It's different now/rev II

It's different now/rev II is coming on like a runaway train, with no one at the controls able to bring it back into the fold based on the revenge of mother nature and the finalization of the world's business with No. 1 moving manufacturing to China and 2, enabling tech to convert dollars into bits, able to be manipulated in ways thought impossible just 10 years ago. With this in mind, Charles Hugh Smith's take on the vagaries of money is both wise and insightful and his view on It's different now proves yours truly is not alone in sensing the world we know now will not be the world we see just a few years hence.

To whit:

That governments around the world will be forced to distribute "helicopter money" to keep their people fed and housed and their economies from imploding is already a given. Closing all non-essential businesses and gatherings will crimp the livelihood of millions of households and small businesses that lack the financial resources to survive weeks without any revenues.

The only question is whether governments which can borrow or print fresh currency will get ahead of the implosion or fall behind, creating a binary choice: go big now or go home.

Half-measures in helicopter money work about as well as half-measures in quarantine, i.e. they fail to achieve the intended objectives. Dribbling out modest low-interest loans is a half-measure, as is cutting payroll taxes. Neither measure will help employees or small businesses whose income has fallen below the minimum needed to pay essential bills: rent, food, utilities, etc.

A day of reckoning is nigh ...

Meanwhile, the ruling elites will be under increasing pressure to bail out greedy financial elites and gamblers--the same scoundrels and parasites they bailed out in 2008-09. But this is not just another speculative bubble-pop, this is a matter of life and death and solvency for the masses of at-risk households and small businesses. It is a different zeitgeist and a different crisis, and bailing out greedy parasites (banks, indebted corporations, speculators, financiers, etc.) will not go over big while households and small businesses are going bankrupt.

The Federal Reserve, was just handed a lesson in the ineffectiveness of the usual monetary "bazooka" in bailing out the predatory-parasitic class of overleveraged gamblers. Nearly free money for financiers isn't going to save the economy or non-elites sliding toward insolvency.

Instead of leaving the bottom 99.5% to twist in the wind while enriching the predatory-parasitic class, the ruling elites will have to let the top 0.5% twist in the wind and save the bottom 99.5%. This will require going against all the thousands of lobbyists, all the chums at the club, and all the millions in campaign contributions, but it's a binary choice.

Either save your citizenry or sacrifice your legitimacy by bailing out the predatory-parasitic class. If the ruling elites save their parasitic pals, the public will demand the scalps of the predatory-parasitic class, and as the crisis deepens, they will eject every craven, greedy elected toady who caved in to the predatory-parasitic class.

So listen up ruling elites: either go big or go home. Either accept that it's going to take several trillion dollars in helicopter money to insure the most vulnerable households and real-world enterprises remain solvent, or quit and go home.

Any questions?