"Monkey Business"
By Bill Bonner
WEST RIVER, MARYLAND – "Today, the new president takes over. You’d think he would find it an easy job. He only has two major responsibilities to remember:
Protect citizens’ freedom.
Protect their wealth.
Everything else is detail… distraction… and (usually) delusion.
Blame Game: But the distractions are many… and the delusions are more common than houseflies. There’s still no wall keeping Mexicans out. But at least there’s a wall – chain link and razor wire – protecting the insiders in Washington from the outsiders in the rest of the country.
Some of our dear readers blame the Republicans for America’s sad state. Others blame the Democrats. But here at the Diary, we blame them both… and no one at all. Birds gotta fly. Fish gotta swim. And a degenerate empire has to find its way down from the peak, one stumble at a time. Each president has to take the fall assigned to him.Bush with his War on Terror. Obama with his Wall Street bailout. Trump with his spending increases, tax cuts, trade wars, COVID-19 checks, and other abominations.
Who’s to blame? Is the wolf to blame for eating sheep? Does he even know he’s a carnivore?And now, et tu, Biden? The new president is just a human. He is probably unaware that he’s supposed to destroy the empire. He just does what comes naturally. He listens to those around him – the other members of the Deep State elite. And they all agree. They have a list of priorities. Protecting citizens and their property is not even on it.
Falsified Economy: Their first priority is to keep the fake economy going. Stansberry Research’s Morning Market commentary reports: "Treasury Secretary nominee Janet Yellen warned lawmakers any delays or insufficient support in implementing Biden’s stimulus plans could lead to lasting economic damage."
A healthy economy hardly needs regular inputs of fake money. But we will cue you in… the U.S. economy is an imposter. Interest rates are fraudulent. Prices are phony. Output is depressed and perverted. Tesla is not really worth $800 billion. Wall Street honchos don’t really earn their executive millions. The federal government can’t really afford to send $2,000 checks to people who don’t deserve the money. The whole system is contrived… jacked up… and falsified. It is now like a married man with a second family… hidden away on the side. He’s gotta stick to his lies. And Yellen et al. have got to stick with their fake money.
The transformation happened over many years. Hardly noticed… rarely understood, it nevertheless turned the U.S. economy into something ghastly… grotesque and unnatural. Over the centuries, mankind learned that central planning, paper money, and prices set by bureaucrats always end in disaster.
But somehow, America’s economic elite forgot. It was as if they had forgotten how to walk upright without dragging their knuckles on the ground and grunting. And now, the simians are in control. Like those in the zoo, they swing from the bars and occasionally throw sh*t at the public.
Obvious Loss: But let’s look a little more closely at the fake economy… and where it is headed. We have seen how the fake dollar system, set up from 1968 to 1971, when the U.S. dollar was unpegged from gold, caused a pandemic of amnesia. People forgot how fake money worked. But the counterfeit money helped the elite shift the nation’s wealth from the 90% of the population on Main Street to the 10% on Wall Street. And the little guys had no idea what was going on. They thought the rich people were just lucky… or that their wealth would “trickle down” to everybody else.
Every president since Richard Nixon aided and abetted this bamboozle. Most people lost wealth. The loss in relative wealth is obvious: the Federal Reserve gives money to the rich, not to the middle classes. Less obvious is the loss of wealth in the whole fake economy.
Growing Output: When you can “print” money and manipulate interest rates… you foul the whole shebang. Savers don’t save. Businesses don’t invest in new factories and better-skilled labor. Investors turn to speculation. The whole economy becomes “financialized,” driven into a frenzy of “get it while you can,” rather than real wealth production.
These things drive down real output – the supply of goods and services that constitute real wealth. While GDP growth – the growth in the value of all the goods made and services provided – clocked in at 4-5% before the fake money did its damage… now, growth rates are barely half that. And if consumer price inflation were measured in the same way it was back in the good old days (prior to the 1990s revisions), today’s real rate of wealth increase (as measured by GDP) would be close to zero.
Then, the authorities claimed that more printing-press (i.e. fake) money would “stimulate” the economy to boost GDP growth. And by the 21st century, the presses were running hot. By the end of 2020, the Fed had added nearly $7 trillion in new money to the system – multiplying its balance sheet 10 times.
No Growth: Alas, real output did not increase. Instead, all of this “stimmy” spending (the War on Terror… Wall Street bailouts… Obamacare… Quantitative Easing… COVID-19 relief… the Paycheck Protection Program… Supplemental unemployment…) had the effect of making Americans poorer.
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said that if previous growth rates had been maintained, U.S. GDP would have increased by $20 trillion in the last decade, not just $10 trillion. If his estimate is right, American families each lost an average of about $100,000 in the last 10 years alone.
Our presidents – Bush, Obama, and Trump – all failed to stop the loss. All of them failed to do the job they were elected to do.
Bad Start: But what about the other major responsibility of the president of the United States? What about making sure Americans can go about their business without anyone bothering them? In this regard, too, the 21st century got off to a bad start… with George W. Bush’s “Patriot Act.” We’ll look at what this might mean tomorrow…"
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