Into The Grey Zone The future is always a grey zone, never black and white.

This is a response to someone at TAE in the comments accompanying The Automatic Earth: July 22 2010: The Big Picture According to TAE - An Updated Primer Guide. There always seem to be people who fail to understand the role of gold in an economic collapse. I will try to explain its role here.

An Associated Press story, Official: Seep found near BP's blown out oil well has been edited to delete references to seepage without notations that it was edited on AP's own site. The link I provided was carrying the original text at the time I wrote this.

In a recent discussion at zero hedge over a post titled Is The Collapse In FX Reserves Even More Dangerous Than The Plunge In Money Supply?, I saw someone saying he expected our society to fall in a staircase fashion. That led to the following post.

Regarding the mainstream media lie that retail sales increased yet again, I've covered that before and I'll discuss it again for those who don't know which statistic is being reported.

All you need to know about the Greater Depression: Food-stamp tally nears 40 million, sets record.

"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security." - US Declaration of Independence

People know that I have little love for the Republicans but the Democrats are now just as despised in my book. The recent levels of hypocrisy by these craven cowards exceeds anything I have ever seen come out of Washington.

I posted this response to the perpetual liar entity named Cheryl before at TAE on December 14, 2009 8:27 PM but apparently she ignored it or was too dense to understand it. Thus I will post it again, here, where I can easily refer to it, since she seems intent on popping up every few weeks with the same bag of tired falsehoods.

Personally, I mark the "public" moment of this financial crisis to July 2007, when two Bear Stearns hedge funds were both completely wiped out. Neither had anything to do with oil or oil trades. Both were highly leveraged funds that were simply in way over their heads. And those funds were symptomatic of the entire financial industry at that time.

One commenter over at The Automatic Earth was recently disparaging comments he read over at Zero Hedge. I began a reply but it became long enough that I felt it better placed here instead.

From the February 6, 2010 discussion at TAE, people were asking about timelines and population targets. This post is an attempt to answer that question in slightly more detail. An in-depth look at this topic could cover multiple volumes.