Budget talks: This is getting nasty

Thanks. Long post coming, so make fun of me, or skip it, or read it. But I will just get it all in on one post and bolt for most of the day.

As for what you said, thanks, I really mean it, but I am sitting here thinking about this stuff more than most people on a sports journalism board. There are plenty of others who are too, and more smartly than I am.

The whole thing confounds me. I personally trade in and out of markets a lot (I find it like sports competition, one thing I like about it), and the discipline I use really doesn't require knowing what is going on in the world. I basically follow price momentum and it works more often than not because when there is momentum up or down things tend to continue moving as they had been. In sort of layman's terms, if you stick that kind of thinking, it's not as hard to make money as people think.

But I also have had decent instincts at times with the macro things I post about on here a lot, and I do move money around in more of an "investment" way than a trading way, too, and see if things eventually play out the way I sort of anticipated. I can sit and wait and watch, and I have had some luck by anticipating things correctly.

I have thought about shorting U.S. treasury bonds about 1,000 times in the last 6 months, and I am glad I haven't pulled the trigger. The whole thing confounds me. I sit there looking at the fundamentals, which are basically: 1) the Fed ended QE2 within the last month, which had them propping up the market by being the biggest buyer (they were buying back their own debt, thus putting us MORE in debt) and yields are ridiculously low for a country flirting with debt trouble, and I wonder how it can go on (and the rating agencies, which need to be hit in the nose to notice anything, have us on watch). 30-year treasury yields are in the 2 percent range. I don't see how that is possible. But then you look around the world and you see Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and now Spain and Italy, and even though you could say invest in German bonds, which have similarly low yields, they don't seem as safe because if there is European contagion, they are toast.

A bunch of big bond investors, most notably PIMCO, have just bolted U.S. treasuries in the last year because of what I typed above, particularly when they ended QE2, I think the sentiment was, who are going to be the buyers? I don't know if there are many who are actively shorting the market, the way I have thought of. But the thinking is, who would want to own U.S. debt at these prices and low yields, when it just smells so bad here? Yet, yields haven't risen and treasury prices have held steady. Which basically says, right now, this isn't a beauty contest, it's a least ugly contest, and the world has deemed the U.S. the least ugly.

This is why I can't short U.S. debt, because the rest of the world is so screwed up and these choices become relative.

It's why I posted all the things I have on that gold thread over the past 2+ years. It was easy to see us at this point, even 2, 3 years ago. And in that environment, the only thing I feel relatively sure about is that paper assets become unpredictable, but hard commodities become a currency all their own and are actually a beneficiary. In hindsight, you were safe with a precious metals play in two ways. The various world's central banks were trying to jump start their economies by creating massive inflation. But at the same time, if that didn't do it, there was a possibility of the kind of mayhem we are seeing, and in that environment, hard assets become a "safe" play.

As for what is going on politically, I just hope the people on here who argue "sides," begin to realize soon that there is very little difference between John Boehner and Barack Obama. Our political parties trade in rhetoric that sounds so different to people, but they both stay in power the same way, which is trading monetary favors (which has put us in our current debt situation) for their power. It's not just the GE's of the world looking for tax loopholes, it's every special interest out there, from labor unions to corporations to research institutions looking for NIH money. And it's a giant cesspool, it's inefficient and at the pace we have brought it to, it will bankrupt the country sooner rather than later. Then I hear these two clowns arguing over how they are going to shuffle a few deck chairs, using stupid rhetoric that distracts people from what is really happening?

We are in a particularly fucked situation, but it is of their making. We have no choice really, but to either increase revenues, reduce spending or do a combination of the two -- bankruptcy is really not imminent, but we are starting to spiral.

The problem is that doing any of that (which I think the President really knows), is going to shave a few million more jobs from the country, inhibit economic growth for some time more, and put us into a malaise that drags on. And as politicians, what they want to do most is just put things off, the way they always do. But that option is not there this time. So they have to make decisions, and no one is ready to own a decision. Politicians DON'T do that.

I actually feel bad for Obama. He is going to preside over a country for one or two terms (if he gets reelected) that has low growth and unemployment probably hovering around 10 percent. We are seeing inflation, even though they changed the CPI to reflect it less (BS), so what we are getting is actually stagflation. And he has to be sitting there knowing right now that his presidency isn't going to be remembered all that fondly, because as the economy is going, so you go down in history. He's a major PART of the problem, but problems this big were not just HIS doing. This has been decades of build up, and it has come to a head when he happened to be president.

If you want one culprit, I'd probably point out Alan Greenspan, because throughout the 90s, using monetary policy, he created an overheated economy and giant asset bubbles that eventually popped (and Bill Clinton benefited, because as the economy was going, he will be remembered). Two decades of artificially induced low interest rates has us where we are as much as anything. That enabled the false prosperity and during those times, our politicians acted like politicians, and upped the ante and spent more and more.

I am of two minds right now. The biggest part of me always says, swallow the spoonful of castor oil and reduce our debt -- raise taxes, decrease spending and bite the bullet.

But I know my ideas sometimes ignore the reality of the corrupt system we are working from within. And I know that the way it REALLY has always worked is that the only time we reduce our debt and deficits is when the economy is growing. It happens on its own, not because of any "plan." It's because economic growth brings in government revenue without them having to argue about taxation, and the deficits reduce despite themselves.

And if we go austerity right now, we are almost guaranteeing we won't see significant economic growth for a long time, so there is a good chance we will make our debt spiral worse, the way Greece saw when it put in those austerity measures all at once. So there are a lot of people who think the way I do, who think we are in so deep that the best thing to do is to keep with the bad game plan that got us here in the first place and hope that by increasing our debt, we can get the economy moving, which will them allow us to bring down the debt the way we did in the 90s -- without trying really, or "planning" anything.

I don't know anymore. I think the latter is probably right, but the problem is that it just enables the Boehners and Obamas to keep doing what they do, which is hand out favors for power, and let's say the economy turns around relatively quickly by some miracle, and we see increased revenues, will they REALLY use it as an opportunity to stop tossing around bags of money and reduce our Federal budget which now amounts to $3 to $4 trillion of special interest favors every year?

One last thing. If you believe we should double down right now to try to get the economy rolling, there is an argument to be made for it, which I will make (even though I am not a proponent). I pointed out above that 30-year treasury yields are around 2 percent. That is the ONE asset we have going for us right now. It defies logic, but we can still borrow VERY cheaply.

They sold that "stimulus" bill when Obama first got into office as "shovels ready" bullshit, but none of that $800 billion really got spent that way (what I said would happen on here). Right now, we have a construction industry with 20 percent unemployment. Our government can borrow at ridiculously low rates. And we do have a crumbling infrastructure. Someone (I am always wary of these arguments, but. ...) could argue that if we borrow money at 2 percent, put a bunch of people to work building bridges (I mean REALLY doing it) and get the economy moving that way, we are doing it at relatively low cost, and you can argue it isn't spending as much as investment, because for the next 50 years that bridge will be boosting economic activity, probably.

The flip side is there is no guarantee with our shaky standing that we can continue borrowing at that low rate, and once Obama and Boehner and the like get their greasy fingers on that kind of idea, the money will be parceled out to various special interests and shovels won't really hit the ground. Which is why I don't advocate more of the same. They will fuck it up. It's NATURAL that they fuck it up, and history has proven that to be true, unfortunately. This is the time when I always wish people would read (or reread) something like Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, which explains why centralized planning can NEVER work and leads to disasters.