Negative Interest Rates

         We’re told that former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers wants to set interest rates below zero, meaning banks would charge you for keeping money with them.  If the rate were fixed at, say, minus 10%, a $100,000 balance would turn into $90,000 after negative interest is deducted, presumably at the beginning of each period for obvious reasons.  To force compliance, the banking system would become cashless, that is, totally electronic, all paper currency and coin withdrawn from circulation.  That way, you'd have nothing to hide from them anymore.

         Why?  Well, this is how, our source claims, some thinkers would have Quantitative Easing end, preempting hyperinflation by making savers sop up the Federal deficit with their personal cash on hand.  Since it wouldn’t resolve the problem, joblessness and free stuff for the entitlement class, one wonders how the proposed negative interest rate program would end once their electronic money pool is sufficiently depleted.

         Quantitative Easing, you will recall, is the printing of money by refusing to acknowledge the printing of money while you rig markets for the financial instruments you print money with.

         Subscribers, it's been perfectly clear to us for several weeks now that the country no longer has a Treasury Bond market, and hasn't for some time.  Trades in what used to be that arena now consist of 1) accounting transactions among sovereign governments, largely between Communist China and a new boy in town, the Communist United States of America, and 2) other players forced to accept state-controlled interest rates set by the participating central party monetary leaders.  "Negative interest rate" is just a fancy name cooked up to deny what’s really been going on here all along: the confiscation of middle class wealth.

 

         From 1) central party financial leaders, Wall Street mafia kingpins periodically gangbanging stock prices into fractions of their real value to 2) central party business leaders, CEO’s and them, confiscating our shares every year through “stock options”, taking the entire amount of our December 31, 1981 savings over 30-plus years now, average Americans have been playing the sucker for decades.  Now the central party political leaders in Washington, themselves fabulously wealthy through graft and payola from their financial and business comrades, are mulling over ways to come at our wherewithal from yet another f#$%ing direction.

         If the obvious ultimate outcome to all this hasn’t entered your head before, surely the time has come now to start polishing the guns and think hard about the side you’ll be aligning with when secession knocks on the door.

         Patriot or commie?  Where will you be standing when the calamari hits the fan?

Because the Doing Isn’t that Important, the Talking Is

Yet another spot-on tractate, perhaps Peggy Noonan’s finest, shared with the MacDougal Post community by one of our discriminating subscribers:

http://blogs.wsj.com/peggynoonan/2013/12/03/low-information-leadership/

Fast Food Workers Strike

         In the early years, the original McDonald’s franchise was a hoot.  Teenagers serving teenagers at the greatest teenage happening of all time.  Cars packed with them turned the nearby streets of Des Plaines into a cruising strip, radios blaring.  The rock ‘n’ roll generation massed there just because the rock ‘n’ roll generation was massing there - every night of the week.  Plus you got fries, if you wanted some, too.

         Working at the Lee Street McDonald’s came to be recognized as the best after-school job in the history of after-school jobs, and if you didn’t get one you hung out there anyway.  It was a place where guys could reasonably expect to check out every available girl in the greater Chicago metropolitan area.

         Living wages never entered into it at all.  Given the job benefit, ogling chicks face to face across the counter, you’d have to be out of your mind to care about the money too.

         Over time, the business model settled into something else, but not the part about the after-school job.  For generations, working at McDonald’s has given kids spending money while they went through school, plus something for the resume.  On graduation, the now young adults went out and found real work somewhere else.

         In recent years, Washington has allowed real work to be shipped overseas, apparently to the point where breadwinners have nowhere else to turn now but fast food jobs never meant to support a family.  In a shortsighted, ill-considered campaign of desperation, union leaders and part-time workers are trying to bully the fast food industry into committing financial suicide by raising wages to levels that will wreak havoc on their extraordinarily successful business models.

         At the prices required to cover these outrageous wage demands, it’s quite possible that nobody will buy the food.  Sounds like a lose-lose to us.  No matter how this thing goes down, it won’t be good.

         What the working poor really need is new faces in Washington.  The answer is as simple as that.

Spreading Yultide Joy

         To help our valued subscribers remember what the holiday season is all about, MacDougal again offers his favorite Christmas carol, with an additional link for Lizards fans:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ooF27ABwmg&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-P2qL3qkzk

Urgent Safety Bulletin - Amazon Aerial Attack

          News that Amazon is testing drone aircraft to deliver orders from their warehouses to your door (within half an hour after you click on the submit order thingie!) sent our staff scurrying to get a handle on probable traffic patterns. If the same kinds of computer geek whiz kids who developed MacDougal's first PC came up with this loony project, and are now seated at flight panels in undisclosed remote underground locations across rural America, Irving expects at least three crashes per flight, probably on the way to each house on every flight they attempt, a rate forecast to continue through the early stages of beta development, if not longer.

         And for God’s sake, stay away from the door. Access your home through a back window or something until we find out more about this.  Much more.

         As of now nobody here knows whether to advise subscribers to board up their windows with plywood sheets, kevlar, or heavy armored plates. But keep reading our posts. We’ll try to stay on top if this thing.

         Though nobody has told us where testing is taking place, one can assume that Amazon computer geek whiz kid drone flight control operations will be located within twenty minutes of a Starbucks. If you find out which one, move there. It will become the safest place on Earth. Subscribers living in states where Amazon warehouses are, or will soon be, located are advised to remain indoors until further notice. These are: Arizona, California, Delaware, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, New Jersey, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Washington. If you have to drive through one of these potential disaster zones, don’t. Go around them.

         Anyone thinking of traveling to countries that have such facilities should visit someplace else. These are Canada (Ontario and British Columbia), United Kingdom, France, Germany, Netherlands. Italy, Slovakia, Spain, Japan, China, and India.

         If you have to head outside to the mailbox or something, KEEP YOUR EYE ON THE SKIES and listen for engines. If you hear any kind of approaching noise overhead, any at all, RUN BACK INSIDE immediately. We don’t know if it’s just drones targeting our doors we have to worry about, or if unmanned aircraft will be dropping packages on our heads too. Remember, these are computer geek whiz kids we’re talking about. Please understand, when you order anything from Amazon at this point, not only could drones be placing your door in their aerial crosshairs, but your stupid item that you could just drive out to Wal-Mart and pick up yourselves, may be putting the entire neighborhood at risk.

         If anyone knows when and where the first trial drone package attacks are scheduled to launch, please email MacDougal about it as soon as you’ve secured your own property and are safely hunkered down.

SEC Hotshots Don’t Ride to the Rescue Once Again

         “Fiduciary capacity” is an ethical standard of trust imposed by law on one who holds another’s money for investment, basically requiring said holder to act prudently, meaning, in Wall Street terms anyway, in the sucker’s interest instead of your own.

         Laughably, the Securities and Excuses Commission (SEC) has always exempted Crime Family goons calling themselves “stockbrokers” from this legal burden.  No matter how they screw you, or how badly, those thugs CANNOT BE SUED FOR BREACH OF FIDUCIARY CAPACITY like employees in, say, a bank trust department would - for doing the same f#$&!ng thing, whatever it may be.

         Recently, in another passive action appropriately ignored in the media, some advisory panel has proposed that our hotshots at the SEC start doing the right thing.  Since that hasn’t happened in the eight decades or so since the worthless, lollygagging, good-for-nothing agency was stuffed down our perpetually victimized financial gizzards, it seems prudent to assume this ain’t going down any time soon.

         Here’s the one piece we could find about this non-development anyway.  We keep our subscribers informed about nothing when nothing’s happening too.

http://washpost.bloomberg.com/Story?docId=1376-MWKLZA6K50YH01-1214TDFMPDV2PUU8R96093VJ5F