MarketWatch

Last update: 10:13 a.m. EDT May 20, 2008

This update of a story originally published May 19 fixes the title of Kevin Phillips book “Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics & the Crisis of American Capitalism.”

ARROYO GRANDE, Calif. (MarketWatch) — Remember that big ah-ha moment in the 1939 classic “The Wizard of Oz?” Dorothy wants to see the Wizard. His voice booms: “Do not arouse the wrath of the Great and Powerful Oz! Come back tomorrow!” Afraid, Lion, Tin Man, Scarecrow shake. Dorothy’s dog runs up, tugs on a curtain. She chases Toto, pulls curtain open:

“Who are you?” Dr. Marvel stutters: “Well, I - I - I am the Great and Powerful, Wizard of Oz.” Dorothy: “You are? I don’t believe you!” He replies: “No, it’s true. There’s no other Wizard except me.” Dorothy’s miffed: “Oh, you’re a very bad man!” Wizard: “Oh, no, my dear. I’m a very good man. I’m just a very bad Wizard.”

2009 Sequel: Script exposes diabolical cover-up conspiracy

Flash forward: Real life, Washington, new leaders, a new Congress, old wizardry. Be forewarned: No matter who’s elected president, America will soon see a massive statistical curtain pulled back, exposing a con game of historic proportions. And when that happens, you and I will suffer another ear-splitting global meltdown, bigger than today’s housing-credit crisis, dragging us deep into a recession and bear market for years.

Cast: New ‘leading man’ from old Nixon political machine

Yes, the lead character pulling back the curtain is none other than Kevin Phillips, a former Republican strategist for Nixon, and today America’s leading political historian. Phillips just published “Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics & the Crisis of American Capitalism,” everything you need to know about today’s credit meltdown.

Scene 1: Numbers racket hiding behind Washington curtain

Opening shot: Phillips pulling back the curtain, exposing charlatan Wizards in a brilliant Harper’s Magazine article: “Numbers Racket: Why the economy is worse than we know.” Far worse. Buy it, read it — this is essential reading if you really want to understand the depth of today’s political as well as economic impending meltdown, and the harsh realities facing Washington, Wall Street, Corporate America, and Main Street in 2009 and beyond … harsh because we cannot cover up the truth much longer.

Scene 2: Statistics, Washington’s new WMDs, a time bomb

“If Washington’s harping on weapons of mass destruction was essential to buoy public support for the invasion of Iraq, the use of deceptive statistics has played its own vital role in convincing many Americans that the U.S. economy is stronger, fairer, more productive, more dominant, and richer with opportunity than it really is. The corruption has tainted the very measures that most shape public perception of the economy,” especially three key numbers, CPI, GDP and monthly unemployment statistics.

Scene 3: Backflash, ‘It’s always the cover-up, stupid!’

As I read further I couldn’t help but think about similar traps politicians get themselves (and us) into. Remember nice guys like Scooter Libby and Bill Clinton: The crime wasn’t their original stupidity, but their lying during the cover-up. Here, Phillips reviews endless statistical cover-ups since the 1960s and concludes there was no “grand conspiracy, just accumulating opportunisms.” I call it plain old greed. And every step of the way the media went along with the con game played by politicians and economists.

Scene 4: Real numbers torture us … like water-boarding!

How bad is it? “The real numbers … would be a face full of cold water,” says Phillips. “Based on the criteria in place a quarter century ago, today’s U.S. unemployment rate is somewhere between 9% and 12%; the inflation rate is as high as 7% or even 10%; economics growth since the

I don’t want to alarm anybody, but maybe it’s time for Americans to start stockpiling food.

No, this is not a drill.

You’ve seen the TV footage of food riots in parts of the developing world. Yes, they’re a long way away from the U.S. But most foodstuffs operate in a global market. When the cost of wheat soars in Asia, it will do the same here.

Reality: Food prices are already rising here much faster than the returns you are likely to get from keeping your money in a bank or money-market fund. And there are very good reasons to believe prices on the shelves are about to start rising a lot faster.

“Load up the pantry,” says Manu Daftary, one of Wall Street’s top investors and the manager of the Quaker Strategic Growth mutual fund. “I think prices are going higher. People are too complacent. They think it isn’t going to happen here. But I don’t know how the food companies can absorb higher costs.” (Full disclosure: I am an investor in Quaker Strategic)

Stocking up on food may not replace your long-term investments, but it may make a sensible home for some of your shorter-term cash. Do the math. If you keep your standby cash in a money-market fund you’ll be lucky to get a 2.5% interest rate. Even the best one-year certificate of deposit you can find is only going to pay you about 4.1%, according to Bankrate.com. And those yields are before tax.

Meanwhile the most recent government data shows food inflation for the average American household is now running at 4.5% a year.

And some prices are rising even more quickly. The latest data show cereal prices rising by more than 8% a year. Both flour and rice are up more than 13%. Milk, cheese, bananas and even peanut butter: They’re all up by more than 10%. Eggs have rocketed up 30% in a year. Ground beef prices are up 4.8% and chicken by 5.4%.

These are trends that have been in place for some time.

And if you are hoping they will pass, here’s the bad news: They may actually accelerate.

The reason? The prices of many underlying raw materials have risen much more quickly still. Wheat prices, for example, have roughly tripled in the past three years.

Sooner or later, the food companies are going to have to pass those costs on. Kraft saw its raw material costs soar by about $1.25 billion last year, squeezing profit margins. The company recently warned that higher prices are here to stay. Last month the chief executive of General Mills, Kendall Powell, made a similar point.

The main reason for rising prices, of course, is the surge in demand from China and India. Hundreds of millions of people are joining the middle class each year, and that means they want to eat more and better food.

A secondary reason has been the growing demand for ethanol as a fuel additive. That’s soaking up some of the corn supply.

You can’t easily stock up on perishables like eggs or milk. But other products will keep. Among them: Dried pasta, rice, cereals, and cans of everything from tuna fish to fruit and vegetables. The kicker: You should also save money by buying them in bulk.

If this seems a stretch, ponder this: The emerging bull market in agricultural products is following in the footsteps of oil. A few years ago, many Americans hoped $2 gas was a temporary spike. Now it’s the rosy memory of a bygone age.

The good news is that it’s easier to store Cap’n Crunch or cans of Starkist in your home than it is to store lots of gasoline. Safer, too.

Gold and Economic Freedom

by Alan Greenspan
[written in 1966]

This article originally appeared in a newsletter: The Objectivist published in 1966 and was reprinted in Ayn Rand’s Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal

An almost hysterical antagonism toward the gold standard is one issue which unites statists of all persuasions. They seem to sense - perhaps more clearly and subtly than many consistent defenders of laissez-faire - that gold and economic freedom are inseparable, that the gold standard is an instrument of laissez-faire and that each implies and requires the other.

In order to understand the source of their antagonism, it is necessary first to understand the specific role of gold in a free society.

Money is the common denominator of all economic transactions. It is that commodity which serves as a medium of exchange, is universally acceptable to all participants in an exchange economy as payment for their goods or services, and can, therefore, be used as a standard of market value and as a store of value, i.e., as a means of saving.

The existence of such a commodity is a precondition of a division of labor economy. If men did not have some commodity of objective value which was generally acceptable as money, they would have to resort to primitive barter or be forced to live on self-sufficient farms and forgo the inestimable advantages of specialization. If men had no means to store value, i.e., to save, neither long-range planning nor exchange would be possible.

What medium of exchange will be acceptable to all participants in an economy is not determined arbitrarily. First, the medium of exchange should be durable. In a primitive society of meager wealth, wheat might be sufficiently durable to serve as a medium, since all exchanges would occur only during and immediately after the harvest, leaving no value-surplus to store. But where store-of-value considerations are important, as they are in richer, more civilized societies, the medium of exchange must be a durable commodity, usually a metal. A metal is generally chosen because it is homogeneous and divisible: every unit is the same as every other and it can be blended or formed in any quantity. Precious jewels, for example, are neither homogeneous nor divisible. More important, the commodity chosen as a medium must be a luxury. Human desires for luxuries are unlimited and, therefore, luxury goods are always in demand and will always be acceptable. Wheat is a luxury in underfed civilizations, but not in a prosperous society. Cigarettes ordinarily would not serve as money, but they did in post-World War II Europe where they were considered a luxury. The term “luxury good” implies scarcity and high unit value. Having a high unit value, such a good is easily portable; for instance, an ounce of gold is worth a half-ton of pig iron.

CRIPPLING “WEALTH”

by Dr. Kurt Richebächer

From the June 21, ‘05 Daily Reckoning

Let us start with a quote from Friedrich von Hayek: “The means of perception employed in statistics are not the same as those employed in economic theory.” American economists think far too much in statistical terms, regardless of underlying economic processes. While the statistics do, indeed, show general enrichment, in reality, there is none at all. The homeowner has zero gain in his comfort of living or income.

This perception of wealth has its true basis in nothing but the famous “greater fool theory”; that is, in the expectation that there will be a greater fool to buy the acquired house later at a higher price. Deluded by this wealth chimera, private households have run down their savings and piled up astronomic debts to be repaid with future earned income.

Where, then, are the economic benefits? The one obvious visible benefit is in the push to GDP growth from higher consumer spending, which also increases current incomes. Yes, but much of that spending on cars, furniture and houses is borrowed from the future. That is, the borrowing pulls future spending into the present, but, of course, at the expense of such spending in the future.

If you think it over, you realize that in reality, such a borrowing/spending bubble adds nothing to economic growth. It only distorts the time pattern of spending in relation to its long-term trend, as in the case of the consumer determined by the underlying rate of income growth.

The second problem is that such a bubble distorts and deforms the direction of demand and production in the economy. Consider these grossly disproportionate increases in U.S. domestic spending since 2000: consumer durables +30.8%, residential building +29.5%, nonresidential investment +5.8%, imports +23.5%, exports +5.8%.

Strikingly, all economies with housing bubbles have features in common that were, in the past, generally associated with ailing economies. These are collapsed savings; skyrocketing debts; chronic, large trade deficits; and booming residential investment, but weak business investment.

Amero, North American Union

Debut of the ‘amero’

By Judi McLeod

Thursday, December 14, 2006

The People’s Republic of China, long lauded by America’s enemies as the world’s next economic power, will be the country that will force the creation of the `North American Union’ (NAU).

Kofi Annan’s former pointman, Canadian Maurice Strong, has been boasting from Chinese soil that China soon would be replacing America as economic king, using the jingo that’s the official language at Turtle Bay.

The billions of dollars China has invested in the flagging American economy will be worthless. They will have to negotiate the exchange rate to the new amero. This will then force the creation of the North American Union.

The cloak of the NAU, fashioned in secrecy, will be thrown over an unsuspecting public, erasing the borders of three countries. Mexico, which already has legions of its citizens living and working inside America, is, in effect already inside the NAU. Their governments will inform the American and Canadian people that there is no option but the bread line.

Unfortunately, the plan, which has been in place for some time, now, has been all but ignored by the mainstream media.

One of the signs that the NAU is on its way is the collapse of the American greenback dollar paving the way for the debut of the ‘amero’.

“Two analysts who have reconstructed money supply data after the Fed stopped publishing it argue a coming dollar collapse will set the stage for creating the amero as a North American currency to replace the dollar,” (WorldNetDaily, Dec. 13, 2006).

The euro followed the same blueprint of

A United States congressman discussing why America(ns) should take back control of their money and demand the gold standard. Oh my!

In this interview with political commentator and talk show host Laura Ingraham, Ron Paul explains why the Constitution should be followed — and how unintended consequences are the inevitable effects of current U.S. foreign policy.

Over forty economists agree gold’s future is very bright
By David Bradshaw, Editor RMP (original post from Swiss America)

Jan 10, 2008 The commodity super-cycle has swept gold prices to triple since 2001 — but that’s just the kickoff say the experts.

How high will this bull market in “real money” and commodities drive gold prices over the next 5 to 15 years? Get ready to be shocked!

Gold prices have grown about $100/oz. per year since 2003. Gold was $300 in ‘03, $400 in ‘04, $500 in ‘05, $600 in ‘06 and now $800 in ‘07. Savvy investors and gold experts see $950 plus gold in 2008!

Recently many analysts have jumped onto the $1,000/oz. plus gold bandwagon — most of whom were not considered “gold bugs” in the past, like Citibank and JP Morgan & Co.

THE BANKERS’ MANIFESTO OF 1934

Capital must protect itself in every way, through combination and through legislation. Debts must be collected and loans and mortgages foreclosed as soon as possible. When through a process of law, the common people have lost their homes, they will be more tractable and more easily governed by the strong arm of the law applied by the central power of wealth, under control of leading financiers. People without homes will not

US Homeland Security Tortures Icelandic Tourist
by Eva Ósk Arnardóttir

A young blonde Icelandic woman’s recent experience visiting the US.
The story of Eva Ósk Arnardóttir:

During the last twenty-four hours I have probably experienced the greatest humiliation to which I have ever been subjected. During these last twenty-four hours I have been handcuffed and chained, denied the chance to sleep, been without food and drink and been confined to a place without anyone knowing my whereabouts, imprisoned. Now I am beginning to try to understand all this, rest and review the events which began as innocently as possible.

Last Sunday I and a few other girls began our trip to New York. We were going to shop and enjoy the Christmas spirit. We made ourselves comfortable on first class, drank white wine and looked forward to go shopping, eat good food and enjoy life. When we landed at JFK airport the traditional clearance process began.

Discover the Scandalous Plot Outlined in the Bankers Manifesto.

Congressman Charles A. Lindbergh, Sr. revealed the Bankers Manifesto of 1892 to the U.S. Congress somewhere between 1907 and 1917.

BANKERS MANIFESTO

We (the bankers) must proceed with caution and guard every move made, for the lower order of people are already showing signs of restless commotion. Prudence will therefore show a policy of apparently yielding to the popular will until our plans are so far consummated that we can declare our designs without fear of any organized resistance.

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