The Bubble to End All Bubbles

Zero Hedge ^ | 1/3/15 | Phoenix Capital Research

[Organic Panic]

The poor have nothing and will lose nothing.

The rich will lose nothing because they protect their assets.

The middle class will lose everything when the government raids their funds to bail out the politically connected and fund programs to keep the poor subsidized and keep government bureaucrats employed.

[kjam22]

LOL.... you’re giving her investment specifics.... you don’t know her age, financial needs, investment experience etc. Investing is not a one size fits all business.

[The Duke]

Yawn...I’ve been hearing “doom and gloom” about the impending collapse of the economy since I ran around in short pants and Lyndon Johnson was president.

Things change, and things *have* changed.

Is the Great Depression a fairy tale?

You do realize, don't you, that the biggest, most paranoid "prepper" of all is the US government itself?

[laplata]

Very interesting. He’s one evil, deceptive creature.

[IncPen]

~~~Then a savior/messiah-type (Obama maybe?) will show up to save the day and become the collectivist dictator of the world.~~~

Yes, that seems as if it could be the likely scenario.

 

Let's say you wanted to kill Capitalism so that it was dead, dead, dead– and would never come back.

Might you drive everyone into the stock market first, using low interest rates, then run that market up and pop the bubble real good?

Wouldn't that also be a goal?

[SamAdams76]

A woman may have false labor pains but one way or another, it's all over with in 9 months.

I've been hearing this alarmist crap about the economy for 40 years now and I'm sure there were people hollering about our impending financial doom well before I came on the scene.

[BfloGuy]

Any advice?

Hard assets: gold, art, land, etc..

It's called the flight to real value.

[SamAdams76]

Everybody talks about the Great Depression like it was some kind of world calamity. Well we got through it and actually the WW2 years were tougher on the average American than the Depression years were. During the war, people's sons and fathers were going overseas, many of them to die. Many staples were rationed and women were sent to work in factories.

During the Depression, nobody in America was starving. In fact, most people were employed and just about everybody found a way to make ends meet.

Even during prosperous times, there are a number of people who hit a stretch of bad luck fall upon hard times. It happens. It happened to me for a couple years once and this was during the go-go 1980s. Lot of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese got eaten and I used to search for quarters in seat cushions and in pay phone coin return slots. Money was so tight I would use public restrooms so that I didn't have to use up toilet paper at home.

Is that what you are trying to warn us about? Been there, done that.

[Pining_4_TX]

*chuckle* I enjoy reading ZeroHedge, but all they do is yell that the world is about to end. They’ve been doing this for years now. I suppose one of these days, they will be right.

[stig]

... They can play pretend for a very long time, as we’ve seen since 2008.

Yes just look how long Bernie Madoff did it and he didn't have the ability to just move a decimal point around.

I don't see how this end's well. Kicking this can down the road is the financial equivalent of heroin addiction. The more you do it the more tolerant you become and you keep doing more of it just to get by. The problem is we are so far into the addiction if someone were to put the brakes on the bubble will pop.

At one point I wasn't as worried because we were finding a ton of oil resources here in this country and I thought we could buy our way out of it by producing commodities. But now that the price of oil is going down it looks like we will just go belly up on all of this at some point in time. But I don't know when either. Worse even though I know it's coming I'm not sure of a clever strategy to make money off of it (if there even is one).

[RegulatorCountry]

I don’t know how such things are structured in Canada, but if you’re in some sort of tax-deferred or tax-preferred situation and can go more conservative without immediate monetary consequence, that’s one thing but selling and taking an immediate tax hit is actually creating a loss, which is what you feared that had you moving or closing your accounts to begin with. Remember that to help temper your alarm.

[RegulatorCountry]

The oil resources aren’t going away and the price won’t stay down forever, but it can go on for over a decade, see 1986-2003. I’d slap a tariff on OPEC imported oil myself, this game has damaged the US economy too many times since the seventies. But, people are operating under the illusion, delusion really, that allowing a cartel to collude and whipsaw us back and forth to their advantage is somehow “free trade.” There are multi-billions in derivatives associated with US shale oil production now, though. Maybe that’s a compelling enough reason to disallow OPEC dumping in an attempt to shut down domestic competition.