John Williams of shadowstats.com is quoted
in an interview by Kevin Phillips in Harper's
magazine, reprinted in the St Petersburg Times
newspaper under the title "Hard Numbers" with the
subtitle "Think the economy's bad? It's worse than
you know; blame a half century of presidential
Pollyanna Creep."
I did not know that John
Williams had cleverly coined the phrase "Pollyanna
Creep" to describe how the White House, US
Congress and the repugnant Federal Reserve,
starting with John Kennedy circa 1960 and
continuing unabated and worsening all the way
through to Bill Clinton where Mr Phillips'
chronology ends, continuously came up with one
stinking lie after another to disguise the
horrendous inflation in prices, and rise in
unemployment, that
resulted from their egregious fiscal and monetary
performances.
The article goes into such
frauds as "imputed income" (such as the "value"
you receive from living in your own home, or the
"value" of your free checking account), the total
of which Mr Williams calculates was 15% of total
GDP in 2007! Wow! "Imputed income" was 15% of GDP?
We're freaking doomed!
Such laughable
duplicity continues into the description of the
phantom jobs conjured up by the "Birth/Death
Model" (which assumes that new businesses are
being formed, and employees being hired, that are
too new for anything to show up in the data), and
the six separate calculations of unemployment, of
which one of the most inclusive shows unemployment
at a terrifying 9%! Nine! One out of 11 people in
the work force is unemployed! Yikes!
Then,
finally, we get to how magically to reduce
inflation with "product substitution" in the
consumer's shopping basket ("if flank steak gets
too expensive, people are assumed to shift to
hamburger, but nobody is assumed to move up to
filet mignon"), continuing with the lunacy of the
inflation-reducing scam of "geometric weighting"
of the items still in the shopping basket ("goods
and services in which costs are rising most
rapidly get a lower weighting for a presumed
reduction in consumption"), and concluding with
the infamous "hedonic adjustment", (which even the
author says is "an unusual computation by which
additional quality is attributed to a product or
service").
It is this last fraud that has
been used to such success by Mogambo
Inter-Planetary Industries (MIPI), by which we
commit an as-yet legalized extortion by utilizing
the word "improved". The basic premise was
outlined in the MIPI business plan, which is
cleverly explained in our corporate motto, namely
"Crappy products made out of cheap materials with
shoddy workmanship, and passing the savings on to
you!"
But before we ship anything a stupid
customer ordered, we send a letter saying that the
order cannot be fulfilled per contractual price
since the product they ordered was "improved"
before their stupid check cleared, and therefore
the new price should be higher because of the
hedonic adjustment for the increase in quality,
and if they had some "problems" with that, then
they could take it up with Alan Greenspan and the
Federal Reserve, ya freaking moron, which is who
first came up with this silly crap. And if they
still wanted their "Mogambo Ultra Blow-Up Doll"
with the optional appendages and pendulous
breasts, then they should send another US$15.95 in
cash, which is their cost for the extra quality
inherent in saying "improved" without having to
prove anything! Hahaha!
The business plan
assumes that sometimes there will be people who
will actually send the extra $15.95, whereupon we
send them another letter demanding another $15.95.
Hahaha! Suckers!
But, as per the business
plan, we are sure that they will all eventually
give up and demand their stupid money back, like
THAT is going to happen (see Section Two of the
MIPI Business Plan: "Skipping Town: The Fun Part",
which I cheerfully title "Starting over again, but
with a lot of money this time!").
The
point is not that P T Barnum was right when he
said, "There's a sucker born every minute", or
that my first girlfriend's father was right when
he said, "You'll never amount to anything other
than a Worthless Piece Of Mogambo Crap (WPOMC)!",
but about how we got to be such suckers to let the
Federal Reserve and the Congress (except Ron Paul)
do this "lying about inflation" crap to us, and
how people being ignorant stupid suckers is so
very vital to the success of Mogambo Enterprises,
Inc.
Where these people come from has
always befuddled me, but which has now been
explained by Junior Mogambo Ranger (JMR) Rob H,
who writes:
Dear Mogambo, I have long believed
that people, in general, over time, were getting
stupider and now have a "grand unified stupidity
theory" equation that I think can serve as the
axiomatic equation for future theorist to expand
upon. If true, this equation is very disturbing,
especially if you add a time element into it and
the associated exponent. This may explain why we
are where we are in the world.
My
finger poised over the Delete button as my eyes
drifted down over the few equations he provided,
and through the rising glaze of incomprehension of
math or anything that even LOOKS like math, I
still knew enough that I could probably use this
to get one of those elusive Nobel Prizes in
economics (and that luscious cash prize of
millions of dollars!).
So, for the
official record, my completely original work that
I came up with all by myself, and I declare under
oath that I never even heard of anyone named Rob,
especially one named Rob H, and that I have,
personally, alone, proved that "one half-wit
multiplied with another half-wit = a quarter-wit",
which is expressed algebraically as 0.5 X 0.5 =
0.25 wit (a "quarter wit"), which soon becomes
0.25 X 0.25 = 0.0625 wit (a "one-bit wit").
But the irrepressible JMR Rob looked at
this halfwit thing and came up with the brilliant
Zen koan "Therefore: Etc" Hahaha! Perfect!
Hahahaha! So we can share credit! Hahaha!
The Mogambo Sez: I admire the sheer
bravado and raw guts of people who look around
them and don't immediately think to themselves,
"This is freaking crazy! I gotta get out of stocks
and bonds, and get some gold! Lots of it!"
I hope this little compliment of mine
about their bravery pleases them and gives them
comfort when their whole world turns to ashes and
crap, although I prefer the proven comforts of
gold, probably because I am such a coward who
prefers not starving in the dark and cold streets.
But, to each his own! Hahahaha!
Richard Daughty is general
partner and COO for Smith Consultant Group,
serving the financial and medical communities, and
the editor of The Mogambo Guru economic newsletter
- an avocational exercise to heap disrespect on
those who desperately deserve it.
(Republished with permission from The Daily Reckoning.
Copyright 2008, The Daily
Reckoning.)
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Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
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