Ready to start a new country yet?'''''

Give it time. 7 million more mortgages go up this coming 18 months. We need the Fed to really pour on the printing presses just to break even. 25 million jobs have to be created to get back to even. Auto and house prices have stabilized for now but not for long. How much more welfare can we give these guys?

Time will tell. Without stimulus these prices  slide back. With it inflation looms directly ahead. 

The Jobless Recovery, So Called

The biggest problem I see is not fiat money (which is collapsing from its own lack of substance), or the purported “global” economy, which is composed of numerous countries none of whom are doing well. (Prosperity in China? Oh, my, tell me another one.) The big problem, which is being exacerbated, is that something like 40% of all “jobs” are in government. Yup. Four out of every ten “workers” are paid lavishly (in general, twice what counterparts in business make for similar tasks) are engaged primarily in the business of making our lives more difficult, our businesses less profitable, and our ability to plan for the future almost impossible. This country has grown bureaucracy and chased manufacturing jobs off shore. It has increased regulation and deleterious “services” at the expense of freedom and capital to create real business which include real jobs and genuine products which can be sold instead of buying shoddy merchandise from China. We’ve seen the cycle…from Taiwan to Japan to Sri Lanka, and now to China. We have sent our money overseas for many decades rather than fight to reduce regulation, reduce taxes, and reduce costs. A fork lift operator simply isn’t worth $86,000 a year, even if he works for the ci devant “Big Three.” Not many of them do any more, and it serves them right. Greed at all levels of the unions made American products too expensive to buy. Manufacturers–whom, I will remind you again, are not in business to employ “workers,” but to make profits–picked up their blueprints and went elsewhere. We cannot blame them. We would do the same if we were able.

No, friends, there will be no “jobless” recovery. There will be no recovery at all until we are so much farther down that October of 2009 looks like “the good old days.” The “green shoots” are the slime growing up the North wall of government, the bacteria of corruption, and of parasites such as governmental Spanish Moss and Pharma and Agribiz mistletoe.

What is to be done? You’ve got your choice. Destroy Carthage, or opt out. Pull back into your own perimeter. Produce nothing that can be taxed or regulated.