The Road to Ruin

Watching the economy fall apart is kind of like watching a glacier melt. It's not an overnight process to say the least.
However, with certainty, it will continue to melt.

AP source: White House projects lower deficit. Another case of “The deficit is growing slower than we originally thought.” They fail to point out its still growing exponentially. They “saved” $250 billion but we will be $2 trillion in the hole by year’s end. And that's 66% of what the entire deficit was when Bush became president!

Marc Faber "in China there is an investment bubble ...the total collapse is ahead of us and probably a world scale war..." - While perhaps the "world war" prediction is a bit extreme, you can't ignore the fundamentals that lead to Faber making this prediction.

Obama to raise 10-year deficit to $9 trillion. The bailouts just won't quit growing.
Stiglitz: Dollar Reserve System Falling Apart
Iceland: What Ugly Secrets Await Being Revealed in the Meltdown
The Consumer Has Dug in His Heels
Frustrations Rising Over Mortgage Relief
More Shoppers Getting Cold Feet in Checkout Line
Global credit quality continues slide, Fitch says – Reuters
Watch out below – CaseyResearch
Fiscal Ruin – Ambrose Evans-Pritchard - "The imperative for the debt-bloated West is to cut spending systematically for year after year, off-setting the deflationary effect with monetary stimulus. This is the only mix that can save us. My awful fear is that we will do exactly the opposite, incubating yet another crisis this autumn, to which we will respond with yet further spending. This is the road to ruin. "

Southern Georgia, US, Schools Swine Flu Outbreak

Can you read between the lines in this following sentence: "Thus, the policy of keeping schools open, and using fever as one of the key symptoms, may lead to extensive spread by patients who have low or no fever. Moreover, most of the students have mild illnesses, so they are not tested, which may allow important genetic changes to silently spread."

What it says is - the swine flu isn't the pandemic we thought it would be, but we want to keep the hysteria going. If this flu is going to get bad, it will be in the Fall and Winter months. But copious secretions and respiratory complications don't seem to be a major factor at this point. Remember how big of a deal they made of SARS? Well, only 70 people died worldwide. We lose twice that many every day in the US from auto accidents. Just recently a 15 year old girl died on a flight from the US to Brazil. The mighty eye of the media descended on that case. Do you have any idea how many people drop dead globally every minute!? That's a very misleading way of observing a potential pandemic. The data set must be HUGE to give a real overview of what we're dealing with. Not n = ~1. (sample size of one)

I don't blame them for being jumpy. A true pandemic with just the right properties could kill a billion people and wipe out a tremendous amount of medical resources. But I don't think this is it. We will continue to observe.

--------------------------------end transmission