Monthly Archives: April 2010

Sincere Ignorance and Conscientious Stupidity

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Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.  -Martin Luther King Jr.

Nobody wants to believe that there are a handful of Wall Street bankers so intractably evil that they would rather destroy the entire world economy than give up their vacation home in the Hamptons.  Nobody wants to believe that there are a handful of Washington politicians so intractably evil that they would steal the life savings of millions of people just to preserve their government perks and pensions. Nobody wanted to believe that the Weimar Republic could devolve into National Socialism in only four years – but it did.

I understand why some would think I’m a conspiracy nut. Had I not seen it with my own eyes, heard it with my own ears, touched it with my own hands and lived it every day for the last 25+ months, I would think I was kooky, too. But the facts are right out in the open for anyone who cares to read a balance sheet.

The financial establishment, (which funds Washington through political donations and funds the mainstream financial media through advertising), love to say “nobody saw this coming” but they are either liars or idiots. Lots of people have been warning that the world is heading for a credit crisis for at least the last 3 years. I can name several right off the top of my head: Karl Denninger, Mish Shedlock, Bill Fleckenstein, Reggie Middleton, Peter Schiff, Nouriel Roubini, Gary North and Marc Faber have all written extensively about it for years.  Their record is both long and public.

These guys deal in hard facts. Not conjecture, not theories, not “interpretations” – mathematics. And the mathematics were there in the publicly posted balance sheets of every major bank on Wall Street for all to see. The mathematics were there in the balance sheets of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, there in the balance sheets of AIG. The balance sheets said these organizations were all doomed when the loans they made to people who couldn’t pay all went bad.

The loans went bad. The money dried up. The banks are technically insolvent. The only reason they haven’t been shuttered is because they own the regulators, they own the Congress, they own the executive branch and they own the Federal Reserve.

Their “profits” are illusions, but the debts are real. There are only two ways to deal with debt: pay it off or default. The banks won’t default, and they can’t pay it off, so here’s what they have done – they stole the money from the US Taxpayer.

How did they do it? Let’s look:

The S&P 500, which is a proxy for the entire market, has been trading at over 140 times earnings since last summer. What that means for you non-financial types is that the price of the stock market is 140 times the value of the profit the combined companies made. (I would post a link to this statistic, but Standard & Poors removed the link from their website in October.) For comparison, the long term, (80+ year) historical average of the S&P 500 is 15 times earnings. In other words, in an economy with “official” unemployment hovering at 10%, “official” underemployment over 20%, a housing market that has crashed, major banks, insurance companies and auto makers that would be bankrupt if not for the injection of literally trillions of dollars in taxpayer money, plummeting tax receipts, states struggling with historic budget deficits and the largest financial bubble in history – the stock market is trading ten times higher than it’s historical average. Is this economy ten times better than average?

How is that possible?

Follow the money:

March 16 2008 – The Fed & Treasury give JPMorgan a $29B gift if they agree to buy Bear Stearns for $2/share. (When the stock closed on Friday, March 14, it was trading at $22/share. The final purchase price was later negotiated to $10/share.)

July 2008 – Congress gives Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac $800B to keep them from bankruptcy.

Early September 2008 – Lehman goes bankrupt. This event triggers the payment of credit default swaps AIG has sold to various banks around the world. They don’t have the money to pay. Congress authorized an $85b payment to AIG, (later increased to $145b), to keep AIG from BKing. Most of the money that goes in the front door of AIG went right out the back door into the pockets of banks such as Goldman, Morgan-Stanley, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Citibank – the usual suspects.

Late September 2008 - The Big Banks are in fact insolvent, so Hank Paulson, (ex-CEO of Goldman Sachs and current SecTreas), goes to Congress and threatens global apocalypse if Congress doesn’t cough up the dough to bail them out. Congress caves. Hundreds of billions are funneled to the banks through the Federal Reserve. Blomberg files a FOIA request with the Fed to see where the money went. The Fed ignores it. Bloomberg takes ‘em to court. The judge rules in Bloomberg’s favor. The Fed ignores them. To date, the Fed still hasn’t turned over the information.

February 2009 – Obama demands another $800b to help goose the economy. Most of it goes to banks.

March 2009 – the S&P500 hits an intraday low of 666, almost a thousand points below the all time high it hit in October 2007.

Since then, unemployment continues to rise, housing defaults rise, commercial real-estate tanks, sovereign debt crises spread around the globe. Where did ALL THAT MONEY we gave to the banks go?

Look at the stock market. We are currently trading right at 1200 on the S&P, a rise of a little less than 100% in a year. Only one sector of the market has profits consistent with a 100% rise in just over 12 months: Financials. One sector of the market has shown the biggest increase in price in the last year: Financials. One sector of the market makes more donations to Washington than any other: Financials. One sector of the market got hundreds of billions in taxpayer dollars: Financials.

Conclusion: The Wall Street banks took the money that they were supposed to be loaning out to Main Street, and used it to drive up the price of their shares.

How’d they do that?

Front-running, co-located servers and high-frequency trading.

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Meanwhile…

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US public debt as a percentage of GDP has more than doubled since the banking crisis started. (As far as I am concerned, the only crisis was for the banks’ shareholders, bondholders and executives. Banks for bust all the time. Big, fat, hairy deal.)

Here’s the money quote from today’s article in Yahoo Finance:

Economists note that countries that endure banking crises often end up having debt crises a short time later. That is because governments borrow heavily to prop up their banking systems, which sends their own debt burdens soaring. That debt buildup has occurred in the United States, which has seen its publicly held debt jump from 36 percent of the total economy in 2007, before the crisis hit, to 64 percent this year. That’s the highest level since 1951, when the country was still paying off the debt run up to fight World War II.

Debt levels of all developing countries are rising to levels not seen over the past 60 years, the IMF said in an economic survey released last week. The U.S. government forecasts that its publicly traded debt as a percentage of the total economy will reach 77 percent by 2020. By comparison, Greece’s debt burden exceeds 100 percent.

This is not a “free markets” issue or a “liberty” issue, this is a moral issue. I will be developing this theme in days to come.

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Why Greece Matters to You-the American Taxpayer

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First, Bear Stearns made a bunch of stupid bets on sub-prime mortgages, and you – the American Taxpayer – bailed them out to the tune of $29 billion in guarantees to JPMorgan, (who bought Bear Stearns only on the condition that the government assume that debt.)

Then, Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac made a bunch of stupid bets on subprime mortgages and you – the American Taxpayer – bailed them out to the tune of $800 billion.

The Lehman Brothers went belly up, which forced AIG to pay billions of dollars in claims on credit default swaps – claims they were unable to pay, so you – the American Taxpayer – bailed out AIG to the tune of $145 billion.

Then the Big Wall Street Banks went kablooie, because they made stupid bets and you – The American Taxpayer – bailed them out with $800 billion in loans. (No, you will not see any return on that “investment”, other than the comfort of watching Goldman Sachs give out $14 billion in bonuses last year.)

Then, Chrysler and GM both came to Washington with their hands out because they made stupid agreements with the UAW and stupid inverstment decisions, and you – the American Taxpayer – bailed them out with “only” about $20 billion.

What have you – the American Taxpayer – received for all this largess doled into the laps of these idiot gamblers? You have the worst economy since the great depression. You have over 22% of the population “under-employed”. You have plummeting home values. You have more tax. You have known tax cheats heading Treasury and the IRS.

Now Greece is going to go bankrupt, and guess who is going to bailout that government? The IMF gives money to Greece. 20% of the IMF’s funding comes from the US Taxpayer, so you – the American Taxpayer – are now sending $7 billion to the Greek government so it can pay its bills.

Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Italy, France and the UK are in line for the same thing.

What can you do about it?

You could start by re-reading the US Declaration of Independence and contemplating this phrase:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

When the colonists determined that the government of Great Britain – their government – had become destructive to the very people it was supposed to protect, they moved to “alter or abolish” that government and establish a new one that would be most likely to secure their life, liberty and happiness.

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A Loving Ode to Mother Earth on Her Special Day

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Earth Day. Bleh.

I’m convinced Earth Day was conceived by tea-sipping western European elites who live in mild climates where nature is a devoted, loving and fertile servant to man. I know better. I spent my childhood in Oklahoma and half my adult life in Texas.

Oklahoma springtime meant tornadoes, thunderstorms, wicked unexpected heatwaves, late snowstorms and crop-crushing hail storms. Summer brought drought, searing heat, blowing dust and energy-sapping humidity. Fall was an explosion of allergens to make up for the relatively mild weather. Winter was tree-crushing ice storms. The ground was 90% limestone, so growing anything required dedication, hard work, sweat, perseverance and more than a bit of luck. We had poisonous snakes and venomous and/or biting bugs. In one 18 month stretch, my hometown of 35000 people suffered a devastating direct hit by a tornado and two “100 Year” floods. In other words, “Mother Nature” was mean, nasty, ill-tempered and downright murderous most all the time.

Texas was like Oklahoma only more so. Literally everything in nature was trying to kill you. The weather was tornadoes, hailstorms, thunderstorms, lightning storms, floods, droughts, high winds, searing heat, deadly cold, wicked temperature changes, (I clearly remember a day that had an early afternoon high in the 80s and a late afternoon reading in the 30s), and suffocating humidity. The ground was either caliche clay, which is impossible to till, or rocks. The array of venomous reptiles and bugs, dangerous animals and poisonous plants was exceeded only by the variety of airborne allergens. Literally everything about Mother Nature in Texas was hostile to human life. She was not man’s willing servant; she was a rabid, foam-mouthed, blood-toothed, sharp-clawed maniacal destroyer.

I lived in London for 15 months in 2001-2002. No bugs to speak of. No venomous critters. No poisonous plants. Mild weather year-round, (with a few exceptions). The ground is so fertile it is ridiculous. You could spit a watermelon seed out the back door and be harvesting watermelons 2 months later. Mother Nature, in SW England, was a compliant, willing and fecund servant to mankind. I understand most of France is the same way or better.

I came away from my sojourn in England convinced that the “Save the Earth” people had never lived in Texas or Oklahoma. I knew from experience that Mother Earth didn’t need to be cared for; she needed to be tamed, broken, collared and caged. She is a saber-toothed tiger, eager to shed man’s blood and blissfully indifferent to the consequences of her actions.

I’m nearly certain that the “Earth-First-ers” never spent weeks on end digging ton after ton of limestone from their vegetable garden. I’m pretty sure they never cowered in a “fraidy hole” hoping the tornado blowing over didn’t kill them. I’ll bet they never spent miserable weeks covered in Calomine lotion because they got a rash from poison oak, poison ivy or poison sumac all up and down their arms, legs, trunk and face. I’ll bet they never itched a night away because they were covered in chigger bites or fire ant bites from walking through the grass. I’ll bet they never had a pasture ruined and livestock killed by an invasion of fire ants. I’ll bet they never suffered through a drought that was broken by a flood, or an unrelenting rainy season broken by a drought. I’ll bet they never sat in the emergency room with a friend whose four-year-old son suffered a rattlesnake bite and prayed he wouldn’t lose his leg. I’ll bet they never dreaded fall and spring knowing that the effluvium from all the budding Texas junipers was going to make them sick for weeks. I’ll bet they never struggled season after season to get something – anything – besides weeds to grow in the dreadful soil. I’ll bet they never worried being bitten by a water moccassin while swimming in a local pond. I’ll bet they never chopped their beloved prize pecan trees into firewood because an ice storm had sheared off it’s 100-year-old limbs. I’ll bet they never tried to scrub the iron stains from their clothes – iron stains that came from the red dirt which wouldn’t grow anything useful.

From the time I started school until I was in college, Time Magazine ran cover story after cover story warning the world of an impending Global Ice Age. “The first Earth Day was celebrated on April 22, 1970, amidst a building alarm about the dangers of a new ice age.” All the scientists agreed; it was coming and it was going to be bad. Then sometime in the 80′s “they” decided that Global Warming was the threat du jour. Recently, that has been changed yet again to “Global Climate Change”, (does that phrase have any meaning at all?) In my lifetime, the experts have wrongly predicted every sort of change possible to the environment. Forgive me for being skeptical now.

The “global warming/climate change” scientists have proven to be liars and frauds. Most so-called green technology actually consumes as much fossil fuel and/or creates as much pollution as the technology it is supposed to replace. Recycling waste is an expensive fools’ errand.

My experience is that nature is a rampaging killer, beating on the barricaded doors, jiggling the latches of the windows and probing every crack and crevice of the walls we have built to keep her out and keep us safe. The bulk of my life has been spent battling nature, not caring for it. The logical, natural extension of the philosophy espoused by the “Save the Earth” crowd is that man is a blight on nature and the best thing we could do for Mother Earth is to commit mass suicide.

Earth Day is a sad, sick, stupid joke played on the gullible, the forgetful and the guilt-ravaged. It helps nothing, it wastes time and it diverts our attention from real, solvable problems – like artificial turf and the designated hitter rule. (I contend that the world started going to hell with the advent of both.)

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