Atomic Fungus loses his cool over the economy and how government has mismanaged it.
This morning, as I was getting ready for work, it occurred to me that I'm never going to be able to retire. I led a feckless life in my youth, and made a lot of mistakes, but that's not why. I mean, even if I had done everything right, just look at the economy right now. Our government is hiding the truth from us because if the American public found out what the real numbers were, all the politicians would be hanging from lampposts by sunset!
Our government has literally spent all the money in the world. They're printing new dollars at the rate of ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-EIGHT THOUSAND DOLLARS PER SECOND and there is no sign of stopping, or even slowing down. There's a story today about our banking system having a trillion dollars' worth of bad assets, things that count up to $1 trillion on the balance sheets, but are simply not worth that much, and won't fetch anything like that if sold. Someone said that so many banks have overvauled assets that FDIC can only insure deposits at 1:100--meaning that for every dollar you've got in the bank, they'll give you a penny.
When the collapse comes, every last damned asset that isn't in your hands is going to be worthless. Your 401k--whether it's $10k or $100k--won't buy a loaf of bread. The stock portfolios won't be worth anything; I mean, even with the Dow at 200 trillion, if a loaf of bread costs five hundred billion dollars, your stocks are worthless.
I am still of the opinion that the government will nationalize 401k and other retirement instruments before the end. Basically, they'll do to your savings what they did to the "Social Security fund": they'll spend it, and give you an IOU.
Bear in mind that FDR made private ownership of gold illegal, and people had to turn their gold in. They got dollars for it. ...dollars which started inflating almost immediately.
The financial cataclysm I see coming means that no one my age is going to get to retire. Anyone who actually has managed it will not be able to stay retired.
And the absolute worst part of this? The part that really keeps me up nights is that I'M OPTIMISTIC ABOUT HOW IT WILL GO. I'm betting that there are going to be some hard times when we'll be eating rice and beans for most of the week, with maybe a can of SPAM on Sunday--no treats, no cookies, no dessert, just the absolute bare minimum to keep body and soul together, and you eat what's put in front of you even if you hate it--but otherwise things will even out relatively quickly and get better. A year, maybe, of hard times. For everyone, not just us. Only the hyper-rich will not see their standard of living change dramatically.
And then I wonder why I have problems with anxiety??
There's more at the link.
He's more optimistic than I am about a short-duration crisis (I think it'll last much longer), but I can't disagree with his thesis overall. We've been saying the same thing in these pages for a long time, most recently:
The scariest graphic I've seen in a long time
I'd dearly love to see an honest politician stand up and state publicly that the USA is bankrupt, that it's our own fault, and that the only way out of this mess is to slash government spending by up to 50% - which will require cutting entitlement programs to the bone, and abolishing many of them. Yes, people will suffer hardship as a result; but they're going to suffer hardship anyway when our fiscal house of cards comes tumbling down. Do it soon or do it later, it's still going to hurt all of us.
Unfortunately, the genus "honest politician" has so few members that one hardly ever encounters them, so nobody's going to own up to the truth.
Peter
1 comment:
As long as Social Security is on the chopping block for lack of funds, while things like WELFARE and upward-spiraling cost of ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION aren't, we're on a rocket sled to hell!
Post a Comment