It Rubs the Lotion On Its Skin

Guest Post by Jesse

“It rubs the lotion on its skin, or else it gets the hose again.”

Buffalo Bill, The Silence of the Lambs

“Fed officials want to start raising the cost of your borrowing because they worry they’ve been giving you a free ride for too long with zero interest rates. We listen to Fed officials all of the time here at The Wall Street Journal, and they just can’t figure you out.”

Jon Hilsenrath, The Wall Street Journal

I see where Ben Bernanke is worried that the US is losing economic control of the world, and is dismayed at the prospect of ‘competing systems’ with the rise of an alternative development bank and currency regime led by the BRICS.

And the Fed’s friendly financial journalist mouthpiece Jon Hilsenrath asks why you are being so stubborn and stingy, and not out there spending. Are you being awkward or something?

You see, the Fed looks at the aggregate numbers, and from what they can tell from their models, people are saving just too darn much.

Perhaps if they paid more attention to median numbers and the broader public, they would see the skew in the distribution of income gains that have gained even greater momentum under their top down monetary regimes. And then they would know that the one percent has plenty of excess income and capital gains from the bubble in paper assets. And why Jamie Dimon just joined the ranks of the billionaires, while the median income continues to stagnate.

That is how good the financial kleptocrats are doing seven years after the financial crisis that they helped to cause with their serial frauds and blatant deceptions. And of course, the serial felonies that they have committed but remain largely unreformed and unindicted since.

And as for the politicians, Billary gets a cool half million just for showing up, and talking. Why don’t the rest of you all get busy and do that? Then you too can be rich. I am sure you have a lot to say too.

Or you can write a column about things of which you seem to know very little, like Paul Krugman. He is high-fiving the recovery caused by Fed money printing, that has not caused inflation. He is so happy that his model predicted this! Take a look at the velocity of money, Paul, and you will see why there is ‘no inflation’ if you look at the right government statistics.

Perhaps it is because all the ‘stimulus’ went into inflating yet another financial asset bubble, and has trickled down to the servants of the privileged few, such as yourself perhaps, but not too many others. There is inflation driven by the rentiers and their growing monopolies in healthcare and communications for example, but not much else.

So the moneyed class asks their servants to ask you, Why aren’t you out there, recovering? Are you trying to make the Fed and the Congress and the Mighty Reformer himself look bad?

But, alas, the rest of the American public, that broad base of consumption, is living pretty much hand to mouth, with little savings to cushion any sort of shock like a sickness or major car repair, and is facing very dire prospects for their non-retirement. There are plenty of shit jobs for poverty wages if you live near a gated community of the wealthy, but that is about it.

Is it the credibility trap, that causes the pampered princes of New York and Washington to so totally misread the public, and the actual conditions they manage and forecast for their own country? Is their blindness willful, an artifact of the credibility trap, or do they just live such sequestered, privileged lives that they have lost all contact with reality?

So get out there and buy, and work harder, and quit your whining you stupid sods.

Dangerous times, my friends, when the ruling class has lost even their meager sense of the public mood. And yet they always seem to be so surprised, each time they steer the economy into the ditch.