Besides putting our grandchildren in deeply in debt, the government stimulus was an attempt to solve the economic problems of this nation by throwing money at them. Has it succeeded or failed? The answer depends on whom you listen to, but the truth is that it did both. The GDP actually rose three percent (3%) the first two quarters of 2009, but how much of this was due to the stimulus spending? The stimulus money that went to state governments got spent on small, “shovel-ready” projects and prevented massive lay-offs which had been planned for early 2009. Larger projects will not occur until early 2010, so they will not impact the economy until then.

In Australia they have a term, “walkabout,” which at present means to take a short, occasional interruption from regular work. The term originated with the Aborigines and was the word applied to a rite of passage in which adolescent males went into the wilderness for as long as six months. On this spiritual journey-of-discovery, the young men would trace their ancestors’ pathways of life, called songlines. The young teens would reenact many of the heroic deeds attributed to these precursors. Continued to this day, the walkabout is misunderstood by the white employers who saw it as an “aboriginal thing” in which suddenly without notice, a young man would disappear, reappearing just as suddenly weeks later. To the Aboriginal youth, it was an important spiritual matter for which his employer, from his lack of understanding, would not grant a leave of absence, so they just left when the need came upon them.

Change isn’t always good, in fact at least half of the time it’s bad. The changes we have been seeing since early in 2008 have been very bad for the USA and for all over the world. The economy has tanked in much of the world, largely due to greed on the part of financial institutions who were encouraged to make loans to unqualified borrowers, who offered credit cards with limits higher than common sense and charged usurious rates of interest on the unpaid balances. They also made “negative equity” car loans in which dealers took trade-ins on which there was more owed than their worth, then rolled the “negative” equity into the new car pricing and the bank bought the paper. Most car buyers started out in the hole and it only got worse from there.

In a recent article in The Sovereign Society’s Offshore Letter, guest writer Chuck Dolce equated the practices of the Federal Reserve, our central bank, to those of The Godfather, Vito Corleone, whom he quoted, “Give this job to Clemenza. I want reliable people, people who aren't going to be carried away. I mean, we're not murderers, in spite of what this undertaker thinks...” - Vito Corleone. It is Dolce’s contention that our banking system operated much like Mafia loan-sharking.

Bargains, bargains everywhere. Headlines in newspapers, on advertisements and across the tops of industry newsletters extol the plethora of bargains available on nearly everything imaginable; Real estate, classic automobiles, jewelry, electronics, hey, even Omaha Steaks are 50% off! One headline announced that baseball Hall-of-Famer, Len Dykstra, just lost his house he had listed for $24.95 million. He had dropped the selling price by nearly $10 million, but it still didn’t sell and went into foreclosure. Another personality, music producer Scott Storch, lost his $7.5 million house to a bank who bought it at auction for $5.5mm.