Jim’s Quote of the Day:

Every economy in the world has experienced booms and busts, but somewhere along the line someone came up with the bright idea of eliminating the busts. Throughout the 1990s the world experienced a series of economic crisis in Asia, Mexico, Russia, and even in the US markets that would have been enough to cleanse the system and restore equilibrium. On each and every occasion the Fed met the problem head on with the printing press, so a full blown reaction was avoided thereby creating what I call a “distortion” in the financial system that would eventually have to be sanitized. What any normal country would have done after a capital injection is withdraw that capital once things got better, but the US never did that. They just kept right on printing much like a drug addict keeps increasing the dosage because the old amount has less and less affect. Unfortunately, like a drug addict the economy eventually dies from an overdose, and that’s where we are today. – Enrico Orlandini