Thank Goodness Everything's Fixed

The trick is to borrow as much as you can and leverage it to the hilt, and buy, buy, buy.

Thank goodness everything’s been fixed.

Now that the big shots in the Eurozone have given Greece the Humphrey Bogart treatment — When you’re slapped, you’ll take it and like it, Bogart’s line as he bullied Peter Lorre in The Maltese Falcon — and a chastened Greece is in line for another 17 billion, or is it 17 trillion?

I’m losing track of the numbers…

But anyways, it’s all fixed, and squeezing Greek pensioners was the trick needed to save Europe from itself.

Now everyone can get back to their summer vacations and the good life resumes. It doesn’t get much better than this.

That spot of bother in China’s stock market has been fixed by criminalizing negative comments about stocks, removing all the stocks that might sink further from trading and extending more margin to more banana vendors, so they can get rich quick.

And since to get rich is glorious, we can anticipate thousands of banana vendors becoming millionaires and rushing to New York to buy a Manhattan cubbyhole for $2 million.

When stocks rise, everybody wins!

Except those who can no longer afford to live in Manhattan, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Vancouver, etc…

But hey, the path is open to them, too–just margin up to the hilt, mortgage your future and buy stocks now–the People’s Bank of China, the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank all have your back.

Thank goodness that brief stock market swoon is over and the march higher can resume, so everybody can keep winning, forever and ever.

The deal with Iran is a win-win for everybody, too–especially consumers, who will see oil prices plummet as Iran doubles its production.

Of course that will drive a knife into the heart of every other oil producer’s net income, but those sorts of adjustments are good in the long run.

Once again, everybody wins.

Volatility in the stock market is once again where it should be — at multiyear lows.

Low volatility is evidence that everyone’s confident the world’s central banks can bail out anyone, at any time — too big to fail banks, every stock market, every real estate bubble, entire nations if need be.

Confidence breed confidence, and complacency means everybody’s winning.

It’s a remarkable feeling, knowing the casino has rigged the game in your favor; you can gamble as freely and wildly as your heart desires, and you’ll always win.

Stocks — up. Condos in Miami — up. Bonds — up (a little negative interest rate action only hurts pensioners and savers–they should get with the program and start buying stocks).

Low volatility proves the game is now rigged in everyone’s favor. The only losers are those sourpusses who refuse to buy stocks.

But it’s not too late to turn your banana cart into a condo overlooking Central Park. The trick is to borrow as much as you can and leverage it to the hilt, and buy, buy, buy. Remember — everything’s fixed.

Regards,

Charles Hugh Smith
for The Daily Reckoning

P.S. Ever since my first summer job decades ago, I’ve been chasing financial security. Not win-the-lottery, Bill Gates riches (although it would be nice!), but simply a feeling of financial control. I want my financial worries to if not disappear at least be manageable and comprehensible.

And like most of you, the way I’ve moved toward my goal has always hinged not just on having a job but a career.

You don’t have to be a financial blogger to know that “having a job” and “having a career” do not mean the same thing today as they did when I first started swinging a hammer for a paycheck.

Even the basic concept “getting a job” has changed so radically that jobs–getting and keeping them, and the perceived lack of them–is the number one financial topic among friends, family and for that matter, complete strangers.

So I sat down and wrote this book: Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy.

It details everything I’ve verified about employment and the economy, and lays out an action plan to get you employed.

I am proud of this book. It is the culmination of both my practical work experiences and my financial analysis, and it is a useful, practical, and clarifying read.