Unmasking the Men Behind Zero Hedge

Not conspiratorial, but the government picking winners and losers is certainly ripe for abuse. The government's job is certainly not to use taxpayer's money to support businesses who made poor decisions (started with LTCM' bailout in 1997). The justification is always one of "saving the financial system from collapse", yet nothing was done since 2008 to break up the "too big to fail" entities.

One shouldn't expect HN commenters to be well educated in the fields of economics and finance.

They are, after all, complex fields that take degrees and years of study and this is largely a tech forum. You don't see economists jumping onto stack overflow and yelling about how wrong this or that piece of code is, but somehow the reverse occurs with mind-boggling frequency.

ZH may be early and there may be some separation of the wheat from the chaff that one must do, but their general bearish theme resonates as true based on the data.

The BLS numbers are phony. They monkey around with the denominator, so drop-outs from the workforce are not counted. They also count one person losing a good full-time job but gaining multiple part-time jobs as a net positive. Never mind those numbers---all you need to know is that the adult labor force participation rate is at its lowest in about 4 decades.[0] The ratio of average income to home prices is about twice that of the 50s/60s (over 3.3) Also, if unemployment were measured as it was decades earlier, the unemployment number would be much higher. Outside of tech, where tons of money has flowed thanks to the Fed's helicopter money and investors seeking higher returns (as interest rates are ~0), the economy has been doing lousy. Yet all we're told via mainstream sources is that the Fed and Obama saved the day and shutup about it already!

As others have noted, this expansion is long-in-the-tooth, at least by historical standards. Companies' inventories are up, which also signals an economic slowdown in the works. After QE1, QE2, QE3, and bond buying totaling $4 trillion (!) of expansion of the monetary supply, we've had a paltry sub-3% GDP growth (0.5% in the first quarter of this year!). A former Fed board member admitted recently that they "front-loaded" the recovery; indeed, it should be noted that this "recovery" is almost a direct result of the Fed's actions regarding monetary expansion. This also explains the fantastic increase in asset values (classic cars, houses, art, stocks, etc.)

The Fed is a private cartel. It is the third central bank in the history of the U.S., and was created so the banks would no longer be forced to compete with each other. It is not independent of politics (far from it)---for example, Yellen knows she should raise interest rates, but knows that the Democrats will be thrown out of office if she does before 2016 (see the minuscule 25 basis-point increase that caused huge market turmoil late last year), and a Republican would throw her out the day he was sworn in. Even if you don't believe the "conspiracy", the fact of the matter is that central planning is disastrous, and it is especially disastrous when it comes to the price of currency (i.e., interest rates), as that affects everything else in an advanced economy (especially long-term capital investments).

ZH has done a good job keeping us apprised of these developments. They operate under the assumption that the current fiat currently standard cannot survive, and they are right. Of course the timing is virtually impossible, but I (like them) predict a bad recession in the next year or two. Over the longer term, the system will inevitably collapse.

[0] https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2015/07/02/percentage-w...

I appreciate the link, this was a good read even though I ultimately disagree with his overall assertion. This issue isn't going to be settled here, or anytime soon, it's been going on since before many of us were born, and will probably continue after we're gone.

You learned half the lesson. The other half is the over-class will force the government to do whatever is needed to keep them from going bust.

My dad claimed that the biggest mistake he made financially was when Chrysler was going bankrupt in in the early eighties. He knew that it was politically impossible for the government to let Chrysler fail. However my dad didn't follow through and sock the 100k he had into Chrysler stock.

I did the same thing. I knew in January 2009 that the slide in financial stocks was over. Should have put half into Goldman Sacks half into JP Morgan. The Fed wasn't going to let Goldman Sacks and JP Morgan fail.