Over the weekend — between Friday’s S&P downgrade and Monday’s 630-point oopsie on the Dow — I had a couple of conversations with world-watching friends.<\/p>\n
They went like this:<\/p>\n
FRIEND: Hang onto your carbine and check your dried lentils. Here it comes!<\/p>\n
ME: Yeah. Uh huh. Well. Maybe.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
“It,” of course, is the financial apocalypse. The long-fabled, eagerly dreaded financial apocalypse. The Big Event that’s finally going to implode the established systems and either a) allow freedom to arise phoenix-like from the ashes or b) bring about Zombie War III, from which only the hardest and most savage will ever recover. Or a) following b).<\/p>\n
You already know my opinions on the “George Romero Scenario.”<\/a> Could happen. Will<\/i> happen in some places (London seems ripe for a zombie attack right about now, and Detroit is overdue). But it’s not what most of us are likely to face.<\/p>\n
But what about the “it”? What about the trigger event that will finally (after some of us have been expecting it for 40 years<\/a>) tell us that “it” has arrived — the day, the moment, the fall of the domino that will collapse all the other financial dominoes?<\/p>\n
Will there ever actually be a trigger event? Or are we just in for a slow, slow fall that culminates in … more slow falling? A downgrade here. A panicky day on the exchanges there … followed (as Tuesday followed Monday on the Dow this week) by desperate bursts of exuberance .. followed by slightly deeper depression, slightly more desperate panic next time? World without end, amen.<\/p>\n
Without a doubt, this summer or early fall look like trigger time. The dollar is shaky (and being shaken to pieces by its masters). Even the “strong” countries of the Eurozone are looking clay-footed. World alleged leaders fiddle while economies burn. And even too-big-to-fail bankers are finally getting their comeuppance<\/i>.<\/p>\n
It’s obvious, finally, that the Keynesian systems of the West have reached the inevitable point<\/a> where they have nothing to fall back on. Europe can’t bail out Europe. The U.S. can’t bail out the U.S. They can’t bail out each other. And China is looking down its nose at both — from its own precarious vantage point. We know this, you and I. But how many think there are still political “solutions”? OMG, please. Not more<\/i> political “solutions.” And oh, please, let’s not hear any more tsk-tsking talk from pundits about whether we “might” slide back into another “recession” — as if they believe anything ever actually got better following the mess of 2008.<\/p>\n
All that’s left is more money printing. We already know that scenario.<\/p>\n
But …<\/p>\n
In Zimbabwe and in the Weimar Republic when their governments turned their money to toilet paper, people did a lot of creative things to keep going — from bartering to burning bricks of money to heat their houses. But they also relied on the U.S. dollar.<\/p>\n
Us … yeah, good luck with that.<\/p>\n
If politicians and money men manage to keep Keynes’ Frankenstein monster sewn together through the winter, another likely trigger point seems early in 2013, after the elections.<\/p>\n
But what if there’s never a recognizable trigger point? What if we just go on like this — until perhaps we realize the “it” we’ve been waiting for actually happened a long time ago and nobody even saw it until long after the fact?<\/p>\n
My friends and I couldn’t agree on exactly what was likely to happen or when. But the one thing we agreed on is that we long for the “it.” We want to be able to say, “Okay. That’s that. The old is over<\/i>. Now it’s just a matter of burying the (hopefully figurative) dead and cleaning up the streets.”<\/p>\n
We long for the day when politicians finally shrug and say what sensible people already know, “Look, we’ve made a botch of things and we don’t have any tools to fix this<\/i>.” Oh when politicians can’t say anything because they’re too busy running from the people they screwed. We long for the day when all the “too big to fails” have met their well-deserved demise — and better business people are rebuilding. We long for the day that Joe and Josie Average quit looking for a Glorious Leader to haul our asses out of the mess that previous Glorious Leaders have made of the world.<\/p>\n
No matter how painful it is to We the Victims, it needs to happen. “It” needs to happen. Right now, as Matthew Norman said so well, it’s like the “phony war”<\/a> in Britain at the beginning of WWI. <\/p>\n
Unbearably unreal. All looks “normal.” When it’s anything but.<\/p>\n
My greatest fear is that that day — the day of “it” — will never come.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Over the weekend — between Friday’s S&P downgrade and Monday’s 630-point oopsie on the Dow — I had a couple of conversations with world-watching friends. They went like this: FRIEND: Hang onto your carbine and check your dried lentils. Here it comes! ME: Yeah. Uh huh. Well. Maybe. “It,” of course, is the financial apocalypse. The long-fabled, eagerly dreaded financial apocalypse. The Big Event that’s finally going to implode the established systems and either a) allow freedom to arise phoenix-like from the ashes or b) bring about Zombie War III, from which only the hardest and most savage will ever…<\/p>\n