Reply #11: The latest ranting of Mogambo - remember, I'm the easily entertained [View All]

[54anickel]

one.

http://205.232.90.194/editorials/daughty/daughty041404.html

Theater of the Absurd
weirder and weirder

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...I take the $21 billion weekly issuance of debt, multiply it times fifty-two weeks, and compare that annual debt issuance to, oh, let's say, income..... I'm talking about the national Personal Income, which is listed as $9,364 billion, a figure that includes the pathetic contribution of us ugly little trolls out here slaving away at our pathetic little low-paying, dead-end jobs, and then coming home at night to listen to someone else whine about THEIR pathetic little low-paying dead-end job, ......

Anyway, so when I calculate all that out that, I find that the federal government, our lackluster elected officials, are putting us in more debt, to the tune of 11.5% of our income. Just this year alone!

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In an article in Business Week entitled "Why Housing Is About to Go 'Pop!'" Mark Weisbrot referenced a guy named Dean Baker at the Center for Economic Policy & Research who has looked at national housing prices going back to 1951. Mr. Baker says "Prices pretty much track the rate of inflation up until 1995. But since then, average prices on new and existing homes have soared more than 35 percentage points beyond the overall rate of inflation. Is that unusual? You bet it is."

And although Mr. Weisbrot did not follow that up with a quote from the Mogambo, I will include it for you now. "When something is unusual, meaning that this meteoric rise in prices has never happened before in the whole history of economics, does it usually mean that something bad will happen? You bet it does!"

Robert Folsom's Market Watch writes "And while cycle patterns may not be rocket science, they can be powerful indeed. They capture when to expect a turn in the trend -- which is to say, cycles present a timing opportunity."

I'm a big believer in cycles, as things that have been going up can't keep going up. And so they have to turn down. And they can't keep on going down, either, so they have to turn back up. And when they do, you have a cycle.

Noting with satisfaction that I have a rough, tenuous grasp of what is meant by "cycle," Mr. Folsom says "Our analysis shows that such a moment has arrived in the Treasury market." Uh-oh! With a debt market so huge, so pandemic, so universal in the breadth of it's toxic breath, spanning international borders, crossing whole time-zones, and at yields that are so low that it seems impossible that they could get any lower, the cycle is being renewed. This is bad news, indeed.

more.....His rants are just too hard to snip and paste while remaining within the DU 4 paragraph guidelines.