The U.S. real estate meltdown and liquidity crisis show no sign of abating. The U.S. dollar is still caught on the horns of its dilemma, forced to choose between the Scylla of lower rates and the Charybdis of higher ones.
Meanwhile the crooked man from the crooked house spins his crooked tales from coast to coast his piggy banking blather as unctuous an oink as ever heard on the animal farm.
Self-servingly justifying all via his intellectually and morally stunted Ayn Rand theftology.
Endlessly invited for fawning interviews to pump the sales of his fairy tale fictions, as adored as ever by the sycophantic chattering classes. The ink stained wretches who serve so well those in the financial class that made off with the loot under the cover provided by the Greenspan Fed.
And why would a man in his 80’s, a man lionized by those he served so well, idolized by the scriveners and courtiers they long ago bought, be on a book tour designed to help him deny his part in shaping our present? Why would a man so completely beyond the reach of the law or even public opprobrium, a man soon to be beyond even the laws of nature herself, care?
Tough question.
And in any case does he not see that by trying to deny that his 17 years as the head of the Fed had any part in where we are today at best robs his life work of any meaning? Does he not see that even if we were to believe such a patently self-serving absurdity then at best it says that his office was primarily ceremonial and that the real decisions and power lay elsewhere? (Now if he were to come out with that…..)
Does he not see that even if this were true, that even then he is still guilty by association?
Guilty of being the principal puppet in a show meant to distract the public from what was really going on while their pockets were being picked?
Does he not see any of this? Again a tough question and one probably even the man himself does not know the answer to so crooked has his path led him to become.
What can be known however is that this man obviously feels sufficiently driven by how badly things are going to spend a good chunk of his remaining time on the planet trying to deny his part in the biggest smash and grab since the kleptocrats took Russia in 1991.
Perhaps as good an indication as any of the ferocity of the economic storm clouds we in North America have now entered.
How soon this will all start impacting on North America’s real debt and deficit, our energy deficit is impossible to predict. We cannot know how soon the multiplying economic evils of the Reagan & Bush war and debt creation machine will impact on the U.S. 12 million barrels of oil a day deficit. Or how substantially the housing meltdown in combination with the Iraq war, a tax cut led $10 trillion debt, and a $800 million current account deficit will impact on America’s plans to globalize their way out of the looming natural gas production crash. Given the very substantial impacts this is and will continue to have on liquidity, it seems safe to say “Quite a lot.”
Today, Greenspan tells us what every one on the street long ago knew about Iraq. “It was all about oil.” If he hopes by such “truth telling” to prove he is one of the people he is more than a dollar short and a day late. What the man in the street does not know is that with these words Greenspan is involved in a much deeper truth telling than even he knows.
For as appropriate as it is to link these words to the crime perpetrated against the Iraqi people they are even more true when applied to the entirety of the 20th Century. And as bad as the economic mismanagement of America has been, and as painful as the resolution of these problems will be, this pales in comparison to the level of economic privation that will be experienced by Americans once their energy mismanagement chickens start coming home to roost. And for those of you new to these truths do yourself a favour and greatly steepen your learning curve by substituting the word energy every time you hear the word oil, gas, coal or uranium.
At present the picture that can tell us how soon America’s energy consumption will be forced downward by its financial and geopolitical problems is at best murky. For now all we can be certain of is that the fossil fuel scarcity deniers like Daniel Yergin at CERA who have been claiming for years that its price will be plummeting “any day now” will finally be relegated to the appropriate historical dustbin.