VECKA 13
Fredag
29
Mars
BT-annons
2019-04-06
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Spirituellt och tankestimulerande
Lobbying, fed och korruption.

VECKANS BILL BONNER är verkligen spirituellt och tankestimulerande.

  1. Every cockamamie public policy dreamt up by America’s activists has been tried elsewhere… tariffs, taxes, soak the rich, coddle the poor; make wars on drugs, poverty, and terrorists; reward the cronies, stimulus, deficits, money printing, negative rates, domestic boondoggles, military bamboozles, price fixing… And the results are always predictable: A waste… or a disaster.
  2.  The old “us versus them” is always a scam. People are unique, with thousands of different cultures… hairstyles… religions… hobbies… businesses… prejudices… trades… and financial interests. Playing off one group against another merely allows another group – the one with the real power, the insiders – to gain at the public’s expense.
  3. The U.S. is following policies and programs that have been tried many times before. They will not make America great again. Instead, they merely keep her on the road to calamity… by way of Japan and Argentina.

Why would taxes on the rich suddenly be so popular?

Easy… the middle classes think they’ve been cheated. Many thought Donald J. Trump would set things right.

Now they look to the tax code.

But will tax changes really make people better off?

In France, for example, they have all the taxes you could possibly want. Do they make the economy stronger? Do they create more jobs? Do they make the society more fair? Think so?

Tell it to the gilets jaunes, who have been setting cars on fire! Unemployment is at 9%. The rich are still rich.

And the government is still desperate for more tax revenue.

That leaves the middle classes to shoulder the burden. And however much you jiggle and jive with the tax system, or switch from direct taxation to debt and inflation, it is not going to make much difference. One way or another, they’re going to pay.

The “tax the rich” proposals are mostly distractions from the essential math. The more the feds meddle, at home and abroad, the more the middle classes are going to pay. Fairness has nothing to do with it.

And it is the money system, not the tax system, that has made the insiders so rich. Neither Republicans nor Democrats are suggesting changing that!

But it really doesn’t matter what public policy you choose, there is a scammy precedent somewhere.

“We” should do this… says one group. “We” should do that, says another. But don’t expect any of these policy proposals to make America great again. Whatever miracle they claim, the actual result is always a transfer of wealth, power, and status to the elite who make the decisions

Politics – whether local or national – is always a con game.

And the con generally increases with the scale.

The bigger the “we,” the bigger the swindle.

Obviously, we won’t all be better off. The only way they can redistribute wealth is by taking it away from the people to whom it was distributed in the first place. Some win. Some lose. There is no “we.”

Tariffs are similar. They’re supposed to help “bring back jobs.” We all want more jobs, right?

But break down the “we” into its component parts. Imagine that a tariff actually did save a job in Milwaukee. What good would it do the guy in Medford or Memphis? He would gain nothing. Instead, he would have to pay higher prices (if the Milwaukee guy were competitive, there would be no need for a tariff).

Overall, millions of consumers pay more so that a few people gain higher incomes and profits.

All up and down the line, it’s the same thing. One person wins. The other is a chump.

But the feds can only “stimulate” one part of the economy by unstimulating another. They can lower interest rates, for example. But then, savers earn less. Stock market speculators earn more. They can buy bonds. But what about people who don’t own bonds?

Wait, you say. The saver just has to get with the program. Nothing is stopping him from speculating on stocks and bonds, too.

But the typical wage earner has neither the time, the experience, nor the deep well of cynicism needed to compete with the pros. Imagine that millions of moms and pops took their savings and piled into the stock market. God help them!

The sharks would eat their lunches and drive away in their pickup trucks.

Stocks would go up to even more absurd heights – while the real economy, where real goods and services are produced – would be as lame and limp as before.

And now that you mention it, the wage earner is doubly cheated. Not only does he earn nothing on his meager savings, he also suffers from the inflation that “stimulus’’ measures cause.

He hasn’t been able to keep up with it; his real income is down 5% over the last 40 years. And that’s by the official figures. The real damage is worse.

Take our example of purchasing a common middle-class item: a Ford F-150.

In 1971, you could buy a new Ford F-150 for $2,500. At $4 an hour, it took 625 hours to buy the truck.

Today’s model costs $30,000, and the average hourly wage is $26. So, the wage earner has to work for 1,154 hours to get a standard F-150.

Put another way, he has to sell almost twice as much of his time to get a set of wheels.

Did “stimulus” policies help him? No... They hurt him.

All public policies are win-lose, in other words. The feds can only give something to one group by taking it away from another. Some win. Some lose. The “we” is a fraud.

Makers and Takers
When we left you yesterday, Dear Reader, you were squirming and squealing… on the edge of your chair, eager to tell us what we all know:
Yes, there is an “us versus them” that is real… and matters. But it’s got nothing to do with Republicans – Democrats, Black – White, Protestant – Catholic, U.S. – Mexico, or any of the other regular categories.

Instead, it’s the oldest two groups in the world – those who earn wealth… and those who take it away from them.

As you know, there are only two ways to get what you want in life – honestly and dishonestly. Either you provide a service or a product, willingly… most often, your time… in exchange for something else. Or, you hold up a liquor store… rip off customers… or get a claptrap giveaway from the feds.

Over time, in a stable political system, more and more people figure out how to game the system, using the feds’ muscle to get what they want. That’s why they’re willing to spend millions of dollars to win an election; they know it will pay off.

And it’s why corporate lobbying has become such a big business. And why Washington has become so much richer than the rest of the nation. And it’s why we have a $22 trillion national debt. And it’s why we have wars on drugs, tariffs, poverty… wars in Afghanistan and hundreds of U.S. military bases around the world.

Just follow the money; it leads to some segment of the Deep State and its cronies.

And it’s also why we have a fake money system, and a central bank, that steals trillions of dollars from the middle classes and shifts it to the insiders and the elite.

Our first prediction was that the Fed would never normalize interest-rate policies, allowing the free market to set short-term rates, rather than the Fed itself.

Our second was that Donald J. Trump would never follow through on his threat of a Full Retard trade war with China.

The two are related in an important way. Fed policies, and the fake money system behind them – not tariffs – caused the trade deficit with China. Prior to the introduction of fake money, not connected to gold, in 1971, the U.S. ran a trade surplus, the biggest in the world.

Now it runs the world’s biggest deficit. Why the difference? Because now it can simply print the money to pay its foreign creditors.

Before 1971, trade imbalances never got too far out of whack. They were reconciled by shifting gold from the deficit country to the surplus country. Gold is limited, so it had the effect of lowering the money supply in the deficit country, forcing up interest rates, and reducing spending on imports.

That is, the feds – and their money system – created the world that we live in… with $250 trillion of debt… and some of the lowest interest rates since The Flood.

Had America stuck with real, gold-backed money… and/or had the Fed not supported Wall Street with ultra-low interest rates and $4 trillion of new money… the situation would be much different.

There would be no trade deficit with China. There would be no $250 trillion in debt. An F-150 would probably cost less than it did in 1971, not more. The working class would have nothing to grumble about… And Donald Trump would not be president.

The Fed would not be “normalizing,” because it never would have un-normalized. The rich would not be so rich. The Dow would not be over 25,000. The government would not have $22 trillion of debt itself. And we wouldn’t be up at 6 a.m. writing this Diary.

All of these things, of course, are going away. But not soon. And not without even more outrageous and lunatic efforts to keep the jig up.

But the whole shebang rests on lies. Fake money. Fake interest rates. Fake “us vs. them” battles. Tax cuts without spending cuts. Social programs that we can’t afford. Military adventures that make us less safe. What are the PhDs… cronies… and hustlers to do? Admit defeat? Let asset prices collapse… dragging down their wealth and reputations?

Let the stock market correct? Let the economy go into recession… or even depression… as it cleans out the mistakes built up by 30 years of phony, EZ money policies?

Imagine Mr. Powell explaining his new “hands off” policy to the hinds in Congress:

“You know,” begins Mr. Powell, “we can’t really tell you what interest rates should be. Or what stocks should sell for. And all that fake money… and that 2% inflation target… well… it was all nonsense, wasn’t it?”

Nope. We can’t imagine it either.

Instead, we see Mr. Powell changing his mind about MMT. Maybe the government should borrow and spend more, he begins to think. And then, under a dense smokescreen of theoretical MMT claptrap, the Fed will follow Japan’s central bank, buying U.S. bonds by the trillions.

Its most important price signal – the cost of money – is no longer determined by the free market, but by a group of 12 hacks.

And if interest rates go up – which they surely will – many of its households and businesses, as well as its government, will all go broke.

Our advice to 11-year-olds: The U.S. markets may repeat the experience of the last 77 years; but we wouldn’t bet on it. It really is a new ball game.

A TALL ORDER (kanske lugnast att läsa det hela i omgångar)
TREVLIG VECKA

 

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