Blood-Letting

There was an old practice of medicine that called for the draining of blood in case of an illness, known as blood-letting. Of course, this had varying degrees of efficacy, but it was a stand-by for doctors for thousands of years. Even barber poles reflect the practice of letting blood, as barbers used to also carry out the procedure, often slitting arteries or using leeches to drain the blood from their vict-er, patients.

Now, of course, we recognize the importance of healthy blood to overall health, and rarely indeed engage in taking away life-sustaining blood from someone already weakened by disease.

Or do we?

In an unprecedented act of largess, the new 9.7 Trillion dollar financial stimulus package (aka, the fiat-slaying apocalypse) is casting forth enough money to give every man, woman and child IN THE WORLD $1,430. That also translates to over $32,000 for every legal citizen of the United States.

This, of course, reduces money to a mere fantasy. The US is deeply mired in debt, so much so that our sovereignty has been all but out-sourced as well. (China or Japan could easily send us plummeting into a depression by shedding their dollar reserves) And now we are summoning forth nearly 10 Trillion dollars to resurrect our economy? Forth from where, may I ask?

From the aether, evidently. Or, more specifically, from that magical world called the Federal Reserve, where more dollars are printed when we need them. As a result, the value of a dollar is based less and less on anything real. Of course, this is the price you pay for going with fiat currency, and has been going on for some time.

But all that debt we kept borrowing time with has caught up with us, and now the glass house is collapsing upon itself. Again according to Bloomberg:

"The worst financial crisis in two generations has erased $14.5 trillion, or 33 percent, of the value of the world’s companies since Sept. 15..."

This does sound like a time for desperate measures, no?

So desperate that we debase our dollar, the currency upon which our economy runs, (the blood of our economy, you might say) to be worth practically nothing but the value of the US Government's promises? (And I'll take a Yen over one of those any day)

Have we really come to the point that we will try to save ourselves from dehydration by drinking blood sucked from our own arteries?

-()4|<.