But its not real money, its a load of electronic ponzi scheme transactions that has created tens of millions of $'s worth of crippling debt out of the trailer town where Jesco White lives with Norma Jean. Only crony capitalism has such potent powers. And still it continues, its greedy, ever needy mission to reduce the world to the living conditions of untermenschen.

If vampyre's exist, and indeed they do, you can rest safe in the knowledge that through enlightened marketing, they're working in banking and looking to get their four quarts of plasma from you over a couple of decades at least. Its your sons, daughters and grandchildren they'll be planning on sucking the marrow out before their prime.  Of course with no easy oil left and the current exposure of our mediocre and contrite elites, anything is possible in the next half hour.

I think something will happen in between to eliminate the debt and possibly quite a few lives too. I dunno' the last couple of weeks, with all the continuing banking crisis, cyber attacks and Wilkileaks, the stage seems set for a grotty and post-industrialised West: jobs gone that will never ever come back, will we end up like Mexico? Or India? Then I remember the industrial might of Germany, and events don't seem that terminal.

At least in Oil & Gas there will be massive up turn in 2011, particularly in the Pacific rim and Australia. The question is, how to get there from here?

That's usual leftist hogwash.  The president got an extension of unemployment benefits - an increase in social spending, wealth redistribution, whatever - in exchange for a *continuation* of the current tax levels.

For the sake of semantics, let's agree that:
- When your tax rate go up from t0 to t1, that's a tax increase;
- When your tax rate go down from t0 to t1, that's a tax decrease;
- When your tax rate stay flat from t0 to t1, that's a non-event.

The Republicans didn't get to the house on the wings of a deficit fear, but on one of a state that has grown too large.

The deficit is a red hearing.  Everyone wants to shrink it at some time.  What the right wants in that context is a lower deficit - eventually a small or null one - combined with a small state and low taxes - i.e., low "redistribution".

Last edited by JDelage (2011-01-04 01:26:54)

Some USA employment stats that are depressing:

http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=176723

An interesting editorial from Jon Snow on the other problem we face:

http://blogs.channel4.com/snowblog/late-put-radical-genie-bottle/14380

More doom, America goes socialist, but not by choice:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/8248108/Dambisa-Moyo-without-change-US-will-almost-certainly-become-a-socialist-nation.html

Last edited by 4F Hepcat (2011-01-09 01:05:02)

I love this:

It certainly hasn’t stopped her from becoming a pronounced free marketeer.

“I think the markets can work in a managed way,” she says. “If they’re left to run rampant it’s obviously problematic, but I think they are the best way of delivering economic benefits and have been shown to be the method to generate the biggest economic benefits to the highest number of people.”

Er....isn't that a contradiction?