“Big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em, and little fleas have littler fleas – and so ad infinitum…”
I was tootling around Amazon yesterday, as you do, when I came across this book: Crash Proof: How to Profit From the Coming Economic Collapse.
Customers who bought this book also bought, apparently:
Financial Armageddon: Protecting Your Future from Four Impending Catastrophes
by Michael J. PanznerAmerica’s Bubble Economy: Profit When It Pops
by David WiedemerThe Great Bust Ahead: The Greatest Depression in American and UK History is Just Several Short Years Away. This is your Concise Reference Guide to Understanding Why and How Best to Survive It
by Daniel A. ArnoldThe Coming Collapse of the Dollar and How to Profit from It: Make a Fortune by Investing in Gold and Other Hard Assets
by James TurkThe Second Great Depression by Warren Brussee
I’m sensing a trend.
My first thought was that if Wall St and the economic media have such weak confidence in the US economy, it must be in just as bad a shape as has been predicted. But how typically Republican, how very now, I thought, to attempt to profit from your own mistakes.
But then I caught myself; hang on – mistakes? Those weren’t mistakes, they were deliberate policy. But why?
What interests me is, why are all these people being herded into investing in certain ways now? Why are all these books getting published? Whose editorial decision is it? Who profits from that?
The short answer is – commodity traders, or at the very least they take a cut.
The long answer is those multinational corporations and private equity funds, who, along with their ther investments in say, biotechnology, or bonds, or maybe even economic book publishing, have mind-bogglingly large sums invested in the commodities markets. People like the Carlyle Group.
My dad, who was no certainly economist but no mental slouch either, always said that the everything in economics boiled down to commodity trading, the rest was just so much sweet f.a..
He based this on his own job delivering oil to manufacturers and on his own father’s experience working on the Liverpool docks during WWII, back when commodities were still real things, rather than just intangible financial instruments, numbers on a screem for bankers to play with.
He vastly oversimplified for the purpose of educating 10 year olds, but in essence he was right. Look at the current range of conflicts – over food. Over water. Over metals. Over gas and oil. Over power.
There is nothing now that can’t be commodified and traded, but it always comes back to those same things, because if you don’t have those there’s little else but back to hunter-gathering.
Even apparently religious wars can be seen as commodity wars dressed up with a veil of religious folderol to give them some oomph amongst an otherwise skeptical populace.
There’s big money to be made from global annihilation for those properly placed, and the authors are preying on the anxieties of the aspiring to be rich – but really quite precarious – middle classes, who’re hoping to get ahead of the game before all the intangibles that their jobs and personal economies depend upon turn to shit – like the dollar’s about to.
Iran, the 6th biggest oil exporter, which ships out 2.39 million barrels of oil per day, is moving from trading in dollars to trading in euros, undermining the dollar, possibly to the point of collapse. Especially so when China and the Asian economies start to divest themselves of dollars to buy euros to trade for oil.
The upcoming bourse will introduce petrodollar versus petroeuro currency hedging, and fundamentally new dynamics to the biggest market in the world – global oil and gas trades. In essence, the U.S. will no longer be able to effortlessly expand its debt-financing via issuance of U.S. Treasury bills, and the dollar’s international demand/liquidity value will fall.
It is unclear at the time of writing if this project will be successful, or could it prompt overt or covert U.S. interventions thereby signaling the second phase of petrodollar warfare in the Middle East.
[…]
What we are witnessing is a battle for oil currency supremacy. If Irans oil bourse becomes a successful alternative for international oil trades, it would challenge the hegemony currently enjoyed by the financial centers in both London (IPE) and New York (NYMEX), …
[…]
Puts an entirely different light on the bellicose Iran WMD noises Bushco are making. doesn’t it? Commodity trading with nukes as backup. Sell us your oil on our terms or we’ll bomb you.
It’s not looking good for the dollar, but instead of supporting the country they profess to love so devoutly – and I’ll bet quite a few have those little enamel flag pins in their lapel – these patriotic American authors have no compunction about getting out of the dollar and into metals. Metals are key in IT and defence tech too – that’s why Central Africa is hotting up again. Oh yes, there’s money to be made.
I’m no economist either, but doesn’t encouraging people to invest their own hard-won funds in metals push up commodities prices, enabling a profit for the those already in the market? It seems so – yesterdays market news:
The dollar slipped against the euro after hitting six-week highs against a basket of currencies, while oil climbed towards $70 a barrel as U.S. warships put on a show of force off Iran’s coast, coinciding with a United Nations agency report on the Islamic republic’s nuclear programme.
A weaker dollar makes gold cheaper for holders of other currencies. The metal is also seen as a hedge against oil-led inflation. In other metals, platinum touched a three-week low of $1,281 an ounce before rising to $1,292/ 1,296, against New York’s $1,285/ $1,290. reuters
It’s eerily like the climate of fear created by the ‘war on terror’, only in the economic media.
I’m not saying there is no cause or alarm – far from it. Therehas to be a collapse, because the current world economy as structured is unsustainable . The advice to have no debt, stay liquid and put your money in gold is actually quite sound.
It just pisses me off to see how many greedy little people are cheering on armageddon just to make a fast buck. I suppose it’s all of a piece with that Ayn Randian ‘we are the superior huimans, we will rule the world when all the untermenschen are gone’ thing they have going on.
They don’t see, or they prefer not to see, that if their heroes’ halfassed plans to rule the world by owning all the stuff succeed, we’re all fucked, including them.
We all know from bitter experience that whatever the situation, the parasites always profit, but we are so infested with them that sometimes a good dose of flea-powder is very much to be desired.
