Suddenly 2015 feels a whole lot like the delusional financial euphoria we saw before the dot-com crash

Thursday, January 22, 2015
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Tags: dot-com crash, financial euphoria, government debt

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(NaturalNews) To fully understand the insanity of modern-day delusional "everything is awesome!" thinking, you have to rewind to the years of 1998 - 2001. Back then, both the mainstream media and citizen masses were all riding the delusional mind game train that supposed we could all get rich by trading each other pieces of paper with larger and larger numbers written on them. It was called the "dot-com boom" and it was a wildly popular mass delusion that swept up nearly everyone.

The irrational exuberance of the time, you must understand, seems wildly insane in retrospect. But in the midst of the dot-com insanity, people were mortgaging their homes to buy dot-com stocks. Financial news hosts were telling us that "all the laws of economics have now changed" and that we no longer had to pay any attention at all to actual company earnings. The new paradigm, we were promised, would create money from nothing from the sheer valuation of dot-com companies that had no customers, no profits and not even any revenues. (Those of us who invoked the fundamental laws of economics and company valuations were immediately labeled "doom and gloomers.")

Ponzi schemes work really well... for a while

So the obedient masses dutifully mortgaged their homes, cashed in their life insurance policies and raided their own bank accounts to dump their money into dot-com stocks, encouraged by the belief they had suddenly become smarter than everyone else... even though everyone else was doing the exact same thing.

And for a while the scheme appeared to work, just as any Ponzi scheme does in its early phases. People seemed to be getting rich (on paper), and word soon spread to hair dressers and taxi cab drivers that they, too, could become "professional investors" by simply buying any stock associated with the dot-com boom.

It didn't even matter what company you bought because they were all skyrocketing in apparent value. You could quite literally borrow a zoo monkey to smoke crack and then throw darts at a stock ticker list duct-taped to your garage wall to determine your buy orders for the day. I remember being told by serious-sounding "financial analysts" that thanks to the dot-com phenomenon, pretty soon no one would ever have to work again because we could all just lounge around in luxury homes, buying and selling dot-com stocks that would always make us rich. The era of people actually having to work for a living was over, we were told.

It didn't matter what the company actually did... or even if it did anything at all. The mere fact that the company had a dot-com in its name was enough to make it an automatic "buy" across institutional and individual investors alike. And because stock values for all the people who currently own the stock is determined by the last price paid for even a single share, the dot-com bubble had everybody convinced they had all hit the jackpot. After all, according to the numbers they saw on their computer screens, they had just inherited a windfall of profits... and there was always more to come according to CNBC.

The laws of economics are never suspended, no matter how many people claim they are

It is during bubbles like this that the delusional masses somehow convince themselves they've stumbled upon an amazing loophole in the laws of economics that no one ever identified before. "The rules are different now," we were all told, and people like myself who loudly and repeatedly warned people to sell their stocks and escape the coming crash were of course condemned, ridiculed and labeled "doom and gloomers."

OPTIMISM was the only tolerable attitude of the day. In fact, anything short of mindless euphoria was considered politically incorrect and possibly even a threat to America. "The dot-com market won't ever crash," we were assured by CNBC and the other financial cheerleading networks who tossed out stock symbol recommendations like topless women in New Orleans chucking Mardi Gras beads from sleazy hotel balconies.

Financial media personalities became prostitutes for the latest IPO, and fundamental concepts like P/E ratios (price-to-earnings) were denigrated as "outmoded numbers from a bygone era." The message to the masses was clear: If you weren't dumping every last dollar you owned or earned into dot-com stocks, you were going to lose out and get left behind in the new economy where wealth was created by magic.

Why 2015 feels like a run-up to another mass financial delusion coming to an abrupt end

Fast forward to 2015. The United States of America is over $18 trillion in debt, and the world's central bankers are furiously printing fiat currency like mad in a desperate bid to out-print each other so they can find out who collapses last. It's like a global game of Russian Roulette except in this case Putin has all his chambers loaded and Obama is shooting blanks.

It's all a game of currency musical chairs where the last nation left holding the debt when the music stops suffers economic collapse followed by social chaos.

Hundreds of billions of dollars in monthly fiat currency printing naturally causes valuation bubbles in all areas of the economy where capital flows: Real estate, the stock market, derivatives instrument purchases and so on. Not surprisingly, the stock market has steadily risen alongside the money printing scheme, and real estate prices have boomed almost everywhere, creating so many bubbles that the bubblecrats in Washington can't even recognize them as bubbles anymore.

In fact, they point to the bubbles as "proof" that their economic policies are not merely brilliant, but possibly even omniscient. If the stock market is up -- even if it has been buoyed by artificial money creation -- that's irrefutable evidence that the economy is going in the right direction, isn't it? If you print out your credit report and it shows a lousy score of 250, and so you cross out the 250 and write "750" in its place, are you now a far better credit risk?

Of course, most of today's investors have never seen a crash before, which means they can't recognize the horizon of the warped bubble in which they live. They do not recognize the signs of a coming crash, nor the signs of the bubbles that are now pre-announcing the crash in the unmistakable language of mathematics. Any person who can clear the fog from their heads and calculate that 2 + 2 = 4 has the cognitive capability to see that the world's bubbles are headed for a catastrophic implosion, yet the thrill of being swept up in the delusion of the day far too often outcompetes the rational mind and silences the inner professor who can still count, add and subtract.

If we can turn off the laws of economics, can we also suspend the laws of gravity?

Fourteen years after the delusional dot-com cheerleaders told us stock prices would rise forever, we are all being promised the same thing in 2015 that the dot-commers promised us in 1998 - 2001... namely, that the laws of economics no longer apply to us.

Somehow -- although it's never explained exactly how -- modern human society is so incredibly progressive, smart and clever that we can selectively choose to turn off the laws of the universe. If gravity had a stock ticker symbol, we could actually increase or decrease the pull of the sun through the buying and selling of its shares, we are promised. "Hey Fred, how's gravity today?" "It's down two points but holding steady." "Yeah, I did feel a little lighter today..."

Money printing, which inevitably and always results is price inflation, can now be conducted outside the laws of the cause and effect, we're told. The very fabric of reality has been suspended by the Gods of Government -- vastly superior beings of pure luminescence who we are taught to not merely obey but to actually worship as divine.

Words uttered by President Obama actually have the magical ability to reshape the fundamentals of economic law, to redraw the curves of supply and demand and to even cause price inflation to be a benefit to us all rather than a detriment. Wow, it's magic! Obama, it might be said, puts the voodoo in voodoo economics.

We the People are all too stupid to understand why endless debt is so awesome, Obama implies in his speeches. The complexity of massive debt spending, derivatives investment risks and unlimited quantitative easing is just way over our heads, so none of us should bother trying to make any sense of it, the thinking goes. After all, the people who came up with these schemes won Nobel Prizes in economics... in exactly the same way our Bomber-in-Chief Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and then went on to kill more overseas civilians with drone strikes than the total number of Americans killed in the 9/11 attacks.

If Nobel Peace Prize winners can bomb nations into geopolitical obedience, then Nobel Prize winners in economics can surely bomb entire economies into financial oblivion. And they will probably be granted a "Senior Research Fellowship" somewhere as a result of their arrogant miscalculations, too, because when the global elite aren't busy confiscating your wealth and destroying economies (or sharing child sex slaves with each other), they are of course handing out noble-sounding awards to each other as a form of amusement.

Economic voodoo, Captain America and Gandalf

Now, don't lose hope quite yet. Because even if Obama's economic voodoo isn't enough to save us, the very same thinking that currently dominates the mainstream financial news gives us hope that magical thinking will yet save us from economic disaster.

In fact, very soon we are likely to be saved from economic collapse by Thor's Hammer, Spiderman's spidey sense or perhaps even the impenetrable shield of Captain America. This will be accompanied by televised conferences between Obama and Gandalf, who uses his magical staff to blast away the orcs and trolls which we will be told cause shortages of food items on the shelves of grocery stores. Venezuela, for example, is currently suffering a horrible orc invasion. That's why there's no food in the grocery stores there. It has nothing to do with failures of socialism or bad economic policies from a corrupt government.

Magical thinking is only dangerous when it becomes an administration's fiscal policy. Just ask Paul Craig Roberts, former U.S. Treasury Secretary under President Ronald Reagan. Roberts is the ultimate former insider who's now sounding the alarm of the coming global economic implosion that he says may be delayed, but not averted.

The media will never tell you a crash is coming, even when it's imminent

The media, of course, will continue to tell you everything's awesome... sort of like the dot-com boom in 2000, right before the crash that lost 99.9% of the value for many high-flying stocks. But the crash that's coming in 2015 or soon thereafter will be a crash that makes the dot-com meltdown look calmer than an overweight nude sunbather lounging on the deck chairs of a cruise to the Bahamas.

No slap in the face of reality is more biting and rude than the one that follows an era of total denial of reality. The longer you live in delusion, the worse the kick in the balls when that delusion collapses. (In the NFL, this causes a horrible economic condition known as "deflated balls.")

The longer the bubble goes on before crashing, in other words, the more painful the correction. And right now the entire world is in a multi-layered bubble of unprecedented size and reach. Before it ultimately crashes, the governments of the world are determined to make the bubbles even larger and more treacherous because that's the only course of action they remember how to pursue.

Government's entitlement promises cannot be kept

All around the world today, corrupt governments have remained in power by making entitlement promises they simply cannot keep if the laws of economics still apply. (And believe me, they do.) When the next global collapse cascades across the world's central banks, one of the first things to go will be the entitlement checks. And when that happens, things are going to get uglier than your ex-wife taking a mud bath at a half-priced day spa.

There's nothing more pissy than an entitlement junky who wakes up one day and finds his government food stamp card is lacking the credits that have always appeared there for free. Where's my free Velveeta and Pop Tarts? I'm gonna take to the streets and demand my FREE MONEY!

Except the free money has run out. Yes, the currency printing presses are still running -- even if the city's trains aren't -- but the currency they're churning out doesn't count for much anymore. Food stamp recipients might even receive "raises" that put 10% more dollars on their cards even though food prices are rising 100% a month. Ah, the magic of compounding interest.

There might not even be much left for people to buy with their increasingly worthless dollars because the inevitable bank holidays will disrupt necessary business transactions and clobber the nation's just-in-time delivery systems that make food magically appear in cities where no virtually food can be grown. Without truck transportation and fuel transactions, food disappears from store shelves all across America in less than 72 hours. Nine meals away from a revolution, the saying goes...

"Nobody could see this coming!"

The final hilarity in this sad tragedy of fiscal delusion will come when the crash is in full force and TV news script readers will utter phrases like, "Nobody could see this coming!"

Actually, lots of us saw this coming. Gerald Celente sees it coming. Peter Schiff sees it coming. Dave Hodges sees it coming. Paul Craig Roberts sees it coming. KingWorldNews.com sees it coming. TheEconomicCollapseBlog.com sees it coming. SHTFplan.com sees it coming. TheDailySheeple.com sees it coming. And you probably see it coming, too. There's even a highly-recommended book that describes all the details of how this is coming: Aftershock, by Robert A. Wiedemer and David Wiedemer. I highly recommend you read or listen to this book while there's still time.

In fact, you'd have to be willfully blind (or delusional) to not see the crash coming, thanks to $18 trillion in U.S. debt and over one quadrillion dollars in global derivatives debt perched on the edge of a gigantic chasm of ineptitude and regret. In 2008, the Federal Reserve bailed out selected banks deemed "too big to fail," but in 2015, 2016 or whenever the "Big One" takes place, the tidal wave of a cascading debt collapse will be too big to BAIL.

That's the day you'll wish you could backtrack to today -- January 2015 -- and trade the dollars you lost in the bank for real assets that can't evaporate overnight. That's the day you'll wish you had bought gold before it skyrocketed to $5,000 an ounce. That's the day you'll wish you weren't trapped in a crowded city populated by mobs of angry people. That's also the day you'll witness what happens when a billion or more people around the world simultaneously realize they've all been lied to by corrupt, inept governments built on making promises they knew they could never really keep.