Golden Umbrellas in an Economic Downpour

Previously by Richard Daughty: Spending Money to Make Ends Meet

I gotta admit that I am very jealous of Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, who is the international business editor of The Daily Telegraph, and who is famous and smart and probably makes a lot of money that he spends having fun with his many friends, while I am “none of the above” and pretty bitter about it, too.

So, you can see how I figure that nothing is more delicious than, as a way of being rude, writing, “Hey, Ambrose! Just because you think you are so famous and smart and probably making a lot of money, you don’t know squat because I heard that you think that you have a solution to the world’s problems, and to that I laugh — hahahaha! — and steadfastly tell you that there is no painless solution to the problem of excessive debt, excessive government deficit-spending and excessive amounts of stupidity that allowed people to borrow so much money that it bankrupted them!”

I am emboldened in saying this because the whole of history is distilled to the realization that a fiat currency in the hands of a spendthrift government is always debased because the temptation to print more and more money is too great to resist, and the purchasing power of the money is always lost due to the over-issuance of so much more money entering the economy, and if you think that all those governments did not try to find a painless way out of that bankrupting mess, just like we are now, then, again — hahahahaha! — I laugh!

I know what you are thinking. You are thinking to yourself, “You are not being fair, you hateful little man! The poor guy has not even hinted that he has some magical solution to the nation’s problems, and yet you are tearing into him like a ravenous wolverine!” to which I reply, “Oh, you do not know these famous, smart, highly-paid people like I do! He’s got a plan! Oh, yes! He has a plan!

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Sure enough, we don’t have long to wait until he tells us his plan! He says, “The imperative for the debt-bloated West is to cut spending systematically for year after year, off-setting the deflationary effect with monetary stimulus. This is the only mix that can save us.” Hahahaha!

Sorry for the laughing, but it suddenly struck me that this Ambrose Evans-Pritchard guy thinks he has come up with a plan so that governments forevermore will be able to spend, spend, spend and promise, promise, promise to spend, spend, spend to their hearts’ content, creating excessive amounts of money all the way, year after year, doling out money to anybody who asks for it, all because Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, in 2009, came up with The Plan That Makes Everything Good Again (TPTMEGA), which is sublimely remarkable in that everybody else in all of history wrestled with this exact, same problem, and they all failed miserably, and now Mr. Evans-Pritchard thinks he, alone in all of history, a veritable giant among men, has solved the mystery and the puzzle!

The answer turns out to be simplicity itself, according to him! “Cut spending systematically for year after year, off-setting the deflationary effect with monetary stimulus,” he says! Hahaha!

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I was hoping that the headline “Could Not Have Said It Better” on the column by Jon Nadler at Kitco.com was not going to be an essay in agreement with Ambrose, making me look bad, but maybe instead about something that I, The Fabulous Mogambo (TFM), said that he found memorable and remarkable, such as my famous quip, “You are all a bunch of lowlife halfwit morons if you are not buying gold when your own corrupt government is giving the green light to the Federal Reserve to create massive amounts of new money so that the Congress can borrow and spend it to sink us further into debt by untold trillions of dollars a year for years and years to come!”

If not that particular bon mot of mine, then perhaps he was captivated by the lyrical prose of my, “Neo-Keynesian econometric idiot-savants at the Federal Reserve are kissing Congress’s deficit-spending butt by creating so much money and credit that we are doomed to an inflationary collapse, and if you don’t believe me, then go to Mises.org and do a little light reading and find out, ya lazy freaking jerk!”

Alas, Mr. Nadler doesn’t mention me or either of these clever witticisms at all, and instead seems to address my constant, shrill demands that you buy gold when he says, “Our three-decade old motto has been ‘IF you buy for the RIGHT reasons, you can IGNORE the price.’”

And something with a “right reason” to buy seems to be gold, as he reports that “we raise our estimated price trading range by $50 on each end, for the next six months.”

And since he did not use any quote from me, I assume that he will also not report the Mogambo Gold Forecast (MGF), which is “Increasingly cloudy and dismal economic conditions, characterized by widespread earthquakes, floods, tornadoes, volcanoes, and large meteor impacts killing everything in their paths, excepting only those who have gold, silver and oil to act as an economic umbrella shielding them from every economic calamity that will befall any country so stupidly moronic as to over-create money and credit,” which I assume Mr. Nadler would probably agree is a “right reason” to buy gold, and probably would, too, if only he were as conceited, arrogant and smug as I am when I fearlessly forecast inflationary doom and economic horror from the insane overproduction of money and credit by the Federal Reserve!

And since I seem to be the only one saying it, let me be the one to add that the best part is that “Whee! This investing stuff is easy!”