Gold 401K

Gold 401k Citigroup
Gold 401k Citigroup

In the movie Dumb and Dumber, the two hapless stars come into possession of a suitcase full of money intended to pay off a kidnapper.

These two deem it “free money” and begin to spend it on every manner of transient, worldly vanity. They replace each withdrawal of “free money” with IOUs.

When the kidnapper finally opens the suitcase, he finds nothing but wads of paper, worthless IOUs which the two characters insist are just as good as money.

This serves as an allegory for the world we find ourselves in, except that the Wall Street banks have taken IOUs and made derivatives of them transmuting debt into trillions of dollars in these fraudulent financial vehicles. Nothing from nothing equals nothing in a world where the term million is now obsolete billion is a throw away term and trillion is the operative term of a counterfeit financial nightmare where the debt of the federal government is approaching $14 trillion, an amount that we have no capacity to ever pay. No average person can fathom a billion, much less a trillion. A billion? That’s what times nine reports say we cannot account for in Iraq reconstruction money.

This is not legitimate banking or investment guided by Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand of capitalism. It is a giant casino world where a small group of elitists gamble in wild speculation; winning, losing and growing ever more addicted to cheap wealth and power in a reckless frenzy that has America and the world teetering at the edge of the abyss. Only the mass infusion of taxpayer money, the monetization of debt by the Fed and massive bail outs have halted the slide for the moment.

Goldman Sachs, aka “Gold Sacks”, who claimed to be “doing God’s work” along with Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, and Bank of America, employing a Ouija board speculation, made bets on things that may or may not happen in the future. They created sub prime mortgage securities and then bet that they would fall in value, making money on the way up and on the way down.

When it all came undone, they insisted that they were too big to fail and demanded money from the very taxpayers they ripped off to save them, offering only the same worthless IOUs as collateral.

According to insiders, also hidden in this murky minefield of grossly inflated and leveraged real estate values was the means, through fraudulent debt vehicles sold abroad, to fund black operations for U.S. intelligence agencies; unauthorized and unaccountable funds to empower rogue operations.

The bankers who enriched themselves on this ponzi scheme used their criminal largess to buy most of the U.S. Congress. None of their “wealth creation” was the result of any honest “sweat of the brow labor,” no mining of natural resources, no utilization of American ingenuity and none of the unique inventions that have historically lifted all ships in this shining city on a hill. All was smoke and mirrors with the new darling of the derivative land on the horizon, carbon credits.

If there were any justice left in this temporal world, these guys would join Bernie Madoff, who they make look like a piker, in his federal prison cell in North Carolina. His crime of $65 Billion, although tragic for his victims, looks paltry next to these guys who have gutted the value of pension funds and 401k accounts and contributed to the low interest rates on Certificates of Deposit that marginally poor retirees depended on. Prisoner 61727-054 in Butner, N.C. could appreciate the irony of it all.

So, what are we to do as the printing presses roll, and we abandon our destiny to unaccountable central bank wizards who have no loyalty to “Mainstreet America?”

An old economics professor, lecturing on the “science” of economics, once told us of two economists who found themselves in a deep pit with no way out. It looked hopeless for the walls were steep and slick. One says, “We are lost. We’ll never be able to climb out of this hole we find ourselves in.”

“Oh, not to worry,” the other says. “All we have to do is imagine a ladder.” Bernie might try that. It is what passes for financial and economic acumen in today’s world of Golden Nugget and Caesar’s Palace investments.

A friend said that he would much prefer to imagine an America where self-respecting bankers still did the right thing and jumped from their windows atop their mountains of worthless IOUs.