Quote of the Day: Money Changed Everything

From Author and Agora Founder, Bill Bonner at his website: 

Not one person in 1,000 realizes it, but America’s money changed on August 15, 1971. After that, not even foreign governments could exchange their dollars for gold at a fixed rate.

The dollar still looked the same. It still acted the same. It still could be used to buy booze and cigarettes.

But it was flawed money. And it changed the whole world economy in a fundamental way… a way that is just now coming into focus.

The Old Testament tells us that God chased Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden with this curse: “By the sweat of your brow, you will earn your food until you return to the ground.”

From then on, you worked… you earned money… you could buy bread. Or lend it out. Or invest it.

Dollars – or any form of real money – were compensation… for work, for risk taking, for accumulating knowledge and capital.

Money is information. It tells us how much reward we’ve earned… how much things cost… how much profit, how much loss, how much something is worth… how much we’ve saved, how much we’ve spent, how much we need, and how much we’ve got.

Money doesn’t have to be “hard” or “soft” or expensive or cheap. But it has to be honest. Otherwise, the whole system runs into a ditch.

But the new money was a phony. It put the cart ahead of the horse. This was money that no one ever had to break a sweat to get. It was based on credit – the anticipation of work, not work that had already been done.

Money no longer represented wealth. It now represented anti-wealth: debt. So, the economy stopped producing real wealth.

The Fed could create money that no one ever earned and no one ever saved. It was no longer the real thing, but a counterfeit.

In this way, effort and reward were cut off from one another. The working man still had to labor. But it was the banker, gambler, speculator, lender, financier, investor, politician, or inside operator who made the money.

And the nature of the economy changed. Instead of rewarding the productive Main Street economy, it rewarded insiders… and the financial sector.

The penthouses of Manhattan and the summer houses of the Hamptons changed owners. Gone were the scions of Detroit factories and the titans of New York commerce. Gone were the people who had added to the wealth of the nation.

In their place were the Wall Street hustlers… the people who moved money around… taking it from the people who made it and giving it to the financial industry, the money lenders, the insiders, and the Deep State.

This process is misunderstood. It is thought that Wall Street greed and deregulation caused the shift. But Wall Street was just as greedy as it always was… And financial regulations increased dramatically throughout the entire period.

It was not human nature that had changed; it was the money. And it changed everything.

Quote of the Day: Markets DON’T Do What Most People Expect Them to Do

Markets DON’T do what most people expect them to do. Reality doesn’t correspond to what the crowd thinks or what it wants.

When large numbers of people expect a particular outcome – say, a bear market – it won’t happen. A bear market is born of excessive optimism (just as a bull market is born of excessive pessimism). If too many people expect a bear market around the corner, they won’t bid up stock prices to the point where they’re likely to crash.

That means only contrary and alternative ideas pay. The mainstream ideas, the conventional wisdom, the soothing nonsense that “everybody knows” and “everybody wants to hear” is a losing proposition.

Because it is already priced in. Everybody already believes it. There isn’t much upside left.

You get a big crash only when investors are optimistic enough to bid up prices to the point where there is no chance of decent returns. And you get a big bull market only when they are so gloomy that they have sold off their stocks to record lows.

The big profits are made from big surprises. The opinion that seems too far out, the analysis that comes to the opposite conclusion of most others – those are the investment ideas that make money!

This excerpt is from Agora Publishing head Bill Bonner at his website Bonner & Partners

Negative Interest Rates: Has Money Lost its Value?

Agora Publishing head Bill Bonner at Bonner and Partners explains

A negative nominal interest rate – meaning a negative rate before you account for inflation – implies an odd world…

…maybe even a world that cannot really exist.

To lend at less than zero suggests you believe the present value of money is less than its future value – in other words, deflation. And you must assume that the risk of default or inflation is near zero.

This allows the Italians to go out and build roads or pay pensions with money that cost them less than nothing.

How long this will last, we don’t know. But as long as rates remain below zero (and they could go lower!) money is not just free… it’s a cost not to borrow!

Imagine you are buying a house. (Now, you can see the mischief afoot!) If lenders are willing to grant a loan at a negative nominal interest rate that’s secured by nothing more than the full faith and credit of the Italian government, then lenders should surely be willing to extend credit to you against the value of your house.

That would leave you with a curious mortgage – one that pays you interest. At the Italian rate, a $1-million house would come with an extra income of about $19.16 a month.

This raises profound metaphysical issues. If a mortgage carries negative interest, it implies that the house (an equal capital value) also has negative value.

After all, you have to pay someone to live in it. And if houses are worth less than nothing, we have to wonder what a car is worth… or a diamond ring… or a luxury cruise?

Does that mean that money has no value? Or even negative value?

After all, you can no longer give it to someone in exchange for a positive interest payment. Now you must pay him to store it for you, as though it were furniture that won’t fit in your house. You don’t like it anymore. But you don’t have the heart to throw it away.

And if money has no value, what happens when you hire, say, a gardener to pull out weeds? Should you pay him? Or should he pay you? How many hours should he have to work for you before you consent to take his money?

The whole thing is so contrary to nature we gasp when we think of it. We are flummoxed.

But you are a smart person, dear reader: Maybe you can figure it out for us.

The Strange Case of Sweden

This is all prelude to taking up the strange case of Sweden…

All we know about Sweden is what we learned by watching the movie The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

And all we learned from that was that Swedes tend to be murderers, sadists, lesbians, and pock-marked wimps.

Maybe that accounts for the torturous financial system the Swedes are creating.

Reports Business Insider:

Sweden is shaping up to be the first country to plunge its citizens into a fascinating – and terrifying – economic experiment: negative interest rates in a cashless society.

The Swedish central bank, the Sveriges Riksbank, on Wednesday held its benchmark interest rate at -0.35%, the level it has been at since July.

Though retail banks have yet to pass that negative rate on to Swedish consumers, they face increased pressure to do so as long as the rates remain where they are. That’s a problem, because Sweden is the closest country on the planet to becoming an all-electronic cashless society.

Remember, Sweden is the place where, if you use too much cash, banks call the police because they think you might be a terrorist or a criminal. Swedish banks have started removing cash ATMs from rural areas, annoying old people and farmers. Credit Suisse says the rule of thumb in Scandinavia is: “If you have to pay in cash, something is wrong.”

A resistance is forming, and some people are protesting the impending extinction of cash. Björn Eriksson, former head of Sweden’s national police and now head of Säkerhetsbranschen, a lobbying group for the security industry, told The Local, “I’ve heard of people keeping cash in their microwaves because banks won’t accept it.”

Alert readers will recognize this negative interest story as one we have been following. We believe it won’t be long before we have negative rates in the U.S., too.

The feds will pivot to even stricter controls on cash to gain more control over the economy and practically unlimited power to tax and spend – without congressional approval.

Sweden is ahead of the U.S. feds on this one. We can only hope it goes far ahead, fast, and blows itself up before the U.S. pivots down that path, too.

Negative interest rates are now being combined with the "war on cash" to ensure the capture of resources by the government and their cronies.

All these as warned by the great Austrian economist in his magnum opus "Human Action" in 1940 or 75 years back.

Public opinion is prone to see in interest nothing but a merely institutional obstacle to the expansion of production. It does not realize that the discount of future goods as against present goods is a necessary and eternal category of human action and cannot be abolished by bank manipulation. In the eyes of cranks and demagogues, interest is a product of the sinister machinations of rugged exploiters. The age-old disapprobation of interest has been fully revived by modern interventionism. It clings to the dogma that it is one of the foremost duties of good government to lower the rate of interest as far as possible or to abolish it altogether. All present-day governments are fanatically committed to an easy money policy.

The result of which would be... 

The wavelike movement affecting the economic system, the recurrence of periods of boom which are followed by periods of depression, is the unavoidable outcome of the attempts, repeated again and again, to lower the gross market rate of interest by means of credit expansion. There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.

Quote of the Day: Capitalism is Love Thy Neighbor

Capitalism is not a “system” like democracy or a composting toilet. It is not something that anyone designed. It is not something that can be consciously improved.

It is the result – or should be – of free markets, including the insights, work, gambles, and luck of millions of people all over the planet.

Improve it?

You might just as well “improve” the price of Walmart shares or of a pound of peaches.

Capitalism is not a system that you can take or leave, or take some parts of and leave the others, thereby making it more suited to your needs.

Capitalism is just what you get when you respect the rules of civilization. Don’t kill. Don’t steal. Don’t bear false witness. The rest probably don’t matter, but we haven’t taken the trouble to think about them very much.

Jesus condensed the rules into two big ones when he gave his Sermon on the Mount: Love God. Love thy neighbor.

The Jewish scholar Hillel the Elder later put it in terms a child could understand: If you wouldn’t want someone to do it to you then don’t do it to someone else.

All the rest is detail. You can’t love thy neighbor and steal his stuff. If you follow that rule, capitalism is what you’ve got. There is no way to improve it.

This is from Agora publishing's Bill Bonner at his web page Bonner & Partners

Quote of the Day: Cronyism depends on the credit bubble

Capitalism takes you into the future… with innovation, failure, and surprise. You invest, you lose your money, you try something different, and you stumble forward. Capitalism is constantly burying its mistakes and discovering tomorrow. 

Cronyism, on the other hand, keeps you in the past. It is today and yesterday trying to stop tomorrow from happening. By bribing public officials (they are remarkably cheap; in terms of return on investment nothing else comes close)… restricting… regulating… controlling… central planning… bailing out well-established businesses… rewarding stockholders… paying off voters, lobbyists, and special interests… and distorting the political establishment, with its geriatric candidates and tired themes. 

And guess what? Cronyism depends on the credit bubble. The future is where new wealth is created. When you try to stop or twist the future into the shape want, you prevent this wealth from ever happening. 

So, you switch from creating wealth now to taking wealth from the future, so you can consume it now. That’s how the credit bubble got so big. And that’s why almost nobody wants to see it pop. 

Cronies owe money. They borrow money. They depend on borrowed money for their budgets, their spending, their bonuses, their portfolios, their welfare checks, and their special privileges. They all depend so heavily on borrowing that few of them – whether in academia, media, business, finance, or government – can see the truth… let alone speak it. 

They are all paid not to see it. And if they do see it, they keep their mouths shut.

This excerpt is from Agora Publishing head Bill Bonner at his website Bonner & Partners

Quote of the Day: Wall Streeters are there to help themselves make money

If you have money, you will know one thing about the financial industry. It is largely parasitic.

A parasite attaches itself to you and drains you of your blood. Its interests are at odds with yours.

The stockbroker, for example, wants to encourage you to buy and sell – when that is precisely what you shouldn’t do.

And the fund manager, the dealmaker and the structured products engineer – they all make their money by encouraging you to spend yours… often on things that make little sense.

Wall Street sells dreams… hopes… and pies in the sky.

Sure, its labor force tends to dress well. They often go to the best schools. They are smart. They are presentable. But get close enough, and you will see they struggle to mask the moral strain of flogging hopeless investments to people who they believe were “born yesterday.”

Wall Streeters are not bad people. They are not dumb people. Neither saints nor sinners, they are just like the rest of us. But their industry encourages a huge fraud: That they are there to help you make money.

They are not. They are there to help themselves make money.

How?

By taking it from YOU.

The financial industry is very large and very profitable. The service it pretends to provide is helping to match worthwhile investment projects with the capital they need. The service it actually provides is separating fools from their money.

But the financial industry isn’t equally bad to all comers. It reserves a special zeal for the “suckers.”

(bold and italics original)

This is from Agora Publishing’s founder and president Bill Bonner published at the Wall Street Daily. 

The above is an example of the principal-agent problem or the agency problem as previously discussed. Of course the participants are not just direct intermediaries mentioned above as this should include Wall Street appendages or indirect participants (e.g. information intermediaries etc.), but most importantly it involves the major beneficiaries of "separating fools from their money": specifically governments and publicly listed companies supported by their patron: again the government.

Quote of the Day: In the hands of economists, the more precise the number, the bigger the lie.

Numbers are a good thing. Economics is full of numbers. It is perfectly natural to use numbers to count, to weigh, to study and compare. They make it easier and more precise to describe quantities. Instead of saying I drank a bucket of beer you say, I drank two 40s. Then instead of saying ‘I threw up all over the place,’ you say, I threw up on an area 4 feet square.

But in economics we reach the point of diminishing returns with numbers very quickly. They gradually become useless. Later, when they are used to disguise, pervert and manipulate, they become disastrous. Hormegeddon by the numbers. Ask Deep Thought the meaning of life then and the answer is likely to be “Negative Forty-Two.”

Exactly what point does the payoff from numbers in the economics trade become a nuisance? Probably as soon as you see a decimal point or a greek symbol. I’m not above eponymous vanity either. So I give you Bonner’s Law:

In the hands of economists, the more precise the number, the bigger the lie.

For an economist, numbers are a gift from the heavens. They turn them, they twist them, they use them to lever up and screw down. They also use them to scam the public. Numbers help put nonsense on stilts.

Numbers appear precise, scientific, and accurate. By comparison, words are sloppy, vague, subject to misinterpretation. But words are much better suited to the economist’s trade. The original economists understood this. Just look at Wealth of Nations—there are a lot of words in that thing. After all, we understand the world by analogy, not by digits. Besides, the digits used by modern economists are most always fraudulent.

“Math makes a research paper look solid, but the real science lies not in math but in trying one’s utmost to understand the real workings of the world,” says Professor Kimmo Eriksson of Sweden’s Malardalen University.

This is from the Agora’s Publishing chief Bill Bonner at the Casey Research.

Numbers are tools, they can be used for good or for deceit, so be careful with numbers.

Quote of the Day: The Keynesian Crank

In the early 20th century, John Maynard Keynes came up with a new idea about economics. The politicians loved it; Keynes explained how they could meddle in private affairs on a grand scale, and, of course, make things better.

Keynes argued that a government could take the edge off a business recession by making more credit available when money got tight, and by spending itself to make up for the lack of spending on the part of consumers and businessmen. Keynes suggested, whimsically, hiding bottles of cash all around town, where boys might find them, spend the money, and revive the economy.

The new idea caught on. Soon economists were advising all major governments about how to implement the new “ism.” It did not seem to bother anyone that the new system was a fraud. Where would this new money come from? And what made anyone think that the economists’ judgment of whether it made sense to spend or save was better than any individual’s?

All the Keynesians had done was to substitute their own guesses for the private, personal, economic opinions of millions of ordinary citizens. They had resorted to what Franz Oppenheimer called “political means,” instead of allowing normal “economic means” to take their own course.

The economists wanted what everyone else wants: power, prestige, women (except for Keynes himself, who preferred men). And there are only two ways to get what you want in life. There are honest means, and dishonest ones.

There are economic means, and there are political means. There is persuasion and there is force. There are civilized ways and barbaric ones.

The economist is a harmless crank as long as he is just peeping through the window, but when he undertakes to get people to do what he wants–either by offering them money that is not his own, by defrauding them with artificially low interest rates, or by printing up money that is not backed by something of real value such as gold–he has crossed over to the dark side. He has moved to political means to get what he wants. He has become a jackass.

Keynesian “improvements” were applied in the 1920s — when then Fed governor Ben Strong decided to give the economy a little “coup de whiskey” — and later in the 1930s when the stock market was recovering from the hangover.

The results were predictably disastrous. And along came other economists with their own bad ideas. Rare was the man, such as Robert Lucas or Murray Rothbard, who pointed out that you could not really improve economic results with political means.

If a national assembly could make people rich simply by passing laws, we would all be billionaires, because assemblies have passed a multitude of laws and seem capable of enacting any piece of legislation brought before them. If laws could make people wealthy, some assembly somewhere would have found the magic edicts — simply by chance.

Instead of making them richer, each law makes them a little poorer. Every time political means are used they interfere with the private, civilized economic arrangements that actually get people what they want.

This is from Bill Bonner of the Agora Publishing at the Forbes  (hat tip Mises Blog)

Quote of the Day: Democracy is a Joke

People will tell you that democracy requires a well-informed citizenry. Some will tell you, with a straight face and an earnest tone, that you have a “duty” to keep up with the news so you can participate in public affairs. Some countries – notably Argentina and Australia – even require citizens to vote.

But this presumes people have access to some set of relevant facts… and then make up their minds intelligently, applying the known facts to the public policy alternatives.

It is nonsense for two fundamental reasons.

First, there are no facts in public life, just memes and BS.

Second, even if there were meaningful facts, the individual citizen is hardly equipped to evaluate them. After so many millennia with no public life of any sort, we don’t know how to judge or master it.

Let me give you an example…

Candidate X tells us he is in favor of cutting government spending. Candidate Y tells us he intends to make the government more efficient. Candidate Z tells us we will all be better off, if the government spends more money to stimulate the economy.

And President Obama says he has a plan to improve the nation’s health-care system.

These are all “facts” – reported in the news media and widely debated in opinion columns and talk shows. But is there any way for the poor voter to know what the politicians really believe… or which public policy is likely to produce the best result?

Nope.

We know, after decades of experience, that public policy rarely improves our private lives. The more ambitious it is – as in the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany – the more it subtracts from our own hopes and plans…

Now, a young man can graduate from a leading university with a head full of public facts… and know nothing at all.

This is from Bill Bonner at Bonner & Partners

Quote of the Day: Robots should say a prayer to central bankers

Slaves – human or robotic – are a form of capital. After the cost of maintenance, the profits from their work go to their owners.

Wolf does not mention it, but the robots should say a prayer to central bankers. By reducing interest rates, they also reduce the cost of capital.

At zero rate of interest, for example, the real cost of a robot is zero. And if that robot can replace an average, marginally competent employee with a bad attitude, the employer makes a profit of $42,000 (or whatever he would have paid the human)… not counting health insurance and the parking place.

The lower the cost of capital, the more robots take their place in the labor force… and the more labor costs drop.

This is an excerpt from Agora Publishing’s Bill Bonner (published at Bonner & Partners) who takes a swipe at the neo-luddites. This shows just how blind the mainstream have been to the theory of capital to embrace age old discredited fallacies

Quote of the Day: The Biggest Insider Trading Perpetrator

We put in a good citizen call to the SEC yesterday.

“There’s a massive scheme to manipulate stock prices,” we told the friendly agent.

“I have to tell you that your call is being monitored so that we can better serve the public,” he replied.

“Oh, don’t worry about that. The NSA is tapping our call anyway.”

“Are you talking about a specific stock?”

“Oh no… I’m talking about all of them.”

“You mean a Madoff-style scandal?”

“No… no… This is much, much bigger than the Madoff scandal. We’re talking major manipulation. Intentional. Knowledge aforethought. Pumping up all stock prices. Trillions of dollars.”

“Who is doing this?” the agent asked… a certain tone creeping into his voice. He was starting to suspect he had a lunatic on the line.

“The Fed, of course.”

“Uh… thank you…”

“You gotta go after those bastards…”

“Uh… yes… we’ll look into it…”

“Okay… thanks… I just thought you should know.”

...

Without Fed support, the economy would probably be in recession. US GDP went up about $350 billion last year. The Fed offset it with $1.2 trillion worth of QE. Even so, the economy only limps along. Without it, the economy slumps. The Fed can’t tolerate a slump. So, it has to continue with QE.

Meanwhile, the federal government is absorbing $400 billion less capital this year than last as a result of lower budget deficits. This leaves a lot of excess stray kittens in need of adoption. Who will take them in?

Stocks! Real estate! Yes, dear reader, we will most likely see more gains in 2014.

This is blatant manipulation of the markets. The Fed is open about it. Even proud of it.

This is from Bill Bonner writing at the Bonner & Partners

Quote of the Day: The Failure of Leadership

That’s what leadership is all about — solemn and pompous lying. The greatest leaders are those who do it most grandly. Abraham Lincoln, for example. Without his leadership, the US would have probably split apart, which is to say the southern states would have been permitted to exercise the right laid out for them in the Declaration of Independence. They merely demanded to do what the 13 colonies had done before them — to misgovern themselves rather than have it imposed on them by others.

Lincoln — at Gettysburg — told the biggest lie in American history. He said they were fighting to preserve the promise of the revolution, and that the war was a test of whether “any nation, so conceived…can long endure.” In the end, his generals, Grant and Sherman, decided the matter in the negative.

The next greatest leadership debacle came in 1917. That was when Woodrow Wilson launched the US into someone else’s war on the basis of a breathtaking deceit. It was a “war to make the world safe for democracy,” he said. But if that were so, the US went in on the wrong side. Specifically, Britain and France ruled hundreds of millions of people — in Africa, Ireland, India, Southeast Asia — with no votes allowed! Germany, in comparison, was a model of democratic humbug.

Leaders lie. And their leadership — founded on lies — typically brings disasters. WWI was a disaster. Then came an economic disaster — the Great Depression. In the previous depression, 1920-1921, US president Warren Harding and Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon, simply ignored it. No leadership was provided. Two years later the depression was over.

This is from Agora publishing editor Bill Bonner at the Daily Reckoning.

Quote of the Day: How Insiders Use Democracy to Pick on Your Pockets

Napoleon Bonaparte himself was an outsider. He was not French, but Corsican. He didn’t even speak French when he arrived in Toulon as a boy. But there never is one fixed group of people who are always insiders. Instead, the insider group has a porous membrane separating it from the rest of the population. Some people enter. Some are expelled. The group swells. And shrinks. Potential rivals are brought in and bought off. Weak members are pushed out. Sometimes, a military defeat brings a whole new group of insiders into power. Elections, too, can change the make-up of the core group.

The genius of modern representative government is that it allows the masses to believe that they are insiders too. They are encouraged to vote…and to believe that their vote really matters. Of course, it matters not at all. Generally, the voters have no idea what or whom they are voting for. Often, they get the opposite of what they thought they had voted for anyway.

The common man likes the idea that he is running things. And he pays dearly for it. After the insiders brought him into the voting booth, his taxes soared…

In short, the insiders pulled a fast one. They allowed the rube to feel that he had a solemn responsibility to set the course of government. And while the fellow was dazzled by his own power…they picked his pocket!..

By the 20th century, developed countries could afford the cost of maintaining an expensive level of military preparedness, even when there was not really very much to be prepared for. But the common man was skinned again. Not only was he expected to pay for it, still under the delusion that he was in charge, he also was made to believe that he had a patriotic duty to defend the homeland insiders! That is the real reason that the modern democratic system has spread all over the world. It allows the insiders to mobilize more of the resources and energy of the country on their behalf. Nothing can compete with it.

This is from the Daily Reckoning’s Bill Bonner

Quote of the Day: The Energy Available to a Society Depends on the Organizational System

Civilizations based on conquest inevitably decline when they meet their match…or just run out of energy. Civilizations that expend their energy building huge monuments have little energy left to defend themselves against invaders or other challenges. But perhaps most often, civilizations die like humans, from the inside out. They develop power structures, aka government, with almost exclusive monopolies on the use of violence. Then, elite groups get control of the government and use it to shift more resources and energy to themselves. The rich get richer. That is why government is fundamentally a reactionary institution; it is almost always used to protect existing interests. Future interests don’t vote…children don’t stab you in the back…and tomorrow’s industries don’t make campaign contributions. In effect, government moves energy from the future to the past…from what will be to what used to be…and finally, to what will be no more…

Joseph Tainter, in his Collapse of Complex Societies, believes the decline in civilizations can be traced to problem solving. Each challenge, he says, leads to a solution, which involves greater complexity. Bureaucracies, hierarchies, rules, and regulations are imposed. These things cost time, energy and resources. Eventually, the cost is too great and the downside is reached.

In the Roman Empire, for example, agricultural output per person dropped as population increased. The problem was addressed by a policy of conquest.

The Romans took resources — grain, slaves, gold — from their neighbors. But this required a large army, which was an expensive, energy-consuming enterprise. The return on investment declined…and eventually went negative. The Empire collapsed. That was not necessarily a bad thing. When the decline on energy investments is negative, you are better off stopping the program. And archeological evidence from bones and teeth suggest that many people were actually better fed after the collapse of the empire.

As the size and complexity of society grows, the governments that are most competitive are those that draw on the most support (energy) of their subject peoples. That is why the Roman policy of conquest was so successful. They were able to turn the conquered peoples into supporters of the regime, with most of the army eventually comprised of non-Roman soldiers. The British Empire was good at this too. The empire began by subduing the Scots, who became the backbone of the British Army. Today’s American army, too, depends heavily on soldiers from the southern states, who were conquered by Abraham Lincoln’s armies in the 1860s.

The energy available to a society depends on many things, probably the least important of which is beneath the ground. More important is the organizational system and its stage of development. In an early stage, the system tends to be robust and efficient — or ‘simple,’ in Tainter’s terms. Later, additional complexity degrades returns on energy investments. While this complexity may be described as a form of problem solving, it is better understood as an attempt by elite groups to hold onto their wealth and power.

This excerpt is from Bill Bonner, publisher of the Daily Reckoning, discussing the ontological cycles of human societies or "the rule of the downside"

Bill Bonner: Why Statistical Numbers are a Scam

Agora Publishing’s Bill Bonner explains at the Daily Reckoning why relying on aggregate statistics can be misleading

I’ve always been especially suspicious of the zero. It is a number. But a number is ‘something.’ The zero, on the other hand, is supposed to represent nothing. Well, which is it? Something or nothing? Nothing, right? But how can something be nothing? You say you have zero tomatoes. And you tell me zero is a number, used for counting. But how can you count tomatoes that aren’t there? You’ve either got tomatoes or you don’t. Zero tomatoes is a contradiction. It’s oxymoronic.

And if the zero is actually nothing, how come you can put it after a number…and suddenly you have 10 times as much? Or, put it in front of a number…and you have 1/10 as much. How can nothing do all that?

Now if I have 3 tomatoes and I add zero tomatoes, I have done nothing. I still have three tomatoes. But if I multiply my 3 tomatoes by zero, suddenly, I don’t have any tomatoes. If zero is nothing, I want to know what happened to my tomatoes.

We didn’t have the zero for thousands of years. As far as I know, we got along fine without it.

Numbers are a trap for economists. They make it look like science, but it is not science. Far from it. Initial conditions can never been controlled or fully understood. Instead, they are infinitely complex. Nor can results be reproduced. Nor can hypotheses ever be disproven. That’s why economists can cling to dopey ideas for centuries — they can never be disproven.

Using numbers, economists pretend to tell you something they don’t really tell you, often something they can’t possibly tell you.

How GDP numbers are not only unreliable but vulnerable to manipulation:

GDP numbers are a complete scam. They don’t tell you if you’re coming or going. They don’t tell you if you’re getting richer or poorer. This is another way that numbers fail. They can only measure quantity. Or speed. Here’s an example. An article ran in the Wall Street Journal last month. It explained how Italy’s economic growth was retarded by strong family attachments. Half the young children in Italy are raised by their grandparents — their ‘nonni’ — while their parents work. Instead of going to day care centers, the kids go to their grandparents.

How does this affect an economy? There is no exchange of money when the grandparents do the day care. So, it doesn’t register in the GDP. No exchange of money, no ‘growth.’ The article also went on to say that people were reluctant to leave their hometowns to seek work elsewhere because they relied on the family for childcare. Theoretically, a mobile population increases GDP too…GDP increases when people take new jobs, move, buy houses and furniture, sign up for health clubs, day care and so forth. All these things add to GDP growth, even though they do nothing to really increase quality of life. They are a kind of phony growth. GDP looks only at the quantity and velocity of money transactions, not the quality of them…nor the quality of life they produce…nor the real wealth of the people in an economy.

I cut your lawn. You mow my lawn. We pay each other. The GDP goes up. The more transactions per person per year — the greater the GDP of a country.

Is anybody better off? What really have the numbers told us? Has one single extra lawn been mowed? One single extra blade of grass cut down?

No, right? So, if a number…the GDP growth number…tells you that you’re growing…and you’re not really growing…what good is the number? It’s a flimflam. An empty number. There’s no good information in it. It’s like the unemployment number. Empty. Hollow. A zero. And so are almost all the compound, formula-driven numbers used by economists. They are dishonest. Their only role is to tart up economists’ confections and make it appear that they can do things they can’t really do. They are designed to make economics look like engineers, working on the economy as though they were real technicians preparing a moon launch.

But if these guys were building a bridge, none of us would want to drive over it. If they were building cars, we wouldn’t buy them. And if they were running the phone company, and we needed a telephone number, we could call “Directory Information;” they’d estimate it for us.

Easy to understand lesson for the layman

Quote of the Day: Democracy is a Delusion that the Majority is Master of Itself

participatory democracy became fashionable in the 19th century. The main reason was probably because it is easier to squeeze and bamboozle a citizen than it is a subject. The real genius of modern democracy is that it makes the citizen feel that the government and its workings are somehow the product of his own aspirations. If he wants more money for his retirement, he presumes he can get is — provided only that enough fellow citizens share his desire. If he wants to go to war, that too is up to him and his fellow voters. If he wants to spend more money on space exploration or ban people from saying prayers in bars, the majority — of which he feels he should be part — can do that too.

There is hardly anything he and his fellow lumpenvoters cannot do — just so long as they are of one mind on the subject. That is why you so often hear people say, ‘If we could only get together on this…” They believe solidarity is the key to success. Whatever the majority wants, it gets.

Even kings had bits in their mouths and a hand on the reins. According to the “divine right of kings” doctrine, a king was a servant of God. A king was subject as well as monarch. God himself had given them the post; they could not refuse it. Nor could they refuse to carry out the job on the terms that they believed God had prescribed. God could pull on the reins whenever He wanted.

Often, monarchs were ridden by those who claimed to represent God. In the famous example from the 11th century, Pope Gregory VII got into a dispute with Henry IV, the Holy Roman Emperor. Henry was excommunicated. How much harm Gregory’s excommunication would do him, Henry might not have known. But he didn’t want to find out. He dressed as a penitent and waited three days outside the Pope’s refuge at Canossa. Then he was admitted and forgiven.

The democratic majority, on the other hand, recognizes no authority — temporal, constitutional nor religious — that can stand in its way. And thus it deludes itself to thinking that it is the master of itself, its own government and its own fate.

“The government is all of us,” said Hillary Clinton.

This from Bill Bonner, founder and president of the Agora Publishing, in one of his latest articles published at the Agora’s Daily Reckoning website.

In reality, participatory democracy is the manipulation of the delusional majority to serve the interests of the political minority.

Quote of the Day: Europe’s Sisyphean Task

Daily Reckoning’s Bill Bonner on Europe’s Sisyphean task or “endless and unavailing, as labor or a task” (Wikipedia.org)

European banks are stuffed with debt from insolvent governments. Governments are stuffed with debt from insolvent banks. Proposals on the table include plans to issue more debt by governments…or more debt by the banks. It’s fun to watch, but there’s no light at the end of the tunnel.

Two drunks propping up each other.

Quote of the Day: Insider-Outsider Government Theory

Bill Bonner’s theory of government.

Every theory of government we’ve come across is a scam. So we offer a better theory: government is just a way for the insiders to take advantage of the outsiders…

Insiders always use government to transfer power and money from the outsiders to themselves…

There never is one fixed group of people who are always insiders. Instead, the insider group has a porous membrane separating it from the rest of the population. Some people enter. Some are expelled. The group swells. And shrinks. Sometimes, a military defeat brings a whole new group of insiders sweeping into power. Elections change the make-up of the core group.

But the genius of modern representative government is that it cons the masses into believing that they are insiders too. They are encouraged to vote…and to believe that their vote really matters. Of course, it matters not at all. Generally, the voters have no idea what or whom they are voting for. Often, they get the opposite of what they thought they had voted for anyway.

Quote of the Day: Political Zombiesm

From Daily Reckoning’s Bill Bonner

Here is the foundation of our General Theory of Zombieism:

1. All (or almost all) people want wealth, power and status.
2. They want to get it in the easiest way possible.
3. The easiest way to get wealth is to steal it, which is why all groups turn to the government, the only institution which gets to steal lawfully.
4. Over time, more and more groups are able to use the system for their own ends.

If they are poor, they implore the government to ‘tax the rich’ and give the money to the poor. If they are rich, they want the government to protect their wealth and status — with every means available to them. Democratic governments generally do both. They support the poor with loud attacks on the rich combined with whimpers of money (for the poor can generally be bought — vote for vote — much cheaper than the rich). As for the rich, their support is more subtle and underhanded. There are tax credits and loopholes for anyone who can afford them; sugar-laden contracts for the insiders and plenty of jobs for well-credentialized blowhards.

The rich complain about the poor. The poor complain about the rich. Both complain about the government. And everybody hates capitalism.

But over time, the giveaways, bribes, regulations, intercessions and meddling on the part of the government have a big effect on the economy. The more the government interferes with market signals and market-based capital allocation, the less able the economy is to produce real wealth. More and more resources are purloined by the insiders before the truck reaches its destination. Paperwork, lawyers, administration, regulation, taxes take a toll. So does misallocation of capital investment to huge, unproductive industries such as education, health, and defense. There is also a shift of wealth generally from those who earn it to those to whom it is redistributed…and from capital formation to consumption. And gradually the economy becomes paralyzed and parasitic…and nearly everyone gets poorer. And often, the state…and the mobs that support it…become desperate for more money. Then…the rich had better watch out!

Quote of the Day: Cycles of Political Institutions

From Bill Bonner

As an institution matures, little by little it shifts from serving its original purpose to serving the ends of those who control it. It becomes rigid — digging in its heels and resisting any change that would diminish the power and wealth of the controlling groups. The longer the institution remains unchanged, the more parasitic and arthritic it becomes. It drains resources away from honest production and redirects them towards favored groups of leeches.

Then…history returns. Then cometh the revolution.