In my father’s house are many mansions. Surely one of them has a room with no elephants in it….

Not to crunch too many metaphors right here at the top, but a consensus seems to be firming up in the animate jello of the Internet that we have entered the Season of the Witch. An odor of ripeness fills the virtual air — something between dead carp and apples baking.

Whatever else appears to be going on in the upper stories and verdigris-tinged turrets of capital finance — currency rackets, gold switcheroos, interest rate arbitrage games, concealment of losses under rugs and behind curtains, Chinese fire drills performed by Spanish prisoners, executive three-card-monte set-ups, boardroom work-arounds, accounting quicksteps, Peter-to-Paul-shuffles, check kitings, pigeon drops, Ponzi schemes, hugger-muggers, bezels, shucks, jives, and enough monkeyshines to make Lord Greystroke cry for mercy — apart, in other words, from business-as-usual, such as it is

In our history, the American nation committed obvious sins against select groups of people, and we’ve paid bitterly for some of that. But now it’s our sins against the land itself that threaten to sink the USA as a viable enterprise.

It’s odd, that in his otherwise excellent blow-by-blow account (”Eight Days,” in the Sept 21 New Yorker Magazine) of the September 2008 Wall Street meltdown that left Lehman dead, and AIG croaking in a ditch, and the banking system in general functionally crippled, reporter James B. Stewart never got around to really describing the cause of it all — namely, the on-the-ground material catastrophe of American suburbia.

It was the worthlessness of the tradable securitized debt associated with all those overpriced (and overvalued) chipboard and vinyl houses, smeared recklessly over the American landscape, that started all the trouble in the first place. And it is our inability to come to

In my larval, pre-blogging days, I always faced the back-to-school moment with abject dread.  It meant returning to a program of the most severe, mind-numbing regimentation in the ghastly New York City public schools after a summer of idyllic unreality in the New Hampshire woods, where I went to a Lord of the Flies type of summer camp.  And so here I am, many decades later, still uneasy as the final page of the August calendar flies away in a hot Santa Ana wind, and a great hellfire closes in on the far eastern reaches of Los Angeles, and the American money system falls into a peculiar limbo, and every fifth person is out of work, or going bankrupt, or glugging down the seawater of default, or being denied coverage by health insurance that he-or-she has already shelled out ten grand for this year, or getting shot in

Resource legend tips his hat to three soon-to-bubble sectors… The housing market has “bottomed out” says PNC… our gentle retort… Alan Knuckman with an economic indicator far superior to unemployment: chicken sales… Our panel of “whiskey shooters” on the worst-case scnerio… how to get out of Dodge if the dollar collapses… Britian now REALLY in crisis… recession, taxes cause wave of pub shutdowns…

Let’s make some trades this morning. We asked Rick Rule, a living legend here in Vancouver, what’s the next bubble market? “The Canadian market does not care about small oil and gas companies,” he told us yesterday. “Which means that small Canadian O&G companies are selling for 50-60% of net asset value. They are very, very, very cheap. They are unloved, with no finance options and no trading liquidity… and I love that. This value is free. There will be much money made in small-cap

Through the tangle of green shoots and sprouting mustard seeds, a certain nervous view persists that the arc of events is taking us to places unimaginable.  The collapse of General Motors and Chrysler signifies more than the collapse of US car manufacturing.  It spells the end of the motoring era in America per se and the puerile fantasy of personal liberation that allowed it to become such a curse to us.

Of course, many Nobel prize-winning economists would argue that it has only been a blessing for us, but that only shows how the newspapers are committing suicide-by-irrelevance. And if other societies, such as China’s late-entry industrial start-up, want to adopt a similar fantasy, they will only find themselves all the sooner in history’s garage with a tailpipe in their mouths.

Here in the USA, we will mount the most strenuous campaign to keep the motoring system going — in fact, we’re

Euphoria managed to out-run swine flu last week as the epidemic-du-jour, with “consumer” confidence jumping and the big bank stocks nudging up. The H1N1 virus fizzled for now, at least in terms of kill ratio, though we’re warned it might boomerang in the fall with a vengeance. No one was surprised to see Chrysler roll over like a possum on a county highway, but the memory of their muscle cars will linger on like a California surfing song. Here in the northeast, where Sundays are not spent at the NASCAR oval, the spring foliage reached the tenderly explosive stage and it was hard to feel bad about anything.

For now, the “bottom” is in — that is, the bottom of this society’s ability to process reality. It may continue for a month of so, even after the “stress test” for banks is finally let out of the massage parlor with a

People of good intentions and progressive predilection are scratching their heads wondering just how President Barack Obama managed to turn himself into George W. Bush Lite with sugar-on-top just twelve weeks after that fateful walk down the US Capitol’s east stairway to the waiting helicopter. I’m hardly the first observer to note that Mr. Obama’s actions in the face of an epochal finance fiasco and economic collapse are a mere extension of the pre-January-20 policies, carried out by much the same cast of characters.

The assumption up until now was something about the reassuring value of continuity — if we could just prop up an ailing set of banks for a little while, the US public could resume a revolving credit way-of-life within an economy dedicated to building more suburban houses and selling all the needed accessories from supersized “family” cars to cappuccino machines. This would keep everyone employed at the

At the moment, money is being sucked out of the financial system, bringing the threat of deflation. But for James Howard Kunstler, the only question is when the new money being pumped in by the Fed will exceed the amount that has disappeared. James says we could see serious inflation - and a slump in the US dollar - before the end of 2009.

This from Whiskey & Gunpowder:

This is the “other shoe” that a lot of people are waiting to drop. Right now we are caught up in a compressive debt deflation as mortgages stop “performing” and loans of all kinds are welshed on. Since money is loaned into existence, and a great many loans are not being repaid, then a lot of money is going out of existence. That’s what I mean when I say that capital is leaving the system.

At the same time, the Federal Reserve has made

We are in a transition between the old profligate energy economy and the new economy of relative scarcity, says James Howard Kunstler. He is not convinced the President-elect Obama is fully aware of the dramatic changes that lie ahead for America. Even if he were, says James, he’d probably be crucified for daring to talk about it.

This from Whisky & Gunpowder:

A lot of readers are twanging on me for refraining to castigate President-elect Obama for deeds yet undone. They’re discouraged by the advisors and cabinet secretaries he’s picked, ostensibly because the crew coming in are Washington “insiders,” meaning they can’t possibly see or do things differently.

My own starting point for this is the belief that in the years just ahead any sociopolitical entity organized at the giant scale will flounder — this includes everything from the federal government to global corporations to factory farms to centralized

America’s credit-based consumer economy is dead, says James Howard Kunstler. The government and its zombie banks are trying to preserve the status quo. But activities based on getting something-for-nothing will soon be replaced by those producing the things we need to survive. And in this economy, there will be enough work for everyone…

This from Whiskey & Gunpowder:

Though Citicorp (NYSE:C) is deemed too big to fail, it’s hardly reassuring to know that it’s been allowed to sink its fangs into the Mother Zombie that the U.S. Treasury has become and sucked out a multi-billion dollar dose of embalming fluid so it can go on pretending to be a bank for a while longer.

I employ this somewhat clunky metaphor to point out that the U.S. Government is no more solvent than the financial zombies it is keeping on walking-dead support. And so this serial mummery of weekend bailout schemes is as