100 Basis Points to Armageddon

by Bill Bonner
Daily Reckoning

Is there a fender anywhere in Christendom that the financial authorities have not dented yet?
They are lost without a compass. They are up the river without a paddle. At the automatic teller without a pin number. They have no theory that has not been discredited. They have no experience which does not contradict them.
In 2006, they couldn’t see the crisis coming. In 2008, they couldn’t understand it. In 2009-2011, they couldn’t fix it. Their theory told them they couldn’t spot a bubble; it was obvious to just about everyone else. Even here on the back page, we warned readers. Then, the financial elite mistook the problem for a lack of ready cash. Practically every American household knew what the real problem was: too much debt. And then, while everyone else knows you can’t fix a problem of too much debt by adding more debt, the authorities missed the point entirely. Since they began applying their fixes, the national debt of Italy grew $360 billion. Japan’s national debt rose $1.1 trillion. And the US added more than $2 trillion. They may have successfully ‘kicked the can down the road’; but now it is a bigger can. Last week, they tripped on it again.
In these, the world’s 3 leading debtors alone, the problem is now $3.5 trillion worse. And that is just a piece of it. These figures do not count the trillions’ worth of other monetary and fiscal duct tape the feds have run through. Congressman Ron Paul put the figure for the US alone at $5 trillion and asked Mr. Bernanke about it.
What do you think you got for all that money, he wanted to know? The Fed chief remained true to his delusions. The money wasn’t spent, he protested; it had been ‘invested.’
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Comment: The deeper root of our present troubles are misleading economic theories due to manifest careerism, particularly at the so-called "elite" institutions which sadly set the standard for the rest.