{"id":23660,"date":"2017-04-17T19:49:15","date_gmt":"2017-04-18T00:49:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=23660"},"modified":"2017-04-17T19:49:51","modified_gmt":"2017-04-18T00:49:51","slug":"buy-the-dip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=23660","title":{"rendered":"Buy the Dip?"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"title-media-block\">\n<div class=\"post-title-wrap\">\n<h3 class=\"title\"><a title=\"Buy the Dip?\" href=\"http:\/\/kunstler.com\/clusterfuck-nation\/buy-the-dip\/\" rel=\"bookmark\">Buy the Dip?<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"entry\">\n<div class=\"column column-01\">\n<p>The military frolics of spring have distracted the nation\u2019s attention from the economic and financial dynamics that pose the ultimate mortal threat to business as usual. Note the distinction between economic and financial. The first represents real activity in this Land of the Deal: people doing and making. The second, finance, used to be a minor branch \u2014 only about five percent \u2014 of all the doing in the days of America\u2019s putative bigliest greatitude.\u00a0The task of finance then was limited and straightforward: to manage the allocation of capital for more doing and making. The profit in that enabled bankers to drive Cadillacs instead of Chevrolets, but not much more.<\/p>\n<p>These days, finance is closer to 40 percent of all the doing in America, and it is not about making anything, but getting more than its share of \u201cmoney\u201d \u2014 whatever that is now \u2014 and what \u201cmoney\u201d mostly is is whatever the people engaged in finance say it is, for instance, Fannie Mae bonds representing millions of sketchy loans for houses of vinyl and strand-board built in places with no future\u2026 or stock issued by the Tesla corporation\u2026 or the sovereign IOUs of the US Treasury.<\/p>\n<p>The list of things that pretend to be \u201cmoney\u201d these days would be long and shocking and the sheer churn of these instruments among the banks and markets \u201cproduces\u201d the fabled \u201crevenue streams\u201d beloved of <em>The Wall Street Journal<\/em>. What happens when the world discovers that these instruments (securities and their derivatives) represent falsely? Why, bigly trouble.<\/p>\n<p>And this is the season we\u2019re moving into as the dogwoods blaze: the season of the re-discovery of actual value. For those of you gloating over last week\u2019s demonstrations of US Big Stick-ism, be warned that our military shenanigans have given China and Russia every reason to discipline this country by undermining the international standing of the dollar.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Buy the Dip? The military frolics of spring have distracted the nation\u2019s attention from the economic and financial dynamics that pose the ultimate mortal threat to business as usual. Note the distinction between economic and financial. The first represents real activity in this Land of the Deal: people doing and making. The second, finance, used [&hellip;]<\/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":[2,5],"tags":[4189,130,14964,449,694,827,2202,861],"class_list":["post-23660","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-geopolitics","tag-buy-the-dip","tag-china","tag-clusterfuck-nation","tag-james-howard-kunstler","tag-russia","tag-united-states","tag-us-treasury","tag-wall-street-journal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23660","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=23660"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23660\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23662,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23660\/revisions\/23662"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23660"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23660"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23660"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}