In this week's Off the Cuff podcast, Chris and John Michael Greer discuss:

• Government By Cannibalism
  • ​Good programs are increasingly killed to support bad ones
• ​'Shale Miracle' Propaganda PR
  • ​The energy boom story we're being sold is wrong
• ​How to Cut Your Energy Consumption by 25% for a Few $ Hundred
  • ​A simple trip to the hardware store
• ​Living with Less
  • ​Easier than you think. More satisfying, too

The title of this piece is The Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing.  The subtitle is Why Your Bread Is Going to Cost More.  I connect these two in reflecting on my recent podcast with David Collum, in which he stated that our money has no value and that this fact is distorting everything.

What he meant was, if you take your money to the bank to deposit it, the bank offers no interest on that money, implying that money has no value to them.  If they valued it or had a legitimate use for it, they would offer you something for its use.  Obviously, money doesn't have zero value to the banks; they can place it on deposit with the Fed for 0.25% yearly interest.  But by any historical measure, money has no value right now.

That's just what happens when any commodity – which money happens to be – becomes too abundant.  It drops in price.  What 0% rates on money tell us is that there's just an enormous amount of it sloshing around – and that, my dear friends, distorts everything else.

As I have said many times, when you misprice money itself, everything else becomes mispriced, too.  » Read more

Well, as expected, some sort of a last minute, sausage-like deal was struck at the eleventh hour.  Well, actually, the twelfth hour, given that only the tax side of the equation was "solved," leaving $109 billion in immediate spending cuts still on the table.

Actually, it's even murkier than that.  The deal that was struck was a Senate deal and the House could do more, less, or even just scuttle the whole thing.  So let's call it a first step on the path to a deal. » Read more

Executive Summary

• A rising dollar would negatively impact stock market profits and valuations
• Interest rates ultimately will rise, and that will be a game-changer
• Investors will eventually realize that "risk-free" assets (e.g., U.S. Treasurys) are NOT safe havens
• Why there will be few places for financial capital to find shelter in 2013

If you have not yet read Part I: The Structural Endgame of the Fiscal Cliff, available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

In Part I, we covered the basics of wealth and political power in the U.S. and found that the Fiscal Cliff is only a symptom of a structural endgame in which the imbalance between what has been promised and what can be collected in taxes will continue growing until it triggers a financially driven political crisis that I believe will inevitably become a full-blown Constitutional crisis.

Though there are many facets of this long-term political crisis that are worthy of further exploration, we will to start with three financial aspects that could start impacting households in 2013: a rise in interest rates and a resultant destruction of bond valuations, a rise in the U.S. dollar that negatively impacts U.S. corporate profits and thus stock market valuations, and a reduction in upper-income households’ spending as a result of higher taxes that depress discretionary consumer spending.

A Rising Dollar Negatively Impacts Stock Market Profits and Valuations

Let’s start with a topic that I have covered in depth over the past year, the structural reasons behind the rise of the U.S. dollar (USD).  The recurring fantasy that Europe’s fiscal and debt crises are “fixed” and the Federal Reserve’s money-printing/Treasury bond purchases have recently depressed the USD, but in the longer term, the USD has been tracing out an unmistakably bullish pattern of higher highs and higher lows since May 2011... » Read more