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What has never been in doubt in my mind is that thin-air money printing and the bailing out of banks and financial institutions would be tried and tried again.  The alternative is unthinkable to those in power, because it involves living within one's means and letting those who took the risks eat the losses. 

Here we are at the tail end of a forty year credit bubble in which everybody participated (although China and India were late to the event) and nobody wants that party to end.  It is simply so much easier to simply borrow, spend and kick the can down the road.

As noted here repeatedly, we have an exponential credit system which, by extension, gives us an exponential money system.  Until and unless the credit markets can be coerced back onto an exponential trajectory, nothing will work quite right to the point that systemic financial collapse is a distinct possibility.

Given that possibility, nobody in power has even the slightest wish to test out the odds and so they will opt to print, print, print.

Just yesterday the UK opted for another round of printing but look how they applied it:

Late 2009

Stress and anxiety defined my world.  But on the surface, no one suspected that.

I was a Vice President at a Fortune 300 Silicon Valley tech giant, about to celebrate my ninth anniversary there. I had arrived there after a successful start-up stint, and before that, an MBA from Stanford and a few years at a Wall Street bulge-bracket firm.

My career appeared to be progressing right on schedule. So what was there to worry about? » Read more

It's been a frenetic couple of weeks.

Amidst the deterioration in Europe and the growing weakness in the US markets, in mid-May Chris issued the warning Get Ready: We're About to Have Another 2008-Style Crisis. Downside momentum has built since then, leading him to release a rare call to buy gold last week (which has since proved prescient in the immediate term) as well as a more-pointed report today to our enrolled members: Buckle Up - Market Breakdown In Progress.

It's times of heightened uncertainty like this where dislocating change has the potential to occur swiftly and sharply. Often events move much faster than people's ability to react appropriately to them. We've been recommending a defensive posture for investors for a long time now, but it's critical to adopt that position before the big market swings occur.

If you are going to keep money in the financial markets (stocks, bonds, etc.), you need to honestly ask yourself if you have the expertise and the bandwidth to intelligently and actively manage your investments throughout a coming period of potentially gut-wrenching volatility and uncertainty. If you know you don't or are uncertain, we can't stress enough the importance of working with a good financial advisor who will design and steward a prudent, risk-managed portfolio for you. » Read more

There’s been a lot of excitement in the past year over the rise of North American oil production and the promise of increased oil production across the whole of the Americas in the years to come. National security experts and other geo-political observers have waxed poetic at the thought of this emerging, hemispheric strength in energy supply.

What’s less discussed, however, is the negligible effect this supply swing is having on lowering the price of oil, due to the fact that, combined with OPEC production, aggregate global production remains mostly flat. 

But there’s another component to this new belief in the changing global landscape for oil: the dawning awareness that OPEC’s power has finally gone into decline. You can read the celebration of OPEC’s waning in power in practically every publication from Foreign Policy to various political blogs and op-eds. David Ignatius of the Washington Post wrapped up nearly all of the recent claims in a nice bundle in his May 4, 2012 piece, An Economic Boom Ahead?, when he quoted PFC Energy’s David West:

“This is the energy equivalent of the Berlin Wall coming down,” contends West. “Just as the trauma of the Cold War ended in Berlin, so the trauma of the 1973 oil embargo is ending now.” The geopolitical implications of this change are striking: “We will no longer rely on the Middle East, or compete with such nations as China or India for resources.”

(Source)

While it’s true that the Americas hold great promise to convert natural gas resources to higher production levels, that is not the case with oil. The celebration of a geo-political swing in energy power therefore misses a crucial point: No region -- from OPEC to Non-OPEC, from Africa to Russia -- has the single-handed ability to lower the price of oil now, because none can bring on new supply quickly enough for a long-enough sustained period of time. » Read more