Debt Rattle June 7 2017

“That Paris accord is a hoax”

But … but it is Obama’s greatest achievement. 🙂

Gold, BTC and Stocks are all rising, but compared to WHAT? Aren’t we pricing them in USD? And if everything else is rising, does that not mean the USD is falling against, perhaps, reality?

I have to protest Keen again. Like other economists, he believes in everything but thermodynamics. An economy is not just numbers, it’s a representation of real, existing matter and energy flows. It may be a better or worse representation, but the map is not the territory. As it’s a real thing, and finite reality is out there and exists, then you obviously can’t double, triple, quadruple the representations on the map and expect the territory to also double. I mean, duh. So doubling, tripling the money supply, the spending of government doesn’t double or triple the activity, the factories, the machine tools in that nation, its ability to plant and harvest crops, provide goods, provide nursing, to get things done. If it did, Zimbabwe and Venezuela would be the richest nations on earth, and it astonishes me that I have to point this out to otherwise intelligent people.

There are just so many fields, so many mines, so many tools, so many people. Therefore, there ARE limits on government spending and abilities, which means there IS a budget the government must live in, and a primary one is that government specializes in graft and influence peddling, so that the projects it funds and undertakes are invariably less productive protections of the already powerful instead of needed national activity. So come on, Keen, you really think if Trump hands out another $20Trillion this year, everyone in America will get rich? The economy will start humming along better than ever? If so, you should move to Venezuela immediately and tell me how it works out for you.

Economics is not about “money”. Remove money entirely from your thinking about it. It’s thermodynamics: real objects and real energy applied and moving in a giant scale. Like other machines it can be good or bad, efficient or inefficient. And it’s not nice to fool Mother Nature. You can avoid believing in reality, but you can’t avoid the consequences of not believing. Likewise our illusionary economy, where “unemployment is 4%” with 100M out of work and 40M on food stamps. Encouraging that illusion may convince people to behave irrationally for a while. Until it doesn’t, and the real and unavoidable consequences of reality are at last perceived, often build slowly but pierced quickly. That’s what a bubble is, and we’re in one.