Virginia Breeze

Hey!  The world is getting crazier and crazier!  Don’t you feel it in the air?  Don’t you sense it every time you turn on the tube?  Much of it, of course, has to do with economics.   When gas prices went up they took with them a lot of comfortable routines.

“This is what we like to do on Friday night”.   Forget it!

“I really enjoy my trip to Starbucks every morning”.    But now I’m going to Burger King!   Yuk!

“My nest egg was in my house”.  Gone!

“My retirement fund was with Lehman Brothers”.     Where is it now?

I just feel a certain restlessness in the air.  And then I saw something on television about a gathering of the rich, famous and powerful in New York City this weekend.   Sarah Palin the naughty librarian is going to be there with her family.   The French President is going to be there with his attractive wife.

Former President Clinton was on Letterman.   So he’s in New York too.  And he had some nice things to say about Ms Palin!  I bet he would like to share them with her in person.   But he said not a word about his party’s candidate for president!   Chris Rock was next up and sat in a chair still warm from contact with presidential power.  And he happily criticized Clinton.

New York City!! A nice place to take photos in the coming days!   I had to laugh when I read that the media guys were not going to cover Palin because she is trying to control them in Alaska.   That is such a joke.  If it moves and makes news they will cover it.

I just wish I was there.  Maybe I will get on the train tomorrow in downtown Richmond and head on up the track.   But I can’t sleep outdoors and hotel rooms are going to be hard to find.  I wish my sister still lived there.  Darn!   Anybody from NYC want to put me up?   It could help you fill up your tank for a month or so!

Changing the subject. Here are my first attempts to photograph lightening.  Not so great right?  It would be really cool to get a photo looking straight up into the cloud!

Or maybe not.

I’m feeling the craziness too.

[Show as slideshow]

Click photo to enlarge

Since I’m not going to make it up to NYC here’s a photographer who is already there and taking some cool photos of the place.  I discovered him today thru Entrecard.

http://www.otilius.blogspot.com/

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“Bye bye Big Guy”
“Thanks for coming out!”

I’m not having a great day today.  I don’t like to write about those kind of days.  Because everybody has their problems.   Do I want to add my problems to your list?

No.  I don’t.   So this post is really going to be about our economy and our future.  If I tell you that my dog died today it’s only so that you will understand a little bit where I am coming from.   Our dog was very old and he needed to go play somewhere that wouldn’t require him to bring his worn out body.   I’m not talking about Sparky and Malarkey.  They are still here waiting for someone to come and feed them.

So what’s going on with our economy?  We went out to dinner last winter with Carlyle Tiller who was the founder of Wheat Securities and remains a very smart guy.  He was buying gold stocks before the buds came out on the trees.  Alan Greenspan said something about the economy being the worst in about one hundred years.  Well that would include the years of the Great Depression if my math is correct.

A few things can happen.  We can have deflation as in a recession or a depression.  Or we can have inflation as we did in abundance during the 1970’s.  Or we can have a combination of the two.  We had that in the late 1970’s.   Actually we have been having it to some degree since then but it was only very noticeable while President Carter was in office.  The numbers were high and he was gone in short order.

Since then we have lived with mild to moderate inflation and periods of recession.  All of this has been a way of keeping our economy going to some degree.  The patient is sick and he’s getting his insulin.  He’s getting his heart medication.  But he’s not getting well.

At some point he’s going to die.  And then things will start over with a new, much younger, patient.   But first we have to have the funeral for the old guy.  And it’s not going to be fun.  There’s going to be a lot of crying.  Just like there was today after our wonderful old dog breathed his last breath.

Someone on television said that the Federal Reserve should pump 5oo billion dollars into the banking system.  Maybe we can keep things going for another ten or twenty years.  But you can never solve the basic problem this way.  The only way you solve the problem is by euthanizing the old guy or dog and putting him out of his misery.

Let things stabilize at the level of their real value.  Let deflation have its way for awhile.  Don’t let go so far that we loose the ability to treat  our new patient.  We don’t want to go back to the stone age or 1932.  But we need to go back down to a level that makes sense and start over with a new patient.

Maybe the big boys understand this.  Maybe this is why Lehman is no longer with us.  Maybe he was the patient.

Maybe everybody is hoping he was the patient.  But I don’t think so.  Most probably he was like one of those  Lilliputians that tried to tie down Gulliver in Jonathan Swift’s satire.   Gulliver is the patient.

But he is not dead yet. Nobody wants to come out and say it but it doesn’t take a genius to read between the lines.  He probably looks more like a combination of AIG, Bank America and Ford Motor Company.  And those are just his facial features.  So it’s doubtful he will be kicking off any time soon.