i've been waiting for this for weeks

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you know, take in some light, escapist fare, get my mind off things.

would you buy a used krugerrand from this man?

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so today i'm scrolling through my news aggregators when i come across the following:

wait--the great keynesian oracle of the left has, after a decade of dismissive condescension whenever the subject is raised, finally deigned to address the 800-pound bull in the room?  "oh, this is gonna be good," i think to myself as i click.

what follows are select quotes from dr. krugman's little treatise, interspersed with my comments.

he opens with the following parenthetical:

(Yes, it’s 4:30 AM where I am. I found myself wide awake, thinking about gold prices. You got a problem with that?)

i have not the slightest problem believing this--the barbarous relic's galling and unfathomable rise against all keynesian reason has no doubt caused the good professor any number of sleepless nights.

In assessing economic prospects since the financial crisis of 2008, there have been two kinds of people: inflationistas and deflationistas.

actually, there's a third kind of people he apparently can't fit into his model:  those (like me) who believe that as the crisis progresses, essentials like food, water, fuel and farmland will experience breathtaking inflation, while non-essentials (i.e., ipads and pretty much every other first-world frill one can think of) won't be worth the pound of rice one would rather have.  but i digress.

I am, of course, a big deflationista

well, no shit, paul--that's the only way you can claim with a straight face that all that stimulus couldn't possibly cause inflation (in fact, all of the chaos and death that took place over the course of the recent "arab spring" as a partial result of your and your cronies' misguidedly inflationary policies--maybe that's what should be keeping you up at night).

But what about gold? As some readers and correspondents love to point out, you would have made a lot of money if you’d bought gold early in this mess. So doesn’t that vindicate the inflationistas, to some extent?

a good question, i say.

My usual response has been that I have no idea what drives the price of gold

again, i totally believe him.

and then he goes on to take a gratuitous swipe at "glenn beck followers" before taking his readers down a twisting path to his sudden blinding insight:  gold is rising because of...wait for it...deflation!

how did he come to this unprecedented conclusion?  by a line of reasoning which is so torturous and convoluted--replete with diagrams and arcane references ("hotelling"--really, paul?)--that i won't even attempt to condense it here.  seriously, you gotta go take a look for yourself.

anyway, after contorting himself into a rhetorical and logical pretzel in order to make the square peg of reality fit into the round hole of his worldview, he comes to the following conclusion as regards his shiny new model:

And this says that the price of gold should jump in the short run.

really, paul--ya think?

he then goes on to gloat about how "intuitive" his new revelation is (so intuitive it took him ten years to dream it up), and humbly closes with the following:

But suppose this [my theory] is the right story, or at least a good part of the story, of gold prices. If so, just about everything you read about what gold prices mean is wrong.

that's right, doug casey--and jim willie, aubie baltin, peter schiff, doug mcalvany, roger weigand and all the other other clear-eyed analysts i follow who started tracking the rise of gold right after the dotcom bust back at about the same time the good dr. krugman was saying shit like

To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.

all of you rubes may have been right, but it was totally for the wrong reasons, you got that?

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so now that dr. krugman has devised a face-saving way for him and his fellow academicians to climb aboard the gold bandwagon, will their mainstream followers be far behind?  is this the push gold needs to enter phase two of its long bull market?  stay tuned...

a post-labor day post

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i used to be such a conscientious blogger--you know, posting semi-regularly, responding to comments, following up on dangling threads, that sorta thing--but all that has pretty much gone by the wayside lately.

all i can offer by way of explanation is that i've become a deer caught in the headlights of world events--events i've long known would come to pass, and from which i've profited handsomely, but which have nonetheless stunned me with their unfolding speed to the point that i can do little but watch in dismay as the world as i've known it disintegrates before my eyes.

one of the things each of my chosen prophets predicted (and the thing which prompted this post) was that the global elites who caused this mess would, when the shit finally hit the fan, set the victims of their crimes against one another, thus effectively deflecting blame from themselves.

and this they've done, brilliantly:  first, by making their crimes so complicated that barely a handful of their educationally dumbed-down victims could begin to grasp the enormity of what had been perpetrated upon them; and second, by enlisting their bought-and-paid-for media shills and politicians to fan the flames of (lower) class warfare.

so the tea party's declared war on labor, and labor has just declared war right back, when their collective rage might be more constructively utilized by, say, banding together, rampaging through the streets and hanging investment bankers from every lamppost in lower manhattan.

not that i would ever advocate such a course of action, you understand.