Six Months To Live? By James Howard Kunstler

[Crewleader]

on January 11, 2010 7:04 AM

The economy that is. Especially the part that consists of swapping paper certificates. That's the buzz I've gotten the first two weeks of 2010, and forgive me for not presenting a sheaf of charts and graphs to make the case. Just about everybody else yakking about these thing on the Web provides plenty of statistical analysis: Mish, The Automatic Earth, Chris Martenson, Zero Hedge, The Baseline Scenario.... They're all well worth visiting.

Bank bonus numbers are due out any day now. The revolt that I expected around the release of these numbers may come from a different place than I had imagined earlier -- not from whatever remains of "normal" working people, but from the thought leaders and middling agents in administration (including the prosecutors) who, for one reason or another, have been diverting their attention, or watching and waiting, or making excuses for a couple of years now. When Frank Rich of The New York Times starts calling for Robert Rubin's head, then maybe the great groaning tramp steamer of media opinion is turning in the water and charting a new course for the port of reality.

Anyway, the grotesque carnival of rackets and lies that the US economy has become -- held together with the duct tape of stimulus cash, gamed accounting, mortgage subsidies, carry trades, TBTF bailouts, TARPS, TALFS, shell-game BLS reports, and MSNBC "green shoots" cheerleading -- gives every sign of tipping into collapse at a moment's notice. There are just too many obvious things that can go wrong, and that means there are many less obvious, hidden things that can go wrong, and isn't it tragically foolish to tempt Murphy's Law, since it operates so well without any help from us? The call is even going out lately for criminal prosecution of the current Treasury Secretary, Mr. Geithner, for engineering AIG's $14 billion credit default swap payoff to Goldman Sachs as part of the AIG bailout. Okay then, why not Paulson, Bernanke, Blankfein...?

http://kunstler.com/blog/2010/01/six-months-to-live.html#more

[eridani]

1. K&R

[BeFree]

2. well

It's a good thing we have somebody such as Obama in office.
It will take him 6 years at least to clean up this mess.

[truedelphi]

3. Of the twelve trillion that has gone out since March of 2009,

Most of it was Obama's appointees doing. To say he will clean up the mess ignores the fact that his people caused a lot of this mess.

People voted for Obama in droves becuase they thought that he was above the influence of the Wall Street peddlers. He even said so himself when giving a progresssive spin to his candidacy in Oct 2008 and stating that his money came from us little people.

And he went on to add in the same speech that if the Bailouts bought and paid for by the sweat of the brow of us normal folks turned out to not be of benefit to us, why he would be spending a good part of this year regulating the Banksters. Instead all he has managed to do is to scold them!

[truedelphi]

4. You might find this video says pretty much what many here in the economy forum believe

It's eight minutes long, but you can listen rather than read it.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=385x421754