In my community, there is an investment venture that is rapidly buying up all the empty housing stock left over by the foreclosure binge at pennies on the dollar. Seems that the wildebeest in our neighborhoods are quietly anticipating a stabilization and rise in home prices as a result of the upcoming scarcity as the elite lions slowly mop up the countryside of stragglers. For it is the way of the world that we survivors accept the feast of the lions.
We are content at having made it through the carnage of 2008 with our assets intact, albeit a bit worse for the wear. At the outset of the crisis, the lions ran the herd into a frenzy. As they outstretched their paws in pursuit, they quickly dried up credit sending the herd scurrying to lay off a great number of the weaker of our species. Oh we tried to allow them to graze at the side of the herd on unemployment and food stamps. But we knew the lions would eventually claim them for that is the way of the wild.
And one by one during the dry season, the lions pounced on wildebeest after wildebeest, feeding on their flesh, collecting their real assets of houses and cars, stocks and bonds, to pay off the debts that had been accumulated and paid for by the stroke of the lions’ pens that had earlier during the rainy season created money from thin air. For in the rainy season, all feast on grain and fatten themselves on the GDP of the land. And in the rainy season, the lions are happy to simply skim profits from the creation of debt.
But in the dry season as the herd stampedes as a great, disoriented band, lost in a sea of collapsing credit, loss of jobs, and loss of consumer demand, that is when the lions feed on real flesh. All of the fattening during the rainy season comes back to the lions now. One by one they pick of the weak, collecting their real assets, skimming off the real economy, and transferring the carnage to their bellies. The dry season is when the lions feast.
Clif Carothers
Job Voucher Plan 