Respect Authority

"I can derelict my own balls."

Ever feel the Earth heave under you? Yeah? Was it when you were reading recent financial news instead of doing something productive? Me too.

Stag-deflation people. Read that word again because its gonna mean something for you very soon. Apparently some crazy guy has been popping out articles since mid-summer about some sort of doomsday scenario in which the economy waddles about while the price of things steadily declines.

Have no idea why that matters? Me neither. But for what it’s worth, we’ve been living with its evil twin - stagflation, the art of increasing the cost of living while plateauing wages - since 1965. Although that sounds like a shitty situation, the “problem” has already been addressed. By using credit cards in order to live paycheck to paycheck, plus floating your cell phone bill, you’re able to free up your one-time bonus in order to put a down payment on a house that gets you the equity loan you need to pay your cable bill.

So how can the price of goods going down with a economy expanding at about the same rate as an ingrown nail hurt you and me?

As far as I can decipher, stagdeflation is a vicious global cycle that decreases confidence, decreasing demand, which decreases value, then production, and finally the labor that produces the worthless shit that no one wants to buy anymore. Basically if no one wants to buy things with money they can’t get, they lose their jobs producing shit to sell to other people who feel the same way. All the while the only sector of the job market that’s actually growing is Arianna Huffington’s unpaid corp of meltdown bloggers. Long story short: Great Depression II.

And like all sequels, G.D. II is going to be bigger, badder and without any of the annoying origin story. This time, the system is really global. When you lose your job and stop buying a new iPod every quarter, not only does that hit Cupertino but the cute Chinese girl who put it together. She loses her job, she stops buying Michael Jackson bootlegs, and you get the picture.

Unless we pull a black Muslim out of an Hawaiian shirt, we’re absolutely fucked. In the meantime, think about this number: $7,760,000,000,000.00 [seven trillion seven hundred and sixty billion dollar$]. That’s how much Bloomberg thinks this whole shebang is going to cost us. That means that every single man, woman, and stupid baby in America took out a mortgage for $26,000 and had no intention of paying it back. You should all be fucking ashamed of yourselves in your shitty mobile homes.

Clearly we’d be in a better place if we just let a million or so guidos, dude-bros, j.a.p.s and Indians (sorry about Mumbai), get hedge fund jobs and lease million dollar lofts in all the world’s biggest cities. That’s financial security in a nutshell.

[Financial Times]