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President Obama, Ben Bernanke and Warn Buffett declared “war on the economy.” The economy is losing. It is simply not possible for the Fed to borrow trillions of dollars, driving interest rates up, simultaneously printing trillions to push rates back down to the .25% target, without diluting the cash savings of individuals and inflating the prices of everything else. Yet, in the trenches, life goes on. The troops follow old routines as if nothing has changed.
Investors are sitting on cash as a defensive strategy, just like they have always done, unaware that the forces unleashed by Obama’s “war on the economy” are bound to reduce the value of cash on hand. As the newly minted money trickles down from the political classes, through their Wall Street buddies, to main street, there will be twice as many pieces of paper chasing the same assets. Shouldn’t we all be buying assets now, before the wave of Bernanke dollars washes ashore?
When then presidential candidate Barak Hussein Obama told us that change is coming, he wasn’t kidding. Change is here. It’s called communism. Conservative pundits, like Hugh Hewitt, defensively say things like, “he is far to the left, but I wouldn’t call him a communist.” Why not? Is Hewitt afraid of a midnight visit from the KGB? What would he call massive nationalization of private enterprises, a systemic push to confiscate individual wealth for the fatherland and limitless intrusions into private lives, with decrees designed to regulate the minutest details of individual behavior, all done under the guise of social justice and reducing global warming? On second thought, it does sound more like fascism than communism.
A declining empire generates a lot of bad news, yet even here it is possible to find a silver lining. The main stream media is collapsing rapidly and particularly vile Antisemitic news outlets, like CNN and the New York Times, are collapsing faster than most. Five years ago CNN was number one in cable news, today it is a distant third. CNN has more viewers in Arabia than in the United States. Their real competition is Al Jazeera. Five years ago the NYT had a market capitalization of $7 billion, today it is valued at $700 million. There, don’t you feel better already?
Yahoo News reports that US newspapers suffered the biggest decline in circulation ever.
The Audit Bureau of Circulations said Monday that average sales of newspapers declined 7.1 percent in the October-March period from the same six-month span in 2007-2008. The comparison is drawn from 395 daily U.S. newspapers that reported in both periods.
It’s the most severe downturn since newspaper circulation began to crumble in the early 1990s. The erosion has been accelerating during the recession of the past 16 months: U.S. newspaper circulation decreased 4.6 percent in the April-September period of 2008 after falling 3.6 percent in the October 2007-March 2008 span.
In the most recent report, 11 of the 25 largest newspapers sustained double-digit declines in average weekday circulation.
