Copied this from www.thedailyreckoning.com very provocative.
HOW TO RELAX AND ENJOY THE END OF THE WORLD by Bill Bonner
The world as we have known it is coming to an end, but what do we care? We laugh and vow to enjoy it.
It took the Roman Empire hundreds of years to fall. During that time, most people didn't even know their world was coming to an end. Most must have gone about their business, planting their crops, drinking their wine and bouncing children on their knees, as if the empire were eternal.
Of course, the mobs in Rome itself may have reeled and wailed with every news flash......the barbarians had crossed the Poe...and were headed South...soon, they would be at the gates!
But others lived quiet lives of desperation and amusement as if nothing had happened. And what could they have done about it anyway...except get out of harm's way and tend to their own affairs?
Plenty of people enjoyed the Great Depression. If you had a well-paying job, it must have been paradise - no waiting in lines, no need for a reservation at good restaurants. Keeping up with the Joneses had never been easier - because the Joneses were in reverse! If much of the satisfaction of life comes from feeling superior to other people...what better time than a depression to enjoy it?
Besides, here at the Daily Reckoning, dear reader, we're suspicious of headline events. We could never quite get into the spirit of the Great Boom of the '90s...we doubt we'll get much juice from the Great Bust either. Nor can we get very enthusiastic about going to war against enemies we don't know for reasons we can't understand.
It is a character defect; we just can't seem to get in tune with mass sentiments. We've never been able to do 'The Wave' at baseball games without feeling like a fool. Now, we can't even watch football on television without falling asleep.
But that is the way of the world; one madness leads to the next. A man feels excited and expansive because the economy is said to be in the midst of a New Era...and then he feels a little exhausted when he discovers that the New Era has been followed by a New Depression. And all the while, his life goes on - exactly as it had before. His liquor is no better, his wife no prettier or uglier, his work every bit as insipid or inspiring as it was before.
And we have no complaint about it!
Still, "the world is too much with us," wrote Emerson:
"Most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set them right. Meantime nature is not slow to equip us in the prison-uniform of the party to which we adhere. We come to wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire by degrees the gentlest asinine expression..."
What better time to shut the world out and wipe that silly grin off our face than now - when the world we have known for 5 decades is coming to an end?
American consumer capitalism is doomed, we think. The trends that couldn't last forever seem to be coming to an end...or they will soon. Consumers can't continue to go deeper into debt. Consumption can't continue to take up more and more of the GDP. Capital investment and profits can't go down much further. Foreigners will not continue to finance Americans' excess consumption until the Second Coming - at least not at the current dollar price. And fiat, paper money will not continue to outperform the real thing - gold - forever.
America will have to find a new economic model; for it can no longer hope to spend and borrow its way to prosperity. This is not a cyclical change...but a structural one, which will take a long time. Partly because structural reforms - that is, changing the way an economy functions - do not happen overnight. And partly because the machinery of collectivized capitalism resists change of any sort. The Fed tries to buoy the old model with cheaper and cheaper money. The government comes forward with multi-billion dollar spending programs to try to simulate real demand. And the poor lumpeninvestoriat - bless their greedy little hearts - will never give up the dream of American consumer capitalism; it will have to be crushed out of them.
The world is so much with these people. TVs are turned on 24-7. Thinking en masse, the latest news gets homogenized into one gloppy paste, where America's success as an economy is amalgamated with its success in the war against terror. "Considering that we're going to get an uptick in corporate profits and a quick win over Iraq," said Scott Black in one of Barron's Roundtables, "I think the market will be up 5% to 10% for the year."
Meanwhile, America has become such an outsized military power that the world has become 'unipolar,' say the latest editorials. 'Tis a strange world with a single pole, we note; out of balance, it cannot last.
Nature abhors a monopoly. Thus must America find a way to destroy itself...and seems to have found two:
First, its consumer economy depends entirely upon the kindness of overseas strangers. When they are finally fed up, Americans will have to stop buying...and start saving themselves. Since it is something that must happen, we will be happy to see it happen, for we might as well rail against death as oppose an inevitable change in the economy. "It will all have to be adjusted someday," as Paul Volcker put it. Why not enjoy it?
Secondly, George W. Bush turned the gods of war against America when he announced that the U.S. would initiate armed conflict - with any nation it feels poses a threat. He has only to pursue this strategy, and he will eventually turn the whole world against America, too. We don't know where this leads, but we will try to make the most of it.
Here at the Daily Reckoning, we have already made our New Year's resolutions. We will try to remember birthdays and vintages...we resolve to find a better way of curing ham...and, oh yes, we will buy gold on dips and sell the dollar and stocks on rallies. The Trade of the Decade, we keep saying, is to sell stocks and buy gold. This trade has been good to us so far. At its peak in March 2000, it took 41 ounces of gold to buy the Dow. You can buy it now for about 25 ounces. Before the decade is over, and here we take a wild guess, it will be one-to-one, as it was before the Great Boom began.
This may or may not be a profitable strategy, but we don't care. We will do what we ought to do, even if it turns out to be unprofitable. Occasionally we will do what we ought not, too, but that will be just for fun.
