A survey showed that only 1 in 10 workers say his income is going up. This is the lowest reading since 1946.

Meanwhile, the news two days ago was that homebuilding took a dive in October. Work began on 11% fewer houses than the month before. On multi-family dwellings, the figures were worse - down 35%.

Why would homebuilding go down when the economy is supposedly gathering strength? Well, builders were wondering what would happen when they finished the houses. The new house tax credit was due to expire; they weren't sure the politicians would be witless enough to renew it.

They need not have worried. Give the politicos a chance to do something stupid and they will come through every time. Since the end of October, Congress passed and President Obama signed an extension of the housing credit. Until next April, at least, first time buyers will get an $8,000 credit.

You'd think that would have revived animal spirits a bit in the residential construction industry. But today's news tells us that mortgage applications are falling - even with lower interest rates.

How come interest rates are falling? Well, here again, we see the heavy hand of the feds. The "quantitative easing" has come to a halt...that is, the Fed is no longer buying US Treasury debt (it doesn't need to). But its buying of mortgage backed securities continues. That program will last until March of next year.

Still...housing is not cooperating.

This news hasn't had much impact on Wall Street. All that can be said is that investors have seemed to hesitate for the last couple of days.

Stocks fell softly yesterday, with the Dow down only 11 points. Oil stayed at $79. Gold rose to $1,141. And the euro remained at $1.49.

Investors must still believe in what The Washington Post calls a "lukewarm recovery." It is like finding a body on the street. You feel for a pulse and discover that it has not quite reached room temperature. It is tepid... Not quite alive. Not quite dead.

Too close to the quick to bury...too close to the grave to boogaloo.

Bill Bonner
for The Daily Reckoning Australia

• Housing and Unemployment Are Weaknesses in the U.S. Economy
• Most People Still Think – “You Can’t Go Wrong in Property”
• Economy Free to Recover?
• Aussie Housing Market Actually Leads the U.S. by Three Years
• Take Away Stimulus Spending and You’ve Got an Economy Entering Depression

'We didn't ask you to stock up all those dollars,' as Obama might have put it. 'It's not our fault if the dollar goes down and you lose money.'

Perhaps Mr. Obama should have quoted the immortal words of a former US Secretary of the Treasury, John Connolly. "It may be our dollar, but it's your problem."

Over at USA Today, the editors are more concerned about human rights. The paper must imagine itself back in the days of Woodrow Wilson or George W. Bush, when the US nobly embarked on a mission to raise all of mankind out of sin and error. In effect, Mr. Obama said that all people have 'universal rights,' including the right to a free press. China figured this was just the sort of opinion that its people didn't need to hear. So, it killed the story in its own press. The American president might as well have been talking to himself.

China is today's big story. Throughout the world's media there is much buzz and blather about the "romance"...the "historic relationship"...between the two titans. Some reporters see love. Some see jealousy. Some see rivalry.

Here at The Daily Reckoning we are suckers for romance. Give us some "a cigarette that bears a lipstick's traces...an airline ticket to romantic places..." and we are moonstruck. But we don't see much romance in the US and China hook up. What we see is the sort of things that delight psychologists and bore everyone else - perversion, co- dependency, and enabling.

On the surface, the two giants bicker over money like any other couple. The US accuses China of being a tightwad...holding its currency down and saving too much. China accuses the US of being a spendthrift, destroying its own purchasing power by wanton and reckless expenditures.

"US president's currency call breaks with script," says a headline in The Financial Times today. US economists think China should raise the value of the yuan. This would immediately lower the value, domestically, of the trillion(s?) worth of US-dollar assets China holds as reserves. It would also make Chinese products less competitive on the world market.

Mr. Obama wasn't supposed to say anything about it on his trip. It would be like bringing up your husband's drinking problem on your wedding anniversary; it would spoil the occasion.

Apparently, Obama couldn't help himself. Or maybe he just thought the folks back home would like to hear him give the Chinese a piece of his mind.

But how does the American president know what price to put on the yuan? A sinking dollar is good for the goose over in the US. Why isn't it okay for the gander in the Middle Kingdom?

A strong yuan would help the world economy "rebalance," say economists who think they know what they are talking about. In a nutshell, the Chinese produce too much; Americans consume too much. A higher yuan would come down on the high side of the scale - giving the Chinese more purchasing power (thus increasing consumption in the Peoples' Republic)...and making Chinese exports more expensive (thus decreasing consumption across the Pacific). With a stronger yuan, the Anglo-Saxon economies would be able to produce and sell more things to the Chinese...thus tilting the US economy more towards capital formation and production.

Chinese authorities are no dopes. They know they have a "floating" population of some 150,000 million people who are looking for work. They know that if they don't find some way to keep these people occupied they are likely to cause trouble. Trouble is the thing China's leaders most don't want.

"You think you've got trouble," Premier Hu Jintao might have replied to Mr. Obama. "Did you know that there are something like 200 million Chinese who still get by on as little as a dollar a day? Let's face facts. You're sitting there in Washington, comfortably talking about how much free health care and unemployment benefits to give the American people. We don't have the time...or the money for those kinds of things. Too many Chinese people. They don't earn enough to afford the kind of cradle-to-grave bribes you give your people. We have to keep them working; there's no other way.

"Besides, we don't quite see why we should pay for your mistakes. It wasn't our economy that blew up. It wasn't our financial industry that sold houses to people who couldn't afford them. It wasn't our consumers who spent more than they had and went too deeply into debt.

"It's the debtor who's supposed to pay, not the lender. We're the lender!"

Behind all the superficial arguing, accusing and kvetching, however, is a sick relationship. It has give and take. But the US is all take. China is all give. And now, on both sides, public authorities make the same mistake. In the US, they try desperately to prod Americans to take more...to continue doing what they were doing wrong. They offer incentives of every sort to lure consumers to consume even more. And their solution to the debt overhang is to hang on even more debt.

In China, meanwhile, the authorities desperately prod their people to give more...to produce more. Or, at least to build more plant and equipment with which to turn out more goods.

In the US, consumer spending is about 70% of the economy. In China, fixed capital formation is estimated to have made up 70% of China's growth in 2008 and as much as 90% in the first half of this year.

Is this a formula for a happy marriage? Over the last two years, this co-dependent relationship has broken down. Paul Krugman wrote in The New York Times that we've seen "the greatest collapse in world trade in history."

But neither side has learned a thing. The taker now proposes to take more. The giver now proposes to give more.

They don't need counseling. They need a divorce.

Bill Bonner
for The Daily Reckoning Australia

• Chinese Yuan Marches Towards World Domination
• Admonishment from China and the Decline of U.S. Credibility
• US Has Highest Unemployment Rate of All Major Economies
• Chinese Consumers Are Getting Shiny New Credit Cards
• Geithner Reassures China that America Takes Financial Obligations Seriously

As for inflation, the lowest inflation rate among the world's larger economies is in - you guess it - Japan. After 20 years of on-again, off-again deflation, it's on again in Japan...with inflation at NEGATIVE 2.2%. But inflation is negative in the US too - at minus 1.3%.

Both Japan and the US claim positive GDP growth, compared to Europe, which is still in recession. But throughout the world - except perhaps for the BRIC nations - growth is weak and hesitant.

The US and the UK are both consumption economies. No consumption; no growth. But how do you get people who've consumed too much to consume even more? They know they can't afford to keep spending. And they know that going further into debt just makes the situation worse. What can you do?

You bribe them!

You give them more money, say, in unemployment assistance. Or, you give them a tax credit when they buy a new house. Or, you give companies a big tax break. In the most recent stimulus bill, for example, the feds do all three - including giving Pulte Homes a $450 million tax refund.

Here at The Daily Reckoning we never met a tax cut we didn't like. But with the deficit at 13% of GDP, we might make an exception. One way or another, someone's going to have to pay for the feds' big spending stimulus efforts. Taxpayers. Bondholders. Dollar holders. All of the above.

President Obama told the crowd in Singapore this weekend that he would make sure Ben Bernanke stayed away from his helicopters. The Chinese are the biggest holder of US bonds in the world. The Japanese are next. Between the two of them they fund a big part of America's current spending. Naturally, America's president is eager to keep the cash coming his way. So he has had to reassure the nation's largest creditor that their loans to the US will be repaid in good order...and good currency.

China alone has $2.3 trillion in reserves...most of it in dollars. Of course, the Chinese want to diversify out of greenbacks. But they're caught in a trap of their own making. If they turn away from the dollar, they undermine its value...and the value of their own reserves. What's more, America is still China's number one customer. They need to sell to America. And for that they need to keep their own currency from rising too much against the greenback. A higher yuan makes their products relatively more expensive compared to other exporters.

So, the infernal system continues...America creates dollars. The foreigners take them as though they had value. And they will have value...as long as they take them.

In the '90s and '00s the newspapers were full of stories about what a great place America was. Its economy was so dynamic...its entrepreneurs were so clever...its financial system was so highly evolved and flexible. What could go wrong?

Everything!

And now we're going to read a lot of claptrap about what an awful place it is.

"The American dream needs repair," is forerunner of the genre. In today's Financial Times, it focuses on the rigidities of the US system. The time was when a young American could start at the bottom and work his way up. Luck and pluck was all that it took. But now, according to scholars at the Brookings Institution, people stay put. If you're born poor in America you're more likely to stay poor than if you had been born poor in Britain, Denmark, Sweden or dozens of other countries.

What happened? The authors do not say. So we will. Success breeds failure. As a society becomes rich, more and more people find ways to game the system. The elite get tax credits, tariffs, and protective regulations. Every layer of bureaucracy makes it harder for new competitors to get ahead. And every new tax on income makes it harder for upstarts to join the ranks of the rich. The poor get their parasitic benefits too. Welfare, unemployment compensation, child tax credits, medicare, food stamps, social security - all of these programs give the poor an incentive to stay poor.

Bill Bonner
for The Daily Reckoning Australia

• US Economists Think China Should Raise the Value of Yuan
• Obama Plans to Do Away With Ireland’s Tax Advantage
• U.S. Government Hiding True Unemployment Rate in Statistics
• Harding the Last American President to Deal Honestly With a Major Financial Crisis
• Baby Boomers Face Early Retirement With No Money Saved

"Think about it. We haven't yet hit bottom on employment but that will happen at some point. Employment is not going to zero, of that we can assure you. But when we do start to see the economic clouds part in a more decisive fashion, what are employers likely to do first? Well, naturally they will begin to boost the workweek and just getting back to pre-recession levels would be the same as hiring more than two million people. Then there are the record number of people who got furloughed into part-time work and again, they total over nine million, and these folks are not counted as unemployed even if they are working considerably fewer days than they were before the credit crunch began.

"So the business sector has a vast pool of resources to draw from before they start tapping into the ranks of the unemployed or the typical 100,000-125,000 new entrants into the labour force when the economy turns the corner. Hence the unemployment rate is going to very likely be making new highs long after the recession is over - perhaps even years."

Like we keep saying...get ready for a long, Japan-like slump.

But here's a headline that offers hope for a brighter future:

"Unions prod Obama to fix ailing airline industry"

On the surface of it, the idea is absurd. What does Obama know about airplanes? Who would want to fly in an airplane with Obama in the pilot seat? But the headline reveals today's most popular delusion - that the government can fix everything.

In fact, there is no evidence that government can fix anything other than the problems it has caused itself. And then only in rare, accidental moments of lucidity.

But that doesn't stop people from hallucinating. They think Obama can fix the auto industry, by paying people to buy a new car. And they think he can fix the housing industry too - by extending the new buyer tax credit.

It doesn't occur to them that the problems in the housing industry are almost exclusively the fault of the federal government in the first place. The feds subsidized mortgages, encouraged mortgage lending to people who should have been renting, and lowered interest rates. These fixes created a bubble in the housing sector. No bubble expands forever. Eventually, they all blow up...which is what happened.

But let's go back to flying machines. The gist of the AP article is that unions want more regulation. The deregulation that began in the Carter Administration produced lower fares, they admit. But it also increased capacity. And now that the economy is in a slump, the extra capacity is a heavy burden to the entire industry.

"Airlines are offering the fewest seats to passengers, measured by available seats and distance traveled, in more than a decade. They have shed more than 158,000 full-time jobs since employment peaked in 2001 and lost an estimated $33 billion over the past decade. Thirteen airlines have filed for bankruptcy in the past two years."

Airlines are cutting back and laying off workers. Someone - O! Bama! - should put a stop to it!

Seems to us that the fly-boys are doing what they ought to do. Any interference by the feds will, once again, only make things worse.

Bill Bonner
for The Daily Reckoning Australia

• Trading Airline Stocks in an Energy Bull Market
• Economy Has to Grow at 1% to Stay Even With Population Growth
• Obama Has Business Plan for the Car Industry
• Tips from an Obama Insider on the Next Two Years
• No Spike in Oil Price Following IEA “Third Oil Shock” Announcement

The financial crisis of '08-'09 was not a head cold. It didn't go away.

It was more like diabetes, a stroke, or cancer. It was serious. Life threatening. We may not recover. Our only hope is to change our habits, undergo some nasty treatments...and endure a long convalescence.

But that's not what most people think. They are convinced that the feds gave the economy a miracle drug. It cleared up the trouble lickety split. Now, our troubles are behind us.

The Dow moved up 17 points on Friday, leaving it above the 10,000 mark. Gold rose too - it is at a new record high, only $5 below $1,100.

According to the news reports, the US economy is 'growing' again. Yes, that's the official storyline.

But wait, what kind of growth is this? David Rosenberg:

"All we can say is that if the overwhelming consensus is correct that the recession is behind us, then what we have on our hands is the mother of all jobless recoveries and whatever economic growth is being squeezed into the system comes courtesy of the most dramatic intervention by the government in recorded history, including the New Deal 1930s era. President Obama is now running fiscal deficits that would have made FDR blush."

The quacks at the Fed and the Treasury department have delivered the biggest jolt of adrenaline in history. People in the private sector won't spend? Heck, the feds will spend for them!

It took the Fed nearly one hundred years to grow its balance sheet - which is the foundation of the US money supply - to $800 billion. Then, after Lehman Bros. went broke, it doubled its balance sheet...to more than $1.8 trillion.

Early last week, the Fed announced that it would keep the firehose- sized IV in place. Then, by the end of the week, the G-20 meeting of finance ministers confirmed said they were all sticking with their stimulus programs.

You can't put that much cash into a financial system without getting some kind of reaction. Goldman is making record profits, for example. How does Goldman make money? It is finance business. It profits by offering credit. When credit expands, the moneylenders and speculators at Goldman make money.

The private sector isn't borrowing. Every day brings more proof.

Consumer credit contracted again in September - the 8th month this year.

Unemployment just passed the 10% mark, reports The New York Times.

"Small Businesses Hunker Down to Survive," says another headline story.

Another big bank went bust in California.

But while the private sector de-leverages, the public sector expands. Now, it's the feds who are doing the borrowing - about $1.7 trillion this year.

This is great for the people who help the feds finance their spending. But all it does is add more debt to the system. And debt is the real problem.

If former OMB director David Stockman is right, we'll see deficits over $2 trillion for a decade.

What people once took for absurd they now take for granted. Such as trillion-dollar deficits. For even with a hole in public finances equal to 13% of GDP the US House of Representatives passed a law overhauling the health care system, at a cost of more than $1 trillion.

What were they thinking?

Well, they were probably thinking that 'deficits don't matter.' And they were probably justifying the expense on the grounds that it was 'countercyclical spending' that would help pull the US out of its slump.

Whatever they were thinking, they weren't remembering what happened 20 years ago. It was 20 years ago today that the Berlin Wall fell, bringing to an end a 40-year demonstration project. The East Germans/Soviets wanted to show the world how well economists working for the government could run an economy.

And we found out!

Bill Bonner
for The Daily Reckoning Australia

• Government Debt
• Bankers Take Money From the Government and Use it to Speculate
• Feds Have Used the Correction to Increase Their Power and Add to Their Wealth
• Why Weren’t Economists On Top of This Thing?
• Where Do the Feds Get Any Money?

Much of your medical info is already stored electronically, of course, but much more is stuffed into old paper file folders. Nor is there any centralized database that routes your records wherever they are wanted. That is going to change, and change dramatically.

The present system has too many embedded inefficiencies, and the industry wants them gone with yesterday's used latex gloves. Whether you like it or not, someday soon there will be a collection of bits and bytes that stores all the most intimate details of your health history.

Making that happen is a daunting job, and a touchy one.

On the one hand, think of how much medical data each American accumulates each year. Multiply that by 300 million. The amount of paper currently required to track it all would stretch to the moon. Doctors want to set fire to that stack.

But on the other hand, they don't want their patients' records falling into the hands of every Eastern European hacker for whom such data would be a major arm shot to his fake Viagra business. Data security has to be tight.

Thus software solutions must be developed both to serve and to protect. Billions will be spent in the process of digitizing, maintaining, and guarding medical records, and guess whose pocket the money will be extracted from. Did you select mine?

Don't care for this idea of white jackets anywhere in the world having access to your private info at the click of a mouse? Or don't like the idea of footing the bill for the conversion? Well, tough. On both counts. You won't be able to prevent the medical business from setting up the grand database, nor from using your own money to manufacture the electronic you.

In fact, the government has already installed the plumbing that will feed the big money shower. As in, very big.

That happened on February 17, when President Obama signed the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH), which its sponsors had tacked onto the comprehensive American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).

Everyone loves ARRA, right? Well, maybe. But citizens who cheered it might not have been quite so happy if they were aware of everything they were agreeing to fund with their hard-earned dollars. Buried inside HITECH is an allotment of $19 billion (yep, that's billion with a B) just for the conversion of paper medical records into electronic.

Tell you who was cheering lustily, for certain: health care software developers. For example, maybe you read about the recent deal whereby Dell acquired Perot Systems, a premium software company, for about $4 billion. What that was largely about was HITECH. Dell didn't have real access to it. Perot Systems - whose annual revenues derive 25% from government and 48% from health care - did. Sound the wedding bells.

Dell, of course, is by no means the only company eager to step into the generous governmental shower stall. You can bet that IBM, Hewlett- Packard, and the rest of the heavies in the field are all busily preparing proposals, if they haven't already filed them.

And the big guys won't have that field all to themselves. There's a lot of cash to be spread around. Smaller competitors will nab their share.

Those are the kinds of companies Casey's Extraordinary Technology searches for and recommends as longer-term investments. The ones whose bottom lines will profit the most from political largesse.

Subscribers learned about one such firm in the September issue. There will be others, as anyone who has both a solid product and the savvy to play Washington's money game, is going to prosper mightily in the years ahead.

Regards,

Doug Hornig
for The Daily Reckoning Australia

• When Computers Meet Cell Biology
• Technology Is Pushing Down Farm Prices
• Meredith Whitney and the Buy Recommendation on Goldman Sachs
• Money Can’t Buy Happiness
• The Impact of the Genome

And don't forget the foreclosures. They're running 23% ahead of last year...even though they weren't as bad last month as last month.

Associated Press:

"The number of households caught up in the foreclosure crisis rose more than 5 percent from summer to fall as a federal effort to assist struggling borrowers was overwhelmed by a flood of defaults among people who lost their jobs.

"The foreclosure crisis affected nearly 938,000 properties in the July- September quarter, compared with about 890,000 in the prior three months, according to a report released Thursday by RealtyTrac Inc. That puts foreclosure-related filings on a pace to hit about 3.5 million this year, up from more than 2.3 million last year."

What an economy!

The Dow is now back over the 10,000 mark...just where it was in March 1999 - 10 years ago. Is that progress...or what?

During that time, the dollar has lost about a quarter of its purchasing power. That means stock market investors have lost only about 25% or their money over the decade. Not too bad, huh?

And, oh yes...they've lost their jobs too...

AP continues:

"Unemployment is the main reason homeowners are falling into trouble. While the economy is likely out of recession, the unemployment rate - now at a 26-year high of 9.8 percent - isn't expected to peak until the middle of next year."

But hey...we're not going to complain. We've got a job - trying to figure out what is going on. And that is a job that is recession-proof. Everyone wants to know what will happen next. When times turn tough they want to know even more.

So, will someone please tell us what is going on...we want to know too!

"What do you think?" asked a friend at dinner last night. "The way I see it, Obama's goose is cooked. He's stuck. He can't go forward and he can't back up. He can't back away from all those promises - including his promise to rescue the US economy. If he does, the voters and his own party will revolt. On the other hand, he doesn't have the money to go forward. He has to borrow it. And if tries to borrow much more, the Chinese will revolt.

"His only hope is that the economy revives...so he doesn't have to do anything. And that's not going to happen."

Why not? Wait a minute...you already know the answer to that question. Because it's a depression. It's the end of the road for the consumer credit economy. Consumers did their best. They borrowed as much as they could. They spent like there was no tomorrow.

But now, it IS tomorrow. And now, they've got to settle up. So, boo hoo...no more wild parties. Daddy took the T-bird away. Get over it.

What should Obama have done? Nothing. But the last chief of state to do that in a time of financial crisis was Warren G. Harding - one of America's best presidents. That's what he did in the panic of 1920. How come we don't hear much about the crisis of 1920?

Because Harding didn't do anything; it went away.

But that was a long time ago. Now, presidents are expected to do something. They have too many people around them who stand to make a buck out of it.

Yesterday, Goldman announced its quarterly earnings. Goldman, you'll recall, is the firm that former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson (a former Goldman chairman) called 13 times before breakfast during the financial crisis of last September. And Goldman is also the firm with its men in key posts in Washington, helping the feds figure out what to do with trillions of dollars in bailout funds (TARP, TALF, Fed's buying toxic assets, etc.)

Well, what a coincidence...now the firm says its latest profit is four times what it was a year ago.

The firm's "activities have become more profitable after the crisis reduced competition and governments injected funds in the banking system," says The Financial Times.

Goldman can borrow the funds at almost no cost. Then, it can use the money in a variety of ways...such as lending it back to the government for guaranteed profits...or speculating on oil or gold, or whatever. Not for nothing is gold is up 17% in the last six months. If you can borrow at zero cost you can do a lot of speculating. Many speculators are using the government's money to bet against the US dollar - and making a lot of money.

The US government has put $13 trillion of the nation's money and credit on the line. That's how much the feds have at risk on all their toxic asset purchases, loans and guarantees. Apparently, Goldman gets its share.

What can the feds do? Everyone is telling Mr. Obama that he must do something...now! So what does he do? Something stupid, of course.

Yesterday, poor Mr. Obama did something stupid. He said he wanted to send 78 million American seniors a check for $250 each.

What a nice Christmas present. But wait. Even Santa doesn't have that kind of money. The feds are already running a deficit somewhere close to $15 billion PER DAY.

But heck, who keeps track of these things? And who quibbles about a few billion more or less?

Not us. Not here at The Daily Reckoning. We've got other things to quibble about. In fact, we've got so many things to quibble about we hardly know where to start.

So let's just pick a news item at random and we'll begin our quibbling there. Here's one:

Social Security recipients are not going to get a COLA. A COLA is a "cost of living adjustment." It's what Social Security recipients get when prices go up. It adjusts their payments to inflation.

COLA seemed like a fair idea when it was put in place. That was when prices were going up. The old folks were getting a raw deal and people felt bad about it. We remember those years. There was a report in the press in the late '70s that old people were "forced to eat dog food" to survive. We suggested that the government allow people to use food stamps to get pet food. But that was greeted like so many of our attempts to be helpful.

The trouble with the COLA is that there is no UN-COLA. When prices fall, there's no way to get the money back. The adjustments only go in one direction.

And prices ARE falling. US import prices roes only 0.1% last month...down 12% from a year ago. Take out energy and they're still down 4%. And that's with a dollar that is losing value at the same time. Imports should be going up in price. Instead, the downward tug of deflation is so strong that they are pulled down...even with the dollar buoying them up.

So, imagine that the United States slips into a Japan-like slump...a long slump with off-and-on falling prices. The government's budget projections call for a rapid return to growth. Even then, they expect trillion-dollar deficits until the end of the next decade. But if the economy does not return to rapid growth, the situation gets much worse - fast. Tax revenues don't go up...and spending continues to mount. There's no way to reduce payments to Social Security recipients. And imagine the poor sap who proposes it. Or who suggests that maybe government salaries don't have to be twice as high as private salaries. He wouldn't last long.

This leaves the feds in a tight spot. They won't have trillion-dollar deficits...they will have multi-trillion-dollar deficits. They won't have just a little trillion-dollar hole to fill; they will have a Grand Canyon.

How to fill it?

Ain't no way... Ain't no way... At a certain, but unknown, point the whole thing falls apart. The feds can't raise enough money. They go broke.

Now, hold on...the US federal government can't go broke, can it? Those fellows have a printing press. They can print their way out, no?

A very, very good question. Why would a government with the power to create money at will ever go bust? And yet, they do. Why? Because it is cheaper.

But this is far too large and important a subject for a Friday. This is a subject for a Tuesday. Maybe even a Wednesday. But Friday? Nope. God didn't make Fridays for this kind of thing. We'll have to come back to it next week.

Can anything stop the Chinese?

"China consolidates its lead in world trade," was a headline in The New York Times earlier this week.

China competes on price - and usually wins. America loses market share.

"We're finished," said our dinner companion last night. "We're fossils. We're yesterday's news. We're a nation of old people. The growth and innovation is taking place elsewhere - such as in China. You can feel the difference when you go there. New buildings. New roads. New cities. New shoppers. Here, everything is old. The buildings. The people. Everything.

"I tell my children to move to the Far East. We're history here."

This morning comes news that the Chinese have bought another auto company - Britain's van maker, LDV. And over on page 11 of The Wall Street Journal is a photo of the head of China's big bank, CCB. Asked about whether the bank was looking at acquisitions in the West, Mr. Guo Shuquing said he wasn't interested. Western banks are on a "downhill path," he said.

"Of course, there's something nice about living in a society which has peaked out," our friend continued. "You have all the grace and style of an advanced civilization without the annoying hustle and bustle. It's perfect for retired people...We live in a retirement society."

Bill Bonner
for The Daily Reckoning Australia

• Feds Have Economy on Life Support
• China’s Economy is Now Freer and More Competitive than the United States
• Have the Feds Given the Economy a Miracle Drug?
• If the Economy is Not Recovering It Isn’t Getting Enough Stimulus
• Rising in Defense of Goldman Sachs

It is as if the Pulitzer committee had given the prize to someone whose book had just one chapter; "We hope this will encourage him to finish it well," says the committee.

But the Nobel committee might have done worse. Barack Obama is not the first American president to win the award. Woodrow Wilson got it before him. Obama seems ready to continue unnecessary wars. But at least he didn't start them. Wilson sent American troops into the Europea in 1917. He transformed the European war into a World War and drew it out for another 2 years...at a cost of millions of lives, not to mention trillions in expenses.

Wilson was a fool and a humbug, no more deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize than Kaiser Wilhelm. As for Obama, we haven't quite gotten his measure yet. Fool? Fraud? It's still too early to say.

But if he had been smart, he would have followed the example of another US president - Millard Fillmore. Go to Washington. You will find no monuments to Fillmore. 'Tis a pity. Fillmore actually kept the peace. Not only that, he made improvements; he installed running water in the White House. Then, when Oxford University offered him an honorary degree, he turned it down. The degree was written in Latin. Fillmore said he didn't want a degree he couldn't understand.

Bill Bonner
for The Daily Reckoning Australia

• Barack Obama is a Strong Favourite to Win the Presidency
• President Barack Obama and Franklin Roosevelt Are Becoming Akin
• Obama Has Business Plan for the Car Industry
• Bernie Madoff is a Giant in His Field
• Obama Admits: America is Out of Money

Then, word came that even Alan Greenspan thinks a recovery is underway.

"This is what a recovery looks like," said the maestro. That settled the matter as far as we are concerned. Alan Greenspan didn't see history's biggest financial bubble until it exploded in his face. In the following few words we undertake to show that Greenspan is as blind as ever.

"Great time for US consumers, America is on sale," says an item at YahooFinance. The "discounts are unbelievable," adds a blogger known as Frugal Rhode Island Momma. All across the nation, merchants are no longer selling the merits of their products; they're selling price. McDonald's advertises its "dollar meals." Hotels have cut room prices by 20% in the last year. House prices are down about 30% since 2006. Sellers are offering bargains and they want buyers to know it. "Sold for $365,000 in 2006. Now $195,000," says a typical house ad.

Foreigners have noticed too. Colleagues in London say they are thinking of moving to Florida where they will get far more for their money. The dollar falls; foreign purchases go up. Stocks, for example. In the first quarter, foreigners were unloading US shares. Now they're buying more than $100 billion worth per month.

It is a deflationary world, at least that part of the world between the Rio Grande and the 49th parallel. The CPI in the United States is negative and falling faster than at any time in 59 years. Households can only be induced to spend money by cutting prices. "Cash for Clunkers" cut prices on new cars by about 20%. As soon as it ended, so did auto sales. Most new house sales could be traced to a tax credit - which reduced the down payment by at least 20%. That program is scheduled to end in November.

And now, the White House frets about jobs. Unemployment is supposed to be a lagging indicator, but this time it seems to have dropped out of the race all together. Still, Congressional elections are coming up. Unemployed voters are surly and unreliable. So, the Obama administration is considering a $3,000 tax credit to bribe businesses to hire them. If the typical employee costs his firm about $40,000, this effectively reduces the cost of labor by 7.5%.

It's beginning to look more and more like the Roosevelt years. By the end of this year, all the jobs created during the bubble era - 2002- 2007 - will have been eliminated, making it the first decade with no job growth since the '30s. We're expecting a fireside chat any day.

Typically big businesses cut workers in a recession. Then, when the economy recovers, small businesses are quick to take them back. But this is unlike the typical post-war recession. This time, deprived of capital as well as customers, small businesses don't have a chance. Neither does a genuine recovery.

The authorities still do not understand what is going on. They are used to fooling most of the people most of the time. They think they can dupe them again - with bailouts and boondoggles. But real demand has vanished as households try to pay down their debt. That is not going to change anytime soon. Not while the federal government is sabotaging a genuine recovery. It's savings - capital - the US economy needs. A capitalist economy in which the capitalist have no capital won't work. Why is there no capital? Because the feds take it.

Supplying cash-for-this and cash-for-that is an expensive proposition, especially when tax receipts are falling. The money has to come from somewhere. As it turns out, the feds borrow it from the very people who are trying to rebuild their personal balance sheets. Of the $1.6 trillion the US government will borrow this year, the biggest single lender is the private sector, chipping in $700 billion. But instead of being put to use in a way that might stimulate a real recovery - providing credit for small business and consumers - it is taken up by the US government and then frittered away.

The banks are happy to play the government's game too. They can borrow overnight money from the Fed at only one quarter of 1%, annualized. But lending to small business is hard work. And it is risky. Why bother? The US Treasury will pay them 4 % for lending back to the government, long term. This is practically free money to the banks. Both the bankers and politicians end up ahead - with a bigger piece of the economy under their control.

Meanwhile, the real economy staggers. "Drought of credit hampers recovery," summarizes The Wall Street Journal. The United States needs to create a million and a half new jobs each year just to keep up with population growth. Currently there are 15 million people without jobs already...and a couple hundred thousand more unemployed every month. And if this recovery continues long enough there won't be a single person left in America who still has a job.

Even if the economy could be stabilized, it will leave millions without jobs - more or less permanently. Add the people working reduced hours, and those who have been looking for work so long they are no longer counted, and their families, and you have a quarter of the population without money to spend. That's why this slump is not going away any time soon. As in Japan in the '90s, we may have to live with this depression for the rest of our lives.

Until next time,

Bill Bonner
for The Daily Reckoning Australia

• Normally Small Businesses Lead the Economy Out of Recession
• The Business Bankruptcies and the Personal Bankruptcies
• Where, Exactly, is this Economy Headed?
• Feds Can’t Cause a Genuine Recovery Simply by Throwing Money into Economy
• There is No Real Economic Recovery Taking Place

- Edward Gibbon

Warren Buffett famously says that people do not make money by betting against the US economy. But two years ago we decided to take a chance.

"We are short the United States of America," we announced from the comfort and safety of our headquarters in London. "Sell its stocks. Sell its bonds. Sell its money. Sell its real estate. Sell the equity. Sell the debt. Sell everything."

What we saw was an over-stretched empire getting ready to snap. But we were also allowing ourselves to be lazy. Rather than deconstruct the capital structure of the world's largest economy, we decided to sell the whole damned thing.

All Hell broke loose in September 2008. Since then, US stocks have gone down about a third. Real estate too. Unemployment has doubled. Consumer prices are going down at the fastest rate since the '50s. And the economy is in the worse recession since WWII.

Meanwhile, Americans' per capita wealth has fallen from $172,000 in September from $212,000 two years earlier. And the UN reports that the quality of life in America has gone down too...from #5 on its list in 2000, it fell to #13 in 2007. No doubt it is below #20 now.

Buffett has lost billions betting on the US economy while our gold positions are handily up; gold was the most profitable major asset over the last ten years.

So you see, we were right; America was a sell two years ago.

And now it is the dollar that is falling. It's gone down 12% in the last six months - a huge move for a major currency.

"Asia tries to slow dollar fall," is the lead story in today's Financial Times.

Today, a buck and forty-seven cents will buy you only 1 euro. Ten years ago, you could have gotten a euro for less than a single dollar. A falling dollar makes imports more expensive, say analysts...raising the cost of living in the homeland. But you wouldn't know it from walking around on the streets of Miami or Las Vegas. You can get a house at 50% off its price three years ago. As for the breakfast special - for less than 3 euros you can get enough food to kill a Pakistani.

By European standards, America is cheap.

"Europeans again interested in Florida houses," says a headline in The New York Times.

House prices are down 30% to 50%. The dollar is down about a third too. That makes the United States a bargain.

But is the United States of America about to become even cheaper?

One thing we were wrong about when we issued our 'sell America' call two years ago was US debt. Treasury bonds have resisted the general downward trend of things with the stars and stripes on them. Bonds have not gone down; they've gone up.

Private households are buying them for their retirements. Banks are buying them for risk-free profits. Speculators are buying them in anticipation of deflation.

David Rosenberg:

"The big story yesterday was the further massive $12 billion decline in outstanding consumer debt in August - the consensus was looking for an $8 billion contraction. This was the seventh month of debt retrenchment in a row. In other words, the tidal wave of the credit collapse continues unabated, and this is the primary reason why bond yields are still in a fundamental downtrend.

"Over the past year, consumers have run down their debt by a record $113 billion (and this does not include mortgages). This is an absolutely epic shift in household attitudes towards credit and discretionary spending."

Americans are saving. And they're buying US Treasury bonds. (More below...) But how safe is their money? Is it a good idea to buy US debt now?

On Wednesday, Latvia tried to raise a trivial amount of money. It offered $17 million worth of 6-month bonds. How likely is it that Latvia will default before Easter? We don't know, but investors judged it not worth the risk. Not only did the bond auction failed, it failed with no bids.

That's what happens when lenders lose faith in a government. They refuse to lend it money - except at high rates of interest. But the high rates of interest work like a noose on the neck of a cattle rustler. They block the vital flow of oxygen - not to mention breaking his neck.

Note that the US federal government is still functioning like an empire at the peak of its power. The Pentagon is still rustling up trouble all over the world - at a cost of trillions. US government employees are growing more numerous and richer - with twice the annual incomes of the private sector. And the Obama Administration - apparently unaware that the total unfunded debts and obligations of the federal government have soared to nearly $120 trillion - is considering new ways to get rid of cash.

Remarkably, investors still lend the US government money - asking only 4% annual yield on a 30-year loan. As for 91-day money, they practically give that to the feds for free; it sports only a yield of 0.066%.

This will surely be a point of puzzlement for the financial historian of the next century. It is certainly a point of puzzlement for us.

Yesterday, gold hit a new record at $1057. Doesn't gold go up when inflation rates rise? And don't bonds go down when inflation goes up?

So why are people buying bonds with such puny yields?

There is a lot of whispering in this market. Gold is trying to tell us something. Bonds are trying to tell us something. The dollar seems to have something on its mind too. Stocks are just babbling.

If gold is trying to signal that inflation is coming, the bond market is not paying attention. Bonds seem to be saying that it is deflation we should be worried about; but the stock market doesn't seem to hear.

And there's the dollar. The greenback is in the same choir with stocks and gold, as near as we can tell. They all seem to be chanting about inflation coming back.

But what if they're all wrong?

Just look at what is going on in Washington, if you can bear it.

The feds have a budget that anticipates inflation and growth. Spending is supposed to remain flat until 2013. Tax receipts, which are no higher today than they were 10 years ago, are supposed to rise, gradually filling in the Grand Canyon of deficits. The number crunchers think we're headed back to the Reagan years - when the tough-love policies of the Volcker Fed squeezed out inflation and created a real boom. Then, tax revenues rose 9% per year between 1984 and 1989.

How likely is that today? Not very. Instead, what is likely to unfold is a deflation story. Instead of staying flat, federal expenses are likely to rise as one failed stimulus gives way to another failed stimulus. Then, instead of going up, tax revenues will go down...digging an even grander canyon between out-go and income.

Then, or long before, there will be a panic out of bonds, the dollar, stocks - practically everything. Everything goes down!

At this point, the US will be in about the same situation as the Roman Empire as it approached retirement. Expenses kept rising. Rome had to pay the Blackwater-type military contractors of the era...in addition to keeping Roman mobs supplied with food stamps and unemployment benefits...while its tax base fell. Gradually, the empire lost the ability to defend itself.

When Edward Gibbon began his history of Rome's decline and fall, Roman real estate had probably been in a bear market for at least 1300 years. Rome's population fell from over a million to under 20,000. Politically, Italy had broken apart more than 1,000 years before Gibbon was born, and it wouldn't be put back together again until nearly 100 years after he was dead.

It's far too early to write the story of America's decline and fall. That job will fall to some future historian, perhaps seated on the ruins of the Lincoln Memorial, wondering how people made such a mess of things.

Our guess is that he will come to the same conclusion we have: Stocks? Bonds? The dollar? Investors should have sold them all!

Bill Bonner
for The Daily Reckoning Australia

• America’s Decline as a Great Empire
• Warren Buffett Says American Economy is a Shambles
• Mistakes Made By America Are the Same Mistakes That Empires Make
• Deleveraging Will Give Us a Bout of ’30s-Style Deflation
• Biggest Problem With US Economy is Too Much Debt