Over Stimulated

The news brings word that Washington has agreed to an unprecedented economic package, estimated to top $6 trillion. This includes the $4 trillion in money the Federal Reserve will hand to rich people through various ways. The other money will go to different rich people in the form of tax rebates and cash payments. Some very small amount will go to everyone else in the form of unemployment checks, loans to small business and one time crazy checks randomly mailed to people.

The money in the stimulus bill is not all a waste. Bailing out the airline industry has a real benefit. Airlines are like a hybrid utility these days. They are technically private companies, but almost all of their actions are controlled by government. They operate through state owned airports and every aspect of their operations must be agreed to in advance by the federal government. We need the airlines to function, so bailing them out has some actual value to the rest of us.

As an aside, you’ll note what is not in this bill. If we are throwing trillions around, it would make sense to build a wall along the border or maybe fix up some roads. Perhaps we could draw back some overseas commitments and put those funds to work rebuilding the homeland. While the checkbook is open, maybe Trump could get something for his voters this time. Instead, you can be sure, tucked away in the details, will be money for more dirty barbarians to be settled in your town.

The stimulus bill is just the show. Its main purpose is to show the public that the actors and actresses hired by rich people to play the role of congressmen and senators really care about the people. The other carny folk post videos of themselves enjoying quarantine in their mansions. The carnies in DC pass stimulus bills. That may sound very cynical, but everyone in small business knows the score with these rescue packages passed by Washington during a crisis show.

The real mischief, however, is in the other money being handed to the nation’s desperate rich people. This is the stuff being done by the Federal Reserve, away from the TV cameras. Trillions of dollars will be poured into the financial markets, much of it through the direct purchase of assets, like bad debt, stocks, corporate bonds and the synthetic stuff no one really understands. The central bank is coming close to turning the global financial system into a palace economy.

A palace economy is a form of economic organization that was common in the Bronze Age societies of Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean. This is a system where a substantial share of the wealth flows to the rulers and is then distributed to the general population. The proceeds of farms, less what the farmers feed their families, goes to the king, who then feeds the people. The same holds for booty gained from conquest of neighbors or the mining of precious metals.

Now, the Federal Reserve is not taking these assets against the will of the current holders and then giving them to the rest of us. Instead, they are paying face value for assets that may or may not be worth what is claimed. The plan is to flood the system with cash in order to prevent cash hoarding. Theoretically, this keeps the banks lending and the credit system moving. In a system entirely based on leverage, any interruption in the credit system threatens the life of the system.

This reveals the big lie about modern economics. Small and mid-sized business are exposed to the dangers of the marketplace. If they make a mistake, they pay for it and possibly go under. In the major leagues, where the big boys play, there is no threat from market forces, as the Federal Reserve backstops everything. It is not a marketplace, but rather a highly complex casino, where the house stakes all of the players. Those that lose are simply given a loan from the house to keep playing.

A good example of this is something that started happening last fall, before anyone cared about the Chinese virus. This was back when the Fed mysteriously began to intervene in the repo market. No one had a good answer for why this was happening and the financial media was told not to ask too many questions. It turns out that it was a quiet rescue of hedge funds. They had over-leveraged themselves working a popular skim called the basis trade. The Fed jumped in to save them.

Just as democracy is a farce to conceal who is really calling the shots, free market capitalism is just a show to conceal the reality of the economic system. The response to the panic they have created shows just how little of the economy is actually a marketplace at all. The $6 trillion in stimulus is a quarter of the economy, on top of the mountain of regulations and trillions in normal government spending. In America, the “free market” is a fringe activity reserved for the little people.

It is tempting to think that this reality is some sort of perversion of our ancient economic traditions, but that’s just another pretty lie. In reality, the normal state of things is for the rulers to tightly control the economy of their territory. In was true in the palace economies of the ancient world. It was true throughout the middle ages. It has been true in the modern world since there has been a modern world. Like libertarianism and communism, the free market exists only in the mind.


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163 thoughts on “Over Stimulated

  1. NEVER EVER forget that the only purpose and mandate for the FED is to insure the profits of the member banks and bail them out when they get caught out.

    FED buying up everything is buying debt, corporate mortgages, called bonds, now sub prime corporate mortgages, same as last time with sub prime house mortgages. Have to get them off the banksters books prior to the impending default or down grade.
    The Ponzi bezzle of debt has to be kept alive as long as possible.

    When the head of CITI bank, (Sandy Weill), stated on camera that he had spent $200 Million over two years bribing congress critters to get Glass Steagle cancelled so it could buy Travelers insurance to get its cash horde, he had to have Slick Willie in his pocket to sign the bill, obviously. Banks then and now are churning the stock market using Algo Robots for fun and profits for bonus money that must be kept alive.

    Throw a few crumbs from Treasury, the co-conspirator who can mail checks, which the FED cannot do, to the little people to shut them up and keep them out of the streets, with unemployment ramping up to who knows where, +20% maybe, and also have to ramp up funding unemployment insurance, the states have to write the checks for. State funds are for sure woefully deficient, so likely the FED will have to shove cash to the states like it did a few decades ago to bail the states out.

    It is good to be the King with the magic computer to generate the debt based fiat currency out of nowhere from nothing. Immortal quote, “I care not who makes the laws as long as I am printing the money.” Imagine if money printing was totally ink on paper for the $19 TRILLION shoved out to the worlds banks in 08, and now more tens of TRILLIONS. The meticulous documentation of the $22 TRILLION unaccounted for in the Pentagon. Coincidentally about the size of the national debt!

    When your house is on fire and the fire department shows up, you care not a bit about any amounts or details of whats behind getting the truck there funding the department, wages, pensions, or cost of the truck.

  2. I’m surprised you that you support bailing out the airlines considering that they evidently planned to get bailed out all along.

    They had no money set aside to pay their employees because they were too greedy to reinvest profits in their own companies and they knew they could get the taxpayer to bail them out. Have you seen how much money the CEO of United or Delta make ? Have you seen how pozzed these companies are with their globohomo marketing campaigns and sodomite safety videos https://news.delta.com/delta-people-celebrate-prideinflight-push-lgbtq-progress

    https://www.aa.com/i18n/urls/rainbow.jsp?anchorLocation=DirectURL&title=rainbow

    https://www.gayborhood.com/buzz/alaska-airs-new-ad-features-adorable-gay-couple/

    https://i0.wp.com/thepointsguy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/virgin.jpg?ssl=1

    How much of the bailout money will just go into the pockets of billionaire airline execs or to fund more propaganda aimed at destroying us.

    The airlines don’t need a bailout. Strike a blow against globalism by refusing to reward these people for irresponsible and destructive behavior.

  3. Since the end of Lincoln’s and the North’s War of Aggression until now there have been two America’s:

    1) imperial oligarchic america that runs FUSA like the Matrix

    2) Real Trad Americans that think the Matrix is real (or are forced to live in this category)

    These two have existed simultaneously for as long as mutual interests existed.

    Those mutual interests have now all evaporated.

    Two years from now one of those entities above will still exist.

    The other will not.

    Geography may have a bearing on that, but the time for the parasite and host to exist in the same place will not.

    Math will drive that. And the reality math brings.

    To finance and pandemics.

    Happy 4th Turning, silly rabbits.

  4. Colorado just issued a statewide lockdown.

    This is looking more and more like a manufactured crisis. The numbers in Colorado were not growing fast enough so on Monday the Colorado health department changed their definition of new cases from a strict definition of cases with a positive test result to a loose definition that includes positive tests and anyone who had contact with someone who had a positive test and who shows symptoms. Numbers are now climbing rapidly, which provided the legal justification for shutting down businesses and locking down the population.

  5. My grandparents had my mother in 1934 deep in the great depression. They were ok due to living in rural Tennessee. No electrify, running water, or indoor plumbing back then. They survived.

    It is odd that my family lived into the their 90s and early 100s back then and each generation has died earlier as we got more “medical care”. The men of my wife’s family and those of my family told me often they hated the “pill pushers”. I don’t know, I just know that modern medicine no longer thinks that eating right and living right are important — pills and shots of vaccinations are the ticket. Money makers.

    What I do know is that the numbers tell us that the coronavirus is far less of a threat than the seasonal flu. Even if it were not; we can not destroy the industrial society without major suffering and death.

    I think it is already too late. Please change my mind.

  6. the repo market was explained to me in a pithy way that gearhead me could understand it, its like going to the bowling alley and renting a pair of smelly shoes for the night of gutter ball fun. finish your last beer, give them back, and they get keep your 5 bucks for the very short term use of the shoes. now if you and all your friends walk out with bowling shoes on, time to call the FED for a new bowling shoe loan.

  7. The state in which I live will soon release a stay at home order to be in effect for at least 21 days. At least I get to work from home while society collapses.

  8. When the MN governor locked us down, he also mentioned that “we see from your cell phones that Minnesotans are taking social distancing seriously”. With a chuckle. Like we all knew they were tracking us.

    So Z-Man, you are exactly right. The Nomenklatura built out China’s super-surveillance state and said, wow, that is SO cool. That kind of lockdown would kick these populist nuisances right in the teeth! How can we talk the rubes into signing up for that kind of set-up? And their Sinic comrades said, well, there’s one idea we’ve been working up for a while…

  9. I’ve been a daily reader for 5 years now, and read most/all of the comments too. Used to chime in without much substance so I’ve been lurking for years.

    I’m going out on a limb and seeking some advice. If nothing else this may be illuminating to some commenters who aren’t connecting the dots re: small business.

    My shop was thriving before this mess. Big, organic growth every year, and 2020 was off to a tremendous start. My steady investments in equipment and obsession with mastering the craft have put us at the top of the market. We are the go-to shop for some of the biggest clients in the business.

    Practically all of our work vaporized overnight. 95% of our jobs are for live concert merchandise. My pregnant wife and I were about 48 hours away from buying our first house when the waterfall started. I was also weeks away from expanding our shop and signing a 5-year lease. Thank God I hadn’t closed on either yet.

    We have dozens of invoices out that remain unpaid, largely jobs for cancelled gigs. Most are for clients I have great trust in, but all are eviscerated by the lockdown too. One medium sized job represents ~$10K in loss of income to my clients.

    I have three full-time employees. I pay better than competitors but it’s not much. I was really looking forward to giving raises and more PTO when anniversaries came around, and adding healthcare in 2021. I’m very concerned about them, both personally and because I *need* them to get back on track whenever this nightmare ends.

    Because of our governor’s edict I was forced to send them home this week and technically next. That alone will put a major hurting on them. There’s nothing productive they can do from home that I could assign them. When they’re back I do have some important shop improvement projects I’m glad we can focus on.

    But I don’t see a scenario in which the faucet gets turned back on any time soon. And I can’t stay afloat for long without A) going broke, B) taking on debt bigly or C) laying off at least 2 (of the 3).

    I am wondering if I should “fire” everyone so that they can collect unemployment. I can run all of the machines for whatever comes in the meantime. This sounds like another terrible option though.

    I am lost.

    • Have a “heart to heart” conversation with all of them and figure out what is best for everyone. Explain the choices and let them have a bit of a say in the matter, and then make a decision. The honorable thing to do, all around, IMHO

    • It’s a small consolation, but you’re not alone. Our Gov did the same. It may vary from state to state, but I think “laid off” folks are eligible for unemployment and healthcare for a certain amount of time. Maybe somebody at the SBA could give you some concrete advice? Wishing you all the best with the new baby.

    • I know a man who runs a small restaurant in Orlando. The Wife and I have been good customers for 20 years. He is facing closing down and never reopening. What can I say? My private school probably can’t survive this.

      I am a nobody, but the advice I would give is to do whatever it takes for YOU to survive this. You can’t help others if you are helpless. I tell my students that the best way to help the poor is to not become one of them. (We are Catholic and charity is a virtue)

      All this over a disease much more mild than the seasonal flu. Why does everyone not hide under their bed EVERY year as flu season starts? People my age with heart problems like I have are prime targets — and yet I never worry at all.

      I got off topic. SAVE YOURSELF so you can save your FAMILY. And then maybe help others later when you have survived.

      My 2 cents.

    • Thanks for the responses guys. I really appreciate it.

      Dutch / Exile — That’s about how I handled it when sending them home for the week after the governor’s announcement Friday. I’ve always been transparent with my squad and I can tell they respect that.

      That was a bump in the road though. I’m see now I’m fighting a rearguard action. The next fallback will probably be a major retreat and that will be a hard conversation. I intend to follow your advice, I agree it’s the honorable way.

      Doing my homework on the stimulus currently. I hope there’s a least-worst opportunity for everyone.

  10. In America, the “free market” is a fringe activity reserved for the little people. This is perhaps the best sentence I’ve read hear at the Z blog.

  11. Seems like you are black pilling. Yeah , the bill is imperfect and may enrich the usual cronies, but i am happy that the market is not tanking anymore, at least for now. Trying to get a wall included would’ve ensured its failure. Most sources put it at $2 trillion. not sure where you are getting the $6 trillion figure from. Trump is due to sign it today,yet we supprot trump and are trashing this bill, so which is it? the biggest problem with conservatism is the lack of logical consistency . The bill has a lot of pork , but that is how all spending bills are. It’s as if we just learned this now.

  12. Minnesota will lock down today. Slowing new cases; 26 hospitalized. In other words, no reason at all. And he, perhaps steepling his fingers as he did so, triumphantly announced, and it will be for MONTHS, there will be no Easter!

    This will, of course, if it actually happens, destroy the state economy. But I suspect rural Minnesotans will defy it and local authorities will join right in. There’s no problem, and it’s getting warmer and sunnier every day.

  13. >The money in the stimulus bill is not all a waste. Bailing out the airline industry has a real benefit. Airlines are like a hybrid utility these days. They are technically private companies, but almost all of their actions are controlled by government. They operate through state owned airports and every aspect of their operations must be agreed to in advance by the federal government. We need the airlines to function, so bailing them out has some actual value to the rest of us.

    if after 911 airlines have not learned risk mitigation ,then maybe some need to tail. Those that were prudent will survive. Air travel li not essential. if it is so important airlines should rise prices and the use the profits to shore up liquidity for times like this. Car, bus, and train worked well for 100+ years. Not everyone needs to fly to Vegas or to see their relatives for the weekend. If they do, make them pay more.

    • Government being involved in the airline industry distorts demand just like government involvement in medicine.

  14. “The banking industry collectively made $233.1 billion in profits in 2019, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation said Tuesday, the industry’s second-most profitable year ever. . . .The FDIC’s look at the banking industry reflects a healthy — and incredibly profitable — industry. The number of “problem banks,” or banks that are at risk of failing, fell to 51 in the fourth quarter. That’s the lowest number of problem banks since 2006, right before the financial crisis.”
    That was just a month ago. https://tinyurl.com/qv93htb Of course Lehman posted record profits right before it went under, too.

  15. Our country may have always had cartels, but a hundred years ago we were a much more balanced people. We understood that currency regimes were fragile, and they pass every few generations from carelessness. Andrew Melon, Treasury Secretary under Hoover gave great untaken advice, “liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate. Purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. … enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.” That’s the advice you need in a panic, and that’s the advice that’s never taken. The problem with bad debt, is that it can only be extinguished or moved around. To extinguish bad debt is to tell the power elite of any country that they’re going to have to take their hits, they invested poorly. The power elite controls the financial levers to merely move the debt around an ameliorate it with currency creation (as happened this week and will continue to happen). This always results in a currency crisis, and the fact that we have the reserve currency of the world will only exacerbate that crisis once it gets going. As the trustee of the reserve currency we not only have to save ourselves, but throw swap lines across the world to various countries that are having dollar liquidity problems. A lot of bankers take comfort in the fact that the velocity of money in our economy is at all time lows and dropping, but so was the VIX only a couple months ago. It’s like watching a smoking volcano and assuring oneself that it will never blow. The monetary problems we face took generations to build. The big turning point was when the deified Alzheimers patient threw caution to the wind in 1983 and attached our economy to the bond market. That’s really when the profligate spending got out of hand. He was a great “conservative” by the way. And all of this will implode on the watch of another Alzheimers patient who will win in November.

  16. Z Man;
    Interesting thoughts about the palace economy. There really are interesting parallels.

    Palace economies were apparently able to function without formal money for many centuries. Gold or silver measured by weight was the means of debt settlement, particularly in external commerce. Supposedly coinage was first implemented in the West in Lydia ca. 500 BC, almost 1,000 years after palace economies came into existence (that we know of). Instead of coinage, they had scribes, lotsa scribes, to keep track of who owed what to whom. Then, like now, ‘book entries’ (on mud tablets) were usually offset and actual cash ((Chinese word (?)) settlement was comparatively rare. So they did have financialization even without money_!

    Thing is, there was constant war, cause if you ran out of booty to keep your armed retainers happy, then a faction of them could be organized by a rival war leader and then the royal family’s heads got to decorate the pikes on the palace wall. Worked like a cycle as described by various historians such as Ibn Khaldun and Glub Pasha. Expand or die was the rule.

    So was the USSR a palace economy_? One parallel was that the Russians themselves recognized the ‘expand or die’ nature of Communism: Likewise Margaret Thatcher. Without somebody else’s stuff to steal they were eaten up from the inside by multiplication of corrupt cronyism for useless elite spawn. Once the USSR couldn’t get more booty and were pressed financially it cratered as the Dirt People walked away en mass.

    So are we also close to cratering due to gross, hidden, financial over-leverage_? This might explain the seemingly unwarranted fear the Wuhan Virus is propagating among the Cloud Financiers. *Somebody* with some real clout got to San Fran Nan yesterday.

    • Bolshevism was by definition internationalist and required constant spreading to survive, albeit it’s fuel was ideology and damaged souls, not coin (communism doesn’t work, so the Soviet economy was always crap). So, no, not a palace economy.

      • F.T.:
        Agree with the not-coin point as an aspiration: Once you own the productive world, no need for coin. Nothing to buy under true Communism, *in theory*. But in practice_?

        The CPUSSR (Communist Party of the USSR) most certainly did loot the productive capital of E Europe (E Germany in particular) after WWII: Picked up whole factories. And they took whatever the Japanese had built up in Manchuria as well before they gave the place back to Mao. They sold off the inception-to-date wealth accumulations of the Tzars, etc. to buy capital goods from the US in particular to build up their armaments industries pre WWII. They looted the lands of the Kulaks (and then killed them) in the 1920s. So, after that, they had to buy wheat every year with the minerals mined by their slaves in the Gulag. Meanwhile the Nomenklatura lived lives of hidden luxury (once Stalin stopped shooting them).

        Sounds pretty damn close to a rapacious palace economy to me.

  17. Latest from the hospital I work at.

    • We received 5 COVID test results today; 5 negative and 0 positive.
    Total tests sent: 97
    Positive: 3
    Negative: 92
    Pending: 2

    • Similar here as well, however the mayor is petitioning the Governor to mandate in home lock down for entire State. Just raised the virtue signaling to ridiculous.

    • Thank you for this information. Very useful. Can you please clarify the time duration of the total data? Is that number over the lifetime of testing in your facility?

      I have seen other statistics that indicate 90% of all tests are coming back negative.

    • Just checked with a friend of mine who manages a lab in a mid-sized hospital in the Midwest. They are currently at 85% of tests returned negative and the percentage of positive tests is dropping as the amount of testing increases. They expect results to stabilize in the range of 90% of all tests negative, plus or minus 5%.

      • And of the 10% that are positive, it will probably turn out that on retesting, maybe half were actually negative. Then from the remaining 5% I wouldn’t be surprised if it broke down like this: 50% asymptomatic, 40% mild cold-like symptoms, 10% severe symptoms. Then from that you get maybe a 3% fatality rate out of the 10% with severe symptoms. Totally worth blowing up the economy over though I’m sure.

  18. Good points about the repo market. Yes, the financial propagandists memoryholed that one fairly quickly; I had forgotten it myself. An injection of cash into the hedge funds continues but it is out in the open now. Take a look at the handful of investors allowed to participate in hedge funds and the reasons make sense. Bond and securities mutual funds with enough political juice will get bailed out, too, but only now. There is a strict hierarchy in the palace economy.

    “Trillions of dollars will be poured into the financial markets, much of it through the direct purchase of assets, like bad debt, stocks, corporate bonds and the synthetic stuff no one really understands. The central bank is coming close to turning the global financial system into a palace economy.”

    Yes, which is a command economy with the fig leaf of marketism. The wildcard here is China, which could collapse in the near term. That would take some of the palace down, too.

    • yeah, I think there’s a good reason Event 201 was in November, and they kicked it off right after that. That reason being the repo market. I will always wonder what happened to the virus to make it so much less deadly than testing, presumably, projected. You KNOW they didn’t expect to have to get the world so spun up about a virus that doesn’t do anything at all 85% of the time.

      • There is a chance when the virus emerged in late October/early November the mortality was overestimated initially. Let’s not discount the induced panic of recent weeks was fomented to seize assets from the middle and working class to prop up the hedge fund folks much as the repos did.

  19. The issue I believe with the corporate bailouts is that the companies got over-levered from buying overpriced stocks from their own executives and now they want the taxpayers to take on that debt. I think it’d be perfectly fine for United, Boeing etc. bond and share holders to have their assets burned alive to teach them a lesson, but alas…

  20. Where is Rod Serling when you need him? The signpost up ahead, the Twilight Zone. We are now entering uncharted waters. Things change slowly until they change very fast. More than half our population’s first line of defense is to whine more loudly and demand miracles. Unless you live in the South, you need to get that garden planted in the next few weeks. Or perhaps you would prefer the new Washington DC option . . . let them eat fiat currency.

  21. Z, thanks for bringing up the repo market. It’s ridiculous what’s been going on but it didn’t just start with the hedge funds. The fed has been pouring money into the repo market since September. The big banks and financial firms have been staking the same treasury bonds as collateral two, three, even four times to get overnight loans of cash. At some point, the other side jacked up the price of the loan or refused to make the loan at all, causing the whole system to seize up. The fed stepped in.

    For a decade, big corporations have been using cash flow and even taking loans to buy back stocks instead shoring up their balance sheets and building a cash reserve. Now, it’s biting them in the ass, first in the repo market and now in the corporate bond market. And the fed is bailing them out in both.

    Oh, and who do you think has been by far the main – sometimes, the only – net buyer of U.S. stocks over the past five or ten years? Yep, corporations. Foreign investors, households, mutual funds and pensions have generally been net sellers – or, occasionally, marginal net buyers. What happens when companies either can’t or aren’t allowed to buy their own stocks?

    • “At some point, the other side jacked up the price of the loan or refused to make the loan at all, causing the whole system to seize up. The fed stepped in.”

      In other words, the market worked, and the fed stepped in.

      • Ha, exactly. The fed is terrified of the market doing its job because the market will crush these firms for their shenanigans. The fed incentivizes absurd – and dangerous – behavior. But from the big bank or hedge fund perspective, why not do this stuff. It the bet pays off, you make a mint. If it doesn’t, the fed bails you out.

        A big question will be what happens if some of the huge amount of BBB rated corporate bonds (the lowest investment grade rating) gets downgraded and thus become junk bonds. Pensions will be forced to sell since they can’t hold junk bonds, but the junk bond market can’t handle that volume. My bet is either the ratings agencies are told to leave everything as is, or the fed jumps into the junk bond market as well to save both the corporations and the pensions, i.e. the pensions and the junk bond market will become semi-nationalized along with repo market and the investment grade corporate bond market and, to a degree, the stock market.

        Basically every market now relies on the fed (and Congress) to backstop them in some fashion. Z is right. We’re rapidly becoming (are?) a Palace Economy.

        • Triple B is back stopped, double B is out the window. Take your credit rating agency rep out for an evening of booze, hookers, and blow, stat.

  22. Predictably, our feminized society has numbly submitted to the hysteria. One would hope that this is Peak Estrogen, but it probably isn’t — rational people don’t get any breaks these days.

    All along, the feminists, in their hurry to pharmaceutically and mentally castrate male children, and turn every little girl into a soccer-playing, fire-breathing Amazon, have failed to realize that they were doing the dirty work for the corporatist warlords. These gods on high need men intimidated as well as women working and thus shopping and consuming with devalued dollars like mad. And so now we will have the Yellow Peril bubble with this latest infusion of counterfeit money. And the Day of Reckoning just became that much more horrific to contemplate.

    • Even a $6 T kick of the can isn’t going to move the Day of Reckoning out very far or long. But, the cliff we’re going to drive over is about to get much higher and steeper.

        • Thelma and Louise can buy a blower for the big block in their T-Bird with part of that six trillion.

          • Thelma and Louise going over the cliff. Well, ’tis an ill wind indeed that blows absolutely no good at all . . .

    • The good news is all those sloots on Instagram are finally gonna have their dream come true: they are all going viral!

  23. The Autocratic Case for Nationalizing the Airlines

    “Airlines are like a hybrid utility these days. They are technically private companies, but almost all of their actions are controlled by government. They operate through state owned airports and every aspect of their operations must be agreed to in advance by the federal government. We need the airlines to function, so bailing them out has some actual value to the rest of us.”

    Airlines are no more free market competitors than Aeroflot in the Yelstin era. Private cronies are allowed to siphon the profits from a business that is for all intents and purposes state-run already. If an airline tanks, Uncle Sucker eats the loss but in good times, profits go directly to the cronies.

    What about taxes, you say? At best the argument is a wash. Everyone is taxed and the airlines are not taxed enough to compensate for their grossly asymmetric privatization of profits vs. socialization of risks. Plus loopholes, lobbying, etc… You get the picture. They don’t even pay enough in taxes to fund the governmental side of their own operations.

    In the USSR iteration of Aeroflot, at least some of the profits made it past the commissar and his cronies. If they took too much of a bite, a few would get Lubyanka’d – pour encourager les autres.

    America has legalized, lionized and practically deified the comissars of industry taking every penny. Those of us who object get Mueller’d, pour encourager les autres.

    What the hell are these titans of industry bringing to the table that justifies this entirely one-sided swindle? Yes, running a billion-dollar operation takes skills and talent, but we somehow manage to staff all of the government apparatus required to keep the airlines in business without offering them a 100% cut of the profits. And who’s seriously going to argue that the airline execs are a uniquely talented cadre worth the price we currently pay?

    This kind of “public-private partnership” gives the customer the worst of both worlds. The airline industry is not only so vital that we must save it, it’s so vital that we cannot entrust it to the parasites who’ve hollowed it out in the name of efficiency and profit margins.

    An industry should be private to the extent it can operate without a net-negative social cost/contribution. To the extent its operations have a social cost, the government should have a role. Where their social costs grossly outweigh the private-sector contributions, we should make airlines part of the palace economy (officially, since they already are in fact).

    If you’re too big to fail, too big to jail, you’re too big to roam free without a leash.

    • Airlines=hybrid utility. And the banks, the defense contractors, the auto companies, the gas & electrics, the big internets, big entertainment, the pharmas, the tobaccos, the telecomms, need I go on?

  24. Don’t forget, this just a preview of coming attractions. Make your plans and get prepared.

      • Difficult times due to a changing of the guard. The revolution, civil war, great depression/wwii, now this. Globalism is on the outs. The economy will change, with the attendant difficulties. History says war will probably break out. Maybe it has. Some say 21st century warfare is about demographics and narratives. Idk.

        Big question for me is do things get bigger or smaller? Does society progress or devolve? Leaning towards devolution because multiculturalism, trans, free money, etc. seems insane, and I doubt corporations can assume control because they’re so reliant on state power.

        At any rate, I’m betting resilience and productivity are the way to go. Back to basics, no trickery. Could be wrong, who knows.

        • Devolution began with the adoption of the welfare state, and was ushered along by personal injury attorneys who taught us that no one is ever supposed to experience discomfort or hurt without recompense.

  25. Makes a lot of sense to me. Ppl will lie, cheat and scam, and most are hypocrites. They pay lip service to ‘a fair contest in life’. But they are angling for an advantage. The elite more than most. Being close to power you see ideals are for suckers.

  26. InfoTainment:

    WmBriggs had a post that made its way around the dissident cul-de-sac. There is another site that shows you how this graph is built from the ground up and it’s done in a way that is easy to follow. The channel itself is a lot of fun if you enjoy noodling around when you have the time. Numberphile.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6nLfCbAzgo

    • Honestly, I wish graph gang would eff off. They’re almost never “incorrect” but their autism is so focused their “right” is more like a pin prick in the target. “I predicted thith….”

  27. I agree that many wealthy parties are wildly benefiting who should be flushed into the dirt class. However, Zman forgets his own missives on the implications of shutting down a massive economy when applied to the massively more complex and fragile financial system. The greater credit and loan apparatuses form an extremely interconnected, complicated system that no one has shut down before or allowed to fail. Without these Fed backstops, everything from the Visa in your pocket to the commercial paper your medium sized business relies upon to make payroll would have ceased to function.

    We are a credit based economy that relies upon hundreds of trillions in loans and credit extensions based upon double digit trillions of assets (often the loans and credit lines themselves). If those assets become compromised in value, that’s many, many multiples pulled out of the credit system. Maybe 100x the initial loss because of the connections and lending of those assets. We would have been in very deep hamburgers and no one knows how the break down in credit markets would have manifested itself in the broader economy.

    I am sure everyone heard these same arguments in 2008, and I also agree much of the bailout is unfair, but it’s the nature of the economic system we have.

    Whaddya, whaddya,

    • I don’t doubt what you are saying but I’m way past sick of hearing about how the vampires must be given more of our blood…

      • The interconnected, complicated credit system is unsustainable. And at one point or another, we are going to get it, financially and cognitively, good and hard.

        • Whatever can’t last, won’t last. I’m just hoping that I’ll have checked out before it happens. And I’m really hoping that this isn’t the start of it.

      • Lots of us are. Which is why “burn it all down” is such a popular missive at this point. BTW, the “burn it all downers” have at least some understanding of what that all means long term. None of us has a complete understanding of it, of course, but we certainly understand it means ‘really bad shit’ for a bunch of us. The ‘burn it all downers’ are ‘accelerationists’ of a sort. I have a really hard time disagreeing with them principally speaking, but also know that ‘burn it all down’ means human suffering the likes of which none of us can even remotely fathom, and of which history offers no example. It’s horrible to be trapped in our current melee, but that is where we are. ‘Trust in the Lord, but your ass belongs to me’ isn’t just a movie line in these times. Y’all take care!

    • I think the USA’s, nay, the world, financial system has gotten so rotten that it is beyond any repair. Hell, there were people believing that 50 years ago too. That doesn’t mean it won’t ever happen. What sometimes amazes me is how long the system has chugged along. The imbalances grow ever larger. As with the malignant growths of a democracy, I think that only a total collapse will “cure” the problems. What replaces it I don’t know, and I don’t think I want to know!

    • “but it’s the nature of the economic system we have.”

      Our system is a result of deliberate policy choices, not circumstances beyond our elite’s control.

      They’ve had 10+ years to learn 2008’s lessons that they’ve ignored. The same bubbles have re-inflated along with new ones and a pandemic is adding fuel to the funeral pyre.

      If we don’t do something to change the nature of our system, we’re going to burn with them.

      • Exile, there is a tom cruise scifi movie, Oblivion, about a man doing a job to protect and service infrastructure that is harvesting water from the post-apocalyptic earth after a war against aliens. Or something like that.

        We won the war but had to leave the planet. Tom is on a skeleton crew left behind.

        Spoilers. He senses something is off. Glitches. A nagging sense that he is not being told everything. Curious amounts of ambiguity. He is curious about the natural life on the planet below his hovering pod and life station.

        He collects relics of the dead planet and abandoned civilization, out of an impulse he doesn’t understand.

        Eventually constructing a rustic oasis in the ‘forbidden’ territory that is supposedly irradiated.

        Only there does he feel his humanity and a sense of being connected to something greater.

        His work partner wife, OTOH, is straight up on board with the mission and the narrative they have pounded into them – including daily rituals and mantras (“are you an effective team?”) as they get instructions from, and give updates to, their leaders off-world. They lead a safe, comfy, and busy life.

        She feels no particular affinity for earth or its dead cultures. Its all just toxic to her. She does as she is told. Everything comes down from the cloud. Pleasing the cloud is everything.

        There are no mysteries to her; she is not curious. Its all just a process that must be flowed to then be allowed to join the colony on Jupiter. They are striving to be an effective team.

        Well. Turns out Tom is not working for the human colony at all.

        He is actually working to finish destroying the earth and what is left of human race; a ragtag band of rebel survivors.

        Who he has been hunting the whole time thinking they are the remnants of the defeated aliens per the direction of his cloud-based leaders.

        For years this has waged on. Tom believing the narrative. Doing the right thing. Hoping his good work will be rewarded with a trip to Jupiter.

        But the realIty is it all ended already. The aliens won. The artifacts he is drawn to are all that remain.

        Now, in the end, after realizing he has been manipulated into destroying his own world and his own people, he takes up the fight. And there is hope.

        But the life is one of war, dissidents living in the shadows, with none of the luxuries and technology of the facade in which he was enslaved.

        But he is for once content, the dissonance is replaced with a new sense of purpose. The unconscious draw toward the artifacts of the past and compulsion toward nesting among the natural environs all makes sense now.
        ———-
        Sometimes i think the war is over. It has already burned. The aliens won the war. And all the work we are doing to reach our Jupiter is just keeping the lights on so the last of the looting can happen. Its every “effective team” for themselves.

        What we are told doesn’t fit with our observations and runs afoul of our humanity and culture that is imprinted in us. But the cogdis is one of many ailments. We are too “busy“ trying to please the cloud to pay it much attention.

        Perhaps “our” system is not ours at all and the change needs to be about something else entirely.

        The oasis is not in the cloud, but down there in the dirt. Where a whole other system has been humming along since something created everything out of nothing (hey, if the fed can do it why not Him?) long before the aliens came and erased our history and is almost done with our future too.

        I want to save something worth saving. I am struggling to weigh the various collapse v status quo scenarios that don’t end with us all here in ten years debating the same things – but this time it totally can’t go on… The more I dig into the system, the less I understand.

        Off for a not-gonna-shelter-in-place bike ride to enjoy some sunshine (and make the shut-in-sheeples angry).

        • My thoughts are the same which is why I’ve been advocating for Community because I know we can only change it together…

  28. … loans to small business …

    This part of the plan has been cracking me up. LOANS! Do they really think that small businesses across the country are going to be borrowing tens of thousands of dollars to pay their employees to sit around at home and/or monthly rent on empty buildings for God knows how long it takes for these @$$holes to allow us to leave our homes only to have to REPAY it all to the government – WITH INTEREST – at some point? I’m fairly confident that they’re not so gauche as to ask their buddies on Wall Street to pay back any portion of the billions they’re about to be handed.

    • They acquired/created the money they’re lending in a QE faerie-land of effectively zero interest rates. In those circumstances, every dime they make over 0% is blood money.

    • I think many smaller businesses may take the hint from this and invest in technology that allows them to go 100% telecommute. It’s been long overdue anyway. In the end it could actually be good for our ideas. The traditional office environment is a toxic swamp that plays to the strengths of useless wammen and vibrants anyway.

      The elite has learned all the wrong lessons from this. One of them is that people will tolerate life under martial law for at least a few weeks at a time and that part of the price of getting things back to normal again will include a nice shakedown of the federal money tree that will benefit the well-connected. They WILL try it again. It might not be a virus, perhaps the old terrorist “dirty bomb” (they could strike anywhere!!!!!). All you need is something that sounds like a halfway plausible reason for everyone to be locked in their homes. Smart businesses will think twice before renting that 25,000 sq. ft. cubicle farm again.

      As with everything else, this will speed up the Great Bifurcation as people and businesses take note of which states and localities went the ape-est of shit and which kept cooler heads. Also as with everything else, it will further highlight the differences between gynocratic nanny government and a more patriarchal style that emphasizes freedom and responsibility.

  29. A strange effect of the crisis has been the near unanimous consensus that the thing we must avoid at all costs is stopping for slowing down, even if it’s for 2 weeks. It’s almost like the 1994 movie Speed, where the bus would explode if the speed dropped below a certain threshold.

    Can anyone explain why a business needs to be bailed out instead of just closing its doors for a month and coming back later? At the very most I would think the government could mandate all debt payments to be suspended and in some cases continue payments to employees so they don’t leave the city and return home, never to return. I understand rents may need to be suspended also as people are unable o work.

    • Can anyone explain why a business needs to be bailed out instead of just closing its doors for a month and coming back later?

      Spoken like someone who has never owned a small business. ETA: Listen, for most businesses, margins are small and expenses are numerous and continuing. Most business owners aren’t rolling in piles of gold with their top hats and monocles. Some may have some money squirreled away for a rainy day, hopefully some of it in liquid form and not tied up in retirement investments. Others have lines of credit (which they then have to pay off), but mostly, they’re just like a wage earner — a bad month or so from bankruptcy. Small businesses fail all the time in *good* times. A mandatory shutdown is a freaking disaster.

      . I understand rents may need to be suspended also as people are unable o work.

      And if rents are suspended, how will the people who depend on those rents pay *their* bills, I ask, as someone who depends on rental income?

      • That was an honest question btw, I really don’t know and it’s starting to feel like another 2008 bailout. I understand there’s an interdependent network of expenses but can’t (in many cases) they be suspended by closing the business? A family friend has a beer pub that employees about 300 people and when they shutdown food items may spoil. I’m just curious what percent of the economy REALLY can’t stop compared to what percent just wants to be made whole, for no other reason then it’s being offered for free.

        • The spoiled food is the least of it. Insurance, rent or mortgage and property taxes, licensing fees, business loans, ongoing contracts with business service providers he can’t just stop paying because business is bad, accounting and HR expenses, the business owner’s personal expenses: mortgage/taxes, utilities, medical expenses, car payments, etc. And then those three hundred people also without incomes, unable to pay their bills. The distributors of food, liquor and restaurant supplies who aren’t making any money and can’t afford to pay their employees.

          And then when it’s over, when will business return to normal — who is going to be spending money going to a brew pub when they have been out of work for a month? How many of the 300 employees will return — how much time will have to be spent on hiring and retraining?

        • Your point about spoiled food feeds into your question above. Your friend purchased that food stock expecting to turn a profit selling it to customers in the near future. Now he is likely to lose the entire purchase price of that food stock. The only thing he can do is plan to write that off as a loss on next year’s taxes. On top of this, your friend will need to find more cash or credit to purchase more food stock, if and when he does reopen. He may not have that sort of financial cushion.

        • Most people and most small to medium businesses cannot go a month or more without income. The side effect of modern economics is a serious lack of savings.

          Hell some larger businesses like Barnes and Noble for example have so few resources they probably won’t come back which than concentrates more money in fewer hands like Amazon thus starving the populace for buying power and stressing the economy further.

          The biggest example is Disney who are so cashed strapped that they are borrowing money to pay the bills. A prolonged shutdown will mean they will either have to divest assess in a market with few buyers (i.e fire sale prices) or go bankrupt

          Frankly we should let them but the spill over effect from all this shutdown will be immense.

          The correct thing to do is to bail out people only, nationalize things that are bankrupt and utterly essential and default on debt with massive jubilee and where needed confiscation thus creating a clean slate. Leave those borders shut too/

          This won’t happen as Democracy selects for bad decision making and oligarchy but if we could buffer the shock its the best long term outcome.

          As it is, keeping the established power base with its pseudo stability and keeping the actual paymasters of congress happy is to be expected.

      • If these people have money saved for a rainy day, you might have noticed the water pouring out of the sky! If the savings aren’t liquid, they aren’t rainy day savings. Rainy-day savings is supposed to be money (not assets) set aside to cover eventualities whose day of eventuality cannot be known.

        Now, it is reasonable to ask, how about the rainy-day savings of the renters? After all, it is raining in their neighborhood too.

        Anyone who cannot cover even a single month of bills with savings is living way beyond their means. Savings are, or at least should be, just another monthly bill. They are, by definition, not saving for a rainy day. Unfortunately, this is just way too many people.

        • Unfortunately, this is just way too many people.

          Whether you judge it’s “way too many people” or not is irrelevant. This is the world we live in. I’m not in that position, but tons of other people are. This shutdown is the very hardest on the people who can least afford it. Andrew Cuomo isn’t foregoing his paycheck. All the salaried government employees aren’t foregoing theirs. Bernie Sanders isn’t having to sell off two of his homes.

          Lots of people would like to have enough money to be able to build themselves a cushion, but can’t afford to. Others could have afforded to, but were short-sighted: they live in a society that tells them they are protected, that they have “safety nets.” Plenty of the people not suffering — the people who aren’t losing their incomes in this shutdown, are just as short-sighted, but they’re just lucky and have no business sitting on their high horses.

          The economic devastation from this is going to land squarely on the people at the bottom. Not on the bankers who are being handed trillions. Not on civil servants. Not on elected officials. Not on the people forcing others to forfeit their livelihoods for “the public good.”

          • I agree with the overall conclusion, but I was under the impression we were talking about small business owners not being able to pay a single month’s expenses without their regular income. Even a loss of their stock of food (restaurant) should not be a business ending event. Refrigerators break occasionally. There are also slow periods.

          • This really doesn’t compare to any normal, foreseeable business incident. Also, many businesses don’t have the luxuryof having attained their ideal, prepared state. The story of startup businesses is often one of constant struggle and long hours just to keep their heads above water.

          • I don’t disagree that not every small business is an established profitable business where the initial investment has been made back and everything is long in the black.

            Really, what this is exposing is the folly of the country in never saving any money for any reason at all. When times are good, I feel like an absolute fool for saving money. But I just cannot help myself. I am compelled to save money and that makes me a weirdo in today’s world. I am as compelled to save money as the spendthrift is to blow it. When something happens and I have to tap in, it literally keeps me up at night with worrying.

            I disagree that this was unforeseeable. Not only was it foreseeable, it was inevitable. Ever since China joined the WTO and globalism went on steroids, people have been saying that the moment a new virus popped up, it would spread across the world like wildfire. Certainly OUR people saw this, just another bad thing about globohomo. But I’m also not saying that everyone should have saved for this in particular.

            It really does piss me off that all the wrong people are going to bailed out. It’s not going to be the mom and pop shops, it’s going to be Disney, Carnival, banks etc. When Obamavilles were popping up around the country in 2009, the banksters were lighting their thousand dollar cigars with burning hundred dollar bills provided by the tax-payer/Fed. That scenario re-playing is the most likely. Again we get screwed while they get rich.

          • Go try running a small business and see how hard it is to save enough money to weather a prolonged crisis that no one saw coming.

    • If they were good with their money and created a slush fund for themselves, they wouldn’t need any handouts…

        • Vizzini,
          Amen to everything you said. Some of these people will never get it. Why didn’t the business owner save up enough to have liquid assets to be able to run his business for a few months in case the government decides to shut it down while also saving for retirement and keeping up with his business expenses in the meantime?
          Why didn’t the guy who supports a family by working a job with low pay and no benefits. like waiting tables, save up enough money to have a slush fund in case he became unemployed and maybe unemployable for an extended period of time? Maybe he could have if manufacturing jobs hadn’t been outsourced to China and his wages hadn’t been driven down by competition from immigrants.

        • I could live for 10 years with just the cash I have on hand…I thought conservatives were into the whole bootstraps thing..

          • Most people aren’t you. Sitting on your high horse and tut-tutting people less fortunate and far-sighted than you may make you feel virtuous, but it really isn’t very helpful when the economy is collapsing around you.

            Also, Just curious about what you consider a reasonable yearly expenditure for a ten-year period.

    • Well, for one, the dollar has been devalued to the point that small business owners and their employees have been unable for some time to build up enough savings to cushion themselves from this unneeded blow. The politicians’ manipulation of the tax code to punish savings has also been a factor.

    • BAT, our economy is so finely-tuned and efficient (AKA fragile) that it can’t withstand that kind of system shock. Like a junkie, it would physically crash without the flow of constant, optimized, just-in-time commerce flowing through its sickly veins.

      • constant, optimized, just-in-time commerce

        You mean, “cash flow.” Otherwise known as “money circulation,” *for the sake of* money circulation, all other considerations notwithstanding. When such a system comes ‘crashing into reality,’ or gives the appearance of finally coming crashing into reality, I can’t help but get a little giddy at the prospect. Lord help me.

    • B.A.T.;
      In the dim recesses of time, no longer ago than the 1950s, there used to be a thing called Owner Equity (aka Capital) on the balance sheet (lower right corner). It was there to function as a financial cushion when things slowed down so 2 or 3 lost weeks of sales (out of 52, i.e. 5% or so) didn’t mean instant bankruptcy. Prudent people who owned their own businesses had quite a bit of this equity held in cash or treasuries ’cause they’d seen what could and did happen to their imprudent peers in prior downturns.

      Then came financialization, non-owner managers and diffuse stock ownership. Financialization (aka leverage) juices up returns on equity (ROE) which is what non-owner managers tend to get paid bonus for maximizing. From the ’60s on, prudent management got punished by rivals leveraging their balance sheets, gaining a high market cap based on paper earnings growth, buying up their relatively depressed stock and ousting them, leveraging their assets and repeating the cycle.*

      Eventually, any remaining actual hands-on owners got displaced in their political connections by Wall St. And now, Wall St owns the politicians so nobody can be allowed to fall into bankruptcy lest The Street’s over-leveraged wealth be turned back into the tissue paper and computer entries it was created from.

      So what’s the answer now_? I’d say either letting the failures proceed or govt. mandated capital requirements. Since the latter lets the game go on and provides ample opportunities for graft, it’s the way to bet.
      __________________
      *Don’t feel bad for those founder owners, once they went public (floating their firm’s stock to the public – which enabled the corp. raiders to function) they retired rich. So much so that they created the foundations that make up the pozd NGO world that so bedevils us today: Trustafarians trying to find meaning by inflicting wokeness on others not so privileged.

    • Economy has become oligarchy. Few psychopaths own everything and everybody else are servants fighting for piece of food. Basically West became Soviet Union.Looking forward to see more concentration of businesses until there is only one left. Gulag. Producing and selling everything from frozen fish to spacecraft. Everybody else will have only very bad job. This is the reason why nationalization is only way forward.

      • I’d love to go on TV like those noggers with the Obamaphones did:

        “Trump’s goanta pay mah gas bills! He’s goanta pay mah mortgage!!! Ah’m saved!!! The Orange Man goanta make the white man pay!!!”

        How’d ya like them apples, boys? When it finally warms up I will burn down my own neighborhood and do undocumented shopping too!

        What’s good for the black swan is good for the white one too! 😆👍

          • The police that start doing that will find the swans will be shooting back, and they will get the worse of it.

          • You need to read One Just Man by James Mills

            Its from 1974 but still relevant. TL;Dr no spoilers

            the lone nail that sticks up gets hammered down hard.

  30. How come Africa does not have any issues with the virus?

    How has China effectively contained it ?

    Why only is the “west” having a problem with the virus?

    Is it cultural? Is it genetic? A combination?

  31. Gee when will Mr And Mrs Conservative learn?
    We elect Ronald Reagan we still get Keynesian economics, we elect Bush we get Keynesian economics, now we elect Trump. Ready for another large dose of Keynesian?
    We have been on this path since the New Deal and the seeds were sown in 1913 with the creation of the Federal Reserve.
    When do we get off?
    When the dollar crashes due to another financial crisis or war.
    It’s coming.
    But it won’t be a pleasant exit.

    • It wasn’t the creation of the Fed that was the problem. The actual problem, once again, was Congress who took over the Fed in 1917 to cover American involvement in WWI.

      • They had to create the Fed in order to finance their war. They knew what was coming in 1913, just as they did in 1938.

        • Enlisted men were offered cross training to receive helicopter training and a warrant officer rating in the army as I finished my 4 years in the Air Force in Feb ’64. Vietnam shortly after. Surprise!

    • Because no matter who loses the election, Wall Street and the Banksters win. In 2016 GOP ran on bringing back Glass-Steagall. *crickets*

      • This is one of the observations that radicalized me. Since running a political campaign is so expensive, the only viable candidates, in either party, are funded by the same small group of wealthy people and corporations.

        If you disagree with this small group, you have no chance of effecting change within the system.

        My initial disagreement with them was their collective refusal to enforce the immigration laws on the books.

        • Politics in a democracy is like boxing. The fighters are backed by investors. Often, the same investors.

  32. Was that the magic trick ? Whether intentional or accidental ” let no good crisis go to waste ” ? After 9/11 we got the Patriot Act which gutted the Constitution and made a fortune for people like Dick Cheney heavily invested in Halliburton.

    Now the ” Yellow Peril ” ( I like that too ) gives us martial law , the shutting down of commerce and a big money grab for the Wall Street bankers .

    Last time they wanted your kids blood. This time it was poor old granny. It’s amazing the sheep never get tired of this.

    • Yes, granny’s well-being is a lot more at risk from the Fed and the bankers than it is from the Yellow Peril (I like that three). It is even more sickening to contemplate the threat to her grandchildren, who have not gotten to live her full, relatively prosperous life, and probably won’t. They are at the mercy of the system she and her husband and their parents blithely let take hold over the years, as they enjoyed The Good Life.

      • Your points are exactly why I can’t get very excited about shutting down the economy to save people currently near the end of their days. I’ve been to assisted living facilities like the infamous Life Care in WA. Even at the best of them it is not a very high quality of life for the residents. The fact that we are going to such lengths for that segment of the population proves we live in a de facto gerontocracy.

    • Last time people resisted some. There was debate over the premise of the idea.

      This time the people demanded it good and hard. Voluntary house arrest. Government must do moar!

      Trump tweet: “…[you will get some money] this is not your fault!”

      Every other op-ed is from some slob with his hand out. Apparently taking responsibility for yourself and your family is for suckers.

      The problem isn’t using public money for private business. The problem, it seems, is in who is getting enough money.

      Its like that punchline to the joke about being a whore or not, “now we are just haggling over price”.

      TPTB are getting better at this or the people are getting worse. Prolly both.

      • Both Brother and it will fail at some point in time… Maybe this will be a wake up call for all those who have procrastinated up until now to actually take control of their future…

      • The people were goaded into it. The medical profession and the MSM colluded in scaring the living daylights out of people.

        This is why I dislike our side to a great extent. Our side is the first to turn on their fellow whites and curb stomp them so they can feel better about themselves.

        Talk about self-inflicted wounding and why we will lose.

    • The American public was goaded into this by doctors like Fauci and the MSM who went around screaming that the virus was going to kill millions even though they had no hard data or worse ignored the facts.

      THEY created the panics.and got them to support measures that are destroying the economy.

  33. The Anti-Defamation League (and other “charity” groups) are asking for $60 billion. “In times of crisis nonprofits are on the front lines, ready to respond and serve communities across the nation—but funds are needed to continue doing so. Emergency stimulus funding will be used to support our work during this time of crisis and need.”

    Chutzpa, baby! Have you been “triggered” yet?

      • Seinfelds soup Nazi episode showed how to properly deal with the inscessant (((asker))) No soup for you. George couldn’t handle it. Elaine went full sociopath.

    • Do like me and jump on the gravy train. I have already contacted my congressman about a $10 million stimulus package to continue my contribution to the national dialogue as a blog commenter.

  34. One of Zman’s links is behind a paywall. Here’s the info from another site. The Fed has pumped in $9 Trillion into the financial markets in the past 6 months. Now another 6 is to be added to that. Let that sink in as paycheck America picks at crumbs.

    https://wallstreetonparade.com/2020/03/the-fed-has-pumped-9-trillion-into-wall-street-over-the-past-six-months-but-mnuchin-says-this-isnt-like-the-financial-crisis/

    If you’re unfamiliar with Wall Street On Parade it’s worth bookmarking.

    • Having a goldbug flashback after reading that.

      Everyone from flea-bitten Marxist profs to Bernie Bros to Boomercons to Nazis has a common interest in razing the Fed and salting the earth where it stands.

      As for the banksters themselves, [redacted].

      For an insider’s take on the 2008 version, see Neil Barofsky’s “Bailout” (former SIG-TARP under W and Barky the Trap). They’re doing the same bullshit today.

        • They’re the bullseye. Say what we will about libertarians, they aren’t entirely wrong about everything.

          • And for many—as in LOTS—libertarianism is a stop on the way to DR and the various colored pills.

          • The more important thing than libertarianism about Dr. Paul and Tom Woods is that they subscribe to the Austrian school of economics. Having said that, lewrockwell.com has been an oasis of sober analysis of The Hysteria. But I imagine most folks on here already know that.

      • The Fed is by the big banks, for the big banks. They do what they do. Giving them power over the economy and all of us is the problem. How did they end up in charge(((?)))

  35. So the big boys get their asses covered well once again, no surprise.
    Did I miss anything in this that would replace lost wages for those ,mostly working class, being let go for weeks? Probably waste it on custom rims for their ride, right?

    The carnage coming especially to small business and their workers is going to be something to behold. A contraction if you will. Keep moving folks , nothing to see here.

    • Probably waste it on custom rims for their ride, right?

      Probably use it to gobble up assets at firesale prices.

    • …leaving an opportunity for the well-funded (or bailed out?) big boys to buy up the shaky or failed small guys. Nothing new there. Heads they win, tails we lose. Opportunism or conspiracy?

      • This will be an extinction level event for small business… by the time this is done the business landscape will be fundamentally changed to essentially a corporate society.

    • Probably waste it on custom rims for their ride, right?

      Hey!, … the custom rims makers need lovin’ too, so don’t knock it.

  36. I always think of how Matt Taibbi used to describe Goldman Sachs and the other players, as vampire squids with their tentacles deep into everything. It’s no wonder their toadies in the managerial class are always stressing how everything is global and interconnected. Borders mean limits on their feeding frenzy. Of course they want to be deep-rooted and ubiquitous: A symbiotic or parasitic organism likes to get that insurance that if the host finds them distasteful, at least he recognizes he can’t pull the cephalopod tentacles free without possibly killing himself. Regardless, I am no longer calling it Covid or the Wuhan virus. Henceforth it is the Yellow Peril.

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