I’m a Street addict, and Meredith Whitney has the good stuff. If you recall, a veritable witch’s brew wafted around her 31 October 2007 report on Citigroup ©, predicting Citigroup would cut its dividend because it was holding too much worthless paper. Some have said that Ms. Whitney is the Oracle of Wall Street. Some CEOs are probably still having nightmares of her flying around on a broom. Ms. Whitney has class and doesn’t call CEOs who cannot comprehend their own books liars, but rather errs on the safe side that they are just dullards. While Whitney had some rough spots, to put it politely, while trying to run her own hedge fund, let’s fast forward to her newest gloom-and-doom scrying—the impending collapse of the municipal bond bubble and her new book, Fate of the States: The New Geography of American Prosperity. I can imagine that there was a cauldron involved of some sort.
Regarding state subsidies that prop-up public pensions and the contrast with private investments that are of a sink-or-swim nature, this interview of her with Steve Forbes echoes the Nekromonger creed, “You get to keep what you kill.” Cf., the film Riddick. Satanists interested in finances will likely get a hoot out of the subtext in other more vanilla parts of the interview:
As Satanists, the poisonous fruit of irresponsibility is obvious. When there are artificially imposed safety nets the perilous heights people ascend to are not so daunting. Per Whitney an estimated $4 trillion in municipal bonds are very likely to default. As Whitney explains, the conventional thinking of investors that bond-holders are always first in line is not always the case, especially in a society that thrives on irresponsible borrowing: “They grab your wallet with the tears,” as Whitney says…. Speaking of irresponsible borrowing, what of the former cradle of Western civilization, Greece?
The Greek crisis is really a blip on the radar, considering some of the statistics and projections concerning the U.S.A. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, no more than 70% of grown men in America work. Authors such as ATOL’s “Spengler” (David P. Goldman) wonder, “What do they live off?” The answer, of course, is the hard-earned money of society’s productive members. As David P. Goldman writes in the Asia Times, “In the near term, the Greek example probably will discourage populism. In the longer term, the rancor of the spongers threatens the political fabric of the United States as well as Western Europe. The failure of debt-fueled populism in the Third World raises the risks of similar crises elsewhere.”
You can set your watch and warrant on it that “We the People” will go broke bailing out the spongers, and “austerity” will be the catchword of the 21st Century. The poisonous fruit of the tree of irresponsibility eventually poisons all. “Satan represents responsibility to the responsible instead of concern for psychic vampires!” But alas, policy-makers have fallen in love with having a voting bloc beholden to them for goodies. One can imagine that the U.S. will be vampirized and discarded like a desiccated husk. As some say, worse is better.
—Satanist D.P.R.K.