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So many shoes are dropping out there that reality is starting to look and sound like the tap-line in a Busby Berkeley
production number. The meme-scape,
too, is humming with viral
transmissions of dire doings. Is JP Morgan unwinding like a 1911 knitted woolen Yale varsity sweater? Did it booby-trap the credit default swap universe in
the process, and is that getting ready to blow? The whole world is hanging by its fingernails, refusing to be dragged into
the future.
That future is all
about contraction. We could
navigate our way into it
but we don't want to. We want
to stay right where we are with all our stuff and no need to make new arrangements
and we are trying every last trick to do that.
Can you not sense a
terrible tidal surge of implacable forces under the headlines' placid
surface? I do offer Mark Zuckerberg
best wishes on his nuptials, but I think he set himself up for one of fate's great pranks as FB stock goes to 99
cents while he's still on his honeymoon (playing Frogger in a super deluxe hotel suite).
Does anybody really
believe that the European money problem has any other ending
except massive repudiation
of obligations and epic political
realignment? Or that the
USA isn't caught in the undertow. The only real
question now is how the civilized world might remain civilized while it rebuilds
its money system. Money, after
all, is a representative
of reality and the representations by nations and person and institutions have been so
false for so long that,
for practical purposes, there is no consensual
reality anymore.
By the way, it was a
nice gag at the time, but
Karl Rove was wrong. We are not creating our own reality.
Reality's theme going
forward is changing from liquidity to liquidation. The European
LTRO was a nice fairy tail, and the mild buzz lasted
a few months, but its flimsy spell
is broken. An awful lot of parties may be liquidating gold and silver, too, this week but under the circumstances I've got to think
there will be plenty of counterparties looking to buy, since uncertainty
is crushing all other media of exchange. The process
begins to look like a
mass metamorphic conversion of winners to losers
and vice-versa. In a giant unwinding
of paper assets the result may be
that precious metals go sideways while all other assets tank - and then once everything's in the tank, PMs
tank, too, because nobody is left
standing with that kind of cash. Of course, in the event
just a little bitty bit of gold will still buy a
lot of stuff. The other possibility is that the rumored global coordinated central bank QE doomsday machine goes off destroying the meaning of cash
money altogether. Surely that sort or stunt will not cast the same spell as the LTRO, a more measured act of desperation, but will call into question the very meaning of dollars, euros, yen, and pounds sterling. That's when you'll
be paying $25,000 for a Little Debbie snack cake.
Let me be first of
the non-right-wing in the blogster
corps to venture the somewhat un-PC idea that Barack Obama turned out to be the first
black schmuck elected President of the US. He didn't
do the one thing that would have mattered most: put an end to government sponsored control fraud.
Control fraud at that level is
so pernicious because it destroys the legitimacy of institutions. It can
only make a nation cynical, by which I don't mean given
to malicious humor, which is different,
but just always thinking the worst of your fellow man and the very idea that
the human race ever produced anything fine and
durable.
And on top of that malfeasance, to try to suspend
due process of law in
Section 1021 of the NDAA bill - smacked down by federal judge Katherine Forrest
last week - was an amazing transgression that the mainstream press greeted four months ago with barely
a shrug. Can't we just start
a movement to go down to Charlotte, NC, this summer and levitate the convention center into
outer space? It nearly worked with the Pentagon forty odd years
ago.
What do you suppose Obama and the other feckless schmucks of the G-8 were telling each other this weekend at Camp David between weenie roasts and ping-pong
round robins? It must have been the emptiest dumb show of mere protocol; an exchange of tie-tacks
in the national colors, the playing
of many anthems and flying
of flags, issuance of bland
assurances and platitudes. Nobody believes any of them anymore, even poor Mr. Hollandaise, who has been on the job a few days.
Angela Merkel must be
good and goddam sick of even
showing up at the office.
Well, perhaps its
best that the world will
go where it has to go without leadership. After all, human history is emergent and improvisation suits us. Forceful leaders often only leave
a big mess behind. But
imagine a world where nobody
gets paid. That might be our
world by the end of the week.
My
books are available at
all the usual places.
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