Dark Skinny

In a simple, concise article in the UK Telegraph, we now have the first overt western-media confirmation of the US Dollar’s fate from one of  the biggest and most respected  international banks in the world. And, once again, barely a whisper of this huge news throughout the US press. I guess that this news might be somewhat bad for US business and the markets — some things will never change.

But within this article, despite past naysayers forever holding to the belief that the dollar will never ever fall, the currency chief of HSBC is saying that the dollar is being slowly and steadily abandoned and attacked by all sides as a trade currency, and that it’s fall is inevitable in time.

Within this article David Bloom, forex chief of HSBC, makes a no-bones, evidenced  judgement on the dollar regarding its future status as a world reserve currency. He describes how the economic policies of  America — for decades now, the largest debtor nation in the world — are working in direct opposition to the policies of emerging market savers like China and the rest of the BRIC nations, as well as working against the Middle-East and African economies.

The article describes the FED’s “super-loose” monetary policies at home and all the coiled monetary dangers that lie beneath. In this ongoing re-balancing of World Trade, Mr Bloom  confirms and predicts the dollar’s inevitable and unsustainable demise, manifesting in the birth of more stable regional trade currencies together with western wealth finally becoming dislodged, only to migrate ever Eastwards on that merciless but unstoppable economic world tide of change.

From The Telegraph(UK)
Article By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Published: 7:14PM BST 20 Sep 2009

“The dollar looks awfully like sterling after the First World War,” said David Bloom, the bank’s currency chief.

“The whole picture of risk-reward for emerging market currencies has changed. It is not so much that they have risen to our standards, it is that we have fallen to theirs. It used to be that sovereign risk was mainly an emerging market issue but the events of the last year have shown that this is no longer the case. Look at the UK – debt is racing up to 100pc of GDP,” he said

Crucially, China and rising Asia have reached the point where they can no longer keep holding down their currencies to boost exports because this is causing mayhem to their own economies, stoking asset bubbles. Asia’s “mercantilist mindset” of recent decades is about to be broken by the spectre of an inflation spiral.

The policy headache was already becoming clear in the final phase of the global credit boom but the financial crisis temporarily masked the effect. The pressures will return with a vengeance as these countries roar back to life, leaving the US and other laggards of the old world far behind.

A monetary policy of near zero rates – further juiced by quantitative easing – is completely incompatible with circumstances in most of Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa. Divorce is inevitable. The US is expected to hold rates near zero through 2010 to tackle its own crisis.

What is occurring is an epochal loss in the relative wealth and economic power of the old G10 bloc of rich countries compared to rising regions of the world. The euro, yen, sterling, Swiss franc and other mature currencies will be relegated along with the dollar in this great process of rebalancing, but the Greenback will bear the brunt.

The Fed’s super-loose policy is turning the dollar into the key funding currency for the next phase of the global “carry trade”, taking over the role of Japan during its period of emergency stimulus.

Mr Bloom said regional currencies would emerge as the anchor for their smaller trading partners, with China, Brazil, or South Africa substituting the role of the US. Australia is already linking its fortunes to China through commodity ties.

From Seeking Alpha
Article By Big Jake

Since the economy began sliding downhill in late 2007, mainstream economic and market experts have consistently erred on the sunny side.

As late as June 2008, mainstream consensus held that the U.S. was heading for a “soft landing” and would avoid recession. Several months later, the slump was acknowledged to have started in January 2008, but we were supposed to see renewed growth by mid-2009, with unemployment peaking in the eight-to-nine percent range. A quick “shovel-ready” stimulus bag was supposed to set us back on the road to prosperity.

In January, recovery projections were pushed forward to late 2009. Today, the consensus is for a mid-2010 recovery, with unemployment peaking at just over 10 percent. Clearly, the mainstream has struggled to catch up to reality for well over one year. What are the chances that they finally have it right this time?

Moreover, the mainstream continues to see what is going on as a plain-vanilla recession that will be quelled with some on-the-fly monetary and fiscal tinkering. Washington, we are told, will pull us out of this slump—as soon as the masses can be enticed back to the shopping malls. Then things will return to how they were before. But what if the experts and politicians are wrong not only on their ever-changing recovery timeline, but also on the nature—nay, the very existence—of a recovery?

America’s reigning political-economic ideology has demonstrably failed. Given that its government is obviously fumbling along without a clue, its foreign and domestic credit is tapped out, and its 300 million people are discovering that their hopes for continuous material improvement will never be met, could the U.S. be headed the way of the USSR?

Instead of a recovery as the mainstream envisions it, what if America permanently bankrupts, impoverishes, and marginalizes itself? What if its cherished institutions fail across the board? For example, what happens when the police realize that their under-funded pension plans cannot support a decent retirement? Will they stay honest, or will they opt to survive by any means necessary? These are questions that the mainstream does not even begin to contemplate.

In the interests of providing you with an alternate vision—something outside the mainstream—below are ten predictions for America through the year 2012. This is not boilerplate doom-saying. Rather, I am laying out in highly specific terms what will happen over the next three-odd years. Others have thrown around the term “Depression”, but I am going to tell you precisely what it means for you, your investments, and your community.

When these predictions come true, I expect to be rewarded with a seven-figure consulting gig, a book contract, or a high-level position in whatever administration succeeds the doomed Obama team—that is, if anyone succeeds it at all.

Prediction one. The twenty-five-year equities bubble pops in 2009. U.S. and foreign equities markets will stop treading water and realign with economic reality. Stock prices will cease to reflect the “greater fool” mentality and will return to being a function of dividend yields, which have long been miserable. The S&P 500 will sink below 500. In a bid to stem the panic, the government will enforce periodic “stock market holidays”, and will vastly expand the scope of its short-selling prohibitions—eventually banning short-selling altogether.

Prediction two. With public pension systems and tens of millions of 401k holders virtually wiped out—and with the Baby Boomers retiring en masse—there will be tremendous pressure on the government to get into the stock market in order to bid up prices.

Therefore, sometime in 2010, the Federal Reserve will create and loan out hundreds of billions of fresh dollars to the usual well-connected suspects, instructing them to buy up stocks on the public’s behalf. This scheme will have a fancy but meaningless name—something like the “Taxpayer Assurance Equities Facility”. It will have no effect other than to serve as buyer of last resort for capitulating smart-money types who want to get out of stocks entirely.

Prediction three. Millions of new retirees—including white-collar people with high expectations for a Golden Retirement—will be left virtually penniless. Thousands will starve or freeze to death in their own homes. Hundreds of thousands will find themselves evicted and homeless, or will have to move in with their less-than-enthusiastic children. Already strained by the rising tide of the working-age unemployed, state and local welfare services will be overwhelmed, and by 2012 will have largely collapsed and ceased to function in many parts of the country.

Prediction four. “Quantitative easing” will fail to restart previous patterns of lending and consumption. As the government sends out additional “rebate” checks and takes ever-more drastic measures to force banks to lend, hyperinflation could take hold. However, comprehensive debt relief via a devaluation of the dollar is even more likely. This would entail the government issuing one “new” dollar for some greater number of “old” dollars—thus reducing both debts and savings simultaneously. This would make for a clean slate a la Fight Club.

As there are many more debtors than savers in the U.S., the vast majority would support devaluation. The Chinese and other foreign holders of our bonds would be screaming mad, but unable to do anything. Every country that has not found a way out of dollar-denominated reserve assets by 2012 will see its reserves eliminated.

Prediction five. The government will stop pretending that it can finance continuous multi-trillion-dollar deficits on the private market. By late 2010, the sole buyers of new U.S. Treasury and agency bonds will be the Federal Reserve and a few derelict financial institutions under government control. This may or may not lead to hyperinflation. (See prediction four).

Prediction six. As the need for financial industry paper-pushers declines and people have less money to spend on lawyers and Starbucks (SBUX), unemployment will rise until the private sector has eliminated all of its excess capacity and superfluous or socially needless jobs. The government’s narrow unemployment figure (U3) will rise into the high teens by late 2010. The government’s broader unemployment figure (U6) will cease to be reported when it reaches 25 percent—it will simply be too embarrassing. Ultimately, one in three work-eligible Americans will be unemployed, underemployed, or never-employed (e.g. college grads permanently unable to find suitable work).

Prediction seven. With their pension dreams squashed, and their salaries frozen or cut, police and other local government workers will turn to wholesale corruption in order to survive. America’s ideal of honest, courteous, and impartial cops, teachers, and small-time local functionaries will have come to an end.

Prediction eight. Commercial overcapacity will strike with a vengeance. By 2012, thousands of enclosed malls, strip malls, unfinished residential developments, motels, truck stops, distribution centers, middle-of-nowhere resorts and casinos, and small-city airports across America will turn into dilapidated, unwanted, and dangerous ghost towns. With no economic incentive for their maintenance or repair, they will crumble into overgrown, plywood-and-sheet-rock ruins.

Prediction nine. By the end of 2010, tens of millions of households will have fallen behind on their mortgages or stopped paying altogether. Many banks will be unable to process the massive volume of foreclosure paperwork, much less actually seize and resell the homes.

Devaluation (as mentioned in prediction four) could ease the situation for those mortgage holders still afloat, but it would also eliminate any incentive for most banks to stay in the mortgage business. In any case, the housing market in many parts of the country will lock up completely—nothing bought or sold.

With virtually no loans being made, even the government will finally acknowledge that most banks are fundamentally insolvent. A general bank run will only be averted through a roughly one trillion-dollar recapitalization of the FDIC, courtesy of new money from the Federal Reserve.

Prediction ten. As an economy is never independent of the society within which it functions, the next few paragraphs will focus on social and political factors. These factors will have as much of an impact on market and consumer confidence as any developments in the financial sector.

Whether rightly or not, President Obama, having come to power at the dawn of this crisis, will be blamed for it by over 50 percent of the population. He will be a one-term president. In response to his perceived socialization of America, there will be a swarm of secessionist and extremist activity, much of it violent. Militias and armed sects will be more prominent than in the early 1990s. Stand-off dramas, violent score-settlings, and going-out-with-a-bang attacks by laid-off workers and bankrupted investors—already a national plague—will become an everyday occurrence.

For both economic and social reasons, millions of immigrants and guest workers will return to their home countries, taking their assets and skills with them. The flow of skilled immigrants will slow to a trickle. Birth rates will plummet as families struggle with uncertainty and reduced (or no) income.

Property crime will explode as citizens bitter over their own shattered dreams attempt to comfort themselves by taking what is not theirs. Mutinies and desertions will proliferate in an increasingly demoralized, over-stretched military, especially when states can no longer provide the educational and other benefits promised to their National Guard troops.

There will be widespread tax collection issues, and a huge backlash against Federal and state bureaucrats who demand three-percent annual pay raises while private sector wages remain frozen or worse. In short, the “Tea Parties” of tomorrow will likely not be so restrained.

Finally, between now and 2012, we are likely to see another earth-shaking national embarrassment on the scale of the 9/11 attacks or Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. This will demonstrate conclusively to all Americans that their government, even under a savior-figure like Obama, cannot, in fact, save them.

By 2012, there will be a general feeling that the nation is in immediate danger of blowing up or coming apart at the seams. This fear will be justified, given that the U.S. has always been held together by the promise of a continuously rising material standard of living—the famous “pursuit of happiness”—rather than any ethnic or religious ties. If that goes, so could everything else. We were lucky in the 1930s—we may not be so lucky again.

Philipp Bagus and Markus H. Schiml, Ludwig von Mises Institute
Only two things can save the Fed at this point. One is a bailout by the federal government. This recapitalization could be financed by taxes or by monetizing government debt in another blow to the value of the currency.

The other possibility is concealed in the hidden reserves of the Fed’s gold position, which is only valued at $42.44 per troy ounce on the balance sheet. A revaluation of the gold reserves would boost the equity ratio of the Fed to 12.35%.

It is ironic that in troubled times a revaluation of the “barbarous relic” could save the Fed from insolvency. Yet this would only be an accounting measure and would not change the fundamental problems of the paper dollar. While shooting its last bullets and weakening the dollar, the Fed is outmaneuvering itself. The end of the experiment is getting closer.

Doug Casey, Casey Research
America, which is basically an idea, a concept, is dead and gone. The United States is just another of 200 awful little nation-states that have spread across the face of the earth like a skin disease. There’s no longer any difference that I can tell between the U.S. and any other country.

There is no real haven for freedom in the world today. The best you can do is go where the governments are so unorganized that they can’t control you effectively. That’s one reason I like to spend time in Argentina. They have an incredibly stupid government, but they’re also very inefficient and ineffective. So it’s wonderful as a place to live. I also spend time in Uruguay, because it’s a tiny little country with no ambitions to conquer the world. The nice thing about New Zealand, where I am now, is that it’s a small country, only 4 million people, lots of open land. It’s got some severe problems, but it’s pleasant. I think the U.S. is going to be the epicenter of a lot of problems in the years to come.

…Europe is going to be hurt much worse than the U.S. Europeans are much more heavily taxed and much more heavily regulated. The average European is much more reliant upon the state psychologically as well as economically. So it’s all over for Europe and this doesn’t even count the problems that they’re going to have in the continuing war against Islam, which are much more serious for Europe than they are for the U.S. So Europe is fated to be nothing but a source of houseboys and maids for the Chinese in the next generation.

Gary Gibson, Whisky & Gunpowder
For the first time in history, currencies everywhere are merely paper…including the world’s reserve currency. The potential…the inevitability…of a worldwide bonfire of these little paper vanities staggers the imagination. The conflagration will be mesmerizing in its size and intensity. You may even find yourself enjoying the view…if you make it a point to be standing far enough away not to be consumed.

Eric Janszen, iTulip
There you have it, the foolproof way to get frightened investors out of Treasury bonds and back into stocks if all else fails: central banks around the world print money and buy stocks. In a world where interventionism is the order of the day, government purchases of stocks for the purpose of supporting the stock market is only, in my view, a matter of time. The question is, how to best prepare for it. For all we know, it’s already started. And, because [Paulson, Bernanke, et al] are not really gods — they can’t foresee the consequences of all they do — there will be myriad unintended consequences. One we’re pretty sure of, the gold price will continue to climb.

…We are getting a 1930 to 1933 financial system and debt deflation collapse but in Internet time. The Internet that operated so efficiently for ultra efficient transmission of pricing information and execution of transactions is accelerating the financial and economic crisis process far more quickly than governments can respond to it. A 20th century international regulatory and trade institutional framework is no match for 21st century computer networked financial markets. No administration can correct 30 years of errors in a few months. Unfortunately, a few months is all we have because of the accelerated rate of change we are experiencing.

History teaches us that adjustments to imbalances can be sudden and brutal, and we think it imprudent to bet that the mother of all international payments imbalances — between the US and the rest of the world — will be the exception. The rise of gold from $260 to $700 in six years followed by an increase from $700 to $1000 in two years may be quickly followed by a rise from $1,000 to $5,000 in just a few months.

Trace Mayer, Seeking Alpha
What if silver trades in backwardation for an extended period? It means individuals are unwilling to take the risk of holding national currency illusions or the risk of an exchange’s failure to deliver. Potentially the national currency illusions could be pulled into the event horizon leading to the fiat currency graveyard. Watching the gold and silver prices in euros and pounds is getting exciting.

David Morgan, Silver Investor
The easy money has been made in the precious metals but the BIG money lies ahead, because if you think like I think, once this “disinflation” turns into a dollar collapse people will be looking for anything that will hold value, and that certainly includes both the precious metals. Remember there is no fever like gold fever, and that will ignite the silver market, as those looking to gold might be priced out of the market and, thus, willing to buy silver!

Doug Noland, Prudent Bear
Analysts made a momentous blunder earlier this decade when they mistook the collapse of the technology Bubble (and attendant recession and corporate debt problems) for the onset of “deflation.” Reflationary policymaking without regard to the nature of inflationary consequences proved disastrous. We’re about to repeat this error. The Burgeoning Bubble in Government Finance is poised to make the Mortgage Finance Bubble appear tiny in comparison.

The Government Finance Bubble is enormous and powerful - and should be anything but underestimated. Akin to the previous Bubble in Wall Street finance, the epicenter of this Bubble is here in the U.S. But I would argue that this unfolding Bubble dynamic has greater potential to engulf the entire world than even U.S.-style mortgages and derivatives did starting back around 2002. Welcome to the new world of synchronized stimulus, deficits, and reflationary policymaking. I don’t believe true systemic deflation (as opposed to collapsing asset Bubbles) is a high probability scenario as long as the Government Finance Bubble is rapidly inflating. All bets are off, however, if confidence in government debt falters.

Gary North, LewRockwell.com
The West’s economy really is at the edge of a leveraged disaster. The politicians know only one answer: deficit spending. The central bankers have only one significant tool: monetary inflation. The speed of events is increasing.

The markets don’t reflect this yet. This gives time to a few people to get out. But the vast majority cannot get out. There are too few escape hatches open.

Peter Schiff, Euro Pacific Capital
Although it may sound harsh, it would be far better for all involved if our foreign friends simply cut us off. Since their loans are merely fueling the growth of our government and artificially pumping up consumer spending, their savings will not only be lost but their sacrifice will severely exacerbate our problems as well.

Darryll Schoon
The day people realize that paper money is worthless is the day economic activity as we know it will come to a halt. What happens next has happened before. Barter begins the movement of goods and services until a trustworthy medium of exchange arises to take the place of the bankers’ debased paper.

Currency collapse is a reoccurring story. Because we denied its reality does not mean it would not happen. Denial is very powerful but, in the end, it changes nothing except the ability to effectively respond. Our wish that gold achieve its rightful price level in today’s accelerating crisis is tempered by our realization that when that day is reached, the human carnage and suffering will be without precedence. It is best, then, to buy gold and silver whenever possible and to wait patiently for things to unfold as they will.

Eric Sprott, Sprott Asset Management So here we are today with governments the world over taking an increasing role in the functioning of the economy and the financial markets. But are they trying to solve the main problem; namely, too much debt? Quite the contrary, every single solution they’ve adopted has been trying to get the good ol’ days back. Cutting interest rates to zero. Throwing money at the banking system so it can lend again. All these solutions have one goal: to bring back debt. They are ignoring, at least for the time being, the paradigm shift. But the markets aren’t buying it… literally. Debts continue to implode.

Every bailout is being followed by an even more massive bailout down the road. The government’s solution has been to shift debt from the financial markets to the taxpayer. Is there a difference? Instead of individuals living beyond their means, we now have governments living beyond their means. Substitute taxpayers for governments and you will quickly realize how the whole thing is a farce.

Take no solace in the fact that the government is the buyer of last resort. It is really you who are the buyer of last resort. In the end, people will be even more indebted than they were before, setting the stage for the next crisis: a currency crisis. This is why governments aren’t, and cannot be, the solution.

James West, Midas Letter
The true reflection of the value of any currency, the only one that’s really left, is how much gold it can buy.

All Extracts from “Best Quotes of February 2009″

While the financial riots continue in Iceland and in the European border states of Ukraine, Latvia, Bulgaria and Hungary, we now have confirmation that the United Kingdom is officially in recession which, so the pundits are saying, is likely to bottom into a Depression equal in magnitude and effect to that of the 1930s.

These writhing European countries do not have all the advantages of the US economy or the dollar. They don’t have a world reserve currency, they are not the largest debtor nation in the world whom the world supports, these countries  can’t sell they’re debt to any great extent, they do not have a high comparative GDP and they do not have a Fed printing truckloads of zero-value fiat paper to hold the whole Ponzi scheme together. This ‘quantitative easing’ by the Fed has recently skyrocketed to astonishing heights. Don’t believe me ? Have a look at this graph from the St Louis Fed:

It took 200-years for the monetary base to go from $0 to $800 billion, but in just the past 3-months it has grown from around $800 billion to $1.5 trillion. The sheer right-angled upturn of this graph is astounding and frightening. Sometimes I can’t help wondering whether there really is any US gold left in Fort Knox. Has anybody seen it ?

From the UK Telegraph newspaper - in an article headed “Britain on the brink of an economic depression, say experts”:

“Families must brace themselves for a slump of far greater severity and longevity than the recessions of the 1980s and 1990s, they warned. They said the current crisis will be of a scale to rival the biggest peace-time crisis in modern history — the Great Depression.

The news sent the pound sliding to its lowest level since 1985. Sterling dropped more than three quarters of a cent to $1.3688 as investors speculated that the Bank of England may be forced to cut interest rates towards zero in response to the recession.

Roger Bootle, the managing director of Capital Economics, said: “I think there’s a very good chance this recession will be the worst since the 1930s. I suspect the economy could shrink by 6 per cent from last year to the end of next year — and that might not be the end.

The plight facing Britain is uncannily similar to the 1930s, since prices of many assets —from shares to house prices — are falling at record rates, but the value of the debt against which they are held remains unchanged.

This “debt deflation” is among the most painful of all economic phenomena, since it means the amount families owe increases each year even if they borrow no more.

Albert Edwards, a strategist at Société Générale, likened the British economy to a Ponzi scheme — a fraudulent debt mountain like that allegedly used by the New York hedge fund manager Bernard Madoff. “What I find amazing is that people aren’t really nailing Gordon Brown and [Bank of England Governor] Mervyn King for this,” he said. “At least in the US they had the excuse of the arrival of sub-prime — a new sector of the market. We didn’t really have anything similar but we ended up with a bigger national Ponzi scheme than the US.”

Regarding the state of the US Markets, I had a quick look at my US stock practice portfolios today and was amazed at what I saw. I created these practice US portfolios on Google Finance in August 2008 - not five months ago - as a real gauge to the US financial crisis and market confidence. And here are the meager results - Commodities -41.49%, Water and Waste -25.66%, Energy and Oil -43.50%, My Portfolio -39.81%, Berkshire Hathaway -26.06%, Dividend Portfolio -31.89%. And that’s only in the last five months !!

I would guess that it’s only a matter of time before these riots spread around the world - and as Gerald Celente has already predicted -  these financial riots will soon start appearing in all the western developed countries as well. Today, on the BBC Oracle TV program - in a sort of European market watch assessment, the expert debaters all confirmed their belief that there would be a run on pound sterling by April 2009, and that a run on the Euro would ensue by December 2009.

Of course the US dollar will also collapse, and my guess is that there is a high probability of a dollar crash occurring when Israel decides to bomb the hell out of Iran at some point this year.

References :

“Prime Minister Steps Down Amid Violent Protests” - Der Speigel

“The bond bubble is an accident waiting to happen” - Ambrose Evans-Pritchard(UK Telegragh)

“Super Baaaddd” - Bill Bonner(Daily Reckoning)

“UK recession: what the experts say” - UK Guardian

“UK Economy Shrinks Most Since 1980, in Recession” - Bloomberg

Some more from Gerald Celente - the predictor from Trends Research Institute, who’s 2009 forecasts include eventual large scale indirect US taxation with the inevitable rise in violent riots and crime in protest - he states that the Fed can only do two things to control the economy and the dollar, that’s print money and artificially force lower interest rates - the collapse of the commercial property sector - squeezing the “little people” -  the way US governments have always statistically doctored and lied with their charts and figures representing the money supply, inflation, CPI, unemployment -  the likelihood of a US government bankruptcy - the horrors and lies of the allopathic pharmaceutical industry with the growth of herbal medicine as a necessity.

Here is the most recent podcast from the Financial Sense website by Gerald Celente :

01-17-2009….Podcast - Winamp version

01-17-2009…Podcast - mp3 version

As a further inevitable consequence of the way that the US government - and particularly the Fed have been behaving towards the economic holocaust, I also came across this recent article by Peter Schiff (01-16-2009) - another consistently successful economic predictor from the Austrian School of Economics who continually swims and beats against government policies and media babble, but who has also been proved right in his own doom-and-gloom predictions in the last couple of years.

Here is his short article from the Financial Sense Website.

Credit Where Credit is Due

This week, in a speech before the London School of Economics, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke offered a perverse economic theory in his quest to gather support for never-ending Wall Street bailouts; “This disparate treatment, unappealing as it is, appears unavoidable. Our economic system is critically dependent on the free flow of credit, and the consequences for the broader economy of financial instability are thus powerful and quickly felt.” In other words, credit is the lifeblood of our economy, and the continued operation of credit providers is an issue of national security.

In truth, not all economies run on credit. But over the last decade, the United States became a bubble economy that needed unlimited credit to keep from collapsing. In a legitimate economy, it is not credit that fuels spending and investment, but simply income and savings. It’s too bad our Fed chairman does not understand the difference.

That American families now routinely rely on credit to make every-day purchases is a habit that needs to be broken and not encouraged. What we need in America is more restraint and less indulgence. For example, Americans in the current economy should not go into debt to buy new cars. Given the level of debt that weighs down the typical family, Americans should defer such purchases until they have paid down existing debt, or replenished their savings to the point where they can afford to pay cash. Until that time, Americans should continue driving their old cars. In the meantime, the untapped savings could be made available to local businesses that would use it to finance badly needed capital investments.

But such a drastic reversal in financial culture represents the kind of change that no one in the outgoing or incoming Administrations appears willing to consider. By providing perpetual support to lenders who have bankrupted themselves through bad loans, the government merely guarantees that bad economic behavior will continue.

Credit is indeed vital to an economy, but it does not constitute an economy within itself. The important thing to remember is that credit is scarce, and is limited by the stock of savings. Savings loaned to one individual is not available to be loaned to another until it is repaid. If it is never repaid, the savings are lost. Loans to consumers not only crowd out more productive loans that might have been made to business, but they have a far greater likelihood of ending in default. In addition, while business loans increase our capital stock and lead to greater productivity, loans made to consumers are merely spent, and do not create conditions that will make repayment easier. When businesses borrow to fund capital investments, the extra cash flows that result are used to repay the loans. When individuals borrow to spend, loans can only be repaid out of reduced future consumption.

One of the reasons we are in such dire straits is that consumers have already borrowed and spent too much. Many did so based on the false belief that ever-appreciating real estate would ultimately provide the means to repay their debts and finance their lifestyles. Now that reality has finally set in, why should the spending spree continue? The fact that a GDP comprised of 70 percent of consumption is currently contracting should not surprise anyone. In fact, such a contraction is long overdue and the government should not do anything to interfere.

In trying to perpetuate the illusion, the government wants to revive the spending spree that has led us to this disaster. But how can such actions possibly help? How will more debt improve the economy? Wouldn’t our circumstances be vastly improved if we paid off some of our debts and replenished our savings? Wouldn’t we be in better shape if instead of buying more stuff we concentrated on producing it?

The unpleasant reality is that years of bad monetary and fiscal policy have over encumbered our economy with debt and undermined our industrial capacity. The sooner we can begin to repair the damages, the sooner we can right the ship. If instead we merely administer more of the same, the ship will sink in a sea of inflation.