{"id":20012,"date":"2016-04-18T19:54:42","date_gmt":"2016-04-19T00:54:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=20012"},"modified":"2016-04-18T19:55:48","modified_gmt":"2016-04-19T00:55:48","slug":"the-elephant-cometh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=20012","title":{"rendered":"The Elephant Cometh"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Elephant Cometh<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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The elephant\u2019s not even in the room, which is why the 2016 election campaign is such a soap opera. The elephant outside the room is named\u00a0Discontinuity<\/em>. That\u2019s perhaps an intimidating word, but it is exactly what the USA is in for. It means that a lot of familiar things come to an end, stop, don\u2019t work the way they are supposed to \u2014 beginning, manifestly, with the election process now underway in all its unprecedented bizarreness.<\/p>\n

One reason it\u2019s difficult to comprehend discontinuity is because so many operations and institutions of daily life in America have insidiously become rackets, meaning that they are kept going only by dishonest means. If we didn\u2019t lie to ourselves about them, they couldn\u2019t continue.<\/p>\n

For instance the automobile racket. Without a solid, solvent middle-class, you can\u2019t sell cars. Americans are used to paying for cars on installment loans. If the middle class is so crippled by prior debt and the disappearance of good-paying jobs that they can\u2019t qualify for car loans, well, the answer is to give them loans anyway, on terms that don\u2019t really pencil out \u2014 such as 7-year loans at 0 percent interest for used cars (that will be worth next to nothing long before the loan expires).<\/p>\n

This will go on until it can\u2019t, which is what discontinuity is all about. The car companies and the banks (with help from government regulators and political cheerleaders) have created this work-around by treating \u201csub-prime\u201d car loans the same way they treated sub-prime mortgages: they bundle them into larger packages of bonds called collateralized loan obligations. These, in turn, are sold mainly to big pension fund and insurance companies desperate for \u201cyield\u201d (higher interest) on \u201csafe\u201d investments that ostensibly preserve their principal.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Elephant Cometh The elephant\u2019s not even in the room, which is why the 2016 election campaign is such a soap opera. The elephant outside the room is named\u00a0Discontinuity. That\u2019s perhaps an intimidating word, but it is exactly what the USA is in for. It means that a lot of familiar things come to an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[3683,13520,63,88,13519,431,449,13521,827],"class_list":["post-20012","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-2016-presidential-election","tag-automobiles","tag-banks","tag-bonds","tag-discontinuity","tag-interest-rates","tag-james-howard-kunstler","tag-sub-prime-mortgages","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20012","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20012"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20012\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20014,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20012\/revisions\/20014"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}