The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle
Commentary on the Flux of Events
If the current countdown to meltdown on Wall Street and prelude to Great Depression II is anything like the 1929 slide into Great Depression I, then there are bound to be plenty of corporate martyrs out there desperately buying their own company stocks with borrowed funds to keep up the appearance of normality, and even rascals shorting their own company stock to make a buck while their own companies go down. The things you can do with financial abstractions are amazing, but they are not magical, not supernatural, and I think we're about to find out exactly what those natural limits are. The markets as depicted in indexes like the Dow and Nasdaq are reaching a critical point and my guess is that the Dow has commenced a luge run that will take it to the 7000 range before the middle of the summer, with the Nasdaq bobsledding to under 1000.
What are the outlines of Great Depression II? One will be the rather sickening recognition by the public that the basis of our economy has been shifted to a deeply unbalanced juggernaut of suburban sprawl creation -- the little vinyl and chipboard houses that are supposed to represent the Average American's life savings, and all the grotesque furnishings for the sprawl lifestyle, including the fry pits, the discount chainstore boxes, the carwash kingdoms, and enough free parking for God's own fleet of SUV's.
A world of pain awaits those who have ridden the housing bubble -- the last bubble -- into the sunset of DiTech home equity loans. Ready for the greatest fire-sale of repossessed badly-built houses that the world has ever seen? It's coming to your subdivision. All you mayors and town councilmen who turned the highways in-and-out of your municipality into discount retail clusterfucks into order to benefit from those alluring ratables: prepare yourselves for a fiesta of abandonment and revenue loss.
Our economy is a joke. We outsourced most of our manufacturing while everybody at home was lost in narcotic raptures of cappuccino and bargain shopping. Our food growing system would collapse overnight without ultra-cheap oil. We've eliminated the merchant class from 99 percent of small-town America. You can't even call your insurance company on the phone and talk to a live human being.
We are heading into an economic shitstorm and the world has become a much more unfriendly place since last summer. The trouble we face at home is going to be complicated by a lot of grievances and sore feelings on the part of people who had unreal expectations about what the world owed them.
Meanwhile Israel and the Palestinians are ramping up to an all-out war.
A tough month lies ahead.