I'm SHOCKED!  SHOCKED!  It turns out that China has been playing accounting tricks to show less of a budget deficit than previously thought, according to a front page Wall Street Journal story this week.  I am so surprised.... not!

As those of you who read this blog regularly know, I have said all along that the Chinese economic "miracle" is a mirage, as who can believe what they are told by a one party dictatorship with no free press or political dissent?  We do, evidently, and are surprised as news of fooling around with the numbers is revealed.  Mark my words, this is only the beginning.  The entire Chinese story is just plain silly, seeing as how can they be in a roaring economy when their best customers worldwide are mired in economic stagnation and recession and therefore buying less?  Their domestic market you say?  Well, they may have a billion people, but the overwhelming majority of them live in the countryside and are desperately poor and restive.  They aren't buying so much as resenting how the ruling elite live at their perceived expense. 

This is a recipe for revolution - not prosperity.

To me, this is not unlike the whole scandal revolving around the mortgage meltdown.  Rating agencies were given the numbers but never had the common sense to analyze them or weren't smart enough while Wall Street executives didn't have any idea what their own companies were doing. It was a sure recipe for ruin, as will be this worldwide flirtation with Keynesian Economics, which has governments from China to Athens (including us in between it all), spending and printing our way not to prosperity, but to ultimate ruin.

You have got to be smarter than the experts.  They are only legends in their own minds.  Don't be fooled by Ivy League degrees and fancy titles.  They are as venal and stupid a bunch of self-dealing morons as have even lived.  There are guys on Wall Street today, learning evidently nothing as a result of past mistakes, which are borrowing money from the Fed at 0% (effectively), and then buying Treasuries at over 3% and calling this brilliance, all the while entitling them to HUGE bonuses! When the inflation kicks in, the reserves on their books prove worthless, the locked in low yields are finally viewed as horrible, and the currency down the tubes the truth will out.  It is all there, as always, for those of us who are willing to see it for what it is.  Foolishness is truly international.  Wisdom must be homegrown.