Seth Klarman: "We Are Close To Collapse"

Seth Klarman is an American billionaire who founded the Baupost Group, a Boston-based private investment partnership, and the author of Margin of Safety: Risk-Averse Value Investing Strategies for the Thoughtful Investor a book on value investing.

From Seth Klarman of Baupost:

Is it possible that the average citizen understands our country's fiscal situation better than many of our politicians or prominent economists?

Most people seem to viscerally recognize that the absence of an immediate crisis does not mean we will not eventually face one. They are wary of believing promises by those who failed to predict previous crises in housing and in highly leveraged financial institutions.

They regard with skepticism those who don't accept that we have a debt problem, or insist that inflation will remain under control. (Indeed, they know inflation is not well under control, for they know how far the purchasing power of a dollar has dropped when they go to the supermarket or service station.)

They are pretty sure they are not getting reasonable value from the taxes they pay.

When an economist tells them that growing the nation's debt over the past 12 years from $6 trillion to $16 trillion is not a problem, and that doubling it again will still not be a problem, this simply does not compute. They know the trajectory we are on.

When politicians claim that this tax increase or that spending cut will generate trillions over the next decade, they are properly skeptical over whether anyone can truly know what will happen next year, let alone a decade or more from now.

They are wary of grand bargains that kick in years down the road, knowing that the failure to make hard decisions is how we got into today's mess. They remember that one of the basic principles of economics is scarcity, which is a powerful force in their own lives.

They know that a society's wealth is not unlimited, and that if the economy is so fragile that the government cannot allow failure, then we are indeed close to collapse. For if you must rescue everything, then ultimately you will be able to rescue nothing.

They also know that the only reason paper money, backed not by anything tangible but only a promise, has any value at all is because it is scarce. With all the printing, the credibility of our entire trust-based monetary system will be increasingly called into question.

And when you tell the populace that we can all enjoy a free lunch of extremely low interest rates, massive Fed purchases of mounting treasury issuance, trillions of dollars of expansion in the Fed's balance sheet, and huge deficits far into the future, they are highly skeptical not because they know precisely what will happen but because they are sure that no one else--even, or perhaps especially, the policymakers—does either.

And While Wall St Celebrates, PMI Drops

PMI now barely breathing in positive territory.

Stocks Jubilant Following Jobs Report

I didn't think this jobs report was worthy of this kind of joy. We got 165,000 jobs, about 20,000 more than expected. That's the good part. But the jobs were produced in low-wage sectors like leisure, hospitality, temp work, and retail. That's hardly something to celebrate.

But don't try telling that to Wall St. They're too drunk on the Fed-fueled stock market bubble to notice reality!

Crude Oil Explodes $5 In Two Days

Nat Gas Crash

from Bloomberg:
"Natural gas futures dropped the most in almost nine months after a government report showed that U.S. stockpiles expanded by more than forecast."