Déjà Vu All Over Again
Sinister Forces
“The way to analyze the situation is to look at the factions comparatively. You do not compare Assad’s regime to the Danish or Norwegian governments, but to the alternative…Assad father’s operatives blew up my house in Amioun when my grandfather, then MP, voted for Bashir. In “Skin in the Game” I discuss this as “acting against one’s interest” (the opposite of conflict of interest). So as a scientist and a humanist, I have been setting my grudge aside in considering the far, far, far, greater cancer of Salafism or Islamofascism.”
Nassim Taleb, 2016
Neo-Cons did this. Again.
“I told [Paul] Krassner one time that his writings made me hopeful. He found this an odd compliment to offer a satirist. I explained that he made supposedly serious matters seem ridiculous, and that this inspired many of his readers to decide for themselves what was ridiculous and what was not. Knowing that there were people doing that, better late than never, made me optimistic.”
- Kurt Vonnegut
I still do not see the introspection necessary to change this:
"I really am getting increasingly concerned that there's no way to understand the world that we live in."
"It still amazes me how we had an assassination attempt against a Presidential candidate (caught live on video too) and we collectively spent all of like two days talking about it. That went down the memory hole really fast."
"American assassinations were different from European ones, [former CIA Director Allen Dulles] told the Commission. European assassinations were the work of conspiracies, whereas American assassins acted alone."
- Allen Dulles, quoted in Deep Politics and the Death of JFK1
I feel I should get this out today, because it’s getting full, I’m a little ticked off about what our foreign policy blob did, again, this time to Syria, and there’s a bunch of good stuff in here as we end the sort of week where CNBC’s Brian Sullivan actually felt it necessary to tell his frightened audience that 5% market corrections are historically fairly normal (no joke).
Below we have Luke Gromen, Grant Williams, Ronan Manly, a bunch of charts, Michael Howell, Marriner Eccles, Steph Pomboy, real estate, stablecoins, Coreweave, war stuff, JFK, Charles Manson, Project Bluebird, just a couple songs, and more! Godspeed.
Let’s see what the A.I. Crypto Scammers Are Up To Lately…
(I hope my comment here is unnecessary, but please do NOT go to this website. It’s a scam.)
“You really can’t have a real correction and have everybody saying, “I can’t wait to buy.” You really need the market correction to be one of those where it’s, “Holy shit. Everything’s falling apart. Get me out. I don’t want anything more to do with this.” That is part of the process and we haven’t seen that in a while. I think that that’s what I’m watching.”
Luke Gromen
“The Fed still has not sold on net a single 10-plus year Treasury bond since 2010. There's one conclusion. They didn't term anything out because they couldn't, because they would have quickly taken 10-year yields to the sort of the Maginot Line. Every trader I talk to says if the 10-year goes over five, everyone's selling everything and buying dollars and probably buying gold.”
“The post-1971 dollar reserve status structure is essentially you got two parties. You got USA, and you've got the rest of the world. U.S.A. - we reduce tariffs, we offshore our manufacturing base, we offshore our jobs to the rest of world. Rest of world sends goods to us consumers. U.S. sends dollars to the world for goods, and then the world invests those dollars into treasury bonds and U.S. capital markets, financing U.S. Government deficits, and helping Wall Street quite a bit. Then the U.S. collects income tax from U.S. citizens to finance U.S. deficits, to pay the interest on the debt to the rest of the world, and so that structure has been what has evolved over the last 50 years. It has a very obvious set of winners that we've all seen throughout the course of our careers, given our ages, which is global capital, China, Washington D.C., too-big-to-fail banks, and, specifically, Wall Street all win on a relative basis over time, and the U.S.A. broadly speaking - and in particular the middle and working classes and the bottom, call it 80% - get poorer on a relative basis, on a real basis, over time via debt-based consumption, and our industrial base and our military, our defense-industrial base, gets followed out.”
“Sorry to my European friends, but they haven't been serious players in any real way to have an opinion. You take your environmental and energy policy from a 14-year-old school girl for long enough and what ends up happening is you unplug your nuclear power plants, and you disconnect the Russians, and you end up finding yourselves where their Industrial base is moving to America, and they don't get invited to peace talks in their own continent.”
“What you hear from the dollar bulls - where else is it going to go? And the answer is, it's all going to go to gold, right? That's what we're saying with these tariffs - take that money out of here, unless you're going to build a factory. People have said, oh, we’ve got to get China out of the Western Hemisphere, Monroe Doctrine, we're showing strength again. Yes, great. We saw it a couple weeks ago when the Panamanians came out and said, hey, we don't want to be in the Belt and Road anymore. Great, but there's two sides to this coin. A lot of these folks that kind of bring this out never mention - do you know what the single biggest Belt and Road hub in the western hemisphere is? It's not even close, it's multiple trillions of dollars. It's the NASDAQ. You're saying ‘we want to separate from the Chinese’ - yeah yeah yeah - they've put multiple trillions of dollars into stocks and in particular U.S. tech stocks, so where else is it going to go? What what Trump policies with the tariffs is it’s not the NASDAQ anymore. take your ball go home. It's interesting right - I was saying gold is starting to see this, right? But it's not the only market. Look at the German DAX. Look at the CAC in France.”
Ben Bernanke on monetizing the debt, 2012
"No, that's not what is happening, and that will not happen. Monetizing the debt means using money creation as a permanent source of financing for government spending."
”There is no market signal in eurozone rates, as the ECB is back to manipulating rates and spreads”
“I didn’t get rich by buying stocks at high price-earnings multiples in the midst of crazy speculative booms.”
Charlie Munger, 2021
Grant Williams and Ronan Manly
“The gold market, and particularly the silver market, both precious metals, have been like a high for conspiracies over the years. Because you’ve had this enormous amount of trading going on in what is supposed to be a pristine piece of collateral, and the fact that we’ve had leverage applied to it, we’ve had rehypothecation applied to it, there have been all kinds of things put on top of this supposedly pristine collateral, that it has created a fervored amount of speculation about how much gold is really here, and how much gold is missing, and all this kind of stuff, which there’s been no answer to. And it hasn’t really been a problem until now, because nobody has actually really wanted, or needed more importantly perhaps, to secure and protect that asset and to have their gold in their own custody.”
“Do they have the gold they claim to have? Because it’s located in four different places. More than half is in Fort Knox in Kentucky, in this sort of legendary gold depository there that was in the James Bond Goldfinger film. Then there’s West Point, where the US has a military academy. There’s actually a US Mint vault there. Supposedly there’s about 1,680 tons there. And then, the third-largest vault is the U.S. Mint in Denver with about 1,200 tons. And then, there’s a small amount in the New York Fed belonging to the U.S. Treasury. So literally, there’s four places that the U.S. Treasury claims their gold is held. And with this current chatter from say, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, he is now saying that Fort Knox needs to be audited. But by extension, all of these other vaults need to be audited all at the same time to make sure that the gold isn’t being moved around. So that’s why it’s very important to the US Treasury to demonstrate that they have the gold they claim to have if they want to revalue it…
There’s also the issue about gold lending. So some of the gold that the U.S. Treasury has might still be there, but it could be in a gold swap with a different central bank, where the U.S. Treasury has taken, say the Bundesbank’s gold in New York, and the Bundesbank has a claim on gold in West Point. So any auditor would have to look at not just is the goal there, but who owns it or who has title to it…
A lot of these central banks who claim to have large gold holdings, like Italy - half of Italy’s gold is supposedly in the Federal Reserve vault in New York. That hasn’t been audited either. So domestically and politically, if gold makes a comeback in terms of a settlement unit, all of these other countries that have gold in foreign jurisdictions will have to work out if that gold is still there as well…
I think that for years now, the COMEX market and the London market have been artificially keeping the physical price down, and it should be multiples higher. So once confidence will be shaken in trading the unallocated gold contracts in London, like the LBMA gold fix is unallocated, the futures price in New York is based on, there’s only a small amount of gold backing huge volumes of trading. So if that all collapsed, I think it would collapse quite quickly, and that there could be some very big shockwaves with physical gold taking off, like a two-tier pricing.”
Michael Howell
“Look at this statistic which I think is a very good one, or pressing one to think about looking forward. Since year 2000 the stock of U.S. Treasury debt in the market has gone up, if my calculations are correct, 9.6 times, okay? Since year 2000 the gold price has increased in value by 9.6 times. Well, that must be more than coincidence. Gold has basically matched the increase in U.S. debt, because that's inferring a longer term monetization, and gold holds its worth. Gold is a hedge against monetary inflation - it's not necessarily a hedge against High Street inflation - but it's definitely a monetary inflation hedge, and that's what it's proven through thousands of years of history.”
I made this up the other day on request and some people liked it…Log vs Linear $NDX since 1990…
Adjusted for M2
I notice that the 10-year minus 3-year spread had recently inverted again…
Looks like this "echo" inversion also happened in October 1989, July 2007 and January 2020 (but not in 2001.)
Sure, why not: BlackRock to buy Panama Canal ports after pressure from Donald Trump $22.8 billion.
A moment of silence please…
Déjà Vu All Over Again
“…a giant suction” pump had by 1929-30 drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of currently produced wealth. This served them as capital accumulations. But by taking purchasing power out of the hands of mass consumers, the savers denied to themselves the kind of effective demand for their products that would justify a reinvestment of their capital accumulations in new plants. In consequence, as in a poker game where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit ran out, the game stopped.
That is what happened to us in the twenties. We sustained high levels of employment in that period with the aid of an exceptional expansion of debt outside of the banking system…
Had there been a better distribution of the current income from the national product—in other words, had there been less savings by business and the higher- income groups and more income in the lower groups—we should have had far greater stability in our economy. Had the six billion dollars, for instance, that were loaned by corporations and wealthy individuals for stock-market speculation been distributed to the public as lower prices or higher wages and with less profits to the corporations and the well-to-do, it would have prevented or greatly moderated the economic collapse that began at the end of 1929.”
“My focus is the consumer, and by any variety of measures the consumer has been in recession. I look at consumer spending deflated by prices, and when you look at things like retail sales, which obviously is mostly discretionary consumption, and you adjust it for the increase in prices, what you find out is that unit sales, the actual number of things people are purchasing has declined for over two years now. I mean you never see anything like that outside of a recession - and not just a garden variety recession, but a really significant recession - so you've seen that, and then another thing - you'll relate to this Adam - I view spending on your pets as sort of non-discretionary. You know this is the last thing you're going to cut, and if you go and you look within the consumer spending numbers at pet spending in particular, and deflate that, what you find out is that's been negative year on year for 28 months, almost two and a half years, so clearly um the consumer under duress.”
Travis and Melody head to San Diego Tent cities, million-dollar shoeboxes, and neighborhoods infested with short-term rentals…
Gavin Newsom orders California state workers back to offices in person four days a week
S.F. mayor on loss of Block and Stripe: ‘We have to be smarter’ “Stripe moved its headquarters to Oyster Point in South San Francisco, about four miles south of San Francisco's southern border, in 2021. Block, which changed its name from Square in 2021 and moved out of its Mid-Market headquarters a year later, embraced a no-headquarters strategy but lists Oakland as home to its principal office in regulatory filings.”
Legendary Los Angeles Restaurant the Original Pantry Cafe Suddenly Closes After 101 Years “The legendary diner, which operated for 24 hours a day, seven days a week for most of its existence, closed due to a dispute between unionizing workers and its owner, the Richard J. Riordan family trust.”
Pair of Manhattan Offices to Sell for 68% Discount to 2017 Price “Two Manhattan office buildings are trading hands at a steep discount as lenders look to cut their losses. Empire Capital Holdings agreed to buy the properties — at 229 W. 36th St. and 256 W. 38th St. — for less than $50 million, according to people familiar with the matter. That price would be at least 68% below the roughly $157 million the buildings last sold for, in 2017. The deal was a short sale, meaning owner Investcorp2 and lenders agreed to sell the properties for less than the outstanding amount on the mortgage…” Haven’t hear “short sale” for a while.
How much does Brookfield really make? “Dimitry Khmelnitsky, head of accounting at Veritas Investment Research, is critical of both the financing and the accounting. “Brookfield is using their own related party insurance companies as a vehicle to offload assets, during what seem to be challenging markets, and at relatively high valuations,” he says.” There’s an entire substack devoted to Brookfield here.
Good rundown of the multifamily situation, from Trepp:
Developers broke ground on 86,000 apartment units in the fourth quarter, bringing total starts for the year to 332,000 units, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
That was a 27.7% decline from the 459,000 units that were started in 2023 and 36.5% fewer than the 523,000-unit starts in 2022.
Construction starts have fallen in response to weaker demand for units, as well as higher financing and construction costs.
However, demand substantially improved last year, as measured by absorption, or the leasing of previously vacant units. A total of 436,000 units were absorbed, up 72% from the previous year, according to Cushman & Wakefield. But that still was well less than the 530,000 units that were delivered.
Units that were delivered last year were started in 2022 and early in 2023, as it typically takes up to 18 months - sometimes longer - to complete a property once construction starts.
That timeline also means that the latest quarter's construction starts won't result in actual units until mid-2026, at the earliest. Yardi Matrix projects that deliveries will slow, with 496,998 units estimated to be delivered this year and 350,331 units in 2026.
But 90% of construction companies and developers surveyed by the National Multifamily Housing Council in its latest quarterly survey said they were experiencing delays in their starts. Most delays were the result of "permitting, entitlement, and professional services" and projects no longer being economically feasible.
Following the Covid lockdowns, Phoenix became the poster child for overbuilding in the multifamily sector. The effects are still being felt, as rents in the area had declined by 1.6% in the fourth quarter, when compared with a year ago, to $1,536/unit, according to Kidder Mathews. That's the result of what became a glut of new supply.
Contrast that with 2021 - rents ballooned by 20.5% that year - when the area saw 9,000 units completed. But those were completely absorbed, meaning they were rented, leaving the market in relative equilibrium.
Last year, however, 21,879 units were delivered - a fourfold increase from the 2014-2020 annual average. Absorption, while substantially higher than in recent years, fell short of meeting that supply, at 15,157 units. It marked the third year in a row that new supply outweighed demand. So, of course, rents softened.
“…the GENIUS Act lays the foundation for a federal bailout by creating impression that stablecoins do not have credit risk and that stablecoin investors have protections that they do not in fact enjoy.” Sobering article.
Via Grant’s:
“CoreWeave filed a form S-1 Monday, paving the way for its Nasdaq debut (ticker: CRWV) with a planned $3 billion plus offering at a valuation of at least $35 billion per Reuters. That compares to a $23 billion price tag achieved during a November private share sale.
The cloud computing provider, which previously plied its trade as digital asset miner Atlantic Crypto Corp. prior to a timely pivot to chip leasing, saw its top line reach $1.9 billion last year from $229 million in 2023, with net losses registering at $863 million in 2024 compared to $594 million in the prior annum. CoreWeave’s capital-intensive foray into the data center construction realm leaves the hyperscaler toting some $6.5 billion in net debt, with an undisclosed portion of those borrowings collateralized with Nvidia chips (proving that one good turn deserves another, Jensen Huang’s outfit itself owns a 6% stake in CoreWeave).”
Ahead of a possible $4 billion IPO, CoreWeave’s founders already pocketed $488 million
“Fewer and fewer companies are accepting the notion that the owners have anything to say to the management and the board. It's kind of shocking."
War News
“MSC Levante F suffered little damage after being targeted by Russian missiles and is understood to have left Odessa already. The ship was attacked by the Russian military, which claimed the ship was carrying weapons onboard bound for Ukraine.
The 2006-built vessel with a capacity of 1,100 teu was fired upon on 1 March with two missiles missing their target, but damaging the 28,500 dwt Super Sarkas, a bulk carrier registered in Sierra Leone, which was loading 21,000 tonnes of corn and soya at the time, reported Ukraine's deputy prime minister Alexiy Kuleba.”
War Finance
“What would be the effect upon the war spirit, so easily ignited and fanned, if the government, resorting to taxation alone for its preparations, were to address its citizens thus:
John Jones, Esquire: This is to inform you that your government is making plans for a war. This costs money. So far your government has spent (amount named). Your share of this is (amount named). You will call upon your city treasurer before (date named) and pay your share in cash. Failure to do this will result in fine or imprisonment.
This might make Mr. Jones wonder whether the war of which he has been talking flamboyantly with his friends is exactly as necessary and desirable as he had thought. But, suppose Mr. Jones’ heart and soul are sincerely committed to the desirability of the war. Then he will not demur. He will pay his scot and feel properly a patriot. If the other Joneses and Smiths feel the same way about it, war ensues.”
- Freeman Tilden, A World in Debt (1935)
Sinister Forces
I’ve been reading Peter Levenda’s massive non-fiction trilogy, “Sinister Forces,” which is an amazing - if overwhelming - read, a bit like Whitney Webb’s 900-page epic, “One Nation Under Blackmail”. (This should explain some of the off the wall quotes I dig up now and then.)
For a few of you, this book may be up your alley. As you know, I like strange things. Most can probably skip all this entirely.
I found this excellent description of the book(s) here:
“I've recently finished Sinister Forces, an absolutely marvelous trilogy of history, cultural criticism, and metaphysics by the curious author Peter Levenda. It's a book which reads like how it is - an enthusiastic, well-employed, world-traveling man spent 25 years researching a 2000 page masterwork all about the American government's role in mind control, the influence of religion and the occult on mind control, and how the bizarre antics of serial killers, shamans, and other fringe elements fit into one horrifying larger picture. It's long, sloppy, dense, fantastic, and addictively readable. Oh, and there are also some very significant detours into quantum psychology.
It's a bit heavy going at first, with isolated strands leaping in and out of a patchwork narrative of what feels like ALL OF WRITTEN HUMAN HISTORY, but by the third volume you're grateful for the information overload, as it really does all tie together. Written in a style somewhere between Lovecraft and The Economist, the books feel better-written and more imaginative than most works of fiction; Norman Mailer, in the introduction to the first volume of the series, asserts that Sinister Forces supplies an endless source of inspiration for spy novels and other such things, which is perhaps an ideal way to approach the material. I think we're all fairly intelligent people here who understand that the American government (and the related military-industrial complex) has embroiled itself in all manner of utterly unethical, immoral enterprises, so while individual revelations will no doubt shock the reader, the political landscape should be relatively familiar; but, if you approach the book perhaps as it ought to be approached, less like a history lesson and more like an intricately designed entry point to a new lens through which we can view civilization, then the real joys of the work come through. The world is a frightening, interconnected world where "coincidence" is not mere coincidence and evil is all around us, operating on levels beyond the comprehension of those supposedly in charge.
The focus of Sinister Forces is difficult to explain; it's not an especially "professional" book, but it is rather rich, intelligent, and idiosyncratic. Levenda begins by tracing the founding of America to the white cultists who settled there, and those before them, such as the Arawaks, and their various occult interests. We also examine strange burial mounds in haunted Kentucky, from ancient peoples who, by all accounting, appear to predate the natives whom the whites had met centuries later. We then dive into the records of MKULTRA, ARTICHOKE, Operation Paperclip, Wandering Bishops, Jonestown, the OTO, Aleister Crowley, Frank Olson, the Manson Murders, the Kennedy assassinations (Jack and Bobby both!), and much, much, much, much, much more. There's also some nonsense about UFOs - well, maybe not nonsense, but it doesn't seem to fit with the rest of the book, except when we start discussing disinformation campaigns. Still, it's a minor complaint.
Levenda's material has enough power as an ostensibly factual resource, although little errors here and there undermine its authority. I'm a film nerd who works in the film industry, so when someone gets a bit of film trivia wrong, I notice, and while it's hardly that important to remember that, say, William Peter Blatty, and not William Friedkin, directed Exorcist III (Jeffery Dahmer's favorite movie), or that, despite rumors to the contrary, Anton LaVey had nothing to do with Rosemary's Baby, the sloppiness evinced over even a minor detail makes it difficult to buy some of the other amazing assertions dropped here and there. TrineDay, the publisher, is a small, overworked house who no doubt have to strain to publish anything, let alone meticulously fact check a 2000 page masterwork, but the books deserve better.
As it stands, however, even if we cannot trust completely the factual rigor of Sinister Forces, so much of its individual bits are true, and its bibliography is so thoughtfully enormous, that it has tremendous value still - and especially on the level of, as Mailer suggests, a fountain of ideas for fictional explorations of similar ideas. And as the books wind down from an extended history lesson to a question of non-local activity on the quantum level and what this might have to do with psychology and trance states, it's best to let go of the handlebars and let Levenda take you on one hell of a ride. You also begin to appreciate how Levenda constructs what winds up being a remarkably coherent and plausible argument: by barraging you with inter-related factual narratives until you are adrift, until he throws you a line and reels you back into familiar waters.
Or something.
In summation, the Sinister Forces trilogy, despite some quibbles over length, organization, and a little sloppiness (which can be chalked up to limited resources and a not the integrity of Peter Levenda), is pretty dang great. Highly recommended for the adventurous, patient reader.”
Remarkable New Republic article from December 21, 1963 on the JFK assassination, Seeds of Doubt. This was before “the official story” became Gospel:
“The central problem – the fact that the President was wounded in the front of the throat, “the midsection of the front part of his neck,” according to “staff doctors” at Parkland Hospital on November 23 (New York Times, November 24) – remains.”
Speech at American University June 10, 1963 by John F. Kennedy
Remarkable speech, especially for the time, and one that probably helped get him killed. An excerpt:
I have, therefore, chosen this time and place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth too rarely perceived – and that is the most important topic on earth: peace.
What kind of a peace do I mean and what kind of a peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace – the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living – the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children – not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women – not merely peace in our time but peace in all time.
I speak of peace because of the new face of war. Total war makes no sense in an age where great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces. It makes no sense in an age where a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in the Second World War. It makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn.
Today the expenditure of billions of dollars every year on weapons acquired for the purpose of making sure we never need them is essential to the keeping of peace. But surely the acquisition of such idle stockpiles – which can only destroy and never create – is not the only, much less the most efficient, means of assuring peace.
I speak of peace, therefore, as the necessary rational end of rational men. I realize the pursuit of peace is not as dramatic as the pursuit of war – and frequently the words of the pursuers fall on deaf ears. But we have no more urgent task.
Some say that it is useless to speak of peace or world law or world disarmament – and that it will be useless until the leaders of the Soviet Union adopt a more enlightened attitude. I hope they do. I believe we can help them do it. But I also believe that we must re-examine our own attitudes – as individuals and as a Nation – for our attitude is as essential as theirs. And every graduate of this school, every thoughtful citizen who despairs of war and wishes to bring peace, should begin by looking inward – by examining his own attitude towards the possibilities of peace, towards the Soviet Union, towards the course of the Cold War and towards freedom and peace here at home.
“We discussed the Charles Manson case. Lennon was bemused by the way Manson had associated himself with Beatles music.
“Look,” he said, “would you kindly inform him that it was Paul McCartney who wrote ‘Helter Skelter,’ not me.”
Yoko said, “No, please don’t tell him. We don’t want to have any communication with Manson.”
“It’s all right,” Lennon said, “he doesn’t have to know the message came from us.”
- Paul Krassner, Confessions of a Raving, Unconfined Nut3
“In June 1988, [New York Lieutenant of Detectives] Arthur O’Connor admitted to me: “‘it’s possible Mark [David Chapman] could have been used by somebody. I saw him the night of the murder. I studied him intensely. He looked as if he could have been programmed—and I know what use you are going to make of that word!”’
Fenton Bresler, Who Killed John Lennon?
After much research, I found a potential source of this: The transcript from the Warren Commission Executive Session Meeting on December 16, 1963. Several books erroneously say it was the December 5 meeting.
The book Dulles gave them was The Assassins by Robert J. Donovan. “Donovan’s central thesis is that most of these assassins were isolated, troubled figures—"assassins" in a psychological rather than organizational sense—rather than agents of vast conspiracies.” (GROK)
Investcorp Holdings is domiciled in the Kingdom of Bahrain as a Closed Shareholding Company.
I haven’t read Krassner’s book yet, but this looks to be a fascinating read. Krassner is described in his Wikipedia bio as “an American writer and satirist,” which is how Jim O’Shaughnessy described me in our recent chat.
It was the day Assad was ousted or shortly thereafter I remember Michael Yon was on a podcast explaining that the next thing the "moderate rebels" would be doing is taking names and addresses - who was a soldier, who had a family member working for the government, who was until recently clean-shaven - to be dealt with soon enough.
Love Groman's summary. And love the Bernanke quote, back from the days before we descended all the way into Fantasyland. No matter what you say, once you start down the path of monetary accommodation, the end point becomes inevitable, a combination of math and human nature.
I wonder how many of our elected elite realize the reality, and are just trying to keep the party going to amass as much personal wealth as possible to insulate themselves and their families from the debacle to follow