I’m back, and finally calmed down, from my disastrous trip to the bank. I’ve never been so angry and humiliated in my life, even including that embarrassing time in the seventh grade when the beautiful Jennifer, whom I deeply, deeply loved more than life itself, told Mary Sue, who told Marcie, who told her boyfriend Mark, who told Todd, who told Bob, who told me, and now everybody knew, that she thinks I’m icky.
Anyway, old scars that never quite heal aside, my day started off innocently enough by my noticing that the enormous, bankrupting national debt has mysteriously stabilized, at $16.738 trillion, for the last few months in a row, probably connected to it being obviously MORE than the Congressionally-mandated $16.699 trillion debt limit.
And I’m supposed to believe that this static-yet-enormous amount of debt is for real, despite large and continuous creations of currency and credit by the evil Federal Reserve so that the selfsame evil Federal Reserve can use the currency and credit to buy more government debt, to the tune of $9.55 billion three weeks ago, $29 billion two weeks ago week, and a whopping $39 billion last week?
At this point my heart is beating noticeably faster, teeth grinding harder, and I’m actually hyperventilating after noting that the Federal Reserve bought, outright, a tidy $782 billion in U.S. government debt in the last twelve months. This is 23 percent of the entire monetary base! Gaaahhh!
It actually becomes surreal when, despite enabling and financing the redistributive fascist government to deficit-spend us unbelievably further into the black hole of massively unpayable debt, somehow, from a strict accounting viewpoint, this new debt has, amazingly, disappeared! Gone! Vanished!
Immediately, what those of us who are properly defined as true paranoid Austrian school of economics, gold bug, gun nut, Constitution-hugging, paranoid and thoroughly outraged people want to know is “Hey! What IS this crap?”
Secondly, being the greedy capitalist, free-market pigs that we are, we then want to know “Can this amazing trick can work for us — meaning me! – work-a-day slobs, too? I’d really love to borrow a lot of money and have it completely disappear!”
It turns out, I am sorry to say, that it’s a trick. Jack Lew, Secretary of the Treasury, wrote to John Boehner as Speaker of the House, to tell him that the Treasury was using “the standard set of extraordinary measures” that would allow the Treasury to continue to borrow and spend at a rate of $4 billion a day, but arrange to keep it off the books.
Ergo, not a penny of it will show up on the Daily Treasury Statement.
Unbelievable!
Of course, it is just an accounting trick, but the brain reels at the implications!
That’s when you again think to yourself “There’s GOT to be a way to make money on this! But how? HOW?”
Then I happened to read that Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, casually figures that the Treasury is not reporting its exploding debt because it is using “an accounting device,” which is apparently OK with Bernanke because it will give the up-against-the-debt-ceiling Treasury — get this! — “some extra head room.”
That was the very moment when, surprisingly and wonderfully, my new, all-time, latest-and-greatest, taking advantage of sudden new opportunities Mogambo Get Rich Quick Scheme (MGRQS) sprang — boing! — fully developed, into my head! Just like that! I amazed myself with this one! I’m really starting to catch on!
Before I am aware of even doing it, in my excitement I jump into the Mogambo Super-Duper Mobile, crank ‘er up and take off! Engine roaring! Tires squealing! Radio blaring! Down the road! Down, down, down, take a left, down a little more, take a right into the parking lot, to the bank! To take out a huge, HUGE loan!
At first, everything was going along just fine, all smiles and handshakes, and everybody wanting to get me some coffee. Until they fixated on how I was going to pay them back.
Casually, I lifted one eyebrow and put a smirking smile of smugness on my face, born of my sudden-yet-profound, Zen-like understanding genuine Treasury Department operating procedures, which are certified A-OK with the Federal Reserve, according to Ben Bernanke, speaking, as he does, as the head of all the banks.
I coolly told them, with a tone of haughty condescension in my voice, “With a standard set of extraordinary measures, of course!”
Judging by the quizzical looks on their faces and abrupt back-and-forth questions and answers, I soon realized that they were not “up to speed” with modern banking theory and practice.
So I carefully explained how they would loan me loads of cash to give myself some “extra headroom,” and I would not account for it (or pay taxes on it!). I mean, it’s in the newspapers and all over the internet!
Yet, again and again I had to patiently explain what seems like a simple concept. “I’ll get the currency and spend it, see, but not put it on the books, and you just keep loaning me more and more currency and just shutting up about it! It’s just the standard set of extraordinary measures! To give me headroom! HEADROOM, morons! With the standard set of extraordinary measures!”
For some unknown reason, the rest of the meeting went abruptly downhill amidst increasingly pointed questions like, as court documents will clearly show, “What the hell is this gibberish?”
But no matter how loudly I yelled “standard set of extraordinary measures” at them, or told them what big, fat idiots they were, or how they were missing a golden opportunity at the cutting edge of modern banking whereby I get tax-free, secret cash and they get more assets, and thus everybody wins, it ended with me shouting over my shoulder as I am being rudely and hurriedly escorted from the bank, “A standard set of extraordinary measures, you morons! Approved by the chairman of the Federal Reserve! Look it up! LOOK IT UP!”
It was only when I was halfway home that I thought of the perfect argument. Perhaps if I had explained “This is your role in the whole scheme of things, dorks! Banks are a parasite on the Federal Reserve, it being that ugly, bloated, diseased sow that is the U.S. banking system, gorged with fiat currency and accompanying crushing debts, and at whose swollen, infected teats bankers suckle the thin, poison milk of a fiat currency and insane amounts of fractional-reserve banking, like the greedy little diseased banker piglets you are, leaving us to wallow in your filth. Now gimme that loan!”
Well, I never did get the loan, and nobody at the bank wants to talk to me about it, but I now have a much better appreciation of how we got into this mess.
Thus, in my seething outrage, I find I wax poetic: Bankers are wankers. Not all wankers are bankers. But bankers are wankers.
By this pithy, incomparable lyricism I obviously deplore their lack of education about the Austrian school of economics, or having never taken a mere cursory look at the entire history of economics and the terrible fate of countries and their banks that were stupid enough to voluntarily increase their money supplies via a fiat currency, or even using common sense, for crying out loud.
If they had, they would be buying gold and silver by the fistful, and they would be insisting that we be safely on a gold standard, as they apparently say in France, toot sweet.
Or at least ordering a copy of the terrific new book Economica Mogambo, from which they would learn this very thing, and which I am happy to say is now being released for sale! And although I have not read it either, I am hoping that it will be everything I hoped it would be, a runaway best-seller, thus everyone will order one, read it, decide “That halfwit lowlife Mogambo is right, and we were wrong to disparage his distasteful personal habits and feral eating skills!” and, by overwhelming consensus, the nation will then rise as one to sweep me into office to rule the country as an absolute monarch with omnipotent, dictatorial powers to enforce the Constitution and a gold-standard money, wielded with an iron fist!
And then… the world!
Falling short of that, the same satisfyingly salubrious end can almost be obtained by simply buying enough gold and silver bullion, and a smattering of oil stocks, whereupon you will be rich beyond your most outlandish, extravagant dreams of gluttony when their prices soar, soar, SOAR thanks to the evil Federal Reserve creating so much excess currency and credit.
And all without actually doing any real work! Just sit back and relax! Let the central banks do it all! Whee! This investing stuff is easy!
