Great Depression Online Archive Issue:

Heavy On The Lard

Great Depression Online
Long Beach, CA
September 23, 2008

Inside This Issue You Will Discover…

*** The Halcyon Days
*** Eradicating Fire Ants
*** Heavy On The Lard
*** And More

“The free market for all intents and purposes is dead in America.” – Senator Jim Bunning, September 19, 2008

The Halcyon Days

We regret to have missed the halcyon days of the great American experiment.  By the time we came to be Jimmy Carter was making a mess of things in the White House and Elvis Presley had just popped his last pill.

Long gone were the days when you could pull over to the side of the road and relieve yourself without some overambitious prosecutor making a federal case out of it.  So, too, long gone were the days when you could shotgun a 12-oz Budweiser and toss the empty beer can out your car window on the way to and from work each day.

Was it a better world?

~~~~~~High-Yield International~~~~~~

The Gift that Keeps on Giving: The Falling U.S. Dollar.  The long-term weakening in the greenback creates a double incentive to get into high-yield foreign securities ASAP.  Not only do you get normal interest and dividends…they’re also worth more relative to the dollar as it slides into the abyss.  Learn more here: High-Yield International.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

We’ll never know.

For that was a world long ago and far away when the U.S. Constitution was still the supreme law of the land…

…back when people were trim and actually cared about such trivialities like individual liberties…

…where the suggestion to use the public purse to bail out Wall Street – even for the greater good of all – would have been met with offense, outrage, and indignation.

Eradicating Fire Ants

Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke put in another weekend shift…someone should really give these guys a raise.

This time they were busy penciling out a comprehensive rescue plan designed to eradicate the billions of fire ants that have been festering inside the country’s oversized financial pantaloons.

“The proposal, not quite three pages long,” reported David M. Herszenhorn for the New York Times, “was stunning for its stark simplicity.  It would raise the national debt ceiling to $11.3 trillion.  And it would place no restrictions on the administration other than requiring semiannual reports to Congress, granting the Treasury secretary unprecedented power to buy and resell mortgage debt.”

The price tag for buying from Wall Street the rotting refuse that no private landfill can bear to take has come in at about $700 billion.

To put this number in perspective…

“A $700 billion expenditure on distressed mortgage-related assets would roughly be what the country has spent so far in direct costs on the Iraq war and more than the Pentagon’s total yearly budget appropriation.  Divided across the population, it would amount to more than $2,000 for every man, woman and child in the United States.

“Whatever is spent will add to a budget deficit already projected at more than $500 billion next year.  And it comes on top of the $85 billion government rescue of the insurance giant American International Group and a plan to spend up to $200 billion to shore up the mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.”

Heavy On The Lard

Will it work?

It depends on what your standard of success is.

Sure it could be just the axle grease the banks need to lube up the gears of finance and churn out the free flowing credit the economy must have to grow.  

Yet it would also apply a fresh layer of sheen to the greased up economic road already paved to hell…

A world where a planned economy tramples upon ideas of limited government, private property rights, and individual liberties…where those who work hard, save their money, and pay their way are punished for their perseverance, prudence, and independence.

Of course Paulson and Bernanke know the populace has grown much too rotund to still care about liberty.  For what the portly people now really want is security.  And Paulson and Bernanke are determined to serve it up for them just the way they like it…

Heavy on the lard.

Sincerely,

M.N. Gordon
Great Depression Online

P.S.  Another bank went belly-up over the weekend.  West Virginia’s Ameribank claimed the honor of the twelfth bank to fail this year.  And on top of that, the dollar’s resumed its’ long-term downtrend…the dollar index’s trading at 76.23 at the time of this writing.  If you’ve ever thought of diversifying part of your holdings outside the United States, now’s the time.  And our friends over at High-Yield International can help: Learn more here: High-Yield International.

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