I have no idea why anyone is surprised by the current stock market rout, the long overdue drop of the US' rather ridiculous triple A credit rating [as if drunkards and bankrupts are a good risk]; or the Euro-zone's probable demise. The only ones who seem generally shocked by it all is the political-media complex. It has thrown them off from their Obama worship, the Globaloney-Climatehooey scam; and the veneration of the State as the opus magnificus and the only moral arbiter of human existence. Many of us realists [or nattering negative nabobs] have spent the last 3 years singing the unholy hymns of financial legerdemain, debt, insolvency, and the vagrancy of the socialist-Marxist-Statist-Euro-Obama model. Quite a few were writing that we are in the early stages of a depression [see here for example].

US default was clearly presented in the Bush years. In January 2010 we could rightly state that the runup in the stock market now descried by the leisured well-coiffed media and political class as a 'sell off' was a fantasy:

“With zero interest rates there is no alternative but to buy stocks. No other vehicle exists to make money. With easy credit, Wall Street can use Federal Reserve money to trade, push up equity prices and 'declare a profit'. This induces funds to reinvest in the market and propels retail investors to partake in the market upsurge. Yet it is clear that the nexus of corruption between Wall Street and Washington is so obvious, entwined and mired in stench, that it is a wonder that Wall Street is not physically relocated to K Street in Washington. Regardless of the Prophet's bank-bashing rhetoric [done only to appease populist revulsion against Wall Street]; the big Finance houses and the Democratic party are married. Until death do they part. Or maybe until the next economic collapse do they part.”

Obama's destructive tenure is a common theme amongst us neanderthal conservatives. In April 2011 I was surprised that the US still had a triple A rating:

“It is not just a Greek, Portuguese or American issue. Insolvency is obvious and clear throughout the width and breadth of every major nation state. National Socialism, or Welfare-Capitalism, or the fantasia of a state-managed 'caring community' – these programs and ideas always fail. When interest rates increase, and the bond market wakes up, the stock market will fall like a rock. S&P's downgrade of the US financial situation is very mild. An A3 rating is frankly preposterous. The US is at best a B grade credit risk.”

In other words expect more downgrades. Ratings agencies usually lag reality by a few years.

Back in the neolithic era of May 2010, my latent Cro-Magnon personality grunted forth that the Eurozone was teats up:

“So we have the parody and the incongruity of bankrupted Northern Europe, sending $1 Trillion of money they don't have, to bankrupted Southern Europe. The total debt problem in Europe is $25 Trillion in the short term, and over $100 Trillion in the medium to longer term. $ 1 Trillion is just another sniff and whiff of a drug that the Europeans have overdosed on for too long. It will accomplish little except to 'settle' markets down for a few weeks, or months, until the next sovereign bankruptcy is declared. And than what?

The Northern Europeans sending to their Southern friends in Greece and beyond more money is akin to one drunk handing over his credit card to another drunk to buy rounds for an entire bar of drunks. It does not make a lot of sense. But little in Welfare-Socialist politics comports itself with reality. There is no easy, painless, communal-utopian solution to some 60 years of massive Keynesian and monetary failure. You can't inflate, print, or in-debt your way out of what is clearly a fiscal and soon to be inflationary disaster. The 3 generational disaster-in-the-making will not be averted by a cool $ 1 Trillion; any more than the next round of US financial contractions will be assuaged by more negative interest rates; TARP's; or 'job stimulus' nonsense.”

The big brains who run the world, spend, print, hector and lie. The media, the 'experts' and the lovers of unbridled statism still twitter on with affected accents and limper wrists that the Euro will survive and in fact rocket to become the world's foremost reserve currency. They also declare that the US and their hero the great man Obama are 'just fine'. Their proof? Socialism in their minds is vastly superior to any system in which 6 layers of government do not control the details of everyday life from olive size to bowel movements. Great sages say so. Mother earth demands such. Don't worry the guys from Harvard will figure it all out for us hunched over peasants with gaps in our teeth.

We are already in a second recession. Little to no job growth, 0 interest rates, guaranteed future inflation, gold now heading above $1800 in the short term; all this and more indicates a very nasty 2^nd round decline. In 5 years post state bankruptcies, the dissolution of the Euro; and a US bond debt downgrade to A status, round 3 will begin. The sad reality is that the elite will learn nothing from these experiences, and the vast destruction of wealth and human hope. They will mindlessly utter that more spending, more government, more John Lennon song's, more hope and change; and more of them are necessary. The media will declaim against all who protest against the obvious. Jews, the market, the evangelicals, the Tea Party, 'immoderates' everywhere will be blamed. But they will never finger themselves for blame.