Re: SC46

http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/ARTICLE2/doodoo.html

The United States Is In Deep Doodoo!

............In short, the United States is in deep trouble. We have lost a huge amount of our manufacturing capacity, and those products we still make do not compete well on the world market, despite the steady devaluation of the dollar. In short we have vast debts to pay and little to pay them with. Like the foolish Farmer we have sold the machinery that allowed us to prosper, and we stand around shaking our investment portfolios back and forth in the hopes that the money inside will somehow grow all by itself. It won't. It never has. The very best that can be said is that money gets moved from one person to the other.

Those nations and banks to whom we owe money have been very patient indeed with us. They know that our economies are so tightly entwined that what hurts America will hurt them. But sooner or later, possibly after a market crash, someone, in order to pay their own debts, will demand their loans to the United States be paid. Rather than get caught with "bad paper", there will be a run on the United States government.

In addition to the government debt of $14 trillion, our businesses are home to trillions more in foreign investment, kept here by the promise that the American taxpayer will be made to cover all losses. But with our manufacturing in decline and our schools producing far more lawyers than anything else, it should be obvious to the prudent observer that the American taxpayer, even if so inclined, may not be able to cover the losses of their own government, let alone a foreign investor. That has to be making them nervous as well.

This brings us to the "equities markets", most notably the stock market. Over the last several years a constant media harangue has assured us that the soaring numbers of the stock market are the sole measure of how good our economy is. But close examination of those high-priced stocks reveals that most are heavily over-valued; their price the result of market forces rather than underlying worth (earnings ability). Amazon.com, as one example, has had a terrific run-up of its stock price, even though the company itself has yet to show a profit.

The government has admitted to using covert means to prevent a market downturn; to keep the stock prices at an artificially high and overvalued level, in order to wave those impressive numbers about as "proof" that everything is okay so that the taxpayers go back to work and pay more taxes. But in order to keep those stock prices up above their actual worth, demand must be maintained to keep the prices high. In other words, NEW investors must constantly be brought into the bottom of the pyramid to keep the prices of the stocks at the top from dropping. Hence the onslaught of commercials luring neophyte investors into the stock market via "online trading". Like any Ponzi scheme, the stock market will collapse when no more new buyers can be dragged in at the bottom. As the market starts to stutter, governments (most recently Britain) have moved to dump huge reserves of gold onto the world market to depress gold prices and deter investors from deserting the stock market for gold.

Some years back I worked on the film version of "The Day The Bubble Burst", and in between playing a stock broker, I got to spend some time with the show's consultant, Mr. William Hupt, who had been on the trading floor in 1929 as it all fell apart. He still had, framed, that last strip of ticker tape that ushered in the Great Depression, and he shared some stories which have a bearing on what is going on today.

The first story Bill shared is that there had been early indications of a dangerously over-valued market, running too deep on margin, and like the Plunge Protection Team, the largest investment houses, in particular the House of Morgan, attempted to reverse the early corrections by purchasing large blocks of stock in order to create market demand and drive the prices back up. It worked all but the last time.

The second story Bill shared was that a friend of his, riding up to his office in September of 1929, overheard the elevator operator chatting about his own stock portfolio, and his investments. Something about that image of an elevator operator playing the market set off warning signals, and Bill's friend immediately liquidated his entire portfolio, just in time to miss the great crash. Many people, including the actor Charlie Chaplin, had recognized the "recruitment" of that segment of society that did NOT have risk capital as new investors as a desperate attempt to prop up an overvalued market, and got out in time to save their own personal fortunes.

In the end, there is no such thing as a free lunch. You cannot make money grow in value by shaking it back and forth from one bank to another. You cannot prosper a nation by doing each other's laundry, or filling out their government mandated and greatly obfuscated paperwork, or flinging stock certificates around which may have as little real worth as Federal Reserve Notes. To make money, to show a profit, you must make products that somebody else wants to buy, and sadly, that is a capability the United States has allowed to slip away in great measure. The "service economy" was political propaganda to make the public believe that the decline of our manufacturing ability was a good thing.

Our nation is broke, bankrupt, and having sold much of its machinery and technology (or given it away to political donors), is unable to easily return to those endeavors which once made our nation great. Our infrastructure is in decay (the percentage of roads in the US with major damage doubled last year alone), our public schools unable to produce a workforce able to function in a high-tech manufacturing environment, and those managers end engineers with manufacturing experience have in great part been lured away to other nations. The severity of our total government debt has reached a point where the promise that the taxpayers can be made to cover any foreign investment loss rings hollow, because we can no longer pay the debts our government has now.

Our nation is in trouble. We don't make many of the products we used to make. Consequently we don't have the products to sell that we used to. We don't even make most of the products we need ourselves (like that computer you're staring at this very moment). Result: we have a massive trade imbalance. Cash is flowing out of the nation, and it's not coming back in anywhere near as fast. There's no way to spin it; that is a major problem. Our nation is becoming poorer, it is hopelessly in debt, and all the artificial escalation of stock prices cannot conceal that.

And as the artificially pumped up stock market continues to decline, the true scale of the economic horror which is the product of decades of government corruption, will become apparent to all..............

Read the rest of this article to learn the finer points of how we have come as a nation to this dire set of circumstances.