Keep buying stocks and pay us our commissions, or we’ll bury you in a rockslide of short-sales. That’s how that racket works.
Some fun, investing.
But there’s a bright side to this too. Short-sellers afford their foils deep insight into the darker forces of Evil.
By shorting, mob armies from Hell lay a demonic overhang of bogus securities atop authentic issues owned by righteous Gangland customers, and then rain this faux paper down upon them. As long as honest, salt of the Earth types keep accumulating enough real stock, market prices kind of zigzag upwards through gaps in the archenemy’s infernal barrage. Once righteous souls start for cover, however, the pummeling intensifies, battering quotes downward, crushing markets if Satan’s ruthless minions scare the Lord’s flock away, as so often happens, otherwise pinning God’s lambs down while Crime Family hit men flank out in the darkness of SEC oversight to slaughter them with blades. It’s a prolonged battle then. Session after session after session. Torture by endless string of down days.
A bleeding, a.k.a. the death of a thousand cuts, and we‘re taking those kinds of hits right now, crimestopper fans. It was brutal out there last week.
The Holy Bible views the primal struggle between Good and Evil as mortal hand-to-hand combat, and clearly you and I enter the fray ourselves forking the hard-earned family savings over to Crime Lords. Good Book also says we lose.
But win upon finally reaching Heaven, making everything just hunky-dory, at least then anyway, though kind of rendering you a stone cold loser at the end, it would otherwise seem.
What gives our tormentors the right?
Bribing Washington, plain and simple. Now and again corporate types get busted for slipping payola to foreign officials, but making “campaign contributions” here is somehow okay. Our justice system, already rendered unabashedly unjust by assuming that all its citizens know all its laws, totally breaks down when enabling systemic political corruption. The Financial Crime Maggot is domestic officialdom’s most generous benefactor.
What kind of people are we? Doesn’t anybody care?
Maybe, but the media’s owned by the corporations too, and voices of dissent are drowned out by “journalists” who can’t possibly fail to see what’s going on, but are willing, if not eager, to puff their feathers for blue chip perps paying them to jabber on about something else. Anything else it would seem, to listen to them.
The type who find that part amusing, we’ve observed.
That Gangland’s Hell-bent aristocracy can flourish taking God’s law-abiding victims down with what amounts to highway robbery at the intersection of buyer v. seller is hilarious to those who make words say whatever The Man wants, and not think twice about it.
Which brings us to perspective. The working Joe cannot support his family here. His job is overseas, his wages fractionalized to yuans and rupees on the dollar. American Dreamholders are technically bankrupt. Collapsed home prices cratered their personal net worth, exacerbated by corrosive home equity loan racketeering.
Investors and the outfits they invest in are pouring money offshore hand over fist. Things are peachy there.
Meanwhile, an imminent financial apocalypse threatens to stomp what’s left of our humbled existence and squish it underfoot. Without material tax hikes or dismantled boondoggles, probably both, Government soon won’t be able to find anyone to buy its debt at anything remotely close to par. When that happens, the Ship of State sinks, her fuel lines fatally severed by an explosion in the engine room. Mismanaging extravagant military escapades with tax cuts, W and Bam have placed a fiscal IED inside our nautical metaphor, primed to go off some years out but perilously close given the timeframe our bomb squad will need to do something about it whenever they can schedule that in.
Particularly in the midst of economic depression. Forget what you read elsewhere. Those pens get paid to say it isn’t, just like they ignore our un-and-under-employment rate of maybe 40% these days. Come to Tennessee and try telling these long faces this is just recession. Or that now-vanished jobs inside empty factories will come back ever.
Or Ohio, or pretty much anywhere outside your metropolitan coastal shoreline communities.
If you haven’t studied economics, and for some who tried, we’re getting at hyperinflation here, now a chilling tad closer than just over the horizon, thanks to the new fiscal adolescents enrolling in Congress on January 3rd. Picture your life sidekick headed for the grocery store behind a wheelbarrow full of dollar bills, where she/he finds prices 50% higher than they were last week, a bargain at half what they‘ll be 7 days from now. That’s the most likely scenario as dangers loom today.
Understand, the country’s beyond the point where traditional spending cuts will work. Unless tax revenues get unplugged and/or whole Government programs are rent asunder, the budget’s toast. It truly is all about 1) tax hikes, and you know where mindless posturing puts Republicans on that limb, and/or 2) downsizing bureaucracy and the Democratic propensity to stuff its big fat voting underbelly with social pork.
So why worry about short-sellers or financial racketeering?
We’re not sure The Post has an answer for that one. But the country’s got a Satan-spawned pack of Wall Street thugs out there, basically un-policed, the same black-hearted sort who buried various peoples in the civilized world and Iceland in 1720 (twice), 1769, 1796/97, 1819, 1837, 1847, 1857, 1869, 1873, 1882, 1884, 1893, 1896, 1901, 1907, 1929, 1937/38, 1973/74, 1980, 1982, 1986, 1987, 1989, 1992, 1997 (twice), 1998, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2007 (twice), 2008/09, 2009, April 27, 2010, and May 6, 2010, not to mention all the clever little issue-specific plummets, freefalls, plops, splats, downdrafts, and tailspins victimizing population segments at every mob bloodletting in between, and if you have to go around fixing things anyway, you might as well start with demons.
Who knows, somebody might finally go to jail.
Investor Aside: Long ago, a German survivor of their notorious Weimar Republic's struggle with hyperinflation in 1922/23 told us he would go into it holding industrial assets like non-financial common stocks and businesses themselves if anything like that ever threatened him again. Half a century had passed, and he was still wary of fixed income securities. In what we'd allocated as the bond portion of his portfolio, he made us take a modest position in gold bars instead.
