Burning Down the House in 2016, by Matt Bracken

SLL is not the only one who spots war on the horizon. From Matt Bracken at theburningplatform.com:

By now, it should be obvious to the observant that the ‘scoundrels-looting-the-treasury’ phase of our economic arc is about played out, and before the entire rotten financial edifice collapses, there will be a war ignited across Europe and the Middle East which will serve as a distraction for the masses, while the very worst of the scoundrels take to ground to wait for the smoke to clear before they emerge.

The gangsters actually directing the national governments that publicly front for their activities have nearly finished siphoning the remaining liquidity from the global financial system, leaving a hollow shell behind. The prostitutes who pose as our political leaders have been complicit at every step of the looting process. Now we are hearing the last wheezing notes of the calliope as the economic merry-go-round grinds to a halt. To borrow the expression from financial author Michael Hudson, the parasites have killed the host.

The world’s central banks – an integral part of the current cabal of looters – are out of even pretend remedies. There is no more smoke behind the mirrors. The zero interest rate creation of digital money can increase paper valuations as assets are traded back and forth between patty-cake playing looters, but the injected thin-air money cannot boost actual increases in productivity or even spur meaningful consumer spending. A global contraction is underway, and neither tap-dancing television hacks nor phony Soviet-style statistical trickery can conceal the emerging reality. Slapping another layer of pretty wallpaper over rotten termite-infested walls with another round of debt creation will have no greater curative power than sticking smiley-face band-aids over cancerous lesions. Whether or not (and how) the bellwether Deutsche Bank goes Tango Uniform in the coming weeks will hold many clues.

The global economy has finally reached the end of John Maynard Keynes’ famous long run, and while Keynes is indeed still dead, we who are still alive shall be left to harvest the bitter fruit of his profligate economic theories. We will test Ludwig Von Mises’ famous observation: “There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.”

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