Slowly We Went Insane

Common Sense Commentary: I reprint the following article from a Pastor's viewpoint. It may have been written about the insanity of financial mismanagement by nations. But from my perspective it is about young High School students who cannot find a part-time job to fill up their idle time and make a bit of spending money, about college students who cannot find a part time job to help pay for their education, about young married couples who can't find a job paying enough to pay their bills and feed their little children, about parents with children in High School or College, but can't afford to help them financially, about older couples who have lost all hope of ever retiring and their meager savings are earning nearly zero interest, about senior citizens who are losing medical coverage under ObamaCare and whose savings are rapidly being diminished because, with no earned interest, they are living off of their principle which will soon be gone.... what then? The reason for all of the above problems is the sin of reckless government spending which has led us all into an inflationary spiral .... which IS about the greed of money and political insanity. But the effects upon our people is not just money, it is physical health and mental health; it is affecting people's emotional and even spiritual lives. Besides that, the insane government spending tended to undermine our national character, our personal responsibility, our very freedom ... and our U.S. Constitution. We are standing at the historic door of a dictatorship. The root cause may be insane money management but the resulting fruit of it is not about money; it is about a disintegrating  nation. RB


Little By Little We Went Insane
By Tim Price
PFP Wealth Management
Lion House
72-75 Red Lion Street
London, WC1R 4NA


“The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both
bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and
economic opportunists.”  - Ernest Hemingway.

“Everyone loves an early inflation. The effects at the beginning of inflation are all good. There is
steepened money expansion, rising government spending, increased government budget deficits,
booming stock markets, and spectacular general prosperity, all in the midst of temporarily stable
prices. Everyone benefits, and no one pays. That is the early part of the cycle. In the later inflation, on the other hand, the effects are all bad. The government may steadily increase the money inflation in order to stave off the latter effects, but the latter effects patiently wait. In the terminal inflation, there is faltering prosperity, tightness of money, falling stock markets, rising taxes, still larger government deficits, and still roaring money expansion, now accompanied by soaring prices and ineffectiveness of all traditional remedies. Everyone pays and no one benefits. That is the full cycle of every inflation.” - Jens O. Parsson, ‘Dying of money: Lessons of the great German and American inflations’.


If it looks like insanity, smells like insanity, tastes like insanity, feels like insanity and struts about

barking, “This is insanity”, then perhaps it might just be insanity.

“We were in the jungle. We had too much money. We had too much equipment. And little by 
little, we went insane.” 

Not the words of Mario Draghi – yet. They are the words of film director Francis Ford Coppola in 
relation to his magnum opus, ‘Apocalypse Now’, a film that so outrageously exploded beyond its 
budget and beyond any reasonable compass that during its making it started being referred to as 
‘Apocalypse Later’. Coppola’s unique vision came at a price. What was expected to be a 14-week 
shoot in the Philippines ended up taking more than a year. Coppola fired his leading man, Harvey 
Keitel, after just two weeks. His replacement, Martin Sheen, turned out to be fighting alcohol 
addiction and suffered a heart attack on set. Numerous members of the crew went down with 
tropical diseases. At key points, helicopters hired for pivotal action sequences were suddenly 
redirected to quell a revolt in the southern Philippines. Then a typhoon hit, the set was destroyed 
and the production was shut down. 

Throughout all of it, Coppola was dealing with increasingly worried money men back in 
Hollywood as the film’s budget ran dry. 

And then Marlon Brando arrived on set, so hugely overweight as to be almost unrecognisable. He 
didn’t have the barest knowledge of the script. And there were actual dead bodies on the set, 
bought to add some ‘atmosphere’ from a local who turned out to be a grave-robber. Then Brando 
shaved all his hair off and insisted on improvising all of his scenes. 

Coppola had sunk his own life savings into the film. He faced financial ruin if he couldn’t finish it. 
He suffered a nervous breakdown and on at least three separate occasions allegedly threatened to 
commit suicide. “My movie is not about Vietnam,” he once explained, “my movie is Vietnam.” 

The markets are not about Vietnam. They are Vietnam. There’s a difference, of course. When a
film studio runs out of capital, the production gets shut down. Corporate resources can only ever
be finite. But when a government runs out of capital, it simply borrows more. Or taxes more. Or
both. At least for as long as it has access to credit by way of maintaining the confidence of the
bond market.

Practically every western government has got its finances into a desperate mess. In the words of
US fund manager Paul Singer of Elliott Management,

“America is deeply insolvent, and for that matter, so are most of continental Europe, the UK and
Japan.”

For as long as governments can perpetuate the illusion of solvency, they can continue to borrow,
and therefore also to spend. But once the illusion is broken..

Actions have consequences. Governments are no different from individuals or corporations or 

film studios in this respect – they can merely perpetuate the myth of solvency for longer, given the
credulity of global capital markets and of agency investors with no real skin in the game in their
bond portfolios. But at some point, the piper must be paid. Which is why every major western
government is determined to inflate, and pay the piper (bondholders) in ever more worthless
paper money. And this is why Mario Draghi has now driven interest rates to below zero. The
natural corollary to universal currency debasement is to own a currency and durable store of
value that cannot be printed on demand. If only we could find one.


Judas Was A Socialist

"Then took Mary a pound of ointment of spikenard, very costly, and anointed the feet of Jesus, and wiped his feet with her hair: and the house was filled with the odour of the ointment. (The ointment was her's to do with as she pleased). Then saith one of his disciples, Judas Iscariot, Simon's son, which should betray him, Why was not this ointment sold for three hundred pence, and given to the poor?  (What Mary did with her own property was none of his business) This he said, not that he cared for the poor; but because he was a thief, and had the bag, and bare what was put therein. (Judas had the morals of a Liberal Politician). Then said Jesus, Let her alone: against the day of my burying hath she kept this. For the poor always ye have with you; but me ye have not always." Jn.12:3-8.

Was this incident about money (300 pence), or about Socialism vs Free Enterprise, Personal Property Rights, Spiritual Commitment, Sacrafice, Love, Greed, Honesty, Dishonesty, Betrayal, Truth and Lying ? RB