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!

Geithner goes a-grovelling

Tiny Tim is off to China, yes he is. And all the news channels want us to believe that he's there to lobby the Chinese for support for our Iran boycotts.

That's got to be a non-starter for the Chinese. What's Iran done to them? Of course when you stop and think about it, what have they done to us?

That's not the only thing that's fishy about the story. Since when do we send the Secretary of the Treasury off on diplomatic junkets? There's a very robust diplomatic corps available for these assignments. Are they all too busy hammering out the details on the latest US-Canada softwood lumber agreement to take time out for China?

Makes no sense at all, unless...

Unless those reports are true about China and Iran agreeing to do their bilateral trade without using the US dollar. That might tighten up a few sphincters in the Treasury Department.

After all, you won't be the world's reserve currency for long once people start doing that.

So the think tank here at Falling Downs figures Obama sent Tiny Tim over to remind the yellow people that if they make side deals that bypass the US dollar, their trillions in US dollar reserves aren't going to be worth chicken shit.

That should get their attention.