Off Topic; The downfall of the US.

Jan Panteltje wrote: ...

I wish we'd kept our Mad magazines - there was an item that prophesied exactly this - Americans had big fat asses, and looked like Schmoos or those Knock-down-pop-up clown balloons, and the Hungry Barbarians conquered us by just tipping us over. ;-D

Cheers! Rich

Ah! So it's _YOU_ who caused the Japan quake and tsunami and nuclear "meltdowns!"

Thanks a lot, you illegal alien!

Rich

Ah, a drug addict. This explains a lot.

Thanks, Rich

On a sunny day (Mon, 14 Mar 2011 03:56:22 -0700) it happened Rich Grise wrote in :

I just made a DVD of 'the fifth element' movie (recorded from satellite). And I got myself a 46 inch Samsung 3D set... Impressive, true home theatre.

I'm not addicted. I'd last quite a while if I stopped taking the pills, and I don't get withdrawal symptoms on those rare occasions when I get distracted and forget to take the pills at all. If I messed up the dose for any extended length of time, my blood pressure and my blood clotting time would move away from the desired values, and my expectation of life would drop sharply, which provides adequate motivation, but scarcely qualifies as habit-forming.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Then the government doesn't owe it to itself, it owes it to the people who made the investment, just like the Chinese, Japanese, ect. I don't see the difference? And I would imagine the SS trust fund carries the first mortgage, since it gets the least interest. Less interest means more security.

Something like that amounts to 17% of SS payments going to disabled people under the age of 50. The new game is to collect early on investments you never made.

I still don't follow the accounting, and I graduated from H&R Block's tax school.

-Bill

Different set of books. They "owe" the money to the people who will collect SS and they borrowed it from their grand children. They will have to borrow even more from their grand children because they spent the money.

That's backwards. More security *usually* means lower interest because people are willing to make less given a higher chance of getting it back, but there is no law that states the two are tied at all.

I guess you're not ready to run for Congress, then.

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Which gives you a boom and bust economy, as Keynes pointed out. Avoiding another Great Depression requires active intervention from the government to deflate bubbles (by taking liquidity out of the finacial markets) and counteract recessions (by feeding in extra liquidity).

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

So, look at how well that is working lately.

John

Perhaps not a good example. The method only works if an economy is more or less in balance, which you could argue it's the governments job to ensure by whatever method is appropriate.

However, if you start from the bottom of a very deep hole, it takes a lot of digging before you even start to see any light at all :-)...

Regards,

Chris

Not true. At least part of the problem is that the market is rigged with dodgy insider traders, speculators and hedge fund spivs out to make money by deceiving the public. All sorts of very clever off balance sheet technical fixes and accounting tricks that are little more than pyramid schemes have been cooked up by Enron et al in league with their auditors who chose to look the other way and pocket lucrative auditing fees.

The economics models are reasonable although it is so hard to measure some of the input variables that the right input parameters may only be known a few years after the event. The controls available to governments are not all that great either. Basically there is no market transparency and not even governments can tell when the city financiers are lying to them. Even the head of the Bank of England admits there is a serious problem of lack of moral integrity in the banking system and we are likely headed for another "too big to fail" car crash.

(actually comment on the interview he gave earlier in the same paper)

And monopolies as the big guys annihilate any and all competition.

It could have been a whole lot worse. UK government is in the process of cutting spending way too fast and we will almost certainly pay the price. The bankers meanwhile are back to unearned big bonuses as usual.

Regards, Martin Brown

Method? Government generally uses a combination of political influence, misunderstanding, fear, and bad timing to make the economic system less stable. Lots of simple things could be done to damp oscillations, but nobody has the combination of guts and wisdom to do any of them.

Digging in the wrong direction, at the wrong time, doesn't help.

John

What fraction of economists predicted the dot.com boom/bust, or the real estate fiascos all over the world, or the soverign debt crisies, or the Chinese destruction of US manufacturing, or the demographic time bombs in Europe? None that matter!

At least part of the problem is that the market is rigged with

Precisely the same individuals who caused the problems are now in government positions, bailing out their Wall Street buddies. And their own stock holdings.

John

Right. The people who deserved to go bankrupt could have, which would've been a terrible shame. Not.

Japan's been in continual stimulus mode for the last 20 years. Has it helped? Nope.

Stimulus spending is pretty much like trying to lift yourself in the air by kicking your own a$$--the money always comes from current or future taxpayers / employers / producers, suppressing the very thing supposedly being stimulated.

Either way it's a momentum shell-game.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

I sometimes wonder if the modern world is so interconnected and interdependent that individual country governments can do little but fine tune the levers.

That's what we pay economists to work out for us. Everyone has an opinion and you know the line about opinions. Whatever you do to try and fix a problem, most likely half the population will disagree with you, even though they have no expertise in the subject whatsoever. Most likely, in inverse proportion to the subject knowledge. Of course, in countries like China, they solve the disagreement problem by taking people outside and shooting them. An idea quite appealing for the sort of people who have got us into this mess, undemocratic though it may be :-)...

Regards,

Chris

Mao killed 20 or 30 million people, and he died a hero. Hell, he still is a hero.

John

It appears to me that USA's government gets paid off by lobbyists to do other than its job.

For example, to repeal Glass Steagall when an extreme bull market resulting in part from earlier deregulation has been in progress for a very long time. Or to keep favoring easy mortgages when a housing bubble is getting big.

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Because the economists who "matter" are those that believe in the perfect free market, and consequently sign the tune that the well- heeled like to hear.

There were economists who predicted the various busts, but their predictions were based on unfashionable reasoning, and nobody of any importance took them seriously.

So what else is new?

Unfortunately, if they weren't being bailed out, the economy would be in a much worse state. US unemployment reached 25% during the Great Depression. If the Tea Party had had it's demented way, you could be doing as well right now.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Maybe _you_ could argue that, but you'd be wrong.

That's the problem. When you find yourself at the bottom of a very deep hole, the first thing you should is STOP DIGGING!

Thanks, Rich