Pondering the State of the Union as the British GDP reading takes a Nosedive

1/26/2011 Portland, Oregon – Pop in your mints…

Today all the buzz is about the State of the Union address that President Obama delivered last night.  Make no mistake, the President is perhaps the best orator that has ever been elected.  He gave what we considered to be a great speech.  It is ironic that only minutes after it was over there was already an uproar from nearly every corner of the Democratic base.  Environmentalists angered at the energy plan laid out and every parasite in the union complaining about the proposed domestic spending freeze.  Unfortunately, there is little He or anyone else in his administration can do, short of cutting taxes and relieving the people of Governmental regulations, that will help revive the American Economy to levels enjoyed just five short years ago.  The Democratic base will have to accustom itself to compromise or risk sounding like spoiled children.

The problem here in America is debt.  Specifically, there is way too much of it.  There is way too much of it because in the insane monetary experiment in which we live, the only way that "money" (and we use the term loosely) can be created is to create more debt.  There is only one way out of this mess, and that is to change the entire monetary system and make money that is backed by something real, that exists today.  Not an ambiguous claim on somebody else's future production.

If they had asked us to pen a few lines we would have taken full advantage of them.  Why beat around the bush on the issue of the currency?  Obama chose to simply ignore it, as have most Presidents.  But wouldn't it have been something if he had, in his classic Obama style, given it to the American public straight for a change?  Our contribution would have been something along the lines of:

An Inflationary Nightmare, a Stock Correction, and The End of the Bond Market Party all on the Horizon

1/25/2011 Portland, Oregon – Pop in your mints…

“Change,

Now it’s time for change

Nothing stays the same

Now it’s time for change”

Hu Jintao with apologies to Motley Crue

We are back in our tiny perch today with our sights trained on the horizon.  In the foreground, we see, along with the world, the horror of another terrorist attack.  This time at the Domodedovo Airport in Moscow.  Such senseless acts of violence, no matter how you may attempt to explain or justify them, have absolutely no place in our view of the world.  We grieve for the dead and injured and we further grieve for the blow that this may deal to the hope of many.  When fear overtakes hope, that is when things get truly dangerous.

Further on the horizon we continue to see reason for hope.  Hope that the current slow death of the US dollar regime may be about to speed up.  For starters, the Dow Jones industrial average, where much of the FED’s printed money makes its first stop on its way into commodity prices, rose to nearly 12,000 yesterday.  Are happy days here again?  Are the largest companies in America and the world returning to such incredible profitability that we are going to experience another bull market in equities?  We don't know, but the Maket Oracle, which seems to call a lot of things correctly, is calling for a 10% correction by mid February.  We generally think that, while nominal stock prices will continue to rise, stocks as an asset class will under perform a little known asset class called "real stuff" for some time.

Oil, Oozing Out of the Ground into Every Consumer Good On the Planet

1/21/2011 Portland, Oregon – Pop in your mints…

Today we are taking a short break from our usual rant/commentary.  As long as governments see fit to tinker with the economy and trade, there will be no shortage of fallacies to refute, advice to give, defeats to lament, and victories to cheer.  We see it as our duty to add a voice to the cause of Liberty, no matter how weak and crackled that voice may be.  However, here at The Mint, apart from bombarding our readers with seemingly incessant yet strangely entertaining commentary, we endeavor to go a step further and attempt to educate.  By educate, we mean assist you, fellow taxpayer, in cutting through the onslaught of data to pick out important trends.

As we have mentioned before, at the bottom of every Mint, we provide data on eleven metrics that we have given the title "Key Statistics."  We follow these Key Statistics daily in order to understand what is broadly happening to the economy within the confines of the US Dollar system which has come to dominate world commerce.  Please note that we define the US Dollar as a system, and we must emphasize that this system, which is often mistaken for Money, is in fact a large fishing net, one that is cast over the world in an attempt to measure every activity under the sun.

With all of that said, we will now move on to our educational Mint of the day, the topic of which is oil.

Obama to Eliminate “Just Plain Dumb” Regulations, Default as a Viable Strategy for the US!

1/19/2011 Portland, Oregon – Pop in your mints…

We awake today and sense that something is about to change, and change for the better.  We can't quite put our finger on it.  It is just a feeling we get from time to time.  We had this same type of feeling in mid 2009 about 2010.  It was going to be bad.  Not catastrophic, not even funny, but just plain bad.  In some ways we were right.  While all appeared to be well in the financial world, at least if you only look at the government sponsored numbers, one got this sinking feeling that something was amiss. 

Perhaps this may be the best way to sum up 2010.  It was the year that the feeling that something was amiss hit main street.

Let's face it.  When the fruits of over 30 years of monetary madness became evident in 2007 and 2008, the average person did not necessarily know what was going on.  On TV, the politicians and news anchors spoke of things going wrong and what was being done by the government to fix it.  By 2009, it was apparent that no matter how much the politicians said that all was well, all was not well.  By 2010, the full weight of the economic catastrophe was beginning to be felt by the general public.

This year we begin with hope.  We have a feeling that 2011 will be better, maybe much better, for the average Joe.  We have nothing to base this on, only a feeling.  It may be that 2011 will be better only by way of comparison with 2010, but better it will be.

The tax compromise reached near the end of 2010 gave credence to this feeling.

US Debt Ceiling Vote to Ignite Armageddon in Bond Markets? Key Indicators all Point to Inflation

1/18/2011 Portland, Oregon – Pop in your mints…

For some months now we have been wrestling with the notion that there will be a major collapse in the Bond Markets.  We have speculated as to the causes and possible effects in these chronicles, comparing the coming events to the battle of Armageddon, famously prophesied by John in the book of Revelation, Chapter 16.  Bondholders have been lured into a valley, and our guess is that they are about to get slaughtered.

When and how will this occur?  This is the subject of our speculation today.  Be forewarned, fellow Gambler, that we do not have any sort of inside information.  Rather, we rely on our own wild imagination and questionable powers of deduction.  Actual events may differ dramatically from what we imagine, and we pray that they will!

Our current speculation has its origin in digesting the reality of the upcoming Congressional vote as to whether or not to raise the debt ceiling.  In the past, this would barely have been news.  The government almost always, without fail, spends more money than it takes in. This is one of the few things that you can count on a democratically elected government to do.  To cover the deficit, the government must issue debt.  Since there is almost always a deficit and there is almost always interest to be paid on existing debt, the amount of debt owed by the government must always increase.  This is the basis of our current insane monetary system.