Big Banks and Bumbling Idiots
Sep 29th, 2008 | By Richard Daughty | Category: Politics & EconomicsRight now we have greedy, lying, thieving, staggeringly stupid weenies owning the banks, and tomorrow there will just be two more big banks owned by greedy, lying, thieving, staggeringly stupid weenies! Hahaha!
The really chilling news is that investment banks are being changed into commercial banks, which gives them the right to create - out of thin air, and then loan - money using fractional-reserve banking! Yikes!
They are now banks! These greedy, thieving, lying, staggeringly stupid weenies who are at the epicenter of the biggest financial catastrophe in American history are now being given the right to increase the money supply at their whim to satisfy the willingness of customers, and themselves, to borrow the money! Astounding!
This is so monumentally freaking outrageous that every muscle in my body had an involuntary spasm, precipitating an accidental hail of bullets from an ever-ready Uzi which shot the hell out of my clock-radio and the shelf it was sitting upon. Of course, the wife and kids come running in, bellowing about how I almost shot them and how I am a crazy, irresponsible, horrible man and blah blah blah.
Not being in the mood for that whining crap, I thought that I could get them to shut up and go away if I reminded them that “A miss is as good as a mile”, and then relate some “up close and personal” anecdotes about how I can remember a dozen times, off the top of my head, when each of them has been a LOT closer to death than this relative non-event, as I remember plenty of times in the past that I wished I could have strangled each of them because they were just (pause) so (pause) damned (pause) irritating. “Sort of like right now!”
It didn’t work, and to make it worse, nobody else is upset about this investment-bank-to-commercial-bank thing, which warns me that it must be time to re-examine my assumptions, whereupon I discover that I have, indeed, made a mistake!
It’s just more of the same! Right now we have greedy, lying, thieving, staggeringly stupid weenies owning the banks, and tomorrow there will just be two more big banks owned by greedy, lying, thieving, staggeringly stupid weenies! Hahaha!
And it is not just the banks, as the FT.com article titled “The Shadow Banking System is Unravelling” by Nouriel Roubini explains that “Because of a greater regulation of banks, most financial intermediation in the past two decades has grown within this shadow system whose members are broker-dealers, hedge funds, private equity groups, structured investment vehicles and conduits, money market funds and non-bank mortgage lenders.”
Of course, this doesn’t mention that all the money being multiplied by the shadow banking system was first created by banks, which may be what led James Turk of Free Market Money & Gold Report to say, “No one can doubt any longer that the United States is run totally for the benefit of the banks.”
And thus it is no surprise that Bloomberg.com proposed that the Fed would soon be lowering interest rates, and that “Rate cuts would help the economy in several ways”, the first of which, of course, is to “boost banks’ profits by lowering their cost of funds, something that the $700 billion rescue package before Congress doesn’t do. That might encourage them to lend more freely.”
At this, I broke out laughing, and I was sorry that I did, too, because I was taking a sip of coffee at the time and it spewed all over the place and I got a bunch of it in my lap. It looks like I did something awful in my pants, which actually works out well, since I have found that people let you let you go to the front of any line, especially lines in restaurants, when they see you messed up like that and hear you muttering under your breath, “AIDS? I don’t have AIDS! Those people are crazy for saying I have AIDS just because I crap on myself! I’m going to kill them. Kill them all! Kill! Kill!”
Well, you may be laughing at my plight and jealous at the way I cut right to the front of the line, but you probably made a mess in your own drawers when you read that the Associated Press reports, “The Bush administration is asking Congress to let the government buy $700 billion in toxic mortgages in the largest financial bailout since the Great Depression”.
And then you learned that this staggering socialist economic putsch is made infinitely worse by learning that the AP’s use of the phrase “since the Great Depression” is Really, Really Stupid (RRS) because there has NEVER been a bigger bailout in this country, ever! Including the Great Depression of the ’30s!
And speaking of the Great Depression, Agora Financial’s 5-Minute Forecast notes that “The national debt ceiling will have to be raised for the second time in as many months to accommodate the request… this time to $11.3 trillion… boosting the national debt to over 70% of GDP. The highest the national debt got during the Great Depression was 44% of GDP.”
I was looking for a way to demonstrate that this is all the fault of the detestable Alan Greenspan, erstwhile chairman of the Federal Reserve who created all the money for all the leverage and all the bubbles since 1987, because without the money he created to pay for it all, there would not have been any bubbles to pop in the first place and we would not be in this fix.
But the only thing I have at hand is Juan Cole, president of the Global Americana Institute, who saying essentially the same thing, but he credits it to the borrowing needs of Congress, not speculators. He says, “You don’t run big deficits of $300 and $400 billion a year in good times, according to Keynes. You save the deficit spending for a recession, when the economy needs a jolt. If you’re already racking up a big deficit every year in a good economy, you have no way of making a difference during a significant downturn except by then going for a truly mega-deficit, which risks destroying the value of your currency abroad.”
Sensing an opportunity to seize the stage, I prepared to interrupt him and take that “destruction of the currency” thing as a springboard to launch into another Unbidden Tiresome Mogambo Tirade (UTMT) about how the smart people are buying gold, silver and oil right now, and how the stupid people are NOT buying gold, silver and oil right now, which I use to conclude that it seems like a public service to slap their stupid faces until they smarten up and get some gold, silver and oil, or at least some silver.
Perhaps sensing my clever plan, Mr. Cole heads me off by wryly saying it seems pretty hopeless to start with, in that “In a service economy like that of the US, a dollar with a declining value might not even help the economy via exports very much, since the manufactured goods are being made down in Mexico now, anyway.” Hahaha! Our few goods exports are being made in Mexico! Hahaha!
And, finally putting my plan into effect, people are not buying gold and silver in the face of such a malignant economy? Hahaha! Morons! Their faces should be slapped! Hahaha!
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Source: Big Banks and Bumbling Idiots
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Richard Daughty a.k.a. Mogambo Guru is general partner and COO for Smith Consultant Group and the writer of The Mogambo Guru economic newsletter, an exercise to better heap disrespect on those who desperately deserve it. The Mogambo Guru is quoted frequently in Barron's, The Daily Reckoning and other fine publications.