The new normal; socialism for the rich, austerity for the rest

There was brisk demand for Boeing's $25B bond offering last week. On the face of it, that's completely retarded.

Why would anyone buy the debt of a company that spent well over $40B on share buybacks over the past decade, has seen hundreds of billions in order cancellations in the last six months, and faces further hundreds of billions in liability claims due to lawsuits resulting from their 737 Max debacle?

Here's why. While you were distracted by that virus, the US government outsourced the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve to Larry Fink's BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, with over $6 trillion in assets under management. Larry's mandate is to buy up "toxic assets," and he's fully backed-stopped by the government's printing presses to do that now.

That should be the biggest story in the world right now, but for some reason your billionaire-friendly (and billionaire owned) corporate media don't pay it much attention.

I personally was a little short this month, what with the lockdown and all, and couldn't spare any scratch to get in on the Boeing bond. Did you? That's a toxic asset by any standard. If you signed up for a couple hundred million worth, no worries; Uncle Larry gonna make you good!

Meanwhile, the powers that be have done an experiment to see just how amenable the masses might be to the prospect of living in a police state. Overall, I'd say it's gone rather well for them. There's a little grumbling here and there, but no resistance of consequence, at least not yet, although there seems to be a surfer rebellion brewing in California.

Conditioning us to authoritarianism is essential once the full brunt of the coming austerity regimen bears down. Who do you think is going to pay for all that new debt we've incurred? That's well over $200 billions here in Canada, or roughly twelve times the projected pre-Covid deficit for this year. It's way crazier south of the border, if such a thing can be imagined.


We're gonna be tightening our belts for a really long time!