Quotes

Bill Bonner at the Daily Reckoning does a nice job here in analyzing the Greek debt crisis simply, and with the possible exception of a central banker or your garden variety EU bureaucrat, in language anybody can understand.

Click anywhere on the quote for the entire piece.

Recomended.

Greek communists are usually a reliable bastion of error and darkness.

Their ideas are appalling.

Their proposals are absurd.

The only thing they are not wrong about is their opinion of the ruling classes - whom they regard as morons.

I have a question:

How does all this massive amount of legislation, hundreds and hundreds if not thousands of pages, which common sense tells us takes months if not years to draft, magically appear overnight right after a crisis, like the Patriot Acts, Obamacare, and the new onerous financial regulations?

Gosh, a skeptic would think that such is crafted well ahead of time behind the scene.

Plus, no politician has or takes the time to read all this legislation.

The politicians blindly just vote.

Is it like the sheeple are being deliberated herded toward the slaughter works, a place that is clearly contrary to their own best interest long-term?

The Gaia, Mother Earth, New Age, collectivist philosophy of the ruling elite is that “humanity is dandruff that needs to be cleansed from the scalp of Mother Earth.”

The masses in Euroland, the US, the UK, Japan and China are starting to seriously question the legitimacy of their political leadership.

Such historically has preceded an economic and politically distracting war.

Historically, mankind gets into trouble when it buys into the earth-based collectivist philosophy as opposed to the Creator-based individualistic philosophy.

So, love your real mother this Mother’s Day!

The Powers That Be (PTB) are fast running out of slick rhetoric, empty promises, zero interest rates, and endless bailouts for their cronies.

Our concern should be that next comes inflation, more tyrannical controls, loss of freedom, and war.

Desperate men, addicted to power, do desperate things.

To quote Richard Russell one more time,

He goes on to say something about denial, the NYSE, the administration, the Fed and clueless newspapers.

It all seemed redundant.

But then ...

He hits his stride.

And since we're on the subject of jokes .....

To quote Bill Gross on ratings agencies,

"Their warnings were more than tardy when it came to the Enrons and the Worldcoms of ten years past, and most recently their blind faith in sovereign solvency has led to egregious excess in Greece and their southern neighbors.

The result has been the foisting of AAA ratings on an unsuspecting (and ignorant) investment public who bought the rating service Kool-Aid that housing prices could never really go down or that countries don’t go bankrupt.

Their quantitative models appeared to have a Mensa-like IQ of at least 160, but their common sense rating was closer to 60, resembling an idiot savant with a full command of the mathematics, but no idea of how to apply them."

And since we're on the subject of savants ...

I have for a long time now read people who read Richard Russell.

Bonehead!!!

He's well into his 80's now and his Dow Theory Letters isn't cheap.

Still, the more I read him the more I wish I had been doing so all along.

"If I told you I was going to give you a large steel box for your kids,

and that box was not to be opened for fifty years,

would you rather I put three million in cash in that box,

or three million in diamonds or gold?"

Helluva question ain't it?

Imagine if the government decided to increase the number of minutes in an hour from 60 to 70.

You can hear policymakers congratulating themselves:

"People will work longer at the same pay. This will be a boon to productivity!"

Or if Washington increased the number of inches in a foot from 12 to 15:

"Home buyers will thus get more house for the same price and that will stimulate home buying!"

Preposterous?

It's no more foolish than what we and other countries routinely do with our currencies.

Steve Forbes for forbes.com 4/21/2010