A trillion here, a trillion there; pretty soon you’re talking real money. The Washington Post reports:
The Federal Reserve said today that it will deploy an additional $1.2 trillion to try to lower interest rates and stimulate the economy, an aggressive move aimed at containing the recession.
The central bank will increase its purchases of mortgage-backed securities by $750 billion, on top of a previously announced $500 billion. It also will double its purchases of debt in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to $200 billion. Those steps are intended to lower mortgage rates. The announcement of the previous purchases pushed mortgage rates down a full percentage point.
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Reuters quotes a foreign exchange consultant who mused upon its effect.
“Bottom line is that the Fed is adding $1 trillion to its balance sheet and that’s a lot of taxpayer money,” said Greg Salvaggio, vice president for trading at Tempus Consulting in Washington. “Interest rates now are effectively negative across the board. The dollar is selling off because this may contribute to long-term weakness in the currency. …
However, worsening economic conditions throughout the world mean dollar weakness may not last long, said Robert Blake, senior currency strategist, State Street Global Markets, Boston.”
The Financial Times asks what the Fed will do for an encore. “A landmark day,” said Alan Ruskin, chief international strategist at RBS Greenwich Capital. “This could be cast as a sign of desperation, but confirms that [Fed chairman Ben] Bernanke will do whatever it takes to get some hold of the problem. There is absolutely no point in fighting this move.”
For better or worse, government is now involved to the hilt in economic management. And that’s an intervention that can always cut both ways. The WSJ writes, “Congress Is the Real Systemic Risk “. Any government big enough to give you everything is also big enough to take everything.
After their experience with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, you’d think that Congress would no longer be interested in creating companies seen by the market as backed by the government. Yet that is exactly what the relevant congressional committees — the Senate Banking Committee and the House Financial Services Committee — are now considering.
In the wake of the financial crisis, the idea rapidly gaining strength in Washington is to create a systemic risk regulator. The principal sponsor of the plan is Barney Frank, the chair of the House Financial Services Committee. A recent report by the Group of Thirty (a private sector organization of financial regulation specialists), written by a subcommittee headed by Paul Volcker, also endorsed the idea, as has the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Securities Industry Financial Markets Association. …
The current financial crisis is certainly systemic. But what caused it? The failure of Lehman Brothers occurred long after the market for mortgage-backed securities (MBS) had shut down, and six months after Bear Stearns had to be rescued because of its losses. In other words, the crisis did not arise from the failure of a particular systemically significant institution. The world’s major financial institutions had already been weakened by the realization that losses on trillions of dollars in MBS were going to be much greater than anyone had imagined, and before the major asset write-downs had begun. So if this was a systemic event, it was not caused by the failure of one or more major institutions. In fact, it was the other way around: The weakness or failure of financial institutions was the result of an external event (losses on trillions of dollars of subprime mortgages embedded in MBS).
If this is true, what is the value of regulating systemically significant financial institutions? Financial failures, it seems, can be the result, rather than the cause, of systemic events like the one we are now experiencing. Even if we assume that regulating systemically significant companies will somehow prevent them from failing — a doubtful proposition, given that the heavily regulated banks have been the most severely affected by the current crisis — we will not have prevented the collapse of a major oil-supplying country, an earthquake or a pandemic from causing a similar problem in the future. All we will have done is given some government agency more power and imposed more costs on financial institutions and consumers.
But nobody’s looking at Barney and other sources of political risk yet. They’re worried about the $126 million in AIG bonuses. That’s chump change. As a noted at the start of this post: a trillion here and a trillion there. Only that is real money these days.
Update: A reader sends these observations from an analyst. The takeaway is that the buy may have been necessary, but not sufficient. There’s more to come.
[The] Fed is now bringing out all the ammo in its arsenal. For someone who looked so calm on 60 Minutes and seemed so convinced that economic recovery was at hand, one would certainly not have expected such a dramatic move by Mr. Bernanke today. It would seem as though the days of incremental “credit easing” moves are now behind us and the Fed is now bringing out all the ammo in its arsenal. …
So, as the Fed’s balance sheet now expands to represent nearly 25% of GDP, we no longer have to ask the question as to whether or not we are just like Japan, for that is what the BoJ balance sheet looked like after the central bank embarked on its quantitative easing program nearly a decade ago. …
Government cannot prevent nature from taking its course. While an additional $1.15 trillion expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet is large as a stand-alone event, it really is just a drop in the bucket when one considers that there is still almost $8 trillion of combined household and business sector credit that must be unwound in order to mean-revert the private sector-to-GDP ratio (which is still close to a record-high). Once again, the government is cushioning the blow, but cannot prevent nature from taking its course, in our view.
The Three Stooges demonstrate how the cure can be not much better than the disease.
embedded by Embedded VideoYouTube Direkt
Thats very old congressional video. Isn’t Moe (D.,Stpd) clever?
There are some ideas floating around to limit the size of these entities such that any one is not large enough to sink the whole boat. That would obviate the need for a systemic risk regulator. The problem of any regulator is that the watcher often doesnt understand what he’s watching or if he does, hasn’t the smarts or the will or even the power to do anything about an observed problem.
CDS’ were developed outside the existing regulatory scheme. I believe the congresscritters tried to do something about that but that was politicked away and everything was fine till it broke.
AIG bonuses, the Comm. Reinv. Act., Fannie and Freddie are all primary evidence that the Govt ought to set simple rules of the game (Glass-Stegall) and keep its fingers the hell out of the marketplace.
The TeeVee is full of the public’s “ANGER over the AIG bonuses.” Don’t suppose that the public isnt so much pissed over the bonuses but that we are now in a position to care? Who got us here? What will we do about it?
Not only was this a necessary move, it is one that has been talked about for more than 6 months. When deflationary signs emerge, dropping the interest rate to zero is insufficient because the increased value of the dollar tomorrow makes it harder to pay back the same dollar borrowed today. Then the only way to truly lower interest rates is to force some inflation while holding down interest rates.
Overall this is a good move. When this stage passes we may still have to worry about serious inflation, but that moment is not yet upon us.
Regarding regulation, there is still a place for it. The people who we want to perform well enough to deserve their bonuses are supposed to manage risk in the fat tail, in other words, to think about all the risks you and I do not think of when we read the news day-to-day. It is not too much for regulators to demand of financial instututions that they lower the leverage and truly understand their own risk exposures.
POP GOES THE WESEAL, POCKET FULL OF POSES AND WE ALL FALL DOWN… THE DREAM THAT WAS AMERICA IS NOW SOAP SCUM RESIDUE ON THE SIDE OF THE DRAIN! CUTTING THE KNOT IS THE ONLY WAY!
The feigned outrage over “bonuses” to AIG employees is like a three card monte game. The real purpose is distract the spectators while the card players confederates pick their pockets. AIG was a conduit for over $170 billion to its counter-parties like Goldman Sachs. The “bonuses” were 1/10th of 1% of that amount, and what is worse, 1/100th of 1% of the $1.5 trillion that Congress has appropriated since Jan 20. The spectators are the taxpayers. The three card monte players are the politicians.
Much of what seems to be going to Gold in Sacks, Barclays, Zurich, et al, is going to counterparty sovereign wealth funds, some of which could be, for all we (or thoe bankers) know, our deadliest enemas, such as the Kremlin ‘kill Amnerica’ faction, or even some instance of global terror such as AQ. The surprise, as open as our system is, would be if it weren’t, rather than if it were, being used against us. Our own system, i mean.
A guy called the Bennet show and said his firm had paving projects set for this summer.
Now they’ve been put on hold to wait and see where the easy money from Uncle Sam is available.
He’s looking for work.
Printing a trillion to mitigate the recession? Mugabe would approve.
Maybe Eggplant knows how to arrange debt’s Critical Mass in such a way that we’ll achieve free money with fusion.
Isn’t it wasteful to spend money before Timmy comes forth with his Master Plan tm?
Obama climate plan could cost $2 trillion
“General Motors Corp. CEO Rick Wagoner said increasing the federal gas tax to guarantee a minimum price of $4 a gallon is worth considering.”
Do you agree?
(If “No” please explain why you hate hybrids.)
– Hybrid car sales go from 60 to 0 at breakneck speed –
The gas-electric vehicles are piling up on dealers’ lots as anxiety over gasoline prices evaporates.
But more hybrid models are on the way.
Doug said:
“Maybe Eggplant knows how to arrange debt’s Critical Mass in such a way that we’ll achieve free money with fusion.”
Wish I could. I suspect after we achieve “critical mass”, we’ll have an economy just like the one in Zimbabwe (“free” money as in worthless).
The commentators over at tickerforum.org seem to believe that something really terrible happened today and all is lost. Could someone explain to me what this terrible thing was?
Also, when do people think this sucker’s rally will end? I’m surprised it lasted this long.
Obama seeks financial seizure powers
I’ll have to tell the wife I gave her a 24 hour orgasm.
Yes! Yes!! Yes!!!
A new documentary called Orgasmic Birth aims to ‘educate’ women that far from going through the normal agonies of labour, we should be getting sexual enjoyment out of it.
Eggplant…
Don’t Worry, Be Happy
‘The Cassandra effect’
The Cassandra effect is when one believes they know the future happening of a catastrophic event, having already seen it in some way, or even experienced it first hand.
However the person knows there is nothing that can be done to stop the event from happening, and that nobody will believe them if they try to tell others.
For example, in finance, the more you warn your colleagues about the tail risks—the rare but devastating events that can bring the bank down—the more they roll their eyes, give a yawn and change the subject. This eventually leads to self-censorship.
Accelerating Future » Charles Stross’ Singularity-Clueless, “New Scientist”, Yawn-tastic 21st Century Future
I usually don’t read Charles Stross’ blog, but I saw a post linked from Brian Wang’s blog, which I read all the time, so I checked it out.
It’s Stross’ “21st century FAQ”, where he says the 21st century will be “pretty much what you read about in New Scientist every week”, something I would just laugh at and ignore if it weren’t the case that so many transhumanists read Stross’ books.
It’s important to criticize this statement because the way we handle the 21st century will be based on how we anticipate it, and if we expect it to be more of the same, we’ll be blindsided by the civilization-transforming changes to come.
Off topic but interesting:
“Shell dumps wind, solar and hydro power in favour of biofuels” refer to:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/mar/17/royaldutchshell-energy
Key quote:
The company [Shell Oil] said that many alternative technologies did not offer attractive investment opportunities. Linda Cook, Shell’s executive director of gas and power, said: “If there aren’t investment opportunities which compete with other projects we won’t put money into it. We are businessmen and women. If there were renewables [which made money] we would put money into it.”
I guess we’re going to find out if we can have bigtime inflation during a serious recession/depression.
Is there anything left worth owning besides gold?
I think I’m getting old-timers disease. I used to have some idea about what was going on but now I’m totally confused.
Let’s see. The problem is that the banks aren’t lending any money. So the Fed cuts interest rates to zero and this makes the banks want to lend?
Roy, this is sorta right i hope: most of the TARP money is ”in the vault” still, Roy. See the Fed is a private deal. originally a consortuim of the 20 largest chartered …oh hell –it’s private and the Treasury is ‘public’. If the treasury okays it, the Fed can make money appear by writing it onto its balance sheet (Treasury may or may not use the paper and green ink) –the trick is, the new money goes on both sides of the ledger –so the Fed balance grows larger, but not ”unbalanced”. That’s what happened today –when the Fed announced it’ll be buying Treasury bonds. The transaction will create demand for the bonds, make other bidders hold the price line (which is the idea) and thus keep yields –and crucially, double crucially, mortgage rates in front of the looming Alt A reset –as low as possible. It could backfire if foreign demand (indirect bidders) dries up. but it likely won’t, because Obama is freakinhg out the entire solar system right now, perversely driving fright money to USA, where the courts and rule of law are still relatively respected.
Clean, Green, Jet-Set Machines
Pelosi has been going to museums in Florence, receptions at night and was even presented the birth certificates of her grandparents by the head of the Italian Chamber of Deputies.
The government-owned Boeing executive jet doesn’t fly cheap; about $10,000 an hour, according to Air Force. 20 hours flying between Washington and Italy adds up to about $200,000.
For weeks now, Congress has chastised banks and bailout recipients for unnecessary trips and conferences.
And CNN caught this group of House members on their way to India last Friday to mark the 50th anniversary of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. journey to meet Ghandi.
The details:
six Democratic members of Congress, Martin Luther King III, Andrew Young, musician Herbie Hancock and others.
Both the U.S. State Department and Congress are picking up the bill.
Martin Luther King III who along with his sibling sold his father’s papers for $32 million two years ago, was among the guests of the state department.
He called it the trip of a lifetime.
Vas is Das
“Rule of Law?“
“where the courts and rule of law are still relatively respected.”
And he said it with a straight face! ROTFLMAO!
See Chuck U. Schumer’s We will ex post facto seize your property, wealth, and whatever the hell else we want out of you puny nobodies.
Jim
Rush had a list of some of W’s biggest contributors that gave money to Chuck U. in 2004.
The Circle of Wealth
IBD
The simplest form of financial infrastructure is money. It’s so basic, we tend to overlook its importance — as Friedman’s predecessors and contemporaries did.
Its proper management is as central to an economy as water is to agriculture. Collecting naturally, water is relatively unproductive; it does limited work. Properly channeled and dispersed, it becomes more efficient and supports more agriculture.
In the economy, money’s productivity is measured by its velocity — the ratio of money income to the stock of money. Friedman showed money’s velocity declines during economic contractions, increases during expansions and does so in proportion to the size of each.
How much work money does can be calculated by comparing the size of the money supply to the size of the economy supported. It is instructive to look at money velocity now. As the adjacent table shows, velocity — of both M1 and M2 — appeared relatively stable in 2007. In that year’s fourth quarter, M2′s velocity swung slightly negative and has remained there since.
M1 did not turn negative until the third quarter of 2008. When it did, it did so with a vengeance. Both measures of money fell precipitously in 2008′s fourth quarter — when real GDP dropped 6.2%, its sharpest decline since 1982.
This seems akin to the circumstances in the Depression, when a collapse of the financial infrastructure slowed money velocity by nearly a third from 1929 to 1933.
However, there’s a crucial difference between the two downturns.
As the table shows, rather than constricting money supply as it did during the Depression, the Fed has been aggressively increasing it in the current crisis.
I don’t always see eye to eye with Rushbo. He is too much some days. But he is spot on with his critique of the hoi poloi. And they are very free with the donations as it isn’t their money they are giving away!
Jim
From Wretchard’s opeing remarks: ” “Bottom line is that the Fed is adding $1 trillion to its balance sheet and that’s a lot of taxpayer money,” said Greg Salvaggio, vice president for trading at Tempus Consulting in Washington. ”
Fed Balance sheet operations are not taxpayer money. They are printing press money. The fed has the authority to increase money supply through repurchase operations, which are euphemistically referred to as “balance sheet operations”, or “quantitative easing”. The mortgages they are purchasing will probably be sold back at a profit at some point after housing prices end up inflated out of their doldrums. The US Notes will likely remain on the balance sheet forever. In fact, the fed will likely repeat this repo action more often than any of us are comfortable with before this crisis is over. This has never been tried on this scale before. It is what Galbraith said should have been done to avoid the Great Depression. We are an experiment. The fed fears deflation. Stable money is their number one priority. The problem is M1 is soaring but there is no velocity. When velocity kicks in inflation will soar. It will happen. It will be a wild roller coaster ride. Mr. Bernanke will have to be very quick on his feet to go from quantitative easing to rapid contraction of money supply. Hang on!
Dear Mr. Larsen,
Thank you for addressing my confusion. Unfortunately, old-timers’ is a cruel disease that requires radical measures. Therefore, I am going to peruse the complete Dylan lexicon, become a Go master and switch to gin for the next four years.
Regards,
Roy
Downwind neighbours fight Dylan’s outhouse
For more than six months, Dylan, 67, has ignored their pleas to remove the outhouse, the downwind neighbours say.
“It’s a scandal – ‘Mr. Civil Rights’ is killing our civil rights,” said David Emminger, whose home is directly behind the toilet – which apparently is intended for use by employees of the entertainer, best known for 1960s-era protest songs.
Emminger and his wife have installed five industrial-sized fans in their front yard in an attempt to blow the odour back at Dylan. They say the fans are no match for the ocean breeze that sweeps across the singer’s land, however.
The problem is the massive uncertainty we all feel. Nobody knows what is going on or what will happen. First Obama tells us that the economy is in dire straits, then he tells us its ‘fundamentally sound.’ First Bernake tells us that the economy is heading over a cliff, then it will be okey dokey by the end of the year, and now it is so bad that it needs another trillion dollars. Some people tell us that the is the next great depression, others say pshaw, its only a little old recession. One group predicts deflation, another hyperinflation. We will get through this, but its only the end of the world. With all this non stop contradiction, nobody knows what to do. A consumer might think, do I buy a house or wait? Should I buy a car or wait? A business owner wonders, do I hire or not? Let people go? Investors question whether they should invest in that company or not. Entrepeneurs don’t know whether to start a new venture. Nobody knows what to do, so economic activity grinds to a halt.
It really is like the Three Stooges are running Washington. Throw the bums out.
Pretty quick doug, as he is known in chinatown, took in RL’s dylan ref & sent it blowin in the wind, in six minutes flat!
youz guys making fun of my ‘rule of law’ ref missed the qualifying word ”relatively” –and also must’ve avoided youthful indiscretions south of the border down mexico way, where the fine to get outta jail is always ”everything you can scrape up in however long it takes you”.
Elby, tim, others, take comfort in a few things, the financials seem to’ve bottomed –indeed are up by half in a week –and Fed has done this before, from time to time, when the need was perceived –it is said, through a quiet deal with Goldman Sachs. Lastly, re the feared hyperinflation, gold (though it swung from the high 800s to the mid-900s in a fantastical range today) ought to be twice as high as it is. There’s alot of slack in global capacity, a condition difficult for monetary inflation to overcome. Plus, Bernanke has a shredder right next to his printing press –Fed can and plans to sop up excess liquidity first sign of it. Ad who knows, DC may realize what the hell is wrong with the third rock from the sun –it’s “DC”! A litle fiscal sobriety will go a long ways in the expectations game –a large part of all this as you know.
Yeah, but what will the Master of Distraction have socialized by the time people recover from their panic and anger attacks?
I expect to see sobriety and fiscal sanity any day now from Barry, Barney, and Nancy.
Sorry about those hallucinations, Buddy.
A short squeeze is not a bull rally.
Knock off with the optimism.
Get real.
we’ve been under severe psychological and economic attack for a decade, and still, with any ray of sunshine at all, we rally back and stay in the fight. Every dog has his day, and if we can keep our sh*t together, we gonna have ours yet. Maybe in little beseiged enclaves, but what the hey.
Buddy, little enclaves? A county electoral map says it’s the other way around. They are little enclaves, albeit populous. But they are dying out, not the flyover country, in some way they internally know that they are screwed up, so the tend to reproduce less.
If we don’t neglect our responsibilities and don’t let them take over our children, turning them into indoctrinated automatons… and I can attest that they never were truly successful anywhere in that regard no matter how they tried… then no matter how long it takes, 4, 8, 12 or twenty years, we will eventually win.
Their days are numbered.
twoby/40; the biggest thing they have going for them is a widespread sense of inevitability. They say this comes from a need for an increasingly populous and resource-short world needing perforce greater top-down control. On this immediately rests the question of whether or not a person is an asset or a liability. Of the two possible answers, ours is obvious, a person is a market and a market-maker at the very least. The other answer, theirs, is the totalitarian’s, a person is just another problem, a task, another beast to be fed, trained and restrained. If life is a problem, then non-life is the solution.
This i think is where their political power comes from –that the philosophy mimics nature’s arc of life, in that since it ends in death, efficiency demands that the being take on the coloration as soon as possible, to get it over with. So, they are reinforced by that observable analogy, by the empiricism. And of all the self-fulfilling prophecies in all the gin joints of the universal imagination, that’s the doozy that dogs.
To us, and depending on our personal relationship with faith, or Faith, there is either something else beyond such a grim womb tomb trudge, or else we just say, what the hell, so what if we’re just a cosmic wink, all the more reason to live — why not make the MOST of it?
But politically we are up against the powerful regression to the mean –in all senses of the word ‘mean’. The ‘attitude’ –the knowing smirk, the cynical devaluation of value itself, is not that harmless tic we picked up, as kids, at the movies or in pop music. It’s the beast –it’s the death wish. I was a huge Stones fan –still am, in a way –but, lordy mercy –pop culture itself a conduit over and around the adults striving in the market, bearing the death wish to the young. If AQ and Lenin weren’t even worse, they’d have standing in that culture critique.
Buddy Larsen@41
When the light is turned out, where do the electrons go?
When the light is turned on, are the same electrons as before flowing?
A big cosmic wink to you this morning.
back atcha, programmer. yes, the photon is a strange, strange thing. almost like a miracle or something the way the eye picks up that little arc of the EM spectrum and thus can in the now see a star all the way across the universe billions of years ago –and comprehend what is happening. that a point of light has aimed itself at your brain and made you a time traveler. that a time traveler must understands perspective, that perspective lets the journey pass from outside to inside, from the edge of the universe to the center of a soul. or so said Ramses and that bunch.
How much work money does can be calculated…
Money does not do work. People and machines do. Money doesn’t. Money is not a thing, it is a measurment, and this fundamental misunderstanding causes all sort of problems. To continue the water metaphor:
Collecting naturally, water is relatively unproductive; it does limited work. Properly channeled and dispersed, it becomes more efficient and supports more agriculture.
Money isn’t the water, it’s the gallons we measure the water with. If the crops are dying in a drought, we don’t have a gallon shortage, we have a water shortage. We have all the gallons of water we want. Just change the size of the measuring cup and, voila, more gallons. In the money world, this is known as inflation and only believers in witchcraft think it creates more water.
When it comes to commerce, governments can do a great deal of good by establishing standard weights and measures. That way, if you and I are negotiating the sale of a gallon of water, we know we’re both talking about the same amount of water. The worst thing the government could do is frequently change the standards. If we’re trying to strike a deal where I give you a pound of coal at the end the month in exchange for a gallon of whiskey, but neither of us know what a “pound” or a “gallon” will actually be at the end of the month, our transaction becomes really inefficient. Neither of us can plan.
Money is a “weights and measures” thing too. Wild fluctuations in the value of money hamper economic activity because nobody knows what the yardstick they have to use will look like next year or next month. It takes longer to figure out the merits of a deal, and short-term deals are preferable to long term deals. There’s your “velocity” of money.
All “velocity” of money really means is how fast can people barter goods and services with one another – especially future goods and services. Stable money is the most efficient measuring stick to use in evaluationg those transactions. A society that has it can be highly efficient and invest heavily in the future. A society that doesn’t has to struggle along and fall behind.
Our monetary system of weights and measures has two serious problems that have led to rising inefficiency and the current economic slowdown. One, the massive debts the Federal Government – the keeper of the standard – have been running means sooner or later we’ll have a serious dose of inflation if the nonsense doesn’t stop, and the current crop are accelerating the spending, not slowing it.
Two, a host of institutions, public and private, essential to facilitating the use of money have become increasingly brazen about using their positions as middlemen to skim large amounts off the top. The “Masters of the Universe” on Wall Street didn’t provide anywhere near enough value to society to justify what they pocketed. An explosion of government supported or mandated “economic auxiliaries” (a polite word for parasites, e.g. welfare receipients, government bureaucrats, lawyers, regulatory consultants, etc) funded by extracting value from everyone else’s transaction are also part of the problem. It makes using the government-approved measurement of goods and services (i.e. money) less efficient because it is “taxed” so highly. This causes productive folks to go either “John Galt” or black market. In either case, we’re less efficient as a society.
The Fed will never solve this problem. It’s beyond their control. They can’t keep money stable when the federal government runs up deficits the size of Obama’s ego and the executive suites of half the moneyhandling institutions in the country are on the take.
Is China quietly trying to reduce their exposure to the dollar?
http://atimes.com/atimes/China_Business/KC18Cb01.html
buddy@41: nice. . .saving that one, maybe even for attribution!
wS/46; –gracias; eres muy amable!
Thank you JNH.
Wretchard,
Spot on in this article.
Then, the overseers of monitized debt are going to solve the monetary crisis created by debt money, by creating more debt(credit). Gotcha.
Trouble is, folks who do not want to borrow money, that required to keep the credit ponze scheme afloat The next step will be law: forbid saving money, followed by heavy penalties for now borrowing!
All debt/credit money systems have always collapsed. It’s simple mathmatics actually.
The Asylum of our Era.
Buddy @5,
Yah, ironic and any peoples stupid enough to understand that real possibility?
I’ve said before, the arrogance of my USA has grown to precarious hieghts. Followed only by it’s hedonism. All that is good and noble is cast off, where our power came from is forgotten, where we are headed is strictly basil human.
Just to be clear I was supporting Buddy & not offend, previous should have been:
Yah, ironic and any peoples stupid enough to _not_ understand that real possibility?
i agree heartily, veracious –esp the forgetting where our power came from –that’s a mouthful –
Helicopter Ben Bernanke is swamping us with Massive Quantitative Easing….The Undertow is likely to destroy us all!
http://fargoneworld.blogspot.com