{"id":50069,"date":"2019-12-11T09:41:02","date_gmt":"2019-12-11T14:41:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=50069"},"modified":"2019-12-11T09:41:08","modified_gmt":"2019-12-11T14:41:08","slug":"why-this-sucker-is-going-down","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=50069","title":{"rendered":"Why &#8220;This Sucker Is Going Down&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><a href=\"http:\/\/charleshughsmith.blogspot.com\/2019\/12\/why-this-sucker-is-going-down.html\">Why &#8220;This Sucker Is Going Down&#8221;<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Once the contagion starts spreading,\u00a0loose money\u00a0won&#8217;t put the fires out.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>As the nation&#8217;s political and economic leaders struggled to contain the 2008 financial meltdown, President George W. Bush famously summed the situation up:<\/strong>\u00a0&#8220;If money doesn&#8217;t loosen up, this sucker will go down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">&#8220;<strong>Eleven years into the\u00a0<em>loose money recovery<\/em>, this sucker is finally going down<\/strong>\u00a0for reasons that have little to do with tight money and everything to do with the inconvenient fact that\u00a0<strong>none of the structural problems have been addressed, much less actually fixed.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>We live in a bizarre world dominated by magical-thinking,<\/strong>\u00a0a world in which the Federal Reserve creating more dollars out of thin air is supposedly the solution to everything, while all the knotty structural problems&#8211;unsupportable pensions and entitlements, unsustainable dependence on debt to fund everything from infrastructure to a new iPhone, a sickcare system that is bankrupting the nation, a higher education system that is looting an entire generation for diplomas with marginal market value, a runaway National Security State that burns trillions on unwinnable wars and lies about it&#8211;are left untouched because they&#8217;re, well, difficult, and it&#8217;s so much easier to say that\u00a0<em>looser money<\/em>\u00a0will solve everything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Alas,\u00a0<em>loose money<\/em>\u00a0has created a new set of metastasizing problems that will\u00a0<em>bring this sucker down<\/em><\/strong>: widening wealth-income inequality, the\u00a0<em>only possible result of our system of creating and distributing new money to banks, financiers and corporations<\/em>; soaring systemic leverage that few see, much less understand; and perhaps most perverse, yet equally unnoticed,\u00a0<strong><em>loose money<\/em>\u00a0has widened the gap between the real economy and the top layer of arcane finance to the point there is literally no connection at all.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The happy story about debt-dependent capitalism is that thriving companies borrow money from our wunnerful banks to invest in new factories, research, software development, etc., hiring millions of top-notch people&#8211;top-notch!&#8211;at generous salaries to boost productivity and make the entire nation wealthier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Why &#8220;This Sucker Is Going Down&#8221; Once the contagion starts spreading,\u00a0loose money\u00a0won&#8217;t put the fires out. As the nation&#8217;s political and economic leaders struggled to contain the 2008 financial meltdown, President George W. Bush famously summed the situation up:\u00a0&#8220;If money doesn&#8217;t loosen up, this sucker will go down. &#8220;Eleven years into the\u00a0loose money recovery, this [&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],"tags":[127,303,1849],"class_list":["post-50069","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-charles-hugh-smith","tag-fed","tag-financial-markets"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50069","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=50069"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50069\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50071,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50069\/revisions\/50071"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}