I hear that there’s some debt shenanigans going on.  If I weren’t so appallingly cynical, I’d be shocked at the apparent inability of politicians and professional economists and Wall Street pimps to understand what’s happening.  I mean, it’s pretty simple, as Reddit demonstrated the other day.

I see only a few possibilities:

• mendaciousness – the individuals in question really do know what’s happening, and are lying to us for their own gain.
• cluelessness – they really are that stupid, and don’t see that they’re spending us right off the cliff.
• unjustified arrogance – along the lines of what Oxford Sovietologist Ronald Hingely once said, noting that basic misapprehensions about the nature of the Soviet Union were rare among really serious scholars, and also among ordinary people.  Those who didn’t get it were those of fair intelligence, the “educated elite.”  Hingely commented: “For it is surely true, if not generally recognized, that real prowess in wrong-headedness, as in most other fields of human endeavor, presupposes considerable education, character,  sophistication, knowledge, and will to succeed.”

It seems to me that each of the three groups most responsible for our current predicament fits one of those descriptions.  I will allow that there is some possibility of overlap…

I’d say that reading the economic news is like watching a train derailing, except that you can’t exactly watch a train derailing from the inside, so its not a perfect analogy.  I have this terrible sense that inexorable doom is coming toward us.  You look at the similarities between the first great depression and our current situation (banking crisis, pause, soveriegn debt crisis…  who will be the Creditanstalt for our times?).  You look at the results of debasing the currency in Imperial Rome, in pre-Industrial England, in dozens of countries from Weimar Germany to Zombabwe in the last century and wonder how we can be different, except in scale. You look at the disingenuousness of the economic statistics – Q1 revised down to .4% growth? G is a component of GDP. Take that out, subtract that from next to zero, and what do you have? And let’s not mention the unemployment numbers.

In this environment, people like Ron Paul are made to look like the crazed radical for pointing out the obvious. Well, maybe the food, gold, ammo approach is less unreasonable and paranoid than it once was.

The Dominion of Canada wonders what will happen if the US economy really tanks.

I haven’t listened to this yet, but I will tonight. Apparently the BBC has unearthed a coup plot in the US from the 1930s.

A new book claims that the Roswell aliens were a Soviet Hoax. It’s discussed in this piece at NPR, down in the “highlights” section. This is the interesting part:

On flying discs and conspiracy theories

“The UFO craze began in the summer of 1947. Several months later, the G2 intelligence, which was the Army intelligence corps at the time, spent an enormous amount of time and treasure seeking out two former Third Reich aerospace designers named Walter and Reimar Horten who had allegedly created [a] flying disc. … American intelligence agents fanned out across Europe seeking the Horton brothers to find out if, in fact, they had made this flying disc.

“The idea behind it remains, why? Why were they looking for a flying disc? And conspiracy theorists have had their hands on this declassified file for over a decade now, and they say it proves that this flying disc came from outer space. If you read the documents, the takeaway that I found fascinating was that at the end of it, the Army admits finding the Horten brothers, and that the Horten brothers admitted their contact with the Russians and that’s where the file ends. Everything after that is classified.”

On why Area 51 is actually classified, according to a source

“The Horten brothers were involved in the flying disc crash in New Mexico. And that is from a single source. … There was an unusual moment where that source became very upset and told me things that were stunning that’s almost impossible to believe at first read. And that is that a flying disc really did crash in New Mexico and it was transported to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and then in 1951 it was transferred to Area 51, which is why the base is called Area 51. And the stunning part of the reveal is that my source, who I absolutely believe and worked with for 18 months on this, was one of the engineers who received the equipment and he also received the people who were in the craft.

“The people were, according to the source, were child-sized pilots, and there’s a lot of debate about how old they were. He believes they were 13, although other people believe they may have been older. But this is a firsthand witness to this, and I made a decision to write about this in the very end of the book, after I take the traditional journalist form of telling you everything in the third person, I switch and I kind of lean into the reader and I say, ‘Look, this is not why Area 51 is classified to the point where no one in the government will admit it exists. The reason is because what one man told me.’ And then using the first person, I tell you what I was told. And there’s no doubt that people are going to be upset, alarmed and skeptical of this information, but I absolutely believe the veracity of my source, and I believe it was important that I put this information out there because it is the tip of a very big iceberg.”

On the Soviet human experiments her source told her about

“The child-sized aviators in this craft [that crashed in New Mexico] were the result of a Soviet human experimentation program, and they had been made to look like aliens a la Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds, and it was a warning shot over President Truman’s bow, so to speak. In 1947, when this would have originally happened, the Soviets did not yet have the nuclear bomb, and Stalin and Truman were locked in horns with one another, and Stalin couldn’t compete in nuclear weaponry yet, but he certainly could compete in the world of black propaganda — and that was his aim, according to my source. …

“What is firsthand information is that he worked with these bodies [of the pilots] and he was an eyewitness to the horror of seeing them and working with them. Where they actually came from is obviously the subject of debate. But if you look at the timeline with Josef Mengele, he left Auschwitz in January of 1945 and disappeared for a while, and the suggestion by the source is that Mengele had already cut his losses with the Third Reich at that point and was working with Stalin.”

On why the Soviets would have undertaken such a hoax

“The plan, according to my source, was to create panic in the United States with this belief that a UFO had landed with aliens inside of it. And one of the most interesting documents is the second CIA director, Walter Bedell Smith, memos back and forth to the National Security Council talking about how the fear is that the Soviets could make a hoax against America involving a UFO and overload our early air-defense warning system, making America vulnerable to an attack.”

Sweet

Untimely Meditations has a this, on the idea that things will only get worse. A basic rundown of the obvious threats, and a pleasant read.

Fjordman posts at Gates of Vienna on preparing for Ragnarok. Well, if there’s one thing I’m ready for, it’s Ragnarok. Dinner tonight, not so much – but I’ve got Ragnarok covered.

According to the French writer Guillaume Faye, for the first time humanity as a whole is threatened by a cataclysmic crisis that is likely to begin in the decade before 2020 — a crisis provoked by degradation of the ecosystems and geopolitical contests for scarce resources like agricultural land, oil, and above all water; by the fragility of an international economic order based on speculation and the massive indebtedness of democratic states; by the return of epidemics; by the rise of terrorism and nuclear proliferation; by the growing aggressiveness of Islam’s world offensive; and by the dramatic aging of European populations, whose below replacement-level birth rates are confronted with rapidly growing masses of young people in the dysfunctional countries of the global South, coupled with mass migrations to the North.

This convergence of catastrophes will mark the transition from one era to another. The USA will most likely cease to be the leading world power by mid-century, perhaps cease to exist at all in its present form. The global center of power will then move back to Eurasia, where it has almost always been previously. The strongest power will probably be China or what Faye calls “Euro-Siberia” — a federated alliance between the peoples of Europe plus Russia. He doesn’t think this is literally the end of the world, merely the end of the world as we know it. Something new may arise from these events, since Europe is a civilization of metamorphosis.

Faye predicts two possibilities for European civilization over the coming century: regeneration based on a resurgence of ancestral values, or else disappearance. Europe, especially the western half of the Continent, is currently being invaded. This is coupled with an incredible masochism on the part of Europeans themselves. Only a terrifying crisis can awaken them, and war is the most merciless of selective forces; a people that abandons its will to power inevitably perishes. A “mental AIDS,” a virus of nihilism, has severely weakened their natural defenses. Consequently, Europeans have succumbed to self-extinction. The primary symptom of this is “xenophilia,” a systematic preference for the Other over the Self.

The current advanced state of decadence owes much to the secularization of Christian charity and its modern egalitarian offshoot, human rights. In the widest possible sense it was the same civilizational genius that gave the world the concepts of universal gravitation and universal human rights. After the unprecedented successes of the Scientific Revolution, post-Enlightenment Europeans fell so much in love with the power of their own ideas that they ultimately came to define their very existence as one big idea, hence the concept of an “idea nation” or “proposition nation” was born. The leaders of this were the Americans and the French, whose Revolutions in the late 1700s came to view their countries as universal republics. This ideal was not and could not be implemented at that time, but two centuries later, coupled with the rise of global communications, it won out over ethnic identification.

Faye believes that Europe now faces a danger unparalleled in its history and refuses to see it. It has been colonized by peoples from the South. This non-European invasion began in the 1960s and was largely self-engendered, by politicians contaminated with Marxist ideas, by an employer class greedy for cheap labor, and by Utopian humanitarian ideals or misplaced post-colonial guilt. Illegal immigrants/foreign colonizers are very rarely repatriated, but receive lavish social welfare benefits handed out to them by anti-white forces in control of the state:

A race war is foreseeable now in several European countries, a subterranean war that will be far more destructive than ‘terrorism.’ The White population is being displaced, a sort of genocide is being carried out against it with the complicity or the abstention of the ruling class, the media, and the politicians, for the ideology these collaborating elites uphold is infused with a pathological hatred of their own people and a morbid passion for miscegenation. The state’s utopian plan for ‘republican integration’ has nevertheless failed because it assumed peaceful coexistence between foreigners and natives, non-Whites and Whites, was possible in a single territory. Our rulers haven’t read Aristotle, who taught that no city can possibly be democratic and orderly if it isn’t ethnically homogeneous… European societies today are devolving into an unmanageable ethnic chaos.

I have to try to resist these thoughts, because I know I am fascinated by disaster scenarios. But as I look around, there are indications of all sorts of potential nastiness – economic and otherwise.

More for my own reference, but here’s a link to that post from a while back where a guy commented on Mangan’s about the real US government ideology, following a Moldbuggian sort of line. If you haven’t read it, it’s worth it.

Also, just read everything on Zero Hedge to get your mind in the right place for the coming econopocalypse. Just recently, they’ve had a few good ones: on attacking the Fed, on game over, on spinning out of control. Plus, there’s more! I really should stop reading ZH, it makes me sad.

[wik]: I almost forgot a couple more. From Simon Rierdon – Solar apocalypse, Detroit apocalypse, and Economic apocalypse. Looking at pictures of what Detroit has become is depressing.

Ironic to think that in the space of just five years, the US and Zimbabwe dollars could switch places at the top and bottom of the world currency rankings:

A week ago we presented the idea floated by once hyperinflationary Zimbabwe, oddly jeered by most, that the country is seeking to move to a gold-backed currency, adding, somewhat surrealistically, that the “days of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency are numbered.” And if anyone should know a hyperinflationary basket case, it’s Zimbabwe. Well, today this bizarre story just went fuller retard, after the country announced that it may exchange diamonds for gold “so that it can have a gold-backed currency, according to a recent proposal from the governor of Zimbabwe’s central bank.” Indeed we speculated previously why: “Zimbabwe, a country rich in natural resources, took so long to figure out that it was nothing but a puppet in the hands of western monetary interests.” Well, others are now getting this idea – Commodity Online reports that “The country is a resource hub: It sits on gold reserves worth trillions. It has the world’s second largest reserves of platinum, has got alluvial diamonds that can fetch the nation $2 billion annually and even boasts of chrome and coal deposits.” And since Zimbabwe is now fully on board this whole “pioneering” thing perhaps it should just go ahead and create the first diamond-platinum backed currency. Just don’t give China and Russia ideas about floating a new reserve currency that actually has real commodity backing. What’s that, you say? They are launching one soon? Oh well.

h/t Zero Hedge

… when Zimbabwe tells you to straighten the fuck out on the whole inflation/fiat currency thing.

From Zero Hedge:

Yes. Zimbabwe, the same place that two years ago sported a brand new crisp Z$100 trillion bill. What is just as odd is that this news comes less than a week after Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad criticized US economic policies, saying that the paper currency created by the American government is taking a heavy toll on the global economy. While Zimbabwe, which now transacts almost exclusively in foreign currencies such as the USD and the South African Rand, is actively considering ways to return its own currency into circulation, the man who has up to now served as an inspiration and a role model to Ben Bernanke, Gideon Gono, said the country should consider adopting a gold-backed currency. “There is a need for us to begin thinking seriously and urgently about introducing a Gold-backed Zimbabwe currency which will not only stable but internationally acceptable,” he said in an interview with state media…

We wonder what took Zimbabwe, a country rich in natural resources, so long to figure out that it was nothing but a puppet in the hands of western monetary interests:

“The events of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis demand a new approach to self reliance and a stable mineral-backed currency and to me, Gold has proven over the years that it is a stable and most desired precious metal,” Gono said.

“Zimbabwe is sitting on trillions worth of gold-reserves and it is time we start thinking outside the box, for our survival and prosperity.”

Curiously, the same can be said for Russia, and, soon enough, after it will have bought every last resource and global extraction company, China.

By now it is far too clear that it is an “Onion” world out there. Will it be all that surprising if Zimbabwe is the first country, following its brief and painful detour into hyperinflation, to introduce a gold-backed currency?

Crazy. By the way, I got my own Z$100,000,000,000,000 note from Amazon not that long ago. I told my son that I was going to give him an allowance denominated in Zimbabwean dollars. He wasn’t amused.

From Zero Hedge:

Like most economists, the Fed and its chairman mistake their manipulation of money for control of the economy. You and I are the economy and it is quite apparent that the Fed has very little “control” over us. If they could control us, then their policies would have worked and they wouldn’t keep experimenting on us with radical policies like quantitative easing and ZIRP.

Money, lest we forget, it just a medium of exchange. It does other things as well (store of value, indicator of the relative cost of things), but its primary function and the reason money was invented is to allow us to easily facilitate exchanges of goods and services. The economy is what we do everyday when we work, buy, sell, and save. Money is just a tool we use. When the Fed manipulates our money what is does is upset our ability to plan about the future. We have one set of perceptions about what money is and then the Fed distorts those perceptions and we end up making bad choices and bad plans. It results in the boom-bust business cycles we have and price inflation or price deflation.

Interesting piece on what hyperinflation in the US might look like.  The prelude is a description of the hyperinflation in Chili under Allende:

Apart from what happened with the Weimar Republic in the 1920’s, advanced Western economies have no experience with hyperinflation. (I actually think that the high inflation that struck the dollar in the 1970’s, and which was successfully choked off by Paul Volcker, was in fact an incipient bout of commodity-driven hyperinflation—but that’s for some other time.) Though there were plenty of hyperinflationary events in the XIX century and before, after the Weimar experience, the advanced economies learned their lesson—and learned it so well, in fact, that it’s been forgotten.

However, my personal history gives me a slight edge in this discussion: During the period 1970–’73, Chile experienced hyperinflation, brought about by the failed and corrupt policies of Salvador Allende and his Popular Unity Government. Though I was too young to experience it first hand, my family and some of my older friends have vivid memories of the Allende period—vivid memories that are actually closer to nightmares.

The causes of Chile’s hyperinflation forty years ago were vastly different from what I believe will cause American hyperinflation now. But a slight detour through this history is useful to our current predicament.

To begin: In 1970, Salvador Allende was elected president by roughly a third of the population. The other two-thirds voted for the centrist Christian Democrat candidate, or for the center-right candidate in roughly equal measure. Allende’s election was a fluke.

He wasn’t a centrist, no matter what the current hagiography might claim: Allende was a hard-core Socialist, who headed a Hard Left coalition called the Unidad Popular—the Popular Unity (UP, pronounced “oo-peh”). This coalition—Socialists, Communists, and assorted Left parties—took over the administration of the country, and quickly implemented several “reforms”, which were designed to “put Chile on the road to Socialism”.

Land was expropriated—often by force—and given to the workers. Companies and mines were also nationalized, and also given to the workers. Of course, the farms, companies and mines which were stripped from their owners weren’t inefficient or ineptly run—on the contrary, Allende and his Unidad Popular thugs stole farms, companies and mines from precisely the “blood-thirsty Capitalists” who best treated their workers, and who were the most fair towards them.

Allende’s government also put UP-loyalists in management positions in those nationalized enterprises—a first step towards implementing a Leninist regime, whereby the UP would have “political control” over the means of production and distribution. From speeches and his actions, it’s clear that Allende wanted to implement a Maoist-Leninist regime, with himself as Supreme Leader.

One of the key policy initiative Allende carried out was wage and price controls. In order to appease and co-opt the workers, Allende’s regime simultaneously froze prices of basic goods and services, and augmented wages by decree.

At first, this measure worked like a charm: Workers had more money, but goods and services still had the same old low prices. So workers were happy with Allende: They went on a shopping spree—and rapidly emptied stores and warehouses of consumer goods and basic products. Allende and the UP Government then claimed it was right-wing, anti-Revolutionary “acaparadores”—hoarders—who were keeping consumer goods from the workers. Right.

Meanwhile, private companies—forced to raise worker wages while maintaining their same price structures—quickly went bankrupt: So then, of course, they were taken over by the Allende government, “in the name of the people”. Key industries were put on the State dole, as it were, and made to continue their operations at a loss, so as to satisfy internal demand. If there was a cash shortfall, the Allende government would simply print more escudos and give them to the now State-controlled companies, which would then pay the workers.

This is how hyperinflation started in Chile. Workers had plenty of cash in hand—but it was useless, because there were no goods to buy.

So Allende’s government quickly instituted the Juntas de Abastecimiento y Control de Precios (“Unions of Supply and Price Controls”, known as JAP). These were locally formed boards, composed of loyal Party members, who decided who in a given neighborhood received consumer products, and who did not. Naturally, other UP-loyalists had preference—these Allende backers received ration cards, with which to buy consumer goods and basic staples.

Of course, those people perceived as “unfriendly” to Allende and the UP Government either received insufficient rations for their families, or no rations at all, if they were vocally opposed to the Allende regime and its policies.

Very quickly, a black market in goods and staples arose. At first, these black markets accepted escudos. But with each passing month, more and more escudos were printed into circulation by the Allende government, until by late ’72, black marketeers were no longer accepting escudos. Their mantra became, “Sólo dólares”: Only dollars.

Hyperinflation had arrived in Chile.

Normally, I have a typically lame excuse for not blogging.  Apathy, work, illness, family, the like.  This last hiatus, though brief by the standards of previous lapses, was more scary.  (For me – if it was scary for you, I am concerned about your mental health.)

Last week, I almost lost my house.

There is a prologue to this story, of course.  I have been gainfully employed for the last year.  The two and a half years previous to last summer were rather more chaotic.  Between January 2007 and August 2009, I was laid off three times.  Once, just five weeks into a year long contract.  This had a profound and deleterious effect on my finances – every time I’d get a new gig, I’d struggle to get caught up, get there, and then immediately be on forced retirement.  With help from family, and by adopting a spartan lifestyle, I managed to make it through.  Except for what I owe my parents, I am no more in debt now than when I started the whole nightmare.  I have no credit card debt, and my only loans are car loans, and my mortgage.  But I did not get through without constant run-ins with the most wonderful and understanding people on Earth, the bill collectors.

My largest debt is my mortgage, and my mortgage loan company is a smallish one.  I’d fall behind, get a job, get on a plan, get laid off, get behind…  Last fall, hopeful again that this job would last a little longer than the last few, I got on a plan.  I scraped up a few thousand in earnest money, and started making payments.

Life is good!  The house is saved, a major worry is de-worrified, and I focus on catching up on other bills.

Now, part of the process is filling out endless paperwork.  I did, back in October of last year.  A call to the mortgage company revealed that they were missing a signed page two of my tax return.  No problem – I’ll fax it.  As I made my last scheduled payment on the plan at the end of March, this came up again.  Didn’t get the first one?  I’ll fax it in again.  I continued making payments, as agreed.  I asked when I’d find out what the new terms would be, they said that the underwriters would look at everything and get back to me.

Okay.

Understand that from January of this year through my departure for Ohio three weeks ago, I received exactly one piece of mail from the mortgage people – a form letter saying that my interest rate might (or might not) change in August.  Got that in May.

‘Round about June, I became concerned that I hadn’t heard anything.  I gave them a call.  ”Oh, hi, Mr. Buckethead!  We don’t have your signed page two of your tax return.”  Well, shit, okay, I’ll get it to you.  I asked where we were – no problem, they say, just get that to us, and we’re cool.  So alright.  I faxed it in, for the fourth time.  Busyness ensued – getting ready for the trip, other issues.  I leave for Ohio.

Last Tuesday, two weeks into my trip to Ohio, I called again, to check on their progress.  And discovered that my house was scheduled for a sheriff’s sale yesterday – the 10th of August, a week away.  Holy mother of fuck.  I say, well that’s mildly outrageous, seeing as I never got anything in the mail, or a phone call, or by smoke signal indicating that my house was going to be sold out from under me despite the fact that I had made every single agreed payment.

In fact, I discovered that the decision had been made four days before I talked to the guy in June – rejected because they had only an unsigned version of page 2 of my tax return, and not a signed one.  They had somehow failed to mention that in the phone call, or the sale.  And it appears that my signature on the initial agreement gave them the right to do that.

I seriously considered just giving them the keys.

My house is worth no more than what I paid for it in 2006, maybe slightly less.  Thanks to missed payments that will be tacked onto the end, I’m at least somewhat underwater.  If I sold the house, I’d lose money.  Having the bank sell the house would mean they lose the money.  I could find a rental for significantly less than my current mortgage payment, even as low as half; and I wouldn’t have the burden of hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.  The upside would be a thousand more dollars in my pocket every month – not an insignificant sum.

Downside, of course, is that my credit rating would be savaged for years, useless.  That’s a hell of a trade-off, freedom and more money with expulsion from the ranks of the credit-worthy; or continued paycheck to paycheck wage-slavery to maintain my status and nice home.

I find that the monkeybrains was arguing for status.  Losing the house would be a real hit to my pride.  But in the end, I decided to go with monkeybrains and keep the house for a couple reasons.  One, employers check credit reports when they’re hiring. Two, I will need a viable credit rating to purchase a new, larger vehicle to accomodate my soon to be larger family sometime before next January.  Three, I have plans for the future that require home ownership.  It’s involved, but take my word for it.  I’m trying to think long-term, and the short term happiness of more money is not outweighing seven years bad luck for defaulting on a mortgage.

So last week, I spent several hours on the phone, arguing, bargaining, negotiating, and managed to avert disaster.  So far as I know, they did not sell my house yesterday.  It came down to me agreeing to pay two payments instead of one, all for their screw up.  A reach-around would have been appreciated, but was not offered.  A timely short term loan from Mom covered the shortfall (thanks mom!) and finally we were able to move on.

The frustrating thing about this is (aside from nearly dying of shock, and then having to fork over an extra mortgage payment for someone else’s fuck-up) that I had not refinanced the loan back in March. I didn’t because the people I talked to said that I wouldn’t be able to get good terms while I was still technically in default, because the plan wasn’t complete.  I figured a couple more months wouldn’t be a bad thing, especially if I can get a better deal at the end of it.  Now, thanks to this most recent ass-rape, it will be until January of ’11 before this new plan is finished.  (Needless to say, I am going to pursue refinancing rather more relentlessly, I want to get away from these people.)

If anyone knows of any good house refinancing resources, I’d welcome a tip.

From what mom was telling me, this sort of thing isn’t exactly uncommon.  Others have had houses sold out from under their feet despite having made regular, agreed-upon payments.  And usually, without notification.  Which strikes me as curious – it’s one thing to foreclose on someone who isn’t making payments, but given the near certainty of massive losses on the sale, you’d think they’d want to keep raking in the interest money.  Unless, of course, it’s cheaper for them to write off the loss and get bailout money from the government.

Andy Grove discusses how start-ups will not necessarily be a jobs engine for the American economy:

You could say, as many do, that shipping jobs overseas is no big deal because the high-value work — and much of the profits — remain in the U.S. That may well be so. But what kind of a society are we going to have if it consists of highly paid people doing high-value-added work — and masses of unemployed?

Since the early days of Silicon Valley, the money invested in companies has increased dramatically, only to produce fewer jobs. Simply put, the U.S. has become wildly inefficient at creating American tech jobs. We may be less aware of this growing inefficiency, however, because our history of creating jobs over the past few decades has been spectacular — masking our greater and greater spending to create each position.

…There’s more at stake than exported jobs. With some technologies, both scaling and innovation take place overseas. Such is the case with advanced batteries. It has taken years and many false starts, but finally we are about to witness mass- produced electric cars and trucks. They all rely on lithium-ion batteries. What microprocessors are to computing, batteries are to electric vehicles. Unlike with microprocessors, the U.S. share of lithium-ion battery production is tiny.

That’s a problem. A new industry needs an effective ecosystem in which technology knowhow accumulates, experience builds on experience, and close relationships develop between supplier and customer. The U.S. lost its lead in batteries 30 years ago when it stopped making consumer-electronics devices. Whoever made batteries then gained the exposure and relationships needed to learn to supply batteries for the more demanding laptop PC market, and after that, for the even more demanding automobile market. U.S. companies didn’t participate in the first phase and consequently weren’t in the running for all that followed. I doubt they will ever catch up.

As they say, read the whole thing.

Looking a lot like 1932?

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard thinks so.

Roughly a million Americans have dropped out of the jobs market altogether over the past two months. That is the only reason why the headline unemployment rate is not exploding to a post-war high.
Let us be honest. The US is still trapped in depression a full 18 months into zero interest rates, quantitative easing (QE), and fiscal stimulus that has pushed the budget deficit above 10pc of GDP.
The share of the US working-age population with jobs in June actually fell from 58.7pc to 58.5pc. This is the real stress indicator. The ratio was 63pc three years ago. Eight million jobs have been lost.
The average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks. Nothing like this has been seen before in the post-war era. Jeff Weninger, of Harris Private Bank, said this compares with a peak of 21.2 weeks in the Volcker recession of the early 1980s.

Then there’s the devaluation:

It is obvious what that policy should be for Europe, America, and Japan. If budgets are to shrink in an orderly fashion over several years – as they must, to avoid sovereign debt spirals – then central banks will have to cushion the blow keeping monetary policy ultra-loose for as long it takes.
The Fed is already eyeing the printing press again. “It’s appropriate to think about what we would do under a deflationary scenario,” said Dennis Lockhart for the Atlanta Fed. His colleague Kevin Warsh said the pros and cons of purchasing more bonds should be subject to “strict scrutiny”, a comment I took as confirmation that the Fed Board is arguing internally about QE2.

Kids, I have come into possession of a $75 Amazon gift card.  While I could easily fill this with items from my wishlist, I was wondering if anyone has recommendations.  Read a good book lately?  Let me know.