In another episode where the comics page eerily mirrors real life, a recent Garfield
cartoon has Garfield confronting a resident rat who has been taking cheese, but
leaving IOUs, from the "cheese drawer" of the refrigerator. Garfield
threateningly says to the rat "Stop with the IOUs" and the rat calmly holds up
his hand in protest and says, with a look of utter sincerity on his face, "No,
no ... I'm good for it"!
Perhaps it is my Refined Mogambo Sense Of Humor (RMSOH), or perhaps it is my
equally refined Mogambo Sense Of Scorn (MSOS), but either way, using a
diseased, lying, filthy, corrupt, thieving rat as a metaphor for Congress is
the funny-because-it's-true part! Hahaha!
I remember it because I was reading the comic strip before I fell
asleep on the couch, snoring and snorting and having a wonderful time while
taking a well-deserved nap after spending the busy morning writing hate mail to
the Federal Reserve ("Dear Morons, I hate your guts because you are the weenies
who have so little intelligence that you let the foul Alan Greenspan, chairman
of the Federal Reserve 1987-2006, create So Damned Much Money (SDMM) and with
So Damned Little Oversight (SDLO) that it allowed massive, MASSIVE bubbles in
debt that produced bubbles in stocks, bubbles in bonds, bubbles in houses,
bubbles in consumer spending, bubbles in derivatives, and huge, backbreaking
bubbles in size and cost of government, and now we're freaking doomed!
Sincerely, Anonymous in Florida and fed up with you clowns!").
I was just in that delicious part of my nap where I usually begin dreaming of
wonderful things that might have been, had I only been prescient enough to say,
"Marry you? What? Are you freaking crazy or something?" or "Have some kids?
What? Are you freaking crazy or something?" but still buying lots of gold,
silver and oil with which to get Fabulously, Fabulously Rich (FFR) so that I
could tell lots and lots of other beautiful women, "Marry you? What? Are you
freaking crazy or something?"
Let's just say that fantastical things were getting dreamed up pretty good, if
you catch my drift, when the kids come running in with a copy of Barron's in
their hands, yelling, "Wake up, daddy! Wake up! You can raise our allowances
even if your income is down! There's a way to do it! Wake up!"
I was lazily rubbing the sleep from my eyes and carefully watching to see if
any of them came close enough that I could reach out and smack them for so
rudely waking me up, which I feel empowered to do because that is what my wife
did to me for doing the same thing just the other day.
I mean, there I was, early in the morning before the sun was even up, nervously
looking at our finances and coming to the only conclusion I could; "The kids
have got to go!" Before I knew what I was doing, I went running into their
rooms, honking an air horn and anxiously yelling, "Get up! Fire! Get up and get
out of the house! Emergency! Get out! Get out of the house!" whereupon they all
went rushing outside in their pajamas and I locked all the doors so they
couldn't get back in.
It was, I admit, probably my most pathetic, desperate attempt to clutch at the
only straw I had left, a move that led to the aforesaid incident of my wife
hitting me, and the police watching her do it, yet doing nothing about it, and
the kids wailing, "We're so traumatized! He's a horrible person who doesn't
give us enough money in our allowances! Boo hoo hoo!"
But they were right about the S&P 500 "paying more while making less"! The
companies in the S&P 500 have been paying out $21.45 in dividends, which is
whole multiples of the $7.90 that they have been actually earning, probably
explaining why the index sells at a price so high (over $1,000), that the
price-to-earnings ratio is 128! Hahaha! Unbelievable! Hahaha!
So, as the kids rightfully pointed out, the companies in the S&P 500 are
paying more than they are making, and so there must be a way for me to pay them
more than I make, too, and the only reason that I don't give them more money to
offset their rising costs is that I am stingy and hateful, which is true but
not breaking any new ground, just as it is also true that buying these stocks
at the price of the index would take an investor 128 years of getting
everything the companies earn just to break even! Hahahaha!
It gets weirder when you realize that the companies would go broke long before
that, because they are always paying out more than they make!
So I look at them and say, "And what kind of Stupid Moron Crap (SMC) is that?"
It was heartbreaking to see the disappointment in their eyes and hear it in
their tender, young voices as they were telling me how monstrously cruel I am
and how much they hate me, but I am still buying gold, silver and oil with
every dime I can manage to keep out of the greedy, grubby hands of the kids,
wife, family members and bill collectors, and soon they will understand why,
and, if they are good, like not ever again waking me up from a nap, grow
fabulously wealthy, insanely wealthy, preposterously wealthy along with me and
all the other people who are buying gold, silver and oil as a defense against
unbelievable government deficit-spending and monstrous amounts of money
creation by the Federal Reserve, which is so ridiculously easy that you hear
yourself saying, "Whee!"
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 2009, The Daily Reckoning.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
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