The shock of a thousand
trillion By The Mogambo Guru
Today we are going to Rgemonitor.com for
the Mogambo Laugh O' The Day (MLOTD) concerning
gold, in the award subcategory, "A joke that does
not make fun of people so damned stupid that they
have no clue of what the last 4,000 years of
economics and gold says about why they should be
buying gold with both hands with every penny at
their disposal, and selling the kids into slave
labor to get a few extra bucks with which to buy
gold, and since they are slaves and thus somebody
else's problem now, they won't need their stupid
piggy banks, and these parents can help
themselves and use whatever
money is in them to buy a little more gold. Later,
when gold has zoomed up in price and you are
finally rich, happy and generous instead of being
poor, hateful and stingy, you can buy the kids
back! Probably at a discount! And certainly better
trained to follow orders and able to work 20 hours
a day chained to a sewing machine for weeks at a
stretch!"
Anyway, this is not about
Fabulous Mogambo Financial Plans (FMFP) that
always seem to take a backseat to some stupid
"child-labor laws" I never heard of, or how some
stupid judge wastes the court's time with some
pointless diatribe about how I am the most
"despicable father" he has ever seen in his life,
but about the MLOTD, which is from a Financial
Times quote about how the US economy is in such
bad shape, and how we have such a disastrous
penalty to pay for being so damned stupid as to
allow the Congress to allow the Federal Reserve to
create so much excess money and credit.
Now, things are so bad that a reader at
Felix Salmon's Market Movers blog is moved to
darkly say, "Gold is for optimists. I'm
diversifying into canned goods." Hahaha! Gold is
for optimists! Hahaha!
The Financial Times
went on, not about this terrific joke, but about
economist Nouriel Roubini, of Roubini Global
Economics and former director of the US Treasury
Department's Office of Policy Development and
Review, who "has long been positioned firmly on
the gloomy side of the outlook scale - but the
past week's batch of predictions has been ominous
even by his own dark standards. In fact, they're
nigh on apocalyptic. Or, in other words, a
'generalized systemic financial meltdown'."
In his own words, Mr Roubini said, "Losses
due to subprime alone will be as high as $400 to
$500 billion and this does not count losses due to
near prime, prime mortgages, auto loans, credit
cards, commercial real estate, leveraged loans,
loans to the corporate system; if added all up
losses could end up - in a US recession - as being
as high as $1,000 billion or $1 trillion. The
financial bloodbath thus has only started and a
hard landing of the economy is clearly ahead of
us."
A trillion? It used to be that a
trillion was a lot of money, but my eyes opened
when I saw the Opednews.com article by Sharon
Kayser, titled, "Hey Buddy, Can You Spare $1,000
Trillion?"
Instantly, I knew that someone
had erred! A thousand trillions? Hahaha! What a
preposterous number!
So I was instantly on
the phone to call Ms Kayser so I could tell her
that there has been an error in the title, and
then maybe, you know, she could drop a line to my
boss and tell her what a nice guy I am and how
firing me right before Christmas is so tacky, no
matter how well-deserved, or maybe she could get
me a job there with her or something.
So
imagine my horror when I learned that there was no
error! We are talking about a quadrillion freaking
dollars! Instantly I knew that she was doing that
on purpose to give me a heart attack!
The
actual excerpt is that "there is currently at
least a $1,000 trillion black hole in the world
economy", what with "$600 trillion in world
liabilities, plus more than a $400 trillion
derivatives neutron bomb, all of which will go off
when the Westerners (from EU and US) will no
longer be able to borrow."
So, with
trembling hands I feverishly punched the
calculator, adding 400 trillion plus 600 trillion,
which is 400,000,000,000,000 and
600,000,000,000,000, and then I think, "That's too
many zeroes! It won't even fit on my calculator
screen, for God's sake!"
So I do it by
hand, and it keeps coming out as
"1,000,000,000,000,000", and it looks so weird
that I knew it has to be wrong. It can't have that
many zeroes in it!
So, I go to the
dictionary and look up "quadrillion", and it says
that it is "a one followed by fifteen zeroes".
Except in Britain, where it is 24 zeroes, for some
reason.
Anyway, it really IS written out
as $1,000,000,000,000,000!
That number
must have stunned me into insensibility, as the
next thing I knew, it was later in the day, things
were coming into focus, people are yelling at me
to wake up and get back to work, and asking when I
am going to do a little work around here, and how
about getting a little work done? Naturally I
responded to their inquiries by yelling
obscenities and spitting on them, when right in
the middle of the discussion about my work habits,
here comes Ms Kayser again, saying, "Talking of
jobs, did you know that in 1972, wages reached
their peak? Today, real wages are nearly one-fifth
lower - inflation adjusted!"
If I wasn't
so engrossed in teaching some manners to my fellow
office workers, I would have said, "No, but I do
know that you can't have economic growth if prices
are rising faster than incomes!"
Now that
I think about it, this is a perfect segue to a
Loud Mogambo Discussion (LMD) of how inflation
eats away at the buying power of your income, and
how the damnable Federal Reserve and the
despicable Alan Greenspan destroyed the dollar and
the American economy when he was in control of the
Federal Reserve and how this means that anybody
who sees Alan Greenspan should be able to slap his
nasty little face, and maybe beat him with sticks,
and throw rocks and him and his nasty little car
and when he has to pay a lot of money to have the
dents taken out and repainted, maybe he will think
to himself, "Hey! That Mogambo Idiot (TMI) was
right! I was a stupid little man who created too
much money and credit, and now we are going to be
destroyed by inflation in prices! For example,
look how much the repair shop wants to fix my
stupid car!" Ugh.
Mogambo sez: Another
day, another wheeze from the morons who think that
they run things, as they frantically drive down
the price of gold, silver and oil with their
market manipulations, meaning that all you gotta
do is walk over and pick up a few bargains every
time they do this. Ahh! Life is sweet!
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.
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Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
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