Wednesday, August 10, 2011

The Stock Yards

How do the places where livestock are herded to facilitate their "harvest" differ from the stock market?

The slaughter is never as bloody or disorderly as Wall Street is now.

Kind of makes you wonder, where have all the Bulls gone?  And, where did the government debt crisis go?

Same place actually, the realization that there is no basis for bullishness in this terrible economy, and there is no government debt crisis, save for the one invented by terrible politicians and economic policy frauds.

This gruesome mess is the result of catastrophically insufficient demand, and a glut of  wasting productive capacity.   

It is consumer debt and desperation that has the blood spewing.  We know the litany of causes, no need to repeat them all again and again.

But the most important cause does need to be declaimed as loudly and widely and often as possible.

It is the unspeakably tragic and life ruining level of unemployment in this country, which is idling and impoverishing huge and ever increasing swaths of  new and veteran members of the labor force.

Recovery will come when, and only when, this problem is taken seriously and solved.

And we know how to solve it.  Even Wall Street knows how to solve it.  Liquefy all that unproductive capital tied up in stocks, ship it over to the government by investing in treasuries, and pray like hell that policy makers will come to their senses and put all this virtually free money to work restoring economic vitality. 

Wall Street knows that the private sector cannot do it now while it is paralyzed by non-existent demand.

Wall Street also knows it is not government debt that is the problem, it is government inaction, at a time when all others are incapable of acting.




1 comment:

  1. Just to drive the point home about the market for US debt. Look at these negative real yield rates for treasuries.

    In an abstract sense, lenders are willing to practically pay the government to borrow money right now. So obviously our policy response is to figure out a way to slash "entitlements." Insanity.

    --Jeff

    ReplyDelete