Recently by James Altucher: I Surrender

Pearl Harbor ruined my life. I’m going to cut right to the chase. When the Japanese invaded Pearl Harbor, provoking our massive WW II response, in a very direct way, it cause the financial crisis of 2008, my divorce, my potential poverty, and most other problems in my life.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, and so did Lincoln’s assassination, right? No, I didn’t say that. Don’t put words in my mouth. In fact, originally I was going to say women caused the financial crisis but it’s not their fault and it’s a bit more accurate to say Pearl Harbor did. We are going for accuracy here. And through accuracy we will eliminate all of the BS, find the truth of what is happening to our financial system, and much more importantly, what is happening to us as a society, as a family, as individuals, and where we are heading. Without truth lies despair.

I Was Blind But Now I ... Altucher, James Best Price: $3.07 Buy New $8.00 (as of 11:55 UTC - Details)

And why should we? For the past three years I’ve been reading non-stop nonsense about what caused the financial crisis. And even though the events are now three years old and its thoroughly boring to read about collateralized debt mortgages over and over again, the events of that foul period have reared their ugly heads again in the anger made manifest by the “Occupy” movements. And then another flurry of articles (and that’s what they are – a flurry – the first taste of snow in a new season of blame, anger, finger-pointing, she said-he said, we’re broke, they’re rich, world is over, contagion, storms that are hitting both coasts and will begin to move inwards.)

How to Be the Luckiest... Altucher, Mr James Best Price: $2.49 Buy New $7.95 (as of 10:50 UTC - Details)

So let’s just quickly decide what didn’t cause the financial crisis: Bush and Obama were too clueless. They messed up the bailouts but whatever. Andrew Cuomo when he was Secretary of HUD under Clinton certainly contributed by lowering the lending standards of Fannie Mae so more people could buy a house. But lets not blame the sick and the ill: he had the best intentions, little knowing that allowing more people to get into massive debt is not necessarily a good solution to anything.

Greenspan kept interest rates artificially low for a long time, allowing the lending splurge to continue, but he did not really know what he was doing. He was afraid of the Internet bust, of 9/11, of Enron, of Bush, of congress, of his reputation falling to pieces, of his sycophantic lust for Ayn Rand. Psychotherapists are now handling him in the asylum so it’s a sad situation and we should let the mentally ill alone.

What we really want to get at is not the finger-pointing. It does me no good to blame you, her, him, them. I only care what’s going to happen for ME and my family NEXT. And here it is. I will be as straight as possible, Disagree in the comments but here’s the real historical and psychological roots of what happened and NOBODY has gotten to the heart of the matter until this very post:

Pearl Harbor was invaded.

• Men went to war. All of the men. Except for me. I wasn’t born but if I was I certainly would not have gone. But that’s another story.
• With all the men at war, women went to work.
• Suddenly the war was over (only several million civilians had to die from nuclear radiation or massive city-wide bombing) and the men came back.
• Along with the men, there was a new family that arrived on the block and try as we might we can’t kick them out: the Jones Family.

Oh those Jonseses. What a bunch of braggarts. They have everything we don’t have. And starting after World War II, they had two incomes.

The Wall Street Journa... James Altucher Best Price: $1.21 Buy New $10.41 (as of 08:50 UTC - Details)

The wife had gone to work in World War II and tasted the first sip of that syrupy but addictive monetary freedom and WILL NOT go back. So Mrs. Jones is hard at work so they can afford an extra station wagon, a pool, a watch, a television set (for those notborn then, that means “a TV”), a phone, two radios, a vacation, an HP calculator, and so on.

• And good for the Jones family! No more War! No more Depression! Let’s put it all behind us. We’re going to buy things now. Buy, BuY, BUY! There’s nothing we can’t buy in a no-inflation, two income world.
• But inflation creeped up. Recession happened. Our spending was cut off. HELP! We need to spend. We NEED to keep up. Early 60s malaise. So we had to boost things. Kennedy started cutting taxes so we could have more take-home money. This spurred the stock market again. We had a boom for almost 8 years in the 60s.

Ahhh, now we can spend again. Stocks were going up. Money managers were starting to be superstars. With all that extra money what should we do? Johnson had an idea – “The Great Society”. Might as well have government join in the fun. Money was not only being spent by the Jones family but by the government. We were going to have one Great Society while we bombed another Great Society (Vietnam) all to hell. No problem, we had the money.

But then of course, inflation creeped in. We needed more money than we had. How were we going to KEEP UP WITH THE JONES FAMILY? So Nixon said, no problem, let’s get off the gold standard and we’ll just GIVE people the money to spend. PHEW! That solved that problem. For a micro-second. And then inflation got out of control. Which at first sounds good. People had more money to spend. But first Ford, then Carter, got scared about it. Ford even made these nifty little buttons (I own a few in my political items collection started as a kid): Whip Inflation Now.

Why did anyone think a campaign button would whip inflation?

The Best of James Altucher

$post_author: WP_User Object
(
    [data] => stdClass Object
        (
            [ID] => 144
            [user_login] => james-altucher
            [user_pass] => 3f2231a99b0222a2427a9765f288c5b6
            [user_nicename] => james-altucher
            [user_email] => [email protected]
            [user_url] => 
            [user_registered] => 2011-12-07 15:12:13
            [user_activation_key] => 
            [user_status] => 0
            [display_name] => James Altucher
            [type] => wpuser
        )

    [ID] => 144
    [caps] => Array
        (
            [contributor] => 1
        )

    [cap_key] => wp_capabilities
    [roles] => Array
        (
            [0] => contributor
        )

    [allcaps] => Array
        (
            [edit_posts] => 1
            [read] => 1
            [level_1] => 1
            [level_0] => 1
            [delete_posts] => 1
            [email_single_user] => 1
            [contributor] => 1
        )

    [filter] => 
    [site_id:WP_User:private] => 1
)

get_the_author_meta: 

$bio: 

$bios: Array
(
)