From Bill Bonner of Bonner and Partners via davidstockmanscontracorner.com:
WATERFORD, Ireland – You go for a nice picnic on the slopes of Vesuvius… You spread out your tablecloth. You open your picnic hamper. You prepare for a relaxing afternoon in the warm October sun.
And then someone comes running down the mountain, warning that the volcano is going to blow up. You pack up your sausages and put a cork in the wine bottle… and rush to the car and drive away. Better to be safe than sorry. And then? Nothing happens.
Most of the time, you can safely ignore the nervous nellies and prophetic Cassandras. (According to legend, Apollo gave Cassandra the gift of prophecy. When she refused him, he spat into her mouth so she would never be believed.) But sometimes the worrywarts are right…
For the last 16 years, we’ve been writing a daily e-letter – first the Daily Reckoning and now the Diary. We saw the collapse of the dot-com bubble coming and warned readers. Most didn’t want to hear it; they were making good money in the stock market. It was a “new era.” And they didn’t want it to end.
But the Nasdaq collapsed in 2000… and didn’t recover until 15 years later. We believed at the time that the U.S. economy would follow Japan into a long, slow slump. With Addison Wiggin, we wrote a book about it, Financial Reckoning Day: Surviving the Soft Depression of the 21st Century.
The Nasdaq’s bubble round-trip between the late 1990s and early 2000ds. No-one wanted to hear any warnings at the top (we still remember people buying profit-less wonder stocks for 100ds of dollars that don’t even exist anymore today) .
“Don’t fight the Fed,” is one of the old-timers’ rules on Wall Street. We understand the principle. You don’t fight the Fed because the Fed has more ammunition than you have. But when we were writing Financial Reckoning Day, we never imagined that the Fed could create an entire fantasy economy based on completely unnatural signals and grotesque manipulations.
That is the economy of the 21st century. It is an economy in which the old rules of supply and demand… value and price… up and down… have to be viewed through the distorted light of central bank intervention. When the price of new money – as set by the Fed to its best customers – is almost zero, who knows what other things are worth?
To continue reading: The Latest (and Dumbest) Central Bank Fraud
