You and your team have very little time left to pull an "about face" on your fatally flawed plans to save the world. Your tactics, including spending trillions "stimulating" a dying economy, doing anything in your power to save the insolvent corpse of a banking system and to prop up a failed automobile industry, feigning confidence and strength in the face of devastation, will not work. They cannot work. The numbers, unlike you and your team, cannot conceal the truth for much longer. You are the President of the United States of America, and yet you are behaving, as all of your predecessors seem to have behaved before you, like the President of Bullshit Nation. Unfortunately for you, the bullshit cannot alter the coming realities.
Sir, virtually all of the banks of the world are, essentially, bankrupt. They have no capital. Capital has been summarily destroyed over the years by falling interest rates, rampant bond speculation and governmental check-kiting, fraudulent accounting, fraudulent valuation, the elimination of reserve ratios, the creation of money by federal decree (fiat currency), hidden off-book "assets" in the tens of TRILLIONS of dollars, a shadow banking system driven by derivative betting scams that globally reach toward half a QUADRILLION dollars in scope, etc. As Secretary Geithner embarks on his supposed banking "stress tests", and if he does so in earnest, you'd best be fully prepared for what you must uncover: Trillions upon trillions of pieces of worthless paper. If Assets = Liabilities + Equity---and in a world where many if not most of these institutions are leveraged 30:1, 40:1 and beyond---then the majority of assets currently held by the world's banks are worthless. Are you ready to tell the people the truth, sir? I fear not.
Peacenik wonders what would happen if Obama stepped up and stated the truth. The truth as Dan W. sees it in this post. Dan W. and Illargi, and Mish and Soros are talking about the need to create a whole new system. Scary times. Who do you trust to create a new system? And how wrecked does the present system have to be before you can start building a new system? The fringe bloggers are talking about systemic collapse happening very quickly and soon. Obama and his advisors are acting like they believe the same thing. Obama and our leaders are acting like they are holding on to the edge of the abyss by their fingernails. They are not making Peacenik confident about tomorrow....or today.
