PopCon: The ‘Economic Recovery’ Lie

By: James_West

It is only human to seek reasons for optimism, and to find comfort in self-delusion. “You’re going to be just fine,” is probably one of the most frequent lies told among family members when serious injury or illness occurs. We have to believe we’re going to be “just fine”, because the alternative is too painful, and painfully unacceptable.

However, when the tendency towards delusion overshoots mere comfort and interferes with the potential effectiveness of a remedy, a brisk slap across the face is occasionally required to exorcise the delusion and let the healing begin.

Such is the case with the global economy and its top leadership. The obsession among Ben Bernanke, Timmy Geithner, and Barack Obama in convincing Americans the storm is over and the rainbow is imminent are thoroughly preventing the corrective influence of unfettered markets from bestowing their therapeutic effect upon us. Only gold, not U.S. dollars, can fill the pot at the foot of the rainbow. They need a good smack across the face to get this through their stubborn little pointed heads.

Japan just got a nice resounding smack across the face from Moody’s. Downgrading the debt of the proud and massively self-conscious Japanese is more like a smack across the face after pulling their pants down in public. I’ve got that nation on suicide watch for the time being.

In Egypt, Tunisia and Yemen, the citizens of those nations are administering a very energetic smack across the government face by rioting, and demanding an end to tyranny and injustice. The grass roots, unorganized and spontaneous nature of the social conflagration is testimony to its origin in the honestly aggrieved and tormented national soul. The smoke from those fires carries the scent of revolution, and threatens to ignite the entire region.

England has just recorded a year of negative GDP growth, or more accurately, a year of GDP contraction. There is no ‘perception management’ program in place among the admirably pragmatic Brits. Things are not good, and they clearly have embraced the idea that happy phony touchy-feely is unacceptable. They’re going to solve the problems by rolling up their sleeves and tackling the credit-spawned imbalances head on. But there’s just one problem.

These damn American elitist leaders and their obsessively inward facing narcissism is hindering the process. The non-stop and accelerating circle-jerk of Fed buying Treasuries so they can write checks and spew dollars into the economy has created the illusion of recovery, based on the selective presentation of certain data, that, taken on their own, might be indicative of economic resuscitation. But analyzed in the context of broader economic events and circumstances, they are merely numbers generated by numbers, and against the larger negative economic factors, are irrelevant. It’s the global economy that’s choking on U.S. dollar driven asphyxiation, and Moody’s is threatening the requisite slap with a downgrade.

This is the spread of the sovereign debt crisis from the European fringe to the globalized mainstream. It’s a cancer that’s spreading, even while these idiot pseudo-Americans harp on about recovery and growth and hijack Davos turning into an après-ski circle jerk glee club.

I tell you I’ve never been prouder to be Canadian. When the real Americans catch the whiff from Egypt and start a little war dance of their own to end the tyranny and oppression of the elitists who have stolen democracy, liberty and justice from the populace, a smack across the face administered from within its own borders shall be imminent. That day is coming…you can just smell it.

Among the irrefutable proof that the economic recovery is a complete and treasonous lie are the following facts:

Unemployment continues to spread;
Consumer prices are rising;
Foreclosures are still mounting;
Home prices are still dropping;
The United States Government is broke.

Here’s how that lie is being morphed into the apparent economic recovery and becoming amplified and broadcast to the erstwhile anesthetized American public:

1. The U.S. Federal Reserve and the United States Treasury, effectively two departments within the administration of the national fiscal management branch of the government, fabricate, out of thin air, trillions of U.S. Dollars, and then give them to the nations biggest financial institutions.

2. These institutions then take these counterfeit dollars, and inject them into commodities markets by establishing hundreds of thousands of derivative contracts both long (betting the future prices rises) and short (betting the future price falls). The losses are rolled over into new contracts, and the wins cashed in and the contracts rolled up. With no position limits, no transparency, and no rules, the recycled losses build and build and build and now sit at some $600 trillion??

3. The money fabricated from nothing becomes more money fabricated from nothing in the form of profits. The profits are reported as earnings (fabricated from nothing) generating positive numbers in the stock market (that mean nothing). All this in an effort to confuse you, the consumer, investor, and saver, into continuously working to generate real wages increasingly worth nothing thanks to this system, and abiding the law while they use your delusion to concentrate control of the world’s assets into ever narrower and centralized control.

Lets put it another way. Lets say, you work for me, and I pay you in popcorn, which you can use to trade for things like rice and corn and steak and cheerios and gas, because the popcorn has been accepted as a medium of trade, thanks to the stupendous marketing efforts of the central popcorn bank and the popcorn treasury, for over a century. Popcorn used to represent a certain amount of gold or silver or both but that system was just too dumb and didn’t make sense and so now popcorn just represents popcorn. Its easy to pop, and everybody likes it.

But suddenly, one day, I start paying you less popcorn, and at the same time, it takes more popcorn to buy the staples of life. Your family’s economy crumbles, and suddenly your son can’t go to soccer games (cause that takes popcorn and everybody knows, popcorn doesn’t just grow on trees), and little Tina can’t go to ballet, cause that takes more popcorn, and all the while, on TV and on the movies, everybody has all the popcorn in the world and they’re all dressed well and healthy and beautiful, and in the news, the popcorn economy is improving. Popcorn, it would seem, is the be-all and end-all of life. But popcorn can’t buy happiness, can it?

Suddenly, the popcorn fed and popcorn treasury announce that hey!. We’re just gonna pop more popcorn, cause that’s what we need. So the popcorn goes into the economy from the popcorn bowls at the top of the food chain, and suddenly there’s streets being paved, and new signs going up, and it starts to look and feel like things are gonna be okay, because the popcorn market, coincidentally is showing that certain sectors of the NYPE (New York Popcorn Exchange) are improving in earnings, and that’s driving the NYPE higher.

Popcorn is buying incrementally less, but there seems to be so much popcorn around…just that you can’t really seem to get your hands on any. But they keep popping popcorn, but more and more of your friends are finding they’re popcorn salaries aren’t cutting the mustard and they’re being turfed out onto the street.

Popcorn popcorn everywhere. Golly. Why then, with all this popcorn around, are things going so sideways on the real world spreadsheet groaning under the increasing weight of the national debt? Why Japan, who has more popcorn out than anybody, just got officially reclassified as an economy that maybe shouldn’t have so much popcorn invested into it. Maybe they can’t repay their popcorn obligations to the popcorn generating countries that keep lending them more popcorn. You could say, they’re choking on their own popcorn.

This is the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time, the most popular con in history. Lets call it PopCon, so it has the slick marketing-oriented anagram that gives it a nice sound and imparts the mantle of respectability.

Despite the popularity of the concept of ‘too big to fail’ among bankers and economists in the diseased economies, the simple truth is, nothing is too big to fail, and perpetual growth is impossible. Any future predicated on perpetual growth is bound to fail. The perpetual growth strategy guarantees that.

Does anybody in Davos know this? And if they do, does anyone have the cojones to say it? And if they do, do they have the political capital to effect the changes that would defer this inevitability and reverse it?

I don’t see anyone. All I see are a bunch of theoretical economists and straw captains paying way, way, way too much for a ticket into the biggest nincompoop club in the world. Davos is just an international forum to strategize the next stage of PopCon.

A Coordinated Assault on Gold and Silver
The proof of a collusive and covert assault on the gold price is cobbled together strictly from circumstantial evidence. The massive build-up of short positions, and the cancellation of thousands of long contracts by the cartel of JP Morgan, HSBC and others is a signal to real bullion investors that such an attack is underway, and long investors dutifully proceed to the sideline while this perennial fraud-in-progress unfolds.

The withering of CFTC resolve into vague policy action items for the future since Bart Chilton’s comments expressing unequivocal conviction of market manipulation is proof of the influence of the banks over government policy. That this assault is mounted on such a coordinated basis is evident in the peculiar headlines and attention of CNBC, CNN, the Wall Street Journal and other elitist controlled mainstream financial media outlets proclaiming the abandonment by investors of gold as evidence by the “sharpest drop in the gold price in weeks.” at the outset of 2011. That has hardly occasioned such a uniform response that unanimously confirms the end of the gold bull market in the past, considering the see-saw rise of gold from $300 an ounce to $1440 an ounce at the end of 2010.

Another highly suspicious behaviour in the gold market is despite what should be highly highly gold positive events, i.e. the sudden breakdown of order in the middle east (normally sending investors flocking to gold), the downgrade of Japan’s debt to AA- (a signal of spreading sovereign debt deterioration) and the U.S. record deficit combined with Treasury needing to go cap-in-hand to ask congress for clearance to borrow more money. AND Moody’s threat to downgrade U.S. debt. These factors manifesting themselves together in 2006 would be enough to send gold soaring, but that reaction is completely absent. What gives?

The lawsuits brought by GATA and the silver traders are proceeding, and the news outlets prefer to speculate on the demise of the gold market instead of focusing on growing fiduciary delinquency of the country’s leadership. I’m sorry but does America not understand that it is now a fascist regime in the purest sense of the concept? What’s happening in Egypt right now could easily erupt in the United States if they don’t revise their self-image. Law and order is eroding in the United States and the grievances of the Egyptians closely mirror those of increasing numbers of Americans.

The time for plastic surgery is over. Radical bypass surgery is needed to resuscitate the U.S. economy meaningfully. The authors of the concept of regime change are closer to falling victim to their own design then they clearly understand.

With the publication of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission’s report, unprecedented evidence pointing to preferential treatment of certain of the largest (too big too fail) institutions by government employees should theoretically catalyze a veritable armada of class action lawsuits. The American public has the ultimate opportunity to apply and keep up the pressure on the failed democracy and suspension of constitutional rights catalogued in this document.

And since the commission has further pledged to publish boatloads of raw data and evidence, the U.S. is in a superb position to attack the anti-American banking and government criminal group in the courts, in the press, and spread the message through social media that the jig is up, and its time to demand in the most vociferous yet peaceful way, in the American tradition, an end to the current regime. New laws are required that decisively (not just optically) divorce banking from government. Banks should not be consulted in any way when drawing up legislation designed to isolate an admittedly predatory and opportunistic industry from stealing the homes and jobs of ordinary American citizens.

Egypt may be a world away, but its grievances are shared, on a growing basis, by increasing numbers of Americans, and the collapse of the U.S. economy under an insupportable debt load is at hand. Abandoning dollars for gold and silver (for Americans) or more stable currencies (Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Norway, Switzerland) as an interim measure is the only defense the average American with any assets or savings left has.

James West is the publisher of the highly influential and widely respected Midas Letter at midasletter.com. MidasLetter specializes in identifying emerging companies in gold and silver exploration at the beginning of their share price appreication curves, and regularly delivers 10 baggers (stocks that increase in value by at least a factor of 10) to his premium subscribers. Subscribe at http://www.midasletter.com/subscribe.php.

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