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January
07
2021

America’s Three Catastrophic Mistakes
Bill Bonner

We had your f*****g back, but we ain’t got your back no more!

– Trump supporter to D.C. police

WEST RIVER, MARYLAND – We’re spending this week in the morgue. That is, we’re cutting open the dead year – 2020 – to better understand the new, live one.

So far, we’ve seen that the brain and heart were both diseased. In the brain, people were delusional… living in a fantasy world, where they thought they could shut down the wealth-producing economy and then make up for it by printing bits of paper, calling it “money.”

And the rot appears to have spread to the heart, where the fake money was used to reward cronies, bail out mismanaged businesses, and pay off the elite.

That’s how former Federal Reserve chief Janet Yellen – now in the bullpen, warming up to be our next Treasury Secretary – came to earn $7 million in fees for delivering forgettable speeches.

The $7 million was merely chump change. While Ms. Yellen was at the Federal Reserve, from 2010 to 2018, the money-printers added $2.2 trillion, doubling the Fed’s balance sheet… with almost all of it going to Wall Street. That’s a 31,000 times return, far more than the money spinners would get from honest capitalism.

Modest Reveal

Today, we continue our unkind cuts. What happened in 2020? What does it mean? And since this is Epiphany… today, we offer a modest “reveal.”

Last year, the feds completed a trifecta of major, catastrophic “mistakes.” We put the word mistakes in quotes, signaling that there is something fishy about them. Indeed there is.

These “mistakes” cost the public dearly… But they served the elite well.

In 2001, George W. Bush might have left the police to deal with the 9/11 miscreants. At trivial cost, those who were still alive might have been brought to justice.

Instead, he made a federal case of it. Cost? $7 trillion and as many as a million lives.

Consequence? Millions of refugees… a much more dangerous and unstable Middle East… more potential “terrorists” than ever before. And a much deeper Swamp… filled with lobbyists, lawyers, and apologists for the U.S. military/industrial/surveillance industry.

Huge Distortion

Then, after 2008, the Bush and Obama administrations – along with the Bernanke/Yellen Fed – might have let markets do their thing.

Mortgage finance companies, big banks, and common households had over-bought the housing market. Many were on the brink of bankruptcy.

But instead of letting the chips fall where they ought, the feds bailed out Wall Street – at a cost of $3.6 trillion.

Doing so, they distorted the whole ball of capitalism’s wax. American stocks, for example – as measured by the Dow Jones Industrial Average – rose from under 8,000 in 2009 to over 28,000 10 years later.

These prices no longer tell us what the companies were worth; they just show how willing the Fed was to push their stock prices up.

Bad Situation Made Worse

And finally, in 2020, the attack of the COVID-19 bug might have been treated like a medical challenge.

Again, at very little cost, those most likely to die – the sick, the old, and the medically vulnerable – might have been protected.

Instead, the elite flexed its muscles. 30 million jobs were lost… thousands of businesses went bust… and the whole economy was transformed in ways no one anticipated.

In addition, according to epidemiologist Dr. Knut Wittkowski, locked-down populations were turned into slow-motion virus incubators, resulting in more deaths, not fewer.

And then, to make a bad situation worse, the feds flooded the economy with fake money, as if that would offset the real damage.

These three “mistakes” – made over the course of the last 20 years – sealed America’s fate. The feds are condemned in their own cockamamie prison.

For now, not just Wall Street, but Main Street, too, with its 300 million mouths to feed, look to the feds for their daily bread. They count on the feds’ fake money to pay rent and mortgages… to pay for holidays and autos… and even to put food on the table.

Today’s news reports tell us that Mitch McConnell’s refusal to allow $2,000 giveaways might have cost the GOP the Senate. Won’t the handouts soon become routine?

All-Round Failure

And so, the year 2020 ended in disgrace.

Donald Trump didn’t make America great again. The Federal Reserve didn’t make it more prosperous. The Supreme Court didn’t make it honest. The news media didn’t make it better informed. The universities didn’t make it smarter. The medical industry didn’t make it healthier. The tech industry didn’t lead us into a glorious future.

Our elite institutions failed. Congress, for example, is a laughingstock. (Yesterday, it passed a new rule eliminating the use of gender-based terms such as “mother” or “aunt.” That should do it… we’re all equal now!)

The universities act as training camps for the elite, prohibiting free speech and closing minds. More and more, what they teach is politically correct propaganda, not free inquiry.

The press blissfully reports what the elite wants us all to believe, favoring more war, more government spending, and more official meddling.

Wall Street no longer allocates real capital to deserving businesses; it merely grabs the fake dollars for itself.

And poor Main Street, left behind by financialization, fake money, offshoring, and claptrap economics, now clamors for bread and circuses…

Someone who would never win a spelling bee scrawls “Weres my money” on Mitch McConnell’s door, blaming him for blocking the $2,000 giveaway.

And today, die-hard MAGA fans, left behind and betrayed by the elite, gather in Washington, fantasizing that Donald Trump will lead an uprising against them.

Yes, that’s just the way the empire’s cookie crumbled in 2020. Badly.

But what’s ahead?

Stay tuned…

Regards,

Bill

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Bill Bonner is the founder and president of Agora Publishing, one of the world's most successful consumer newsletter publishing companies, and the author of the free daily e-mail The Daily Reckoning. Bill's passion for international travel and big ideas are reflected in the company he's successfully built. In 1979, he began publishing International Living and Hulbert's Financial Digest. Since then, Agora has grown to include dozens of newsletters focusing on finance, health and travel. Since the early '90s Bill has vigorously expanded from Agora's home base in Baltimore, opening offices in London, Paris, Bonn, Waterford, Ireland and Johannesburg, South Africa.

 

 

 

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