By Paul B. Farrell, MarketWatch
SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (MarketWatch) — Memo to the Super Rich, your high-paid lobbyists and your no-compromise political puppets whose sole mission is destroying the presidency: Yes, you are succeeding. You’re also killing the economy.
Thanks to your self-destructive ideology, America is now in the second of back-to-back Lost Decades. A new one on the heels of the 2000-2010 Lost Decade where Wall Street lost more than 20% inflation-adjusted. Get it? You guys launched America’s second Lost Decade of 21st century.
Demonstrators from the Occupy Wall Street campaign march into the courtyard of New York Police Department headquarters in New York last week. Yes, two consecutive job-killing Lost Decades. The first created by Wall Street’s obsessive greed. The new one triggered by the widening wealth gap that’s feeding endless partisan political wars powered by Super Rich conservatives hell-bent on re-establishing the same free-market, trickle-down Reaganomics policies that have been sabotaging America for the last generation.
Unfortunately, the new one gets worse: Why? The coming Lost Decade is a backdrop for a wave of class warfare destined to trigger a historic revolution in American politics, bigger than the ‘29 Crash and Great Depression.
Initially inspired by the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street is a virus spreading rapidly as Occupy Everything, a reform movement that will overshadow the GOP/Tea Party as the voice of the people, leading to an Occupy America. Read more about the origins of Occupy Wall Street.
Investors, listen closely: First, we’ll summarize five major signs of America’s new Lost Decade 2011-2021. Then, we summarize seven diverse examples of rebellions across the world adding fuel to America’s accelerating Occupy Wall Street revolution.
Why is this crucial for investors? Because these class wars are guaranteed to deepen America’s market and economic problems during the coming Lost Decade. So listen closely investors:
1. Decade of debt stagnation till 2021
Barron’s Gene Epstein warns that Obama’s latest is “Too Little, Too Late.” Even if the president “gets everything he asked for in his new proposals, it won’t reduce our growing public debt. And he won’t get it all.”
So America’s debt will remain around 80% of GDP for a decade, levels not seen since the 1940s. That’s right, debt will remain dangerously high at least through 2021. And it won’t matter who is president. Class warfare will accelerate this job-killing debt cycle.
2. Investors lose faith, bailing out
Over at the Wall Street Journal Tom Lauricella warns “Investors lose faith in stocks … in a historic retreat, investors world-wide during the three months through August pulled some $92 billion out of stock funds in the developed markets,” more than reversing the total “put into those funds since stocks bottomed in 2009.”
Worse, there’s a “widening belief that the mess left behind by the housing bubble and financial crisis will be a morass to contend with for years.” Yes, many years.
3. Fed surrenders, cannot fix economy
In a Cleveland speech last week Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke warned that with 45% of the unemployed out more than six months, long-term unemployment is now a “national crisis” the Fed cannot fix. “Unheard of … this has never happened in the post-war period.” They’re “losing the skills they had, they are losing their connections, their attachment to the labor force.” But a job-killing Congress won’t act.
4. Wall Street still doesn’t get it
In a recent Foreign Policy article, William Cohan, a former J. P. Morgan Chase managing director and author of “Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World,” warns Wall Street not only learned nothing after the 2008 meltdown, they’re aggressively lobbying to kill all reforms that might “break this dangerous cycle in which bankers and traders get very rich while the rest of us suffer from their mistakes.”
Wall Street is deaf, blind and myopic, wants no limits on “all manner of bets on the market,” even at the “risk of a U.S. recession.” Only a catastrophe will wake Wall Street.
5. Yes, America’s second Lost Decade just began
In a Money interview, “Are We the Next Japan?” Nomura Research economist Richard Koo sees “striking similarities between our current malaise” and Japan’s Lost Decade. Their stimulus did work, but then “the Japanese made a horrendous mistake in 1997.”
The IMF told Japan “you’re running a huge fiscal deficit with an aging population … reduce your deficit.” So Japan “cut spending and raised taxes” and “the whole economy came crashing down.” Sure sounds familiar.
Warning: to Wall Street CEOs, the Super Rich, the top 1% who think they own our government … the party’s over. No matter who gets elected in 2012 and 2016, the new Lost Decade 2011-2021 will make life miserable for the president and Congress, as with Japan earlier.
Worse, this Lost Decade will make life miserable for everybody: corporations, investors, consumers, workers, small businesses and all our families, with the kind of economic suffering experienced in the painfully long Great Depression era.
