spouts the kind of hatred for God's chosen people that the prince of Persia no doubt will use to inspire Iran's (Persia's) leader to join with Gog in raging against Israel in that satanic attack (Daniel 10:20).

Recently, Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has brought his nation into the Iranian and Arab world's mantra for Israel to, in effect, be neutralized–be eradicated as an entity in the Middle East. Thus, Ezekiel's prophecy about the Gog-Magog forces continues to congeal, with the ancient area of Togarmah now firmly within the foretold mix of peoples that will storm over the mountains of Israel to meet their God-ordained doom during the final battle.

MANKIND HAS NO ANSWERS FOR THE MAJOR PROBLEMS HE IS FACING. IN FACT THE CENTRAL PROBLEM IS OUR SINFUL HUMAN NATURE AND THE ONLY ANSWER IS JESUS.

HUMAN HISTORY DOES NOT GO ON FOREVER AND AT THIS POINT EVERYONE, EVERY FAMILY, EVERY CHURCH AND EVERY NATION SHOULD BE WATCHING FOR THE RETURN OF JESUS.