Category Archives: Debt

The Uncertainty Chant

Barack Obama, Business, Debt, Economy, Inflation, Regulation, Taxation

In “You Can’t Fix Stupid,” I counted the ways of Barack Obama’s stupidity, as far as the natural laws of economics go. Today he did me one better, claiming that “uncertainty over the debt ceiling has hindered hiring in the private sector.” The horrible jobs reports, in other words, were a function of market fears that the US would halt the borrowing and bankruptcy trends. That’s certainly novel. Let’s not forget that Republicans feed this folly by advancing, as a counterargument, the same tack: we have no certainty in capital and other markets, therefor no one will hire.

Nonsense on stilts: There is ample certainly; certainly about economic gloom-and-doom to come. Given the indicators in the US—OPD (Outstanding Public Debt) almost equaling GDP (Gross Domestic Product), the first is growing faster than the second—businesses have to become as lean as possible.

The uncertainty mantra is a mindless one. There is plenty of certainty: certainty about a dark future. A business that is to survive needs to streamline and become super efficient. It has to hunker down and stay in survival mode. So should you.

Where Was Coulter On … Economic Freedoms, Asks Vox Day

Ann Coulter, Bush, Debt, Economy, Federalism, John McCain, libertarianism, Republicans

My WND colleague Vox Day wants to know “where was Miss Coulter when the McCain-Palin ticket suspended its Republican presidential campaign to help the Bush administration collude with the Democratic Senate to ram TARP down the throats of a protesting American public?”

“Cowering frauds,” writes Vox—with reference to Ann Coulter’s term for libertarians who do not want a department of marriage affairs to be added to the Federal Frankenstein in enforcing morality—“is a term that is best reserved for Republicans, who preach fiscal responsibility while repeatedly raising the debt ceiling, who talk about the importance of respecting the law while permitting Wall Street to openly violate it at will, and who claim to advocate personal freedom while staunchly supporting a futile Prohibition that saw three times more Americans arrested for drugs last year than were arrested in 1980.”

Check the WND archives for the two months leading up to the 2008 presidential election. Miss Coulter was too busy cheering on the Red Faction of the bifactional ruling party in a futile attempt to elect John McCain to bother speaking out against the Republican elite’s rejection of economic reality, small government principles, the U.S. Constitution and the American people. On the other hand, WorldNetDaily’s two libertarians, Ilana Mercer and myself, wrote no less than 10 columns attacking TARP and the treacherous Bush bailouts during those two months. When viewed from this perspective, Ann Coulter calling libertarians ‘”cowardly frauds” looks rather like Anthony Weiner calling Pope Benedict XVI a perverted exhibitionist.

Borrowing From … Brazil

America, Debt, Economy, Foreign Policy, Free Markets, Inflation, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim

Did you know that Brazil “is now the United States’s fourth-largest creditor”? They’ve been increasing their wealth, which has afforded the US the opportunity to spread its debt.

This according to a book by Larry Rohter, BRAZIL ON THE RISE: The story of a country transformed, reviewed in the June 17, 2011 issue of the Times Literary Supplement.

To read between the lines, Brazil is changing from a crappy country to a not-so crappy country. Given Rohter’s retarded analysis—Brazil’s improvement he puts down, in part, to wise “cash-transfer social programmes”—it’s hard to know what’s afoot. The Left truly feels—for they don’t think—that moving money from wealth creators to wealth consumers generates plenty.

It’s safer to say that, as in Chile, freeing markets has generated greater prosperity for Brazil.

Like white on rice, the Us in on any country with “significant foreign currency reserves.”

UPDATED: The Animal (Spirits) Move Chairman Ben

Debt, Economy, Federal Reserve Bank, Inflation, Political Economy, The State

John Maynard Keynes wrote impenetrable prose. Likewise, Ben S. Bernanke speaks it. Obscurantism typified Bernanke’s address at the International Monetary Conference, Atlanta, Georgia. The “animal spirits” are lurking everywhere here. See if you can spot them.

UPDATED (June 8): John Maynard Keynes, “the commie who controls economies from the grave,” is alive and well in Fed Chairman Ben’s voodoo economics:

BEN: “[T]he ability and willingness of households to spend will be an important determinant of the pace at which the economy expands in coming quarters.”

“Spooky dude” Keynes, and his acolytes, honestly believed that the fickle consumer’s biorhythms control the economy. If the consumer is spooked, “the economy” gets that way too.

BEN: “[H]ouseholds are facing some significant headwinds, including increases in food and energy prices, declining home values, continued tightness in some credit markets, and still-high unemployment, all of which have taken a toll on consumer confidence.”

The Keynesian mixes cause and effect liberally. After all, the average man hasn’t a hope in hell of grasping the exclusive knowledge and magic formulas to which only Voodoo economists are privy. What Ben fails to mention is this: He is pumping vast amounts of paper, non-stop, into America’s phony economy. With every infusion of fake money, as Austrian economists have warned, the dollar drops like a stone. Assets will continue to devalue. Saving will be difficult; retirement near impossible. Prices will soar, and the currency will eventually collapse (hyperinflation).

Before you blame Obama, the Republikeynsians began this spiral in earnest.

Have at it.