Monday in the Financial Casino / The Off-Planet View

New shooters….coming out!”

Yes sir, it sure feels like a casino…all kinds of craps… but I feel strangely light-headed about it.  Maybe Doc Thompson can get me some pills, or something, for it.  Ah…there’s the rub…Which pill? 

Well that depends on which casino game we’re talking about.

One pill might be for infectionthis would be for the systemic infection that could flare up with this week’s Argentina financial disaster waiting to flare up.  As you’ll remember, the IMF et al want Argentina to pay up and Argentina, which turned stiffing the international banksters into high art back in 2002, wasn’t it?, is set to do it again.

So we might want to start a prophylactic course of Ciproflaxin, for that one.  Bondholders are such whiners…terminal wallet disease carriers, too.

Next, we might want to grab a couple of aspirin for the Federal Reserve meeting this week which is widely expected to reduce the quantitative pleasing by $10-billion per month, or so.

Then tomorrow morning, we’ll have our monthly “split personality” report in order to update you on the Standard and Poorhousing picture.  Remember, the housing recovery has been dramatic overs the past couple of years, just as any pulse is considered a zillion percent improvement from dead/flat-lined, so too, housing isn’t exactly pumping and jumping.  Along with the rest of the green shoots, recovery, or whatever you want to call it, come to think of it.

So for that, maybe I need a mood stabilizer like Abilify or Seoquel, you think?  That might help with Consumer CONfidence data, due out tomorrow morning, as well. Focus on the positive, we’ll mindlessly mantra-fy…

Then to cap off the week, we will have the latest unemployment data to digest with the hash-browns Friday morning.  Depending on how the numbers roll, the range of expectations is somewhere the  Devil’s Quadrangle between blow, nitrous oxide, Ambien  and Oxy.

And, since this morning’s trip to the medicine chest for coping assistance seems to have taken on a distinctly pharmacological angle to it, reader Mark was asking me what I thought about the NY Times view on marijuana out this weekend.

Stay away from rolling in newspapers, is my advice:  Vape, pipe, or Zig-Zags, sure. But newspapers are best saved for fish (while we have ‘em) and besides, no one in Washington can read.

If they could we wouldn’t have MS-13 recruiting kiddies as the border comes down, would we?  Instead they’re making plans to legalize illegals and all without CONgress which is a cost pit with no useful output, anymore.

A check of the futures tosses the Dow down only about 20 at the open.  But that doesn’t mean anything other than someone got to the medicine chest before I did.

But Pappy didn’t raise no fool:  I look at the combined net worth of the Sinaloa gang, the Cartagena blow merchants, and the total market cap of all the publicly traded drug companies…well let me ask you something:

If you just drifted across a time-window from another dimension and did a quick econometric measurement of humanity on this rock, what would you say is our “business”?  Going to the stars?  Universal enlightenment?  Peace, prosperity, and technology?

Not no, but HELL NO

We are on a drug planet.  And I’m on the verge of referencing Washington as a “cartel” no longer simply an “administration.”

You see, it’s what we do.  We can say all freaking day long.  But here’s Mr. Cynical’s Monday morning eye-opener.

The market cap of Microsoft is  $366 billion.  Apple: $584 billion.

Pfizer is $192 billion, and sure, they get smaller as you go down the list (Glaxo is only $117 billion, for example) but there are tons of drug outfits.

Now, the numbers on the illegal side of drugs is now globally estimated at over $600 billion per year (a 2010 number, by the way)  and it is 7.6% of global trade.

Drugs do get their share of blame for social ills, but is that really the reason for the rise in homeless in Denver?  Could that have something to do with failed economic policies and systemic corruption?  Naw…blame the drugs…you bet!  Towering student loan debt with a lack of jobs while the Washington Cartel rubberstamps H1-b’s?  Naw…must be the drugs!

Drug, drugs, drugs…it’s what we is anymore.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but when you take the trillion plus in legal pharmas and toss in what seems reasonably to be placed at $700+ billion today, and let’s not forget them tobacco companies which are pimping death in emerging markets, let me ask you again:

So I’ll ask again:  What the hell business is this planet in?

Oops…forgot the booze companies…you starting to see why I’m standing by the medicine chest this morning?

And now you see why I may start referring to our Capitol’s functions as the “Washington Cartel?”

How it looks depends on where you stand.  Me?  I’m standing asides and looking befuddled.  But this is precisely what the UFO guys would see and it’s probably why we haven’t been invited by Gazorpians to test drive spacetime transiting technology yet.

Bet?

The headlines this fine Monday argue rather starkly that we can’t even deal with the training wheels.  And I’ve got even more proof..

More after this…

The Thrilla-Killin

Not that the planet doesn’t have a few places of interest besides our weird fascination with trading paper for drugs or all kinds.

We’re also pretty good at killing people directly.

The latest example being Israel stomping Gaza (along with the West Bank) and despite the UN calling for an immediate cease-fire, nothing seems likely to change.

Now, back to this morning’s viewpoint (from a UFO wandering by):  Is this the kind of neighborhood where you’d invest, or would you bulldoze it and start over?

Global Pandemic Coming?

Of course, the off planet types may just be getting whatever it is that Gazorpians eat for snacks because we may be on the verge of global pandemic with the outbreak of Ebola which has caused Liberia to close down most of its borders now.  And you know it’s bad when doctors are getting it.

Hmmm…since the UFO types previous communication may have been mistaken for religion, which horse of the four horsemen, do you figure this one could be?

Ever try to have a meaningful discussion with a troop of monkeys?  They’re bound to miss the metaphors, huh?

Who Owns the Rat Maze?

I bet you didn’t know that 90 percent of media in the US is owned by just six companies, did you?

Grab them by their advertising revenue gonads and what do you have?  The perfect rat maze!

All run by the Washington Cartel and the K-Street goon squads.

Gee, maybe I won’t need drugs after all.

In the land of the blind, a one-eyed man is king.

More tomorrow morning…