Agora Financial's 5-Minute Forecast cited a survey performed by
careerbuilder.com, probably because they found it rightfully alarming that "21%
of people earning US$100,000 a year or more say they live paycheck to
paycheck".
Always ready to pick a fight with little guys, medium-sized girls and large
children, I am especially pugnacious with guys who live a long way away from
me, and so I arrogantly say that I don't know why anybody is surprised at this,
as, according to the novel-yet-laughably-stupid theory propounded by the
financial services industry of always "putting money and equity to work", you
are SUPPOSED to have zero excess cash!
Ergo, you cannot mathematically be "putting your money to work" if you still
have some money that is doing no work! This point is
reached only when your house is mortgaged to the hilt so that you could invest
the money in something that pays a higher yield than what the total mortgages
are costing, and thus every spare dime of earned, unearned and capital gain
income that you cannot hide from your family or creditors is used as a down
payment to buy more stocks, bonds or houses!
The surprising thing, perhaps, is the associated fact that the other 79% of
those surveyed are NOT "putting their money to work", and are therefore
complete failures as money managers, according to the Modern Financial Theory
(MFT), as shrilly propounded by every lowlife Wall Street and banking huckster
for the last quarter of a century.
In fact, The 5 goes on, "10% of the same respondents say they save nothing - $0
- each month", which means that, according to this MFT stupidity, that 10% of
people are investing correctly; they have nothing left after putting all of
their income "to work", saving nothing, and all the money was put into stocks,
bonds and houses, as the dichotomy between "savings" and "investing" was erased
years and years ago by greedy guys who were anxious to get their hands on your
savings! Hahahaha!
And things will not be getting any better for these people for a long, long
time, as jobs are disappearing left and right, spending is falling even as
consumer installment debt fell by $7.9 billion in August ("the most on record
since statistics began in 1943"), prices for everything are high and rising,
business conditions are worsening, government revenues are falling, investments
are losing money with every tick of the clock (exacerbated by people are taking
money out of their retirement accounts just to stay alive), and the Federal
Reserve and Congress are busily making everything worse and worse.
As Roger Wiegand of webeatthestreet.com pithily and cleverly says, "Something
is wrong and going wronger."
And what is going wrong, mostly, is that Ludwig von Mises, called the Father of
the Austrian School of Economics, nailed it when he said, "There is no means of
avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The
alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as a result of a
voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and
total catastrophe of the currency system involved."
Since former Federal Reserve chairmen Alan Greenspan, his successor Ben
Bernanke and Congress have consistently chosen the latter, we have "total
catastrophe" to look forward to! And sure enough ... Look!
Or perhaps it is as Ayn Rand said, circa 1959 - according to a clip sent by Ed
Steer of CaseyResearch.com - who also nailed it when she said, "Watch money.
Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is
done, not by consent, but by compulsion - when you see that in order to
produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - when you
see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - when
you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws
don't protect you against them, but protect them against you - when you see
corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - you may know
that your society is doomed."
And although society is doomed by the execrable actions of the morons at the
Fed and Congress for these last few decades, that does not necessarily mean
that we are all doomed, as gold, silver and oil will always do very well in
times like these, which I say with such powerful authority that you can see the
sincerity shooting out of my eyes like incandescent sparks because for the last
4,500 years when an idiot government did this kind of crap, gold and silver
protected their owners, while nothing else really did! Nothing!
As for oil, it is now indispensable and ubiquitous as a necessity throughout
the entire economic world, we have passed the Peak Oil point, and without the
stuff we would not be able, for example, to drive our cars to Washington, DC,
and make a fuss about the economic stupidity that is so rampant there, or to
drive someplace where we can buy more gold, silver and oil to take advantage of
the economic stupidity that is so rampant there!
Whee! This investing stuff is easy!
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 2008, The Daily Reckoning.)
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