Stewart Dougherty delivers some bitter medicine for retirement investing. But he also recommends an antidote.
Link: The Metastasis of Moral Hazard and its Effect on Gold - by Stewart Dougherty
As average American citizens lose their jobs by the millions, become mired in financial distress and are crushed by the largest debt increase in the history of civilization to pay for government bailouts and fiscal stimulus programs, several Wall Street firms, in actions so arrogant they beggar and defy belief, have announced that they will pay record bonuses in 2009. These bonuses commonly amount to 20 – 200+ times the median American wage, in other words, 20 – 200+ times the earnings of the citizens whose taxes were spent only a few months ago to keep the Wall Street firms from imploding.Nurses, police officers, school teachers, store clerks, truck drivers, gas station attendants, firemen, flight attendants, ambulance drivers and everyday workers of every other description, many of them struggling to provide only a humble, basic lifestyle for themselves and their families, were asked to reach deep into their pockets to help Wall Street survive. Now that Wall Street has taken their money, it will use it to lavish huge bonuses upon itself, in a callous Roman orgy of excess.
The American psychological landscape has been parched by the searing winds of financial desperation, surging inequality and dying hopes. And the tinder of the desiccated American Dream, once the great calling and aspiration of a nation, is now piled so high that a spark igniting it would unleash raging flames reaching up to and scorching an astonished Sun. Yet politicians and the press are so divorced from reality that when the people express at town meetings and other venues their deep, legitimate frustration over the loss of their hopes and nation, they are viewed as whiners, or paid political activists. As noted earlier, denial is very dangerous drug. [click to continue…]
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