{"id":41235,"date":"2018-12-03T14:18:41","date_gmt":"2018-12-03T19:18:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=41235"},"modified":"2018-12-03T14:18:41","modified_gmt":"2018-12-03T19:18:41","slug":"the-ghost-of-christmas-present","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=41235","title":{"rendered":"The Ghost of Christmas Present"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Ghost of Christmas Present<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Apparently one additional world leader turned up in Buenos Aires without fanfare this weekend. The General Secretary of the North Pole, known popularly as Santa Claus, took his latest-model hypersonic sleigh to the G-20 Meeting, and made sure that the global financial elite would find their Christmas stockings stuffed with sugarplums one last time before the great reflation bull market dies of incredulity.<\/p>\n

Something drastic was required as so many enterprises were skidding into a ditch last month, especially FAANGs, cars, house sales, and oil, while the Grand Old Man of the Dow Jones, General Electric, was singing its death song like an old Arikara chief in the prairie twilight. The US threat of 25 percent tariffs on Chinese exports was shunted ahead 90 days, giving the almighty algos and their human errand boys one last shot at looting the future.<\/p>\n

How exactly will this change the basic equation of China sending its industrial output to WalMart in exchange for American IOUs, while the trade deficit mounts ever-higher and the last holdouts of the US middle class sink into debt, addiction, and hopelessness? It won\u2019t, of course, because Americans have to find another reason to get up in the morning besides reporting to the national demolition derby. I don\u2019t know about you, but it doesn\u2019t warm my heart to hear about x-hundred thousand \u201chousing starts\u201d every month, knowing that it represents the destruction of x-thousand acres of meadow, field, and forest, and that what\u2019s being laid down on the landscape out there <\/em>is soul-crushing infrastructure with no future.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not hard to see why US life expectancy is going down, driven by the two new leading causes of death: opiate drugs and suicide \u2014 the former often in the service of the latter.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Ghost of Christmas Present Apparently one additional world leader turned up in Buenos Aires without fanfare this weekend. The General Secretary of the North Pole, known popularly as Santa Claus, took his latest-model hypersonic sleigh to the G-20 Meeting, and made sure that the global financial elite would find their Christmas stockings stuffed with […]<\/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":[130,14964,344,449,805,3222,827],"class_list":["post-41235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-geopolitics","tag-china","tag-clusterfuck-nation","tag-g20","tag-james-howard-kunstler","tag-trade","tag-trade-war","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41235","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=41235"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41235\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41236,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41235\/revisions\/41236"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}