FedUpUSA

Archive for January 31st, 2012

This was a surprise?

Confidence among U.S. consumers unexpectedly dropped in January as gasoline prices picked up and more Americans said jobs were hard to get.

The Conference Board’s confidence index fell to 61.1 from a revised 64.8 reading in the prior month, figures from the New York-based private research group showed today. The median forecast of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News called for a rise to 68. The figure was lower than the most pessimistic projection.

Why is this a surprise?  As I noted early in the month the Employment Report, which many said showed “improvement” with a +200k headline number, in fact showed job loss when one looked at the household survey, and it is actual consumers who buy actual things, not government fudge-boxes!

Of course we can’t have the truth in the mainstream media off those reports, can we?  Never mind that other data has showed a contracting consumer spending appetite and more desperation as credit is being used once again in a “last gasp” attempt to avoid insolvency.

The data is all around you if you care to look — the consumer is collapsing as there has been no recovery of materiality in employment.  Just look at the labor participation rate!

Recovery….. where?

Wake up America.  The government’s policy of ladling out “free cheese” in an attempt to prevent the adjustment of the economy back to what we can actually afford both at a government and personal level is both futile and stupid.  It in fact serves only one purpose — attempting to buy votes.

What is the difference between printing money and counterfeiting? There is none.

Counterfeiting is illegal because it is the false creation of value. The counterfeiter takes low-value paper and turns it into high-value money, which is fundamentally a claim on the real productive value of the economy that issues the currency and recognizes it as a proxy means of exchanging that productive value.

Counterfeiting is illegal because the counterfeiter creates no additional value–he creates only the proxy for value. Creating real value–adding meaningful goods or services to the economy–is tedious, hard work.  How much easier to simply transform near-worthless paper into a claim on actual goods and services.

If this is illegal, then would somebody please arrest the Board of the Federal Reserve for counterfeiting? The Fed has blatantly printed money without creating any real value to back up their added claims on productive value. Hence they are counterfeiting, pure and simple. A government based on rule of law would  arrest these fraudsters and cons at the earliest possible convenience.

And while you’re drawing up the indictment, can you also charge them with counterfeiting competence and policy, as they have demonstrated the Peter Principle par excellence: the Board has risen to its highest level of incompetence. Their  counterfeit policies have wreaked incomparable damage on the real productive economy.

The essence of counterfeit policy–a fake policy that claims to be something it is not–is “extend and pretend.” And the sole goal of  “extend and pretend” is self-preservation and the preservation of the Financial Elite which has tightened its grip on the nation’s throat as a direct consequence of Federal Reserve policies–notably “extend and pretend.”

“Extend and pretend” extends the “too big to fail” Financial Sector’s licence to mask its insolvency  and its licence to continue issuing debt, leverage and derivatives under false pretences, i.e. that the   risk and market value of these instruments are transparent. They are not.

In effect, the banks are also counterfeiters, as they are issuing debt–a claim on future productive value–without adding any actual value to the economy.

Thus the Fed and the Financial Sector are both diluting the base of actual real value with ever-expanding claims on real productive value by printing money and issuing debt.  If an economy creates 100 units of productive value, and issues 100 units of currency as a proxy claim on that value to be used as a means of exchange, then there is a 1-to-1 correspondence with the money claim on productive value and the actual value.

If someone prints another 100 units of money and starts buying assets with that money, then they are claiming 1 unit of money still equals 1 unit of production  though they have debased the currency so that it actually takes 2 units of money to represent 1 unit of productive value.

This is a con of the first order, which is why counterfeiting is illegal. If counterfeiting is illegal because it is a con, a fraudulent claim on real goods, services and assets, then how can money printing by the Fed (a private bank, mind you) be legal?

It can only be legal in a kleptocracy ruled by a Financial Elite bent on political and financial dominance, a Plutocracy whose wealth is all skimmed from the productive economy via ever-expanding issuance of money and debt.

When corporations and the State are one, we call it fascism. In the U.S., it has taken the form of financial fascism, and the Federal Reserve and Federal agencies (Treasury, Freddie Mac, FHA, etc.) are  the handlers and enablers of this kleptocratic financial fascism.  They add no value, they only steal value from those who create it.

Charles Hugh Smith – Of Two Minds