By Bill Bonner
A Truly Sucky Century
BALTIMORE – What an awful century! Worst we’ve ever seen. Household incomes are down. Employment is down, with 7 million people in the U.S. of working age without jobs. Productivity growth is down. GDP growth is down – to only about 0.5% per capita last year. Even life expectancies are down. Drug overdoses are up. Suicides are up. One out of every eight children lives in a family getting food stamps. One of out every eight adults takes psychoactive drugs .
Death from drug overdoses is back in fashion – big time. Club of Rome Malthusians can only dream of such effective population control. The picture to the right illustrates the the adventurous lifestyle of many 21st century junkies. Contrary to many of their contemporaries, these young men are not weighed down by a great many possessions, and they do get a lot of fresh air. Before you decide on a career change to join these rugged outdoorsmen though, you should consider that they do have a bit of a life expectancy problem – click to enlarge.
Half of all families get money from the feds. Half have less than $500 available for emergencies. Two-thirds aren’t saving for retirement. More than half cannot afford their own homes. And 49 million live in poverty.
What’s to blame for such a sucky century? In addition to declining health and declining standards of living – as well as declining standards of decency – we also have wretched art, music, and architecture… unwinnable wars against poverty, drugs, and terrorism… $20 trillion of national debt… and overpriced assets that leave little of interest to the sober investor or desperate retiree.
We find much of modern art more funny than wretched actually, such as this Barnett Newman painting called Anna’s Light which recently sold for $105 million. It is often confused with his very similar looking work Vir Heroicus Sublimus, which has a differently placed white stripe and a black stripe as well! There’s also the almost exactly similar looking “Who’s afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue?”, which sports a blue stripe on the left hand side, and a tiny yellow stripe on the right hand side. Given that so much more is going on in the latter painting, it would probably trade at a premium over Anna’s Light. We see the prices paid for modern art as a very telling inflation signal. Rich people seem to be almost in a Weimar-like panic to get rid of their cash balances. Incidentally, Barnett Newman ran for NY mayor in 1930 as an “anarchist” (of the leftist variety, we presume).
And don’t get us started on the feds! Meanwhile, the signs of another debt crisis – like a flash mob at a political rally – are growing.
The stock market has been going up far too long without a correction. The economy is overdue for a recession. Federal Housing Administration mortgage delinquencies are rising. Student debt defaults are rising. Auto-loan repayments are slipping.
How did we get in …read more
Source:: Acting Man
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