It’s no secret that I've taken the contrarian position for seven long (and frequently frustrating) years.
Why? I happen to believe that if it were possible to print one’s way to prosperity, we’d all be speaking Latin. The Romans would have perfected the practice of money printing and would never have faced their own collapse due to insufficient resources for their empire’s continued maintenance and expansion.
History repeatedly has shown us that every culture and generation that has dabbled with we'll-just-issue-more-money “solutions” has met with the same miserable fate.
This time will be no different. And if that makes me a ‘contrarian’ then so be it. I'm happy to stand against the tide of popular opinion and boldly declare that there’s no such thing as a free lunch.
More broadly, the Fed is staffed by lunatics. As are the major banks. These are people who fervently believe that endless growth on a finite planet is both desirable and possible. Of course, those of us who look at this empirically know it's an impossibility.
True leadership, responsible leadership, would recognize that simple fact and be working diligently towards a new monetary solution that does not require perpetual expansion. A monetary approach not founded on debt-based money, which pretty much has only two states: rapid exponential expansion, or collapse.
Of course, expecting the Fed, et al., to recognize this is folly. As Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Look, we’ve been down this road before, and the sheer stupidity of our current situation is that we’ve been down it recently enough to know better. It worked out poorly for us in 2000, again in 2008, and will soon enough again. That's why I'm currently short the US stock market and plan to increase that short position as time goes on.
“But They Won’t Let It Fall.”
I'm quite familiar with, and even sympathetic to, the idea that the central banks will not ‘let’ the markets fall. And indeed, they’ve done everything imaginable to keep the stock and bond markets magically levitated including, I'm sure, extreme tactics that we've not been told about (and maybe never will)
And I can understand the initial reasons as to why they did this back in 2009 as the global financial market was in full meltdown.
by springbank1