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“Full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes” was an approach fortunately justified by events during the Battle of Mobile Bay, but as a strategy for managing a nation’s economy it is folly. Mr. Obama’s mission to destroy America’s economy is complete. The damage he has done is irreversible. The dollar is history. The American economy is going down, and soon.
The posh commentators say the collapse will be gradual rather than sudden. But few are now predicting there will not be collapse at all.
Here are just some of the pointers. First and foremost, U.S. public debt is $18.3 trillion. By the time Mr. Obama leaves the White House late next year, he will have doubled it in a single “presidency.” On top of that, Uncle Sam has unfunded liabilities of at least $100 trillion – Medicare, Medicaid, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, Social Security and so forth.
Partly as a result of all that debt, and partly through scandalous mismanagement, the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank is insolvent – insolvent even though it has robbed the citizen blind by reducing the value of the dollar to just 4 cents compared with what it would buy when the Fed was founded a century ago.
At book value, the Fed pretends to be solvent, but that is because it accounts for its assets at cost and not at today’s market price. The Fed has $60 billion in capital, about twice that in total assets, and $4.5 trillion in liabilities. Its average leveraging was around 40:1 over the past half-century. Now it is leveraged at more like 80:1. That kind of leveraging among the private banks was what brought about the crash of 2008.
On a mark-to-market basis, the Fed is trading while insolvent. That is illegal for any bank, including the Fed, but the GOP is weak, the individual citizen is too poor to fight city hall in the courts and increasingly the governing class is above the law anyway. So nothing will be done about what is, in essence, one of the largest financial frauds in history.
To try to stave off the now-inevitable crash and the long depression that will follow, the Fed has resorted to the desperate measure of printing more than $3 trillion unsupported by any assets in less than a decade. That works out at $25,000 for every taxpayer in America. It isn’t working. The velocity of money has tanked.
Interest rates have been pushed down to zero, robbing pensioners of a reasonable return on their savings.
Not only that, but new GDP growth per dollar of debt has plummeted from around 50 cents on the dollar to zero under Mr. Obama, whose borrowing produces not merely a loss but a total loss. There is nothing to show for it.
That is not all. There are indications that the Fed may have laundered some $300 billion by paying Belgium to buy some of the U.S. Treasury bonds being dumped by Russia and China. If it isn’t the Fed, then who is it? Belgium can’t afford it. Memo to the CIA’s economic threats division: You’d better find out.
Russia and China are now dumping U.S. Treasuries on the market by the sackful. They know America is going down, and they are getting out in good time. China is going into gold in a very big way, doing so while the price is low. China will make billions when the crash comes and the price of precious metals spikes. Even after dumping Treasuries, she remains far and away America’s largest creditor, holding something like 20 percent of all U.S. government debt.
As Margaret Thatcher used to say, if you are in debt to another country, you are no longer sovereign. The first step she took was to pay back every penny the previous Socialist administration had borrowed overseas. Not so Mr. Obama. His fellow Communists in China now rule the America roost by holding more than a fifth of your nation’s debt.
The CEO of one of Russia’s biggest banks said not long ago: “It is time to change the entire international financial system that considers the dollar the key reserve currency.”
Russia is increasingly denominating international energy export contracts not in dollars but in roubles. China is increasingly doing bilateral trade deals in renminbi, the international version of its own currency, the yuan. America, then, is going to lose the vast cash value of the dollar’s status as the international reserve currency. Indeed, much of that value has already been lost.
Then there’s the private sector. U.S. banks are carrying $60 trillion in debt, which is not far short of a year’s global total economic output. And that debt is growing around 25 times faster than the U.S. economy as a whole. Hardly a stable situation.
Yet, as the Titanic sinks, the band plays on. Stock-market capitalization is currently more than double the annual output of the entire U.S. economy. The normal ratio is about half that. Shares are seriously overvalued. Hardly a stable situation.
The plight to which Mr. Obama has reduced America’s finances has global implications. One of these is that the total value of open futures and options contracts – derivatives based on the underlying value of stocks and shares – is now equal to 10 years’ total global economic output. Hardly a stable situation.
America is already not merely in recession but in depression. One citizen in six gets food stamps. Hardly a stable situation.
In the U.K., we have similar problems. The Children’s Coalition that governed us till earlier this year doubled our national debt in its five-year term of office, and the present administration has now deferred, yet again, the date on which we shall begin to pay back our national debt. More than half of all British households receive more in benefits than they pay in taxes. Hardly a stable situation.
Yet the current British government won the recent general election because the people feared, rightly, that the even more socialist alternative would be still worse for the economy.
In Europe, many Eurozone countries are bankrupt. Greece is just the first domino to fall. Even China, whose stock market has crashed, continues to be weak and may itself be the nation that triggers the worldwide collapse that will bring low the economies of all nations which, like America and Britain, have foolishly adopted socialism.
To quote Margaret Thatcher again, socialism is all very well until other people’s money runs out. Other people’s money has now run out. Expect trouble ahead.
