The more I listen to David Stockman’s The Great Deformation audiobook, the more enraged I get, and so far there hasn’t been much in there that I didn’t already know.

TARP was a Grand Swindle, perhaps the crime of the century as the better part of a Trillion dollars was injected into the banking system to shield corrupt, incompetent thieves from a cleansing purge that is the basic fundamental mechanism of a free market.…

Not long after the Cyrpus”bail-in” happened markets were spooked when Dutch finance minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem (a.k.a Diesel-BOOM or just D-Boom for short) called it “a template” for future rescue actions.

Notwithstanding that in recent days ECB head Mario Draghi has backed away from the “bail-in as template” position, the “template” seems to have already found its way across the pond – to Canada and popped up in the proposed budget  (PDF) in an innocuous sounding paragraph on page 155:…

The venerated “5-second rule”, which enables youngsters and adults alike to retrieve and then eat a coveted sweet, candy or morsel of food that has been dropped on the floor, provided it is retrieved within 5 seconds of impact, has been suspended by executive order of the Obama administration.

Citing “3 key win/win effects” executive order 1304-01 (dubbed the “Zero-Cost Prosperity Act”) was announced moments ago.…

As I mentioned in Confessions of an Economic Witch Doctor, the analogy of the economy having been in a car accident is the wrong metaphor to describe the predicament we’re in, and that a much more appropriate one is that of the alcoholic. We have become so accustomed to collectively living beyond our means, to consuming without producing, to buy now, pay later that we have become a society addicted to debt.…

Familiar with “Calvinball” ? The game of choice in a comic strip, whose nonsensical and kafka-esque rules now describe global finance more accurately than any other model.

Forget Rule of Law, forget the sanctity of private property and given the Cyprus “bail-in”, forget the concept of “risk free” savings. In the olden days (2012) people used to refer to an endeavor considered to be a fairly safe bet as  being “as good as money in the bank”.…

2011 documentary by Johnson & Johnson heir Jamie Johnson about wealth disparity in the US. There is an unflattering interview with Milton Friedman in there, along with a clip with Warren Buffet’s grand-daughter which paints the folksy billionaire in a not-so-benevolent light.

At the end of the day, this is where a jerry-rigged cronyist system gets you to, a hockey-stick shaped graph of wealth distribution with a protected aristocracy at the top.…