Perhaps the most important thing you will ever read - Seriously

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From oftwominds.com Charles Hugh Smith
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2011: The Last (Debt-Consumerist) Christmas in America

December 20, 2011 (Mobile version)


The end of debt-based affluence: welcome to The Last Christmas in America (TLCIA).
Almost 35 years ago, as unemployment rose toward 10%, the January 1975 cover of Ramparts magazine blared: The End of Affluence: The Last Christmas in America. (TLCIA)

The article wasn't referring to the religious celebration; it was referring to the postwar concept of Christmas as the frenzied, exhausting year-end pinnacle of our one true secular faith, Consumption, a final orgy of buying and binging.

It is instructive to recall how the Federal government responded to unemployment, high inflation and rising budget deficits in the early 1970s: it began fudging numbers, manipulating data to mask the politically inconvenient realities of rising inflation, unemployment and deficits by playing switcheroo with Social Security Trust Funds, inflation data, etc.--games it continues to play in 2011 to cloak reality from the media-numbed public.

The market was not so easily fooled. The Bear market, reflecting the "real" recession, lasted 16 years, from 1967 to 1982. Now statistics are echoing that last great recession: rising prices for essentials, systemically high unemployment and stagnant wages while the corporate media and the organs of statistical manipulation (a.k.a. the sprawling, putrid public-private cesspool of the Ministry of Propaganda) trumpet "the return of growth" and skyrocketing corporate profits.

(Today's propaganda: housing starts blip up due to statistical noise, and though starts are less than half pre-recession levels, this is heralded as "evidence" that "strong growth is back.")

The difference between the postwar boom of 1946 and the boom that followed 1982 is the last boom was based on the explosive expansion of debt. People didn't save and invest in productive assets; they went into debt to consume more and to become a "bigger" persona via the miracle of credit.

I often use this chart to make this point: if credit had expanded along with GDP, then we'd be considerably less indebted. Instead, it required a vast expansion of debt--some $30 trillion more than the rise in GDP--to fuel the 1982-2000 boom.

From oftwominds.com Charles Hugh Smith