Hi,
This came in this week and thought it was interesting. My fear is it is very hard to argue with...
regards,
5412
The Dancing Corpse
I increasingly feel like a gum shoe detective staring down at an awkwardly sprawling corpse, but being told by the boss that I'm wrong. In fact, that the corpse has a bright and promising future.
"Why, look!" The boss says, hauling the corpse to its feet and waving its stiffening arms about like a dancer in a disco. "See, no problem at all, he's shovel-ready."
It's enough to make me wonder if we haven't already made the transition into the world of Orwell, or "V" (as in "Vendetta"). A world where no official data or pronouncement are to be trusted, and the mainstream media has devolved into little more than a willing mouthpiece for officialdom.
In a call last week with the research team, Doug Casey repeated his view that "There's no way out for the U.S. economy," an opinion seconded by Casey Research Chief Economist Bud Conrad, whose beliefs are based on almost non-stop crunching of the hard data. (Samples of Bud's work appear in this service now and again, and you find his deeper analysis and recommendations in our paid Casey Report).
Yet, seemingly everywhere you turn lately, the official pronouncements are sunny, or at least sunnier. Housing, consumer spending, manufacturing activity are all up, we are told. And look at the stock market!
"See here, he can even tap dance," the boss says, placing the corpse's feet on top of his own and shuffling around.
"Hold on. You're propping the poor stiff up!" we argue, with Cash for Clunkers and untold billions in other bailouts popping to mind. "What happens when you stop?"
Ignoring the question, the boss and corpse execute a clumsy pirouette, finishing up with a self-satisfied "Ta-dah!"
We are not the only ones looking behind the cheery headlines to the hard facts of the real economy and finding ourselves unconvinced that the economy is in the process of bouncing back to the better days of the recent past.
(I deleted the name - 5412) runs a company that makes money by consulting for large retailers. He's also a plain-speaking and thoughtful critic of the idea that the all-important U.S. consumer is being reanimated. Among the views Davidowitz shared on Yahoo Finance's TechTicker this week.
"The retail business is terrible... It's almost all negative."
"We're going to close hundreds of thousands of stores."
On the consumer:
"They're still overleveraged, they're losing jobs, their credit has been cut back."
On America:
"We are in the tank forever. As a country, we are out of control, we're in a death spiral."
On the stock market:
"We're in terrible shape. That's what the fundamentals tell me. I can't explain the stock market."
You can (and should) watch the Davidowitz interview here, because the words above don't properly communicate the depth of his passion about just how bad conditions on the ground in the retail sector are.
Yesterday, one dear reader and regular correspondent wrote in with the following. I think it does a good job of summing up the unease that many now feel as they observe the disconnect between what their own eyes see and what the government tells them they should be seeing.
XXXXX,
I'm thinking that the USA will implode, much in the same way that the USSR did "suddenly" ... there will be a threat coming from some event(s) and before you know it, like a building that has been detonated, poof, the USA as we have known her is gone ... and likely this will happen during or just after Obama has rammed the USA into the heights of debt and printed the last $0.004 dollar!
Going after tax havens and looking to increase taxes ... will speed up the exit of the wealthy and the leader class, leaving the middle class to collapse under the burden of having bailed out the scammers and white-collar thieves of Wall Street ... Obama is either guilty of not seeing the forest for the trees or extremely misguided, perhaps insane and/or suffering from a split personality with both Eastern/Western values and has the unenviable role of leading the USA's national suicide...
Could the almighty U.S. implode almost overnight as the weight of reality overruns the ramparts of a fictional recovery in the economy - an economy that is hampered at every turn by an overextended, overreacting, and overreaching government?
History is clear and unequivocal on this point. Yes.
It has happened to every empire that has come before.
