Welcoming the end of the
world By The Mogambo Guru
Junior Mogambo Ranger (JMR) David B C was
amused at a blurb from Associated Press, which
read, "The dollar, which is often treated as a
hedge against gold prices, was mixed in afternoon
trading." Hahaha! Fabulous! What a world! The
dollar as a hedge against gold prices! Hahaha! Too
much! And getting spookily correct, too!
But then, lots of spooky things are off
the charts lately, such as Kevin Kerr in the
Resource Trade Alert newsletter saying, "Kernel
counts for corn are poor, and
with all this wet weather, many soybean crops are
underwater or will get hit by mildew and disease.
Not to mention the fact that farmers simply can't
get equipment into the fields. Heck, you'd need a
combine on pontoons in some places. High hopes
from planting intentions in April now seem like a
distant memory. I expect bean yields will be awful
and corn to be much lower weight and quality than
projected."
Always looking for an
opportunity to be the center of attention, I
quickly realized that this was another perfect
opportunity to demonstrate the delicate dance of
the Supply-Versus-Demand Dynamic, and how that
determines price in the free marketplace. So I
started gathering up my charts and graphs, but
before I could get ready, a horrified Mr Kerr
quickly sums it up as, "All this means even higher
prices, especially this winter."
Higher
prices in winter? Brrr! "Sounds miserable," I
think to myself, "but not the end of the world!"
This was immediately, directly contradicted by
Doug Casey in his essay, "The Greater Depression"
at DailyReckoning.com. He writes, "Let me cover
the big picture. I do think we're approaching the
end of the world as we know it." Hahaha! What a
card!
Apparently, Mr Casey and I have the
same general sense of humor, as this is the same
gag I used on the family last September, as a sort
of "early Halloween" trick. I sat them all down
and somberly told them how I was sorry that we
were in big financial trouble and how we were
approaching the time where, to survive, I was
going to have to kill them all for the life
insurance money and bravely start over.
Well, they did not think my little joke
was funny at all, even when I took the time to
explain the humor in it, like if I were REALLY
going to kill them, I sure as hell wouldn't tell
them about it beforehand! Jeez! What morons!
Then, horrified, I saw that Mr Casey was
telling the truth; he thinks we ARE approaching
the end of the world as we know it! After thinking
about it, I realize that this may be good news, as
I was getting pretty tired of the "old world as we
know it", which is the one where my job is hanging
by a thread, the traffic is always heavy and
backed up, where everybody is out to get me, and
the neighbors are always accusing me of things,
like trying to shoot them if they step over onto
my property, and I have to tell them that if I
wanted to shoot them, I'd have shot them, either
between their stupid little beady eyes or their
stupid fat butts, depending on the circumstances,
and the reason I shot a hole in their stupid
garage door is not because I missed them, but as a
reminder about stepping onto my damned property!
Jerks!
Anyway, I was just joking with the
family about the insurance trick, but now I am
thinking ("Hmmm!") that maybe I ought to look into
this insurance thing a little more closely. Mr
Casey is too savvy to be drawn into my weird, ugly
little world, and sticks to the economics of it
all by saying, "I think there is such a thing as
the business cycle."
Me, too! So there are
TWO of us that can stand, shoulder to shoulder in
solidarity, outside the Federal Reserve building
in Washington, DC, heroically shouting, "The
Austrian economists were right, and there IS such
a thing as the business cycle, all caused by you
Federal Reserve weenies creating the money to buy
a boom, which sets up the bust! So tell Bernanke
to come on out here so my buddy Doug can kick his
butt!"
Mr Casey, obviously alarmed at
being arrested for making a stupid point that
nobody seems to care about, immediately gets the
conversation back on track, namely about the
business cycle with its booms and busts, by
saying, "We've had the longest expansion - and the
strongest expansion - in world history. But we're
at the end of a 25-year boom. It's gone on more
than a full generation now. And I'll tell you how
it's going to end: It's going to end with a
depression, and not just a depression; not just
another Great Depression; it's going to be the
Greater Depression." Boom! Yikes! Mega-yikes!
Then he asks, out of the blue, "What's a
depression, incidentally?" Instantly I am alarmed
and feeling cornered, as I figure that he is
talking to me, and I have no idea how to define
"depression", and the last thing I want in this
world is to have another person tell me what an
idiot I am, especially someone of Mr Casey's
stature. So I pretend to get an important,
important call on my cell phone, and it works! He
immediately defines a depression as "a period of
time when distortions and misallocations of
capital are liquidated; that's called a
depression".
The use of the word
liquidated makes me think of how the movies had
old-style commies, Nazis and various unsavory
other bad guys going around "liquidating" people,
and that's pretty depressing, so I can see how
capital being liquidated would classify as a
depression, as your portfolio, your house, your
retirement accounts, your "collectibles" and
damned near everything you own goes to squat,
including your stupid little job and your stupid
little life, which may be what prompted him to
say, "Another general definition of a depression
is this: a period of time when most people's
standard of living goes down significantly."
And I already knew that people's level of
anger about having to "make do with less" changes
in reciprocal lockstep with the fall in the
standard of living, more and more, year after
year, until some tipping point is reached and one
day people are so angry and so miserable that
things suddenly explode, and history has another
huge discontinuity, and then after a while they
will be so miserable that they will try to break
into the Fabulous Mogambo Bunker (FMB) in search
of items to relieve their suffering, which turns
into tragedy before they even get close. That's
how you define "depression". Ugh.
Mogambo
sez: The official Mogambo-Approved Investment
Portfolio of holding nothing but gold, silver and
oil has again vaulted to the top in terms of sheer
investment performance, as precisely calculated
The New Government Way; by taking a rough
estimate, fudging a few numbers in my favor and
disregarding anything that would tend to prove
that I am lying my head off.
Of course,
the media is in a frenzy, and wants to know things
like, "What now?", and "What should we do?", and
"Do you know you have coffee stains all over your
shirt and that your zipper is down? We can see
your Scoobie-Doo boxer shorts, dude!" and they all
laugh and laugh, until I inform them that I had
pulled my zipper down on purpose ("Not all poems
are written with a pen!"), and that my Scoobie-Doo
undergarment is not a pair of boxers, but a thong
of the especially tiny variety, and they all go
"Eeewwww!" like they've never seen a thong before!
But as for the question "What now?", the
answer is obviously, "The trend is your friend,"
so prices of gold, silver and oil will keep
rising.
And as for the question "What
should we do?", the answer is "Buy more gold,
silver and oil, you moron! What in the hell did
you think you should do?"
But you won't,
because you haven't, and you won't until it is too
late, if then, and that is why you will always
have to work at a stupid job, all your life, doing
crappy things like interviewing a leering lunatic
who got lucky in the market, and whose zipper is
down, for crying out loud, as if he was not
disgusting enough to start with.
So don't
let this happen to you. Buy gold, silver and oil
today!
Richard Daughty is
general partner and COO for Smith Consultant
Group, serving the financial and medical
communities, and the editor of The Mogambo Guru
economic newsletter - an avocational exercise to
heap disrespect on those who desperately deserve
it.
Republished with permission from The Daily Reckoning.
Copyright 2007, The Daily
Reckoning.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
