Reply #31: The First Law of Holes (Mogambo)

[54anickel]

http://www.kitco.com/ind/Daughty/dec212005.html

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But things will continue to get weird, as Puru Saxena at DailyReckoning.com answers that age-old question "How much debt qualifies for the use of the term 'ridiculous' "? Well, Mr. Saxena figures "The total American debt is roughly US$40 trillion whereas the size of its economy is around US$11 trillion. So, the debt to GDP ratio is over 350%!"

And I will note, for the record, that the debt-to-GDP ratio at the top of the stock market in 1929 was "merely" 260% of GDP, which was, until today, America's worst example of rampant financial stupidity. But we stupid Baby Boomers and our grubby, mutant children have set a whole new world record in financial stupidity and insanity.

And, in keeping with that level of ignorance and mental illness, we now have Ben Bernanke as the new head of the Federal Reserve, who actually thinks that he can engineer (in "cooperation" with the Congress, I suppose) a permanent prosperity based upon constantly-rising asset valuations? Hahahaha! I can hardly believe that we Americans, who think that we are so smart and so educated and so sophisticated, could possibly believe that such a thing was even possible! Hahaha! Buy stocks and they will always rise? Buy bonds and they will always rise? Buy houses and they will always rise? Hahaha! But my charming and mirthful Mogambo ways (CAMMW) are suddenly silenced. A look of cold, dead seriousness gleams from my blue steel Mogambo eyes (BSME) and you wonder to yourself "My goodness! What has happened to The Mogambo?" What has happened to The Mogambo is that he has remembered what happened in all the rest of the history when some idiot country tried that inflation crap (and they all did); it did not work then, and the result was catastrophe. And it will not work now, and the result will be a bigger catastrophe.

I had planned to use this space for another official Mogambo rant of outrage (OMROO), about, you know, the Federal Reserve and Congress, and how they are murdering our money, and, by extension, us. And, by further extension, everybody else, too. But then I would get all worked up, angrier and angrier, more and more, finally escalating into senseless, mindless, gratuitous use of childish, gutter profanities at high-decibel volumes. And nobody wants that, especially little kindergarten children who, it turns out, get REALLY freaked out by it, and there's suddenly a lot of screaming and crying and pooping in one's pants, and it's a real ugly mess, and then the children start screaming and crying and pooping in their pants, too. So instead, I think to myself, "Perhaps young grasshoppers would be better instructed by a genteel and refined approach!" Always willing to take the easy way out, I graciously turn today's lesson over to Robert Blumen on LewRockwell.com, and his essay entitled "Bernankeism: Fraud or Menace?"

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