The “Dividend Stock”

       The linguistic shift wasn’t all that subtle, and we apologize for not picking up on it before, but our valued subscribers need to know what we know, and as red-faced as your MacDougal Post staff finds itself this morning, all of us here at Global Headquarters are rushing to right the oversight five hours after realizing we’ve been making it.  Five hours because that’s the amount of first-lap rack time MacDougal gets these days, and you don’t want to read what that sleepyhead can come up with when horizontal duty calls, and thoughts of what we’re about to cover for you hit our guru as he was hanging ten on the cusp of Shuteye City kind of early last night, early even for an ancient blog bot like Irving.

       Subscribers, there’s no such thing as a “dividend stock”.  The label, which pops up endlessly these days, is flat out misleading, and deliberately meant to be so.  It makes us cringe to think how we’ve remained silent whenever the offending term was used in our presence in the past.  Traditionally, the righteous way to go here, equities have always fallen into two classifications, investment-grade and speculative.  Investment-grade common stocks pay dividends.  It’s definitional, for goodness sakes.  Failure to do so excludes the guilty issue from the Investment Universe.  The nonbeliever, used to picking stocks the way he hits on an endless line of potential girlfriends, will jump in with “what about Berkshire Hathaway?”* or some other naive tommyrot, and fail to see The Light no matter how hard a seasoned journeyman tries to spread the consecrated word, that PRICES OF STOCKS ISSUED BY COMPANIES NOT PAYING DIVIDENDS REVOLVE AROUND DREAMS.  Dreams of future dividends mostly, unless you’re looking for a buyout or something, as well as dreams that what those financial statements say is there, is there.

       “Dividend stock” implies that there's some other kind of investment that doesn’t pay dividends.  There isn’t.  To wit:

       Sometime before the dotcom catastrophe at the beginning of the century, Wall Street Crime Families began using talking heads and them to lure suckers into “trading”, the insidious con that turns marks into counterparties to the racketeers’ much-ballyhooed “trading profits” whereby pretty much everyone else but the Crime Lords totally lose their a$$e$$.  It was the start of a movement that led to the “Buy and Hold is Dead” campaign that ultimately destroyed so many financial lives less than a decade later, leading us to where we are now, which is almost broke.  Except for the Crime Families, of course.

       Readers, whenever you see the two words, “dividend” and “stock”, joined together, get p!$$ed off.  Financial psychopaths are using the term to go after your wad.

       That a company pays dividends, does not necessarily make the stock investment grade.

       And that another doesn't, means you shouldn't be mentioning the two companies in the same dang apples and oranges sentence.  We wouldn't even put them in the same dang paragraph together.

*In the case of Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffet has been confiscating what should've been your dividends and reinvesting that money to build his empire. His premise that he can do more with your dough than you can should, in our view, be rephrased to, he can do more for himself with your dough than you can.

What the Fiscal Cliff Means to You

         The superrich have never accepted financial responsibility for the poor.  Instead, this criminally insane class has always used politics to divert any money that could’ve been used to ameliorate, or even eliminate, a profoundly simple income distribution problem.  In our recent past the superrich unleashed the likes of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney onto the world stage, war criminals who lavished taxpayer funds on ungodly military actions against parties posing no national threat, and, more importantly today, turned to the hideous practice of torture, insuring that potential enemies would rise against us forever, creating a permanent need for over-the-top defense spending.  In the process, the supers have deliberately amassed this gigantic national debt to let them claim that there’s no money left for the impoverished.  None at all.  We have to pay off our bondholders instead.

       Taking their lunacy one step further, these reprobates are buying off everybody in sight to convince you that their taxes shouldn’t be raised to pay for the nefarious scheme they hatched to avoid accepting their responsibilities to the poor, a class that they create, for goodness sakes.

       The superrich have been so successful at all this the country can’t even afford to come up with market interest rates on all those bonds.  For one despicable reason, transferring American jobs overseas and keeping them there, sovereign piles of money, mostly in China, Japan, and the U.S., have kept gobbling up enough U.S. Treasury bonds to rig interest rates to the point where we really don’t have to pay bondholders anything if we don’t want to.

    Drama queens now running the country are using the Bush/Cheney legacy to focus attention on themselves.  The debt has to be paid off somehow sometime, and they schedule events around the how and the when so that they can shine, mostly by giving the other guy dirty looks in photo ops.  One of these debacles, labeled the “financial cliff”, comes up on December 31.  The specifics here aren’t important.  That Bush and Cheney aren’t in jail, and that their curse continues to plague us, is.  

      The superrich have convinced half the nation that we have to stop spending money on our poor, and the other half are too close to poverty to go along with that bovine scatology.   Underpinning the whole mess is one incontrovertible fact:

       Continuing to dick investors is the only way out.  Inflation is the visible possibility.  As long as the rich are bent on buying politicians to destroy the lives of their fellow citizens, you’d expect the cost of living in this wretched place to remain under constant attack.  Lately, it’s been held in check by the sovereigns, and that will probably go on, but some day ………

       The chickens will come home to roost, and at ever-escalating prices.

       Which brings us to the nuclear option, the invisible possibility, refusing to honor some or all of the nation’s debt obligations.  In times like these, that is always on the table.   Asset destruction is a tantalizing quick fix for elected officials opting to pin blame on a wealthy investor class.  A fix that’s been used time and time again throughout history in the kind of polarizing political atmosphere coming out of Washington in December 2012.

      Under the visible possibility, the worst-case scenario is hyperinflation. At market realization of the threat that prices could go that far out of whack, if you’re sitting with long term bonds bearing a low single digit coupon rate, YOU WILL LOSE SOMETHING LIKE HALF YOUR CAPITAL ON THE FIRST STRIKE.  After a brief dead cat bounce, that loss will deepen - to TWO-THIRDS OF YOUR CAPITAL if encountering 1970’s style inflation, or mathematically worse should hyperinflation actually rear its horrific head.

      And don’t think you’ll be able to trade your way out of it either.  Markets can close for days or weeks in the midst of a financial holocaust - simply because nobody has any idea what anything is worth anymore.  Even if stock exchanges are open, buyers can vanish and bid-asked spreads widen to blatantly racketeering levels.  God help the naive investor who thinks that markets function at his convenience.

     As for the second possibility, your loss, usually 100%, is determined as of the date the announcement comes out.  That's all she said about that.

      So, whatever the media mumbles about the fiscal cliff in the days to come, remember this.  As catastrophic as the event may seem, it’s only a drop in the bucket given the course this country is on and where we’re headed eventually.

     Stay tuned for that, valued subscribers, and please remember this, we join you in hoping we all outlive our money.

Urgent News Bulletin for Subscribers in Westchester and Putnam Counties

         The Journal News, 1133 Westchester Avenue, White Plains, NY, has just published the names and addresses of all handgun permit holders in New York's Westchester and Rockland Counties, meaning armed robbers throughout the world are now hard at work identifying families incapable of defending themselves against armed robbery there.  Running the Journal News names against those in local phone records will spit out each and every unprotected family, as Gannett newspapers are famous for thoroughness and accuracy in reporting.

         If you live in one of these two counties and no one at your address has a handgun carry permit, YOU ARE AT IMMINENT RISK OF AN ARMED HOME ROBBERY, maybe two or three armed home robberies if all the armed robbers in the world show up, as one would expect them to.  Give it maybe two days because the award-winning newspaper's list is thorough as well as accurate, and then start fearing for both your lives and your valuables.

         Our staff criminologist offers three suggestions to MacDougal Post subscribers now being targeted in the militarized zone:  either 1) drop everything and hustle your loved ones down to a gunshop as soon as you finish this blog, picking up an assault rifle for each member of the household over the age of, say 9*, particularly if you're a dumb fool Liberal who's broadcast his anti-gun stance throughout the community (Don't think your neighbor isn't going to point that out to the armed robbers when the sot's negotiating over his daughter's virginity or whatever); or 2) get the hell out of Dodge because Dodge City is what Westchester and Rockland Counties have suddenly become, or will in a couple of days, and, most of all, 3) if anyone in the household spots an ethnic of any kind nobody's ever seen before, and he's driving through the neighborhood, immediately notify the police and tell them there's an ethnic (give appropriate racial description here) nobody's ever seen before driving through the neighborhood, especially, and this is really important to remember, if he's staring at the street number on your house while holding up a list.

        Now get your pathetic butt down to the gunshop and start doing the right thing for once in your life, reflecting on where your candy a$$ politics has brought you.

         Should the Liberal media choose to furnish armed robbers with the kind of information needed to determine the names and addresses of everyone in the country unable to defend him/herself against armed robbery, it would mark an escalation in their War Against the 2nd Amendment.  MacDougal suggests that the rest of us look into that militia deal the amendment talks about and start pricing your basic M1A2 Abrams equipped with the Tank Urban Survival Kit (TUSK) for improved fighting ability in any metropolitan area, the principal main battle tank of the US Army and Marine Corps.  If you have a good job in the financial industry, you may want to think about funding a division of them for the entire gated community.


* Use your discretion here - at ages younger than 9, kids into video games have already developed weapon proficiency better than anything you can come up with in the next 2 days, no matter how many hours you put in at the local firing range if you even have one that lets you bring assault rifles in with you.

Deport Piers Morgan

         A White House petition calling for the immediate deportation of this unbelievably stupid man for engaging in a hostile act against the U.S. Constitution has already passed the 25,000 signature threshold requiring a White House response, but if you want to sign it anyway the link is:

http://wh.gov/nLz7

         Googling unbelievably stupid Brit comes up with all kinds of background, including:

http://gawker.com/5969741/piers-morgan-goes-apeshit-on-prominent-gun-lobbyist-larry-pratt-youre-an-unbelievably-stupid-man

         and

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/white-house-petition-to-deport-piers-morgan-over-anti-gun-views-hits-31900/

What if?

      What if financial institutions paid off politicians for legislation letting bank Crime Families rip off the public so that Government could share in the loot by “fining” perps instead of providing restitution for the victims of their nefarious scams, like rigging world interest rates?  What if this garbage is intended to go on for decades?  Lifetimes?  Centuries?

       What if this is how politicians are already trying to tax the rich?

       Well, they missed this time.  It’s you and me the sleezebags hit.

      And what if the armed investing public suddenly started to take all this for bedrock, the malignant underpinning to an imbecilic system looting Peter to pay Paul, a profligate Peter-bashing anarchist who's been tearing Peter's culture down with a long list of outrages from wanton civil disobedience, ne rap "music" and media glorification of a crime-ridden drug/pimp urban street culture, to wastrel overindulgence, ne food stamps, subsidized housing, admission quotas, employment fast tracks, and God knows what, of a pampered lowlife affirmative action, equal opportunity/no qualifications class of quality-of-life bandits?  If you were a crooked, thieving piece of garbage politician, wouldn’t you try and take away everybody’s guns too?  Especially the assault weapons.  

        Every chance you got.

      Lets see how the Biden Anti-Home/Personal-Defense Commission turns out.  If public awareness hones in on the real business of Washington, grand larceny – voting public, this flagrant threat of political suppression, the first step in establishing a totalitarian Nazi state not so many years ago, seizing weapons, may not bode well for donkey and elephant alike.

         We need our weapons so that they know we have them just in case .........

         Just in case things get more ridiculous than they already are, we suppose.