The Mogambo Guru

09/05/07 - Inflation Attacks the News Stand

09/06/07 - Know Your Gold

09/07/07 - Subprime Meltdown Finally Affects Beer Drinkers

09/10/07 - Remembering Richebächer

09/11/07 - Toying Around With Toxic Exports

Total Fed Credit was down another $1.7 billion last week, continuing on its trend that I rudely characterize as, "a worrying lack of growth in money and credit if you are going to keep inflation going up and up and up forever until we are all destroyed by such monetary idiocy!"

TFC, of course, is the source of magic that produces out-of-nowhere credit in the banks, which the banks lend, which increases the money supply, which increases the prices of whatever in the hell it was that was bought with the damned borrowed money, and after a few iterations of the system increases the prices of everything else, like food, as the money sloshes around hither and yon, and the next thing you know I am screaming at the stupid little cashier at the grocery store because she thinks I am freaking MADE out of money or something!

This week what set me off was, of course, inflation. And not just inflation in general, as in the joke used by Adrian Ash at BullionVault.com in his essay "USD R.I.P" that was told by comedian Max Kauffman in the '50s; "Among the things that money can't buy is everything it used to." Hahaha! Very clever!

But even Mr. Ash sees the futility of attempting levity, as he notes, "But US consumers have since lost their sense of humor. The dollar has dropped another 86% of its purchasing power since then."

No, the particular thing that set me off in a rage was that she said Barron's rose in price from $4 an issue to $5! A 25% jump! Overnight! Naturally I assumed that the stupid cashier deliberately overcharged me, the little vicious brat, who is probably a willing participant in some FBI plot against me or another. Like for instance, the way government agents snuck into my kitchen sometime last week and sabotaged my blender! After 16 years of working perfectly, all of a sudden the blender just stops working? Just like that? For no reason? Ha! Government sabotage, I tells ya!

Naturally, the cashier allying with the FBI and trying to cheat me makes the famous Mogambo Reflexes Of Lightning (MROL) take over, and I drop into a defensive crouch behind the bagboy, using him as both a victim and human shield, and I snarl, "Overcharge me by 25%, will you? Inflation is not so bad that I don't suffer enough already, but now you want me to suffer even more by cheating me out of an extra dollar? As ye sow misery, so shall ye reap!" With that, I tighten my grip around the neck of that stupid bagboy to show him what suffering is, and suddenly the cashier is yelling, "No! Stop! You weren't being cheated! That's the new price! Look at the cover of the magazine! See? It says $5 right here at the top! See? The new price is $5! It is the new price they are charging!"

I am suddenly thinking to myself, "Oops!" I let go of the bagboy's neck, which is good because I think he had an accident in his pants (the little wimp!) and I certainly did not want him bumping up against me.

So I look, and sure enough, she was right! The new price for Barron's is $5 an issue! A 25% increase in price! As a long-time reader, I know that Barron's has the official stance that refined and educated people like us do not sully ourselves by wallowing in such nastiness as grubby inflation in prices or the greasy, corruption of Federal Reserve policy, because the only thing that counts in life is that a) stocks are rising and b) bond prices are rising (which means interest rates are falling and bond owners are showing capital gains), which they always do, and if they don't, then they soon will, because the Federal Reserve is always "on the case!", and when the Fed slashes interest rates or convincingly tells another series of lies with doctored statistics (or both) that everybody swallows without a whimper (including Barron's), everything will be perfect again!

And speaking of Barron's, I was jarred to note that they report the Monetary Base as having contracted almost $9 billion last week, dropping to $820.5 billion from $829.4 billion! Wow! This is such a huge move that it looks like a typo!

Anyway, like I said, TFC was down $1.7 billion last week, which is not much, but which is still utterly, completely inconsistent with a Federal Reserve that history proves wants two things in life: Firstly, to never take my calls ("Let me speak to that butthead Bernanke!" and the receptionist sweetly says, "Let me put you on hold for the rest of your Nasty Mogambo Life (NML)! Thank you!"), and secondly, to keep creating more money and credit, to produce more inflation in prices, particularly asset prices like stocks, bonds and housing, and more inflation in consumer prices, which they will lie about, so it doesn't count.

Incredibly, the action in the stock and bond markets shows that investors believe that incredible monetary inflation engineered by the Federal Reserve will, again, produce healthy inflation in the prices of stocks, inflation in the prices of bonds, inflation in the prices of houses and inflation in the size of government, and everybody is out buying lots of each, creating the very inflation that they saw coming!

I think that the original Latin expression is "Biggus stupiditus cerebrum fiat currency happy days are here again excelsior cogitum ad infinitum crapola", which, of course, translates into English as, "Only a brain of big stupidity could possibly believe that excessive creation of fiat currency and credit would always produce wonderful benefits without unintended inflationary consequences, because to imagine such folly is a load of excrement."

If you don't believe me, then read, "It's Different This Time, I Swear" by Charles Zentay of thinkinvestblogspot.com. He explains, "Ben Bernanke has a plan. Bernanke, a long-time student of the Great Depression, believes that the cause of the Depression was that the Fed first overlent and then underlent, whipsawing the economy into catastrophe. The solution to prevent a future crisis is to flood the banking system with liquidity during times of instability."

My blood freezes in horror. And then people wonder why I am so paranoid and hateful, when it is so obvious "why" that they could just ask this Zentay guy, who doesn't even know me!

Jim Sinclair of jsmineset.com sums up the current economic disaster as, "The hope for every central bank is that the real problem can be kept from public view. The truth is the public, even professionals on Wall Street, have no clue what the problem is. They know it has something to do with derivatives, but none realize it is a more than $20 trillion…mountain of unfunded, unregulated paper that has just been discovered to not have a market and therefore any real value."

Jim Cook at InvestmentRarities.com looks at this and snorts, and reminds us that this is just one small part of what Austrian economist and author Henry Hazlitt warned us about, namely that, "The consequences of inflation are malinvestment, waste, a wanton redistribution of wealth and income, the growth of speculation and gambling, immorality and corruption, disillusionment, social resentment, discontent, upheaval and riots, bankruptcy, increased governmental controls, and eventual collapse."

You would think that with an economic situation like that, gold would be more popular. Is it? Well, from time to time, I do a little research so that I can write off the activities of Mogambo Research Associates (MRA), which is pretty much used to finance furtive trips into a lot of dirty bars, saloons, night spots, dives, rat holes, and "gentlemen's clubs", which (given the activity inside) is an insult both to gentlemen and clubs.

But this is not about the flaws in my research methodology or the flaws in my personality that drives me to grovel in the gritty gutter pursuing such fatuous intellectual pursuits, but a glorification of them, since they are so effective and efficacious; I find someone who is a lot smaller than me, grab them by the collar, drag them up close to my face so that they can smell my various aromatic stenches, and then loudly interrogate them, demanding to know things like, "Tell me everything you know about gold as an investment, or I shall take you to my spacecraft and use strange devices to probe your orifices, lowly Earth creature!"

Analysis of the data from these Mogambo Research Associates (MRA) forays into the field has shown that test subjects readily and consistently reveal that they don't know anything about gold, they don't have any gold, that they will happily rat out their family and friends about THEIR gold, offer to buy me all the gold I want if I let them go, and that the younger ones usually have about sixty cents for lunch money, which isn't really that interesting in itself but it explains why I am not that happy that those stupid kids are so physically exhausting, always squirming and crying for their stupid little mommies to come and help them, just to net a lousy sixty cents "for science."

And this is not to mention my troubles with the police, who are impressed with the obvious parallels between Mogambo Research Associates (MRA) and the United States of America, which is a country that has recently adopted 1) the military philosophy of the "preemptive strike" as so famously utilized by Japan at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and 2) the use of torture to get information.

The police are probably, like me, old-school Republicans, and we are both horrified by what the neo-con Republicans are doing, which I think is best summed up by Paul Craig Roberts as, "In the administration of George W. Bush, the Republican Party has achieved the greatest combination of idiocy and evil in human history", which is both true AND (I note for your edification) makes absolutely no comparative reference to Mogambo Research Associates (MRA) or the eerie similarity of our fact-gathering methodologies.

So imagine my chagrin when it turns out that I could have saved myself a lot of time and trouble by merely asking Doug Casey of the International Speculator newsletter about the general attitude towards gold, who writes that there is no rush, and you can still buy gold and silver at bargain-basement prices at your leisurely convenience.

This is the conclusion I get from his referring to the behavior usually encountered in the "mania phase" of classical boom-market phenomena, which is that glorious ultimate bull phase of a boom market when there is mass, universal public participation, as literally everyone with two nickels to rub together is buying and clamoring to climb aboard a booming asset bubble, and prices are rising to the moon because of it.

Specifically, he reports that the mania phase lies ahead, as, "The public is still out of the gold market. I promise you that every market top I've witnessed in my life was accompanied by cocktail party chatter about the asset class in question. I have yet to have any indication the public has a clue that gold and other resources even exist. If this is a market top, it's unique."

This very point was brought home to me the other day when I had accidentally driven my tee shot into a greenside sand trap. I instantly sized this up as a "touchy shot", and since nobody was looking, I just picked the ball up and threw it onto the green, very nearly holing it out and leaving just a two-inch "tap-in" par.

Suddenly, one of the other guys in the foursome yells out "Hey! I saw that! I just saw you throw your ball onto the green, you Cheating, Lying Piece of Mogambo Crap (CLPOMC)!"

Naturally, I yelled back, "You can see me throwing a little golf ball, even when your back was turned to me, but for some reason you can't see that your own government is lying to you, and the Federal Reserve is lying to you, and they are destroying the purchasing power of your money right in front of your eyes? Is that what you are telling me, you stinking mashie-niblick moron?"

As I walked up to my ball with my putter in hand and tapped in for par, I continued yelling, "Well, you are a lying piece of trash, because you couldn't have seen me throw it on the green because I purposely waited for you to turn your back to me so that you COULDN'T see me throw it on the green! And yet even with your remarkable power to see out of the back of your damned stupid head that even Superman would envy, you don't buy gold in response to the blazing destruction of your own money caused by the Fed issuing so much more of it, right in front of your stupid, ugly face?"

Well, skipping the ugly details of the ensuing animated discussion, I got the par and they all resolved to watch me much more closely from now on, and one day they will start watching gold, too, just like Mr. Casey said they would!

If you are one of the nervous people who have spent a lot of time tracking me down to get information about your investment in the Mogambo Super-Secret Hedge Fund (MS-SHF), you are wasting your time trying to get your money back…or what's left of your money back…or even finding out if there is even any money to get back.

In fact, if there IS any money left, I will probably give it to myself as the bonus I deserve for hanging around here all day, listening to you stupid investors whining about how my incompetence means you "are ruined" and how you have "lost everything" and blah blah blah, like I care or something, and then I voluntarily compound my misery by going home at night to listen to my hateful little family saying the same thing, only using the term "sadistic, nasty psychopath" more often.

I will give you no specific information regarding your money, or what country I have escaped to, or whether or not there are extradition treaties in effect here, but I will let you know that we stand by our press release, which said "MSSHF operating results are in line with industry standards and averages in terms of both Fund performance and general attitude of management towards moron investors."

Most investors were happy with hearing that uplifting message (as it is nice to know that you are at least "average"!) until George Ure of UrbanSurvival.com revealed that "The data seems to suggest that out of about 10,000 hedge funds operating worldwide, some 30% of firms reportedly have losses of 40% in their portfolios." Yow! A 40% loss!

Tired of pretending to be a foreigner and hanging up the phone on callers ("Mogambo him no live here! You go to hell now, okay, G.I.?"), I decide that it's time, once again, to visit the Mogambo Mailbox (MM) and perhaps answer emails from thoughtful readers who ask things like, "Dear Mogambo, Why is the cost of housing removed from the Consumer Price Index, which distorts inflation, or do you not even understand what I am talking about, you lowlife jerk?"

I am proud to say that I actually DO know what you are talking about, you rude and hateful little bastard, and I am even more proud to present Robert Hardaway, who is a professor of law at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law, to tell how this started.

He relates, "In 1983, the Bureau of Labor Statistics was faced with an awkward dilemma. If it continued to include the cost of housing in the Consumer Price Index, the CPI would reflect an inflation rate of 15 percent, thereby making the country's economy look like a banana republic. Worse, since investors and bond traders have historically demanded a 2 percent real return after inflation, that would mean that bond and money market yields could climb as high as 17 percent."

Yikes! What to do, what to do, what to do whattodowhattodo? "The BLS's solution was as simple as it was shocking: Exclude the cost of housing as a component in the CPI, and substitute a so-called 'Owner Equivalent Rent' component based on what a homeowner might 'rent' his house for." Hahaha! The government resorts to lying! "Wow! Why didn't we think of this before?" they are heard to ask among themselves.

Fortunately for the government, it worked. "The result of this statistical sleight of hand was immediate and gratifying," Mr. Hardaway writes, "for the reported inflation index quickly dropped to 2 percent", down from the real, and horrifying, 15 percent, which was due "in part" to the drop in rents caused by speculators wanting to "offset their holding costs by renting out their homes while their prices skyrocketed, thereby flooding the market with rentals that pushed down the cost of renting a house or apartment." Hahaha!

You can almost hear the contempt in his voice when he says, "While the BLS was correct in assuming that this statistical ruse would fool the average citizen into believing that inflation was only 2 percent (and therefore be willing to accept a meager 4 percent return on his bank savings), what is remarkable is that the ruse also fooled the bond traders, and apparently continues to do so, leading analyst Peter Schiff to describe these supposed savvy bond traders as the 'hormonal teenagers of the capital markets.'"

Putting it all together, he concludes, "The present subprime credit crisis can be directly traced back to the BLS decision to exclude the price of housing from the CPI. It is now clear that the 'benign' inflation figures reported over the last 10 years" were, (using my awesome editorial powers to insert my own words for special emphasis), "A big stinking load of lying crap by the corrupt Federal Reserve and the despicable government (except Ron Paul)."

I think that there is a link between this inflationary monetary nonsense and the bad economic news that, as columnist Ernest Hooper reports in the St. Petersburg Times, a restaurant owner friend of his is saying that around this part of Florida the usually-slow summer business season, "is so bad this year that even beer distributors are noticing a difference."

There are probably a lot of theories why St. Pete customers aren't going to restaurants to swill beer like they used to, and he cites a marketing director saying that beer sales may be down because "people are consuming at home" because of "declining real estate values and other economic factors." Hahaha! Gosh! Ya think so? Hahaha!

Apparently they both think that we dummies who eat in restaurants are too stupid to notice the menu prices going up (or the portion size going down, or both) as inflation in labor (higher minimum wage), supplies and taxes are devouring the income statements of restaurants, who must raise prices and in turn devour the incomes of us patrons, or they think that we are too thick to understand the fact that our incomes with which to pay for our tasty menu selections are not going up and so it is stupid for us to go into a restaurant if we don't have any money, or that we failed to notice that their menu now indicates a charge of $6.95 for a lousy beer, when right down the street at Dangerous Dan's Dank And Dark Den Of Scandalous Iniquity you can, for three bucks cash, not only get a cold, frosty brew, but listen to a fantastic sound system played at high volume while watching attractive young ladies undulating and dancing around in their underwear, performing various gymnastic feats on a shiny brass pole, all thrown in for free! Three buck beer! So, the ball's in your court, restaurant owner!

We are not here to argue the finer points of marketing, but neither Mr. Hardaway nor I bother to point out that nothing about inflation, or government lying about it, has changed to this very day, except to get worse, much worse, and that is why, as I never seem to tire of pointing out, "We are freaking doomed!"

Dr. Kurt Richebächer, a legendary luminary in the Austrian school of economics vein, has, I am very sorry to say, died. I will miss him, although I never met him, but I have always been very impressed with him, and what he thought, and what he wrote.

In my own way, I am proud to think that we were somewhat simpatico as regards our economic thinking, a point that I mentioned several times in this very newsletter. And that is why I am sure that if you had asked him about his opinion of The Mogambo, he would have said, "Who? Never heard of him."

But Dr. Richebächer HAS heard of Wilfred Hahn, of Hahn Investment Stewards, who wrote the essay titled "A Tribute: Dr. Kurt Richebächer." From their intimate association, he writes, "In recent years, Dr. Richebächer became ever more despondent about the runaway financial inflation he was seeing in America…and nascently, also around the globe. He was sometimes apoplectic, disbelieving that such recklessness was possible."

I leapt to my feet to exclaim "And me, too! I got the same impression! In fact, I missed the entire housing boom because I could not believe that banks could get permission to make housing loans at such outrageous multiples of income to unemployable dirtbags like me and my stupid friends! In fact, I thought it was insane to even suspect that a gigantic government regulating empire, that sees its role in life as trying to control and regulate every tiny aspect of the society and economy, would even allow the banks to lend such huge amounts to buy a house at such outrageous multiples of gross incomes! And at prices that were obviously much higher than historical trend, too! In light of the obvious facts, who could have predicted a boom in housing? It's insane!"

I could tell that Mr. Hahn was not too fond of either my unsolicited comments or the idea of Dr. Richebächer being tainted by mere association with me and my stupid opinion about anything. Apparently, Mr. Hahn is a very good judge of character, and correctly deduces that any reference to mathematics must surely be confusing to a halfwit like me, and says that Dr. Richebächer would "often mention how few financial economists were left on Wall Street and its sister centers around the globe who knew anything about theory and causality. Without such understanding, he regarded the quantitatively-driven research of Wall Street as so much voodoo."

Hahaha! Me, too! In fact, it prompts me to merrily sing "You say 'voodoo', I say 'doo-doo', you ask 'who do?', and I say 'you do', and then you say 'I do?' and I say 'you do, doo-doo'" which always cracks me up because it reminds me of the Bob Newhart show when he and Howard and Mr. Carlin were all drunk and tried to order Chinese food over the phone, and Bob hilariously said he wanted some "Moo Goo Goo" instead of Moo Goo Gai Pan! Hahaha!

I bring this up because when I call the Chinese restaurants around here, they act like they never even heard of Moo Goo Goo! What a ripoff! Naturally, I reply "Never heard of Moo Goo Goo? You never heard of Bob Newhart either, you stupid Chinese morons?", and then they get angry, like their laughable cultural ignorance is my fault or something!

Anyway, this was supposed to be a nice tribute to the late Dr. Kurt Richebächer, and how he was charming, intelligent, educated, and exactly right about how the economic stupidities of central banking and fiat currencies are going to destroy us all, but I ended up only highlighting how I was not any of those things, then degenerating to Chinese restaurants lying about their menus, and how I heroically managed to balance the scales with raw, gnawing envy of Dr. Richebächer and his success, and with enough firepower to confront the lies of surly Chinese cooks.

And I like to think that he knew that, in his own way. I'll miss him.

And this brings up Michael Nystrom at BullnotBull.com, who rubs my face in the fact that he moves in circles where he would routinely run into fabulous people, on a professional and social level, like Dr. Richebächer, and now Ron Paul, who is a Presidential candidate and the only person running for the office who is as trustworthy or as qualified to be President of the United States.

Except for, of course, The Mogambo, who would be an excellent President and a better emperor, ruling over you with an iron fist and a cruel streak a mile wide, and believe me when I tell you I have given them both considerable thought.

But this is not about the megalomaniacal political ambitions of a vicious wannabe tyrant strutting around wearing a bling-bling crown of gold and a cape of some color that brings out my Twinkling Blue Mogambo Eyes (TBME), but about how in the course of the conversation between Mr. Nystrom and Rep. Ron Paul, Mr. Paul let it slip that he saw Mr. Nystrom's name mentioned in a Mogambo Guru newsletter, too, and now both of them are soiled and sullied by having their names appear in my stupid newsletter.

I secretly laugh that they think that I am new to this "tainted by association" thing, like neither my kids nor my wife have ever come home, plopped down on the sofa in disgust and whined to me, "Nobody likes me because you are so hateful and horrible!" Hahaha! Hell, by this time I am so used to it, that it seems like mother's milk to me! Hahaha! Chumps!

Thus, I breezily interpret the fact that Ron Paul has read the MoGu as some good news for a change. For one thing, now he can't say "Mogambo? Never even heard of him!" when I subpoena him to appear at my trial ("United States, et. al., vs. Mogambo Guru, alone and unloved") where I will conclusively prove my hypothesis that "The Federal Reserve is a lunatic asylum of idiot savants who are determined to completely control the economy by constantly expanding the money supply by constantly creating excess money and credit, and then explaining away the resultant ruinous inflation in prices by extrapolating a zillion constants and variables expanding to infinity according to the fixed rules of their incomprehensible equations, all dependent upon a strict calculation of probability using the bell curve, and thus it is resolved that The Mogambo was well within his Constitutional rights to modify their precious little equations with what he calls the Mogambo Louisville Slugger Factor (MLSF), where a rogue force appears out of nowhere with a baseball bat and renders a little Talebian Black Swan reality upon their precious little orderly world by destroying their stupid little bell-curve computer models, whack, whack, whack until I am exhausted and out of breath, but a stirring performance nonetheless, which ought to win him a Nobel Prize for economics, or the big prize on 'America's Funniest Home Videos.' Or both. Preferably both."

I want to make it perfectly clear that the MoneyWeek.com headline, "China's most toxic export", does not, in any way, refer to any products licensed under the trade name Mogambo Discount Toys And Medicines, Inc. that we import from China, as were so cruelly and maliciously maligned in the popular press as "Some kind of murky corporate shell where cheap, nasty people import cheap, nasty things (mostly cat toys and baby pacifiers) that are apparently made with cheap, nasty, toxic industrial by-products of some kind, mostly something that stinks and apparently glows in the dark."

The "toxic export" from China referred to in the title is, instead, inflation, and to save you from the tedium of listening to me expound relentlessly on how growth in the money supply soon means inflation in prices, I will cut right to the meat of the article, as far as I am concerned; things bought from China will cost more, and things that we will be importing from other places will cost more, too, because of all the new demand made possible with more Chinese money.

And how much money? In China, the "Money supply continues to grow at around 18 percent." Yow! See what I mean?

And what did it buy? From the Technical Market Report by Mike Burk, we read, "In a recent WSJ article a Chinese government official stated that over 70% of publicly traded Chinese companies were worthless." Hahaha! That ought to work out real good! Hahaha!

And speaking of worthless, of all the people invited to rub shoulders with the worthless idiot-savant weenies at the Federal Reserve economics confab at Jackson Hole, Wyoming (which I famously refer to as "A-holes at the J-hole" because it perfectly suits my low opinion of them all), two people were conspicuously missing from the guest list; one is The Mogambo, who is every bit as big an A-hole as any of the other attendees, and William L. Anderson, an adjunct scholar of the Mises Institute, who teaches economics at Frostburg State University, who is NOT an A-hole, but was still not invited, either! I mean, what are the criteria for inclusion here? How do you predict those guys?

I am pretty sure that I was not invited probably because they know that I hate them all and I have zero respect for any of them or their stupid economic theories, and they probably did not invite Mr. Anderson because he wrote the essay, "The Party is Over - Again", where he says things like, "the markets now seem to be catching on to the reality that Austrians and their fellow travelers have recognized for years, and that is that a policy of easy money cannot sustain itself. Someone has to pay the piper, and he has shown up at the door."

That was going to be my cue to suddenly appear at the door, radiant and resplendent in my Mogambo Super Outfit (MSO) with the oversized bejeweled codpiece (with matching tunic and cap), whereupon I was to order the doors locked and bolted and then leap upon Ben Bernanke and the other attendees to deliver the painful face-slapping they all deserve and desperately need.

The reason that I am so desperate to wrest control of the Fed away from these guys is neatly summarized in "It's Different This Time, I Swear" by Charles Zentay of thinkinvestblogspot.com. He writes, "Bernanke, a long-time student of the Great Depression, believes that the cause of the Depression was that the Fed first overlent and then underlent, whipsawing the economy into catastrophe. The solution to prevent a future crisis is to flood the banking system with liquidity during times of instability."

Yow! Perpetually increasing the money supply, meaning perpetually increasing consumer price inflation! Now you see why I am so despondent and suicidal!

And, even worse, they can count on the cooperation of the government, as one can surmise either from long experience, or from the ML-implode.com site (where one can view the on-going carnage in the mortgage market, also caused by the Federal Reserve, via the now-famous Mortgage Lender Implode-O-Meter), which has the subtitle "Tracking the housing finance breakdown: a saga of corruption, stupidity, and government complicity." Hahaha! Perfect!

And even if the Fed and the government can get another fraudulent boom going in stocks, bonds and houses, it will be a hollow victory for the winners, as Jim Willie of the Hat Trick Letter says that, "since the US Dollar fell by roughly the same 15% to 20% as the stock market indexes rose", then the "purchasing power of one Dow share or one S&P500 share has been preserved. That is a wash, not a boom."

And while I laugh at market speculators for not actually making a dime but merely breaking even against the ravages of inflation, I notice that nobody is talking about the effect that this "15% to 20%" inflation in prices has on us lowlife workaday bozos and slobs out here who, like me, are not being "made whole" by an investment that is rising, but instead must slave away at our stupid jobs, day after miserable day, up to our freaking necks in debt and overbearing supervisors who correctly suspect that we are incompetent lazy bums, while our stupid kids and hateful families are out wasting all our hard-earned money on things like "back to school supplies", even after you remind them that inflation has made that stuff expensive, and the school will be absolutely lousy with the stuff as all the other students arrive on that first day!

Hell, you could probably outfit a freaking army with the amount of "school supplies" the other kids will drop on the ground ("finders keepers!") when you accidentally bump into them and knock them down! But do they listen to you? NoooOOoooo! They want to buy their own! New! Retail! With tax!

So you silently seethe with anger as you work, and you spend one more dreary day getting that little bit closer to your death while imagining the fun you could have had with the dollars that are flying out of your wallet to pay for all that silly crap, and you grind your teeth in rage and exasperation.

Inflation. It's a killer. Ugh.

Mogambo sez: I'm really, really starting to get really, really freaked out here, as the really, really outrageous mismanagement of economies by the central bankers is getting really, really weird, and the fact that people, the world around, are NOT madly converting everything into gold and silver is even MORE really, really weird, and I can only conclude that sinister mutant spores from outer space have invaded the planet and are eating our brains, making us really, really stupid, which is the really, really weirdest thing of all because it is the only thing that would really, really explain it all. Really.

P.S. To get The Daily Reckoning sent directly to your inbox, sign up for our free email newsletter, or if you prefer to use RSS, subscribe to the Daily Reckoning RSS feed.

The Mogambo Guru is quoted frequently in Barron's, The Daily Reckoning and other fine publications.

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