I have a lot on my mind as I nervously sweep the nighttime perimeter with my periscope, thinking troubled thoughts and imagining monsters lurking in the dark, or government agents of one kind or another, hiding in the gloom behind Rick’s garbage cans, or perhaps zombies, or space creatures, or something where a .50 caliber, belt-fed, water-cooled machinegun at the ready would come in so, so, SO handy that nobody would ever again DARE say “Why do think you need to buy a machinegun, and why are you always buying gold and silver in fear of the Federal Reserve’s insane monetary policies, like some crazy old man, when the kids need new shoes?”

In my pathetic defense, it is cold and lonely inside the Mogambo Man Cave Bunker (MMCB), and yet watching all the porn in the world, on all the TVs in the world, and eating all the yummy burrito el grande supremos and cold, cold beer in the world is not NEARLY enough to calm an angry, outraged old man, terrified at the sheer level of despicable lies being told by the federal government, which is not to even mention the colossal corruptions, the sheer number of criminals and crimes, and the unbelievable stupidities in all the rest of the economy, and in the world, all now overlapping in an ugly, stinking, giant web of willful ignorance, extortion and Secrets of the Temple:... William Greider Best Price: $1.57 Buy New $15.97 (as of 02:40 UTC - Details) deceit, grown dense and deadly through the decades, which is bad enough without being a long, run-on sentence, only to end with a pointless, gratuitous alliteration.

My trigger finger spasms reflexively, and I glance nervously at the safety switch so that we would not have another episode of old man Parker going ballistic just because a couple of his stupid garbage cans accidentally got a little shot up. One time. A long time ago.

Anyway, standing there, ever at the ready, my finger on the trigger, I am getting angrier and angrier at the terrible tragedy that is to befall the United States because we were so completely stupid as to be beguiled by the Keynesian economic insanity of the government selling trillions upon trillions of dollars’ worth of new debt, having the Federal Reserve create the cash and credit necessary to buy it all, and the government spending the new cash! In-freaking-sane!

Now, I am obviously in highly-defensive mode, in anticipation of even more of the same monetary and fiscal nightmares that got us here, where sheer desperation and panic reign as the bloated, malignant, insanely Dark Pools: The Rise o... Scott Patterson Best Price: $6.32 Buy New $11.74 (as of 06:25 UTC - Details) overvalued, over-indebted, gigantic government-centric economy both explodes and implodes, where the weight of the explosion of inflationary suffering will fall like a wet bag of cement (“plop!”) on the poor and what remains of the middle class, who will both rise up in a sudden fury, exclaiming “The Mighty, Mighty Mogambo (MMM) was right about the Federal Reserve being evil, yet we mocked him just because he is insufferable, and has the table manners of a pig!  To the Federal Reserve then, baying vengeful mob! Let us throw the evil Keynesian malefactors in prison, and thus stop the insane inflation in the money supply, which leads to inflation in prices and inflation in debt, which are currently kicking our butts, and also to a deflationary bust with its attendant unemployment because nobody is spending money.”

Sure enough, John Williams at ShadowStats.com calculates unemployment the classical way that it has always been calculated until the Clinton administration, when things starting to get weird in that “I’m lying right to your face” kind of way. He figures the real unemployment rate is running about 23 percent! Yikes!

Broken Markets: How Hi... Saluzzi, Joseph C. Best Price: $7.44 Buy New $24.98 (as of 05:40 UTC - Details) And it is not going to get better in that regard anytime soon, as Tony Sagami at Mauldin Economics is, like me, alarmed that ISM Non-Manufacturing (Services Sector) fell, and “Moreover, the services index has dropped three out of the last four months and saw the largest one-month fall in six years!”

Plus, there is more bad news, in that construction spending fell, prices paid fell, new orders fell, supplier deliveries fell, production fell, and order backlogs fell.

But strange, terrible things are happening behind the screen, as the monetary base, after a rather longish spell of relative quiescence, suddenly jumped an astonishing $303 billion, which is a whopping 8.1% of the entire $3,759 billion monetary base of the entire economy of the United States!

And, of course, the money supply is still chugging along at a 5% rate of growth, but which may be slowing.

And for those whose Junior Mogambo Ranger (JMR) credentials dictate sheer horror at the prospect of inflation in consumer prices, times are indeed hard.  According to the lying government scumbags at the Labor Department (a location which only differentiates them from the lying scumbags in the rest of the government, the lickspittle press and the sycophantic education system, upon all of whom I heap the Scornful Disdain Of The Mogambo (SDOTM)), their new inflation report shows that everything is peachy, peachy, peachy, as far as rises in prices is concerned, and if you think otherwise just because you are paying more for things, then you are crazy to believe your own lying eyes, and you are probably buying gold and silver against the inflationary/deflationary collapse caused by the evil Federal Reserve creating so much excess money and credit, just like the rest The Secret Club That R... Kate Kelly Best Price: $2.23 Buy New $16.87 (as of 09:55 UTC - Details) of your hateful JMR friends.

Looking at the numbers in the report for inflation over the full year, we note with predictable horror and a lot of screaming and gnashing of teeth in outrage, that price inflation in “food” was a horrifying 3.4% for the year, that “food at home” was up a whopping 3.7%, and “food away from home” was up 3.0%.  So no matter where you eat, it costs more.

Even worse, electricity was up 3.1 percent, energy services up 3.7 percent, shelter up 2.9 percent, and medical care up 2.4 percent.

In short, the stuff you need to stay alive cost more.  And it is coming at a time when the average inflation-adjusted income (using the statistics of a lying government) is lower than it was in 2007, commonly acknowledged as the start of the recession.

Eight years in a row of higher and higher prices, and eight years of lower and lower incomes! Wonderful. Just freaking wonderful. You can almost taste the sarcasm.

Against the State: An ... Rockwell Jr., Llewelly... Best Price: $5.02 Buy New $5.52 (as of 11:35 UTC - Details) Not only that, but corporations are trying to cover up falling revenues by lying with their accounting practices, in that they are reporting recurring expenses (like executive compensation, bonuses, employee pension contributions, etc.) as extraordinary expenses, so that they can say “We would have done very, very well, if it wasn’t for these unexpected expenses we had, and so that is why our overvalued stock is not so overvalued at a lofty P/E of 19, and why we, as lying, conceited, greedy executives, deserve the big bonuses we award ourselves.”

In short, I conclude everything is a mess because there is no escaping the fact that total current U.S. debt, including governments’ debts, business debt and private debt, is over $60 trillion, in an economy that has a GDP (the total price of every bit of goods and services produced by the economy in an entire year) of $17 trillion. Consumer debt has never been higher. Margin debt in brokerage accounts is in the stratosphere. There are more businesses going out of business than there are businesses going into business. (Actually, business deaths had been sort of low and steady since at least 1977, and while business births have always outnumbered business deaths, births have been gradually declining all this time, until now, when there are, for the first time, more business deaths than births).

I can see by your face that you are as frightened as I.  “So, Fabulous And Wonderful Mogambo (FAWM),” you fearfully ask, your breath coming in ragged gasps, your face a frozen mask of icy terror, “is there nothing we can do?”

To this I smile benignly, and cheerfully reply “How happily apropos you should address me as Fabulous And Wonderful Mogambo (FAWM), because there is something you can do to save yourself, and I know what it is!  And I’m going to tell you! For free! I mean, how fabulous and wonderful is THAT?”

So hold onto your hats, because here it is. The fabulous and wonderful thing to do is the same thing that other people have always done to successfully escape the economic calamity, and have always done over the last 2,500 unbroken years full of dirtball governments borrowing themselves into bankruptcy: They bought gold and silver, the ultimate money and asset.

And the best part, and perhaps the most fabulous and wonderful part of all, is that you can still easily exchange your crappy, depreciating dollars for fabulous and wonderful gold and silver bullion, almost everywhere! Whee! This investing stuff is easy!

The Best of Richard Daughty