From the Desk of Will Bonner:
There’ll be no Thursday entry from Bill Bonner today.
Dad is on the road again after his recent trip to Ireland… and the Bonner roots.
He’ll be back with you tomorrow.
In the meantime, here is a classic Diary entry.
We’re all f**king f**ked!
Neil Barofsky, the federal employee in charge of auditing the TARP program, says the “U.S. is pretty f**ked.” The Huffington Post reports that he is not the first to resort to the F-word to describe Americans’ situation:
Christina Romer… the former chair of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, told Bill Maher last year that the U.S. was “pretty darned f**ked” on the night that Standard and Poor’s downgraded the country’s credit rating.
Another Washington official known for his testy language? None other than Tim “I have been the most f**king transparent secretary of the Treasury in this country’s entire f**king history!” Geithner.
Yesterday, we found out that whatever it takes to bring about a real f**king recovery… with real f**king growth… and real f**king prosperity… central banks don’t have it.
All they have is the ability to manipulate the credit market… and print more money. If that’s all it took to make people wealthy, Zimbabweans would be the wealthiest f**king people on Earth, followed by the f**king Argentines.
And now we discover that, despite f**king Herculean efforts on the part of central bankers, more and more of the world economy is nevertheless still f**ked.
Central banks doubled their f**king assets (and the foundation of the world’s money supply) in just four short years. The Bank of England was particularly energetic. It tripled its f**king assets. But the recession in Britain continues. And in the U.S., another f**king recession may be here already. If not, it’s probably right around the f**king corner.
McDonald’s sales are at a two-year low. If you can’t afford a f**king Big Mac, what can you afford? Economist David Rosenberg, at Gluskin Sheff, says export orders are collapsing too. The last two times this happened, we were in a f**king recession. From Bloomberg:
Exports appear to be collapsing around the world. Data out of Germany this morning showed exports falling 1.9%, and South Korea, the canary in the coal mine, has seen exports crumble.
Now, Gluskin Sheff’s David Rosenberg writes that soon we’ll find “that the U.S. prints a negative-GDP reading on the back of a negative export shock that does not appear to be in any forecast.”
He writes that 70% of real GDP growth since the “recovery” began three years ago has come from export volumes and inventory investment.
In fact, Rosenberg points out that there is an 81% correlation between annual growth in U.S. exports and ISM new orders, and that this level of new export orders coincided with the last two recessions.
And yesterday came the official announcement that France, too, is in a f**king recession.
“France is f**ked,” said a friend at dinner last night.
“Everything is rigged… and re-rigged. France’s Socialist president, Francois Hollande, is a rich man. He has three houses on the Cote d’Azur. But he claims to hate the rich. And gets votes by promising to punish rich people with higher taxes.
“They’re already doubling the wealth tax. And now they’re putting the income tax up to 75%. Of course, it doesn’t really matter. It applies only to people earning more than a million a year. And hardly anybody earns that kind of money in France. If you’re going to earn that much, you go somewhere else.
“So they say it’s mostly symbolic. But symbolic of what? It’s a symbol of a stupid, hypocritical government… that pretends that it can treat people who create wealth as though they were milk cows. It squeezes them dry… and then kicks them in the ass.
“And you know what? I can do something symbolic too. I can leave France.”
Which is why France is f**ked. People with any gumption leave. They can move to London. They can move to Geneva. They can move to Brussels. They can live well in any of those cities.
Another guest at last night’s dinner party was a farmer:
“I went to a meeting hosted by our regional farm bureau last week. They were explaining to us all of the wonderful things they are doing for us. They had a PowerPoint presentation… with great photos of them at work… showing all of the resources we had to work with.
“What they didn’t bother to talk about was how costly all of their ‘help’ has become. In Europe, there are now five bureaucrats working in some area of agricultural administration for every one farmer. And these people increase a farmer’s workload. Now I spend half of my time filling out the forms that these people require… or being inspected… or complying with some new rule or regulation.
“So when they got to the end of the presentation, they asked if there were any questions. I stood up. I said, ‘I’d like to make a proposal. Since there are now five administrative people in the agricultural sector for every farmer… and since every farmer must spend half of his time dealing with the admin people… I propose that each farmer be given one paper pusher to work for him exclusively. That paper pusher’s job will be to push the papers back to the other paper pushers.
“‘You can plainly see the advantage of such a system. It will cost nothing. No jobs will be lost. And it will free farmers from doing things that aren’t productive. In theory, it should double a farmer’s productivity. So everyone will be better off.’
“The guy from the farm bureau just muttered something, and then they closed the meeting.”
Our friend did not say so. But farmers are f**ked by the f**king farm bureaucracy.
But so what? We’re all f**ked, because whatever the f**king central bankers have got, it ain’t f**king enough to bring about real f**king growth in the real f**king economy.
And as we saw yesterday, the central bankers and central planners are the ones who f**ked up the economy in the first place. And now the only thing that would bring real growth is the very thing they refuse to do: Stop f**king with it!
Regards,
Bill