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Can it happen again?Larry LaBorde Last Friday night my wife Puddy, my son and I went to the movies. We saw the new movie, Cinderella Man. While the movie was inspiring in that it featured a man's come back or a second chance, the backdrop for the movie was the Great Depression. The main character was living in a nice house and earning a good living at the beginning of the movie. As the movie progressed the family moved into a cheap one room apartment, sold all their furnishings and talked about how their investments failed. Hunger set in and the husband finally in desperation went on relief and sent the children to live with relatives. Other fathers in the story left home in despair feeling they had failed their families. After the movie while we were walking to the car Puddy asked if I thought things could really get that bad again. I calmly stated that I thought they could actually get much worse. You see while there are some things that are similar there are other things that are very different. The easy parallels are an overvalued stock market, too much stock speculation, Elliott wave cycles and others. The differences are: excessive debt (corporate, government & personal) is everywhere you look; a negative savings rate; zero equity left in our personal homes; much of our manufacturing base has left the country; our fiat dollar has evaporated significantly and continues to do so; our financial institutions hold vast derivative positions, and our trade deficit... just to name a few. During the great depression Henry Ford bragged that the Ford Motor Company never had to borrow money. Henry Ford simply built up all the cars he could with his parts inventory and told all his dealers they had to each buy 5 or so cars and put them in their inventory or have their dealerships pulled. He then simply closed the plant and sent everyone home until further notice. While Ford did not have to borrow money he made each of his dealers do so. With today's labor laws sending everyone home to wait out the depression is impossible. Furthermore Ford Motor Company is so deep in debt that they may not be able to pull out of it even if the economy stays healthy. Back then most big companies had little or no debt and large cash reserves. That is hardly the case today. All of the above items may tend to make another depression much worse since we seem so ill prepared to face it. Since we are mired in debt with little savings set aside any setback will be immediately painful. Do you think most families have a 6 month emergency fund saved up or do you think most are living paycheck to paycheck? We do not even own our homes anymore. The banks own them lock, stock and barrel. We have refinanced all the inflated equity right out of them with ARMs. Disaster struck in the South after the WBTS (war between the states for those of you who graduated from public schools) because people who owned their homes outright could not afford to pay the property taxes. How many people do you know who own their homes outright anymore? It was much more common to own your home without any debt then than now. We have also exported many of our manufacturing jobs out of the country. This destroys our ability to create wealth. Our government debt is held more and more by foreigners. If they face hard times in their own country they may sell the US debt they hold in order to raise money for their needs back home. That could result in a lot of selling with no one purchasing our debt forcing us to monetize our debt. This could result in rubber stamping a lot of zeros on our currency. We have even become a net importer of food. It seems we cannot even feed ourselves now, when a few years ago we not only fed ourselves but exported large quantities of our surplus food. So could things ever get that bad again? We hope they ONLY get that bad. Just in case, get out of debt and save; don't speculate. Invest in 5,000 years of history. Invest in gold and silver. Larry LaBorde 321gold Inc |
