"ricochetboy" <philzberg@e...> wrote:
If you believe the government statistics on cpi and unemployment, then
some research on your part might be advised.
Hand-waving about nebulous government conspiracies counts as neither
evidence nor argument.
it seems to this obsrever
that there is a great deal of suffering going on in the cities the
suburbs and the hinterlands, and that when viewed through an Austrian
lens, our economy and our people are in for a very rough ride.
Vouching doesn't count as evidence or argument either, and the plural of
"anecdote" is not "data".
I vividly remeber one Cato
scholar on C Span smugly telling folks, if they just put thier 401 k
into stocks they will be OK. Well anyone who retired in 1929 or 1966
would have waited 20 years for the purchasing power of thier portfolio
to break even.
The Cato Institute's reputation does not stand or fall on your memory of a
single quote of a Cato scholar speaking extemporaneously on television.
Under standard investment practices, nobody who retired in 1929 or 1966
would have had an equities-weighted portfolio. Rather, the standard practice
is to weight your portfolio toward less volatile instruments -- typically
bonds -- as you approach retirement. The Great Depression was a one-time
outlier event; that's why it's called "the Great Depression" instead of "the
1930s depression". To understand the historical returns to equities since
1871 without the above cherry-picking , see
http://www.vakkur.com/financial/spx_real_rtns_1871.htm. There has never been
a 30-year period with negative real returns, and more than 90% of 20-year
periods have had positive returns.
It has been a
great ride. But all credit expansions end in trdgedy. They always
have. This one being global due to Bretton Woods, and unlimited due to
the worldwide adoption of a faith based paper money system, will end
very badly.
Has the massive increase in global annual output since Nixon closed the gold
window in 1971 been somehow illusory? Do you question not only CPI and
unemployment but also GDP as part of the Vast Mainstream Conspiracy to make
the gold standard look antiquated?
Talking to San Fransiscans who are riding high on the real estate
credit bubble about trouble ahead is like talking to a flapper in
August 1929 about what her life will be reduced to in 1933.
Invoking the Great Depression of 1929 is like invoking the Black Plague of
1347. We've learned a little bit more about both pandemics and depressions
since these calamities. Keynes' General Theory is to depressions as germ
theory is to disease. Ever since the Great Depression, economists in America
have been indoctrinated to monitor and nurture aggregate demand, and to
never let it be starved out again like it was in the 1930's. For postings
Yahoo | Mail, Weather, Search, Politics, News, Finance, Sports & Videos.
Even is this group,
economic campaceny is the prevailing sentiment. I can't tell you
how or when the party ends, but my bets are on worldwide
hyperinflation.
As long as the world has multiple major currencies that are not locked into
fixed exchange rates, the chances of simultaneous worldwide hyperinflation
are vanishingly small. The future to fear is Eurosclerosis, driven less by
the 20th century's scourge (leftist equalitarianism) and more by the 21st
century's scourge: neophobic eco-pessimism. See
Yahoo | Mail, Weather, Search, Politics, News, Finance, Sports & Videos for details.
Brian Holtz
Yahoo! Inc.
2004 Libertarian candidate for Congress, CA14 (Silicon Valley)
http://marketliberal.org/>
blog: http://knowinghumans.net/>
book: http://humanknowledge.net/>