The post title is a paraphrasing of words of wisdom from Caddy Shack’s Carl Spackler:

So I jump ship in Hong Kong and make my way to Tibet, and I get on as a looper at a course over in the Himalayas. You know, a caddy, a looper, a jock. So, I tell them I’m a pro jock, and who do they give me? The Dalai Lama, himself. Twelfth son of the Lama. The flowing robes, the grace, bald… striking. So, I’m on the first tee with him. I give him the driver. He hauls off and whacks one — big hitter, the Lama – long, into a ten-thousand foot crevice, right at the base of this glacier. And do you know what the Lama says? Gunga galunga…gunga – gunga galunga. So we finish the eighteenth and he’s gonna stiff me. And I say, “Hey, Lama, hey, how about a little something, you know, for the effort, you know.” And he says, “Oh, uh, there won’t be any money, but when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness.” So I got that goin’ for me, which is nice.

I wonder what that was that Austan Goolsbee muttered to himself there…

In the universities of Athens, the city where Plato taught and Cicero studied, campuses are covered in anarchist graffiti, stray dogs run through buildings and students take lessons in Swedish with the aim of emigrating.

Higher education in Greece, as in much of Europe, has been battered by the recession and austerity measures. Budget cuts of 23 percent since 2009 mean buildings aren’t heated in the winter, schools have slashed faculty salaries and newly hired professors can wait more than a year to be appointed.

Students say it’s hard to be hopeful with youth unemployment surpassing 50 percent and protesters seizing university buildings.

“People are pessimistic and sad,” said Konstantinos Markou, a 19-year-old law student, speaking in a lobby at the University of Athens, where dogs fought nearby and students say drug dealers and users congregate. “The sadness is all around the air.”
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As universities in Greece reduce salaries and slow hiring, young academics are rethinking their careers there, said Leonidas Karakatsanis, 39, who received his Ph.D. in political science last year from the University of Essex in England and has a research fellowship at Panteion University in Athens.

“My initial plan was to spend some years abroad and return back to Greece,” Karakatsanis said. “Now it seems like it’s impossible to return to Greece. I’m starting to imagine myself living abroad for the next 15 to 20 years.”

While no one is expecting any U.S. states to follow the path of Greece, there are already some important parallels, namely, how policy makers continue to pass on a disproportionate share of the pain to the younger generation who have little political power and how people are adjusting to recent changes by relocating within the U.S.

… and I guess, since it’s an election year, there won’t be much of an effort to do anything about this until after all the voting is done in the fall, if then. Oh well, as long as the Federal Reserve keeps buying Treasuries, we shouldn’t have any problems…

Federal Reserve officials are considering a new type of bond-buying program designed to subdue worries about future inflation if they decide to take new steps to boost the economy in the months ahead.

Under the new approach, the Fed would print new money to buy long-term mortgage or Treasury bonds but effectively tie up that money by borrowing it back for short periods at low rates. The aim of such an approach would be to relieve anxieties that money printing could fuel inflation later, a fear widely expressed by critics of the Fed’s previous efforts to aid the recovery.
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In the new novel approach, the Fed could print money to buy long-term bonds, but restrict how investors and banks use that money by employing new market tools they have designed to better manage cash sloshing around in the financial system. This is known as “sterilized” QE.
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Unlike Operation Twist, the size of the program wouldn’t be constrained by the Fed’s own holdings of short-term Treasurys. This approach would also give officials an opportunity to try out some of their new tools to see how they work on a large scale.

I don’t know about you, but, to me, the idea of an “unconstrained” Fed trying out some of their new money printing tools on “a large scale” sounds pretty bullish for just about everything that isn’t the U.S. dollar.

Note that the image above is not the one offered up at the WSJ. It is from this interesting collection of images that are returned when you do a Google image search on Bernanke Money Printing. It actually took a little while to pick one out – the selection was vast.

Another data point comes today in this item at Sober Look in which the dramatic rise in government involvement in student loans is made clear in the graphic below:

I’ve known that rising student loan debt has been doing a pretty good job in recent years of offsetting falling credit card debt in the Fed’s monthly report on consumer credit, but I didn’t know that the gubment was on the hook for so much of it, though, with all the other money that has been gushing out of the nation’s capital since the Great Recession started in 2008, it really shouldn’t be too surprising.

Of course, it would be nice if a college degree was worth what it used to be in the workplace. It used to be that for little or no money you could go out and get an engineering degree at just about any state college and you’d be rewarded with a pretty decent standard of living (I should know, I did it). But, that doesn’t seem quite as easy any more.

Q: But the unemployment rate is falling and companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 are making more money than ever.

A: That’s very short-term. Look at the data that really counts. The 131.7 million (jobs in November) was first achieved in February 2000. That number has gone nowhere for 12 years.
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Q: What will 10-year Treasurys yield in a year or five years?

A: I have no guess, but I do know where it is now (a yield of about 2%) is totally artificial. It’s the result of massive purchases by not only the Fed but all of the other central banks of the world.

Q: What’s wrong with that?

A: It doesn’t come out of savings. It’s made up money. It’s printing press money. When the Fed buys $5 billion worth of bonds this morning, which it’s doing periodically, it simply deposits $5 billion in the bank accounts of the eight dealers they buy the bonds from.

Q: And what are the consequences of that?

A: The consequences are horrendous. If you could make the world rich by having all the central banks print unlimited money, then we have been making a mistake for the last several thousand years of human history.

Q: How does it end?

A: At some point confidence is lost, and people don’t want to own the (Treasury) paper. I mean why in the world, when the inflation rate has been 2.5% for the last 15 years, would you want to own a five-year note today at 80 basis points (0.8%)?

If the central banks ever stop buying, or actually begin to reduce their totally bloated, abnormal, freakishly large balance sheets, all of these speculators are going to sell their bonds in a heartbeat.

That’s what happened in Greece.

Here’s the heart of the matter. The Fed is a patsy. It is a pathetic dependent of the big Wall Street banks, traders and hedge funds. Everything (it does) is designed to keep this rickety structure from unwinding. If you had a (former Fed Chairman) Paul Volcker running the Fed today — utterly fearless and independent and willing to scare the hell out of the market any day of the week — you wouldn’t have half, you wouldn’t have 95%, of the speculative positions today.

I guess it shouldn’t come as too big of a surprise to learn that Stockman owns no stocks at present – he says his assets are mostly in cash with a smaller portion held in gold.

“Neither a lender nor a borrower be.” If you borrow to invest, it will interfere with your survivability. Unleveraged portfolios cannot be stopped out, leveraged portfolios can. Leverage reduces the investor’s critical asset: patience. (To digress, excessive borrowing has turned out to be an even bigger curse than Polonius could have known. It encourages financial aggressiveness, recklessness, and greed. It increases your returns over and over until, suddenly, it ruins you. For individuals, it allows you to have today what you really can’t afford until tomorrow. It has proven to be so seductive that individuals en masse have shown themselves incapable of resisting it, as if it were a drug. Governments also, from the Middle Ages onwards and especially now, it seems, have proven themselves equally incapable of resistance. Any sane society must recognize the lure of debt and pass laws accordingly. Interest payments must absolutely not be tax deductible or preferred in any way. Governments must apparently be treated like Polonius’s children and given limits. By law, cumulative government debt should be given a sensible limit of, say, 50% of GDP, with current transgressions given 10 or 20 years to be corrected.)

In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, it was Polonius who said, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be”, words of wisdom that seem to have gone out of fashion over the last thirty years or so but that now seem to be making a strong comeback.

According to a survey by Bankrate.come that included the graphic to the right, a full one-quarter of Americans now have more credit card debt than emergency savings which, when you think about it, shouldn’t be too surprising.

But, what was surprising (at least to me) was that a full 30 percent of those earning $75,000 or more could not say that they have more savings than credit card debt and 36 percent of college grads were characterized the same way.

One could make allowances for the avalanche of zero interest rate offers from credit card companies and how recent college grads have been having a tough time in the current economy, but still, these numbers seem quite high.

As might be expected, for non-college grads and low wage earners, things are much worse with nearly two-thirds of the respondents saying they had less savings than credit card debt, but things seem to be deteriorating rapidly for the middle and upper-middle class.

Overall, just over half of Americans now have more emergency savings than credit card debt while another 21 percent either don’t know what they have or have neither.

When asked how they feel about their level of savings as compared to a year ago, only 14 percent said they were more comfortable while 38 percent said they were less comfortable.

Don’t look for any of these numbers to improve much in the years ahead – at least not until 2015 when the Fed’s low interest rate policy might finally come to an end.

The term “loan shark” comes to mind when listening to this depiction of what Goldman did and, paraphrasing former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, financial innovation that, over the long-run, benefits the economy stopped with the ATM machine.

In November alone 126,000 Greeks lost their jobs in a country of 11 million, equivalent to three and a half million Americans in a single month. The unemployment rate jumped from 18.2pc to 20.9pc.

This has not yet fed through into social breakdown. Greeks receive unemployment support for an average of thirty weeks, with a ceiling of €454 a month, according to Professor Manos Matsaganis of Athens University. Those with civil service tenure are placed on labour reserve for two years at half their basic pay, or a third their actual pay.

Once these cushions are exhausted, Greeks are on their own. The monthly ratchet effect will then become painfully evident. It is why the Orthodox primate Hieronymos II warned in a letter to the prime minister that ever further doses of the same “deadly medicine” is becoming dangerous.

“The voices of the desperate, the voices of Greeks are being provocatively ignored. Fear is giving way to rage and the risk of a social explosion can no longer be ignored by those who give orders and those who execute their lethal recipes,” he said.

Anyone looking for alternative solutions to what ails Greece should consider a recent comment by Jeremy Grantham about central bank policy: “Well, I wouldn’t start from here”.

When the government accounts for 40 percent or more of a nation’s GDP, you’ve basically purchased yourself a one-way ticket to a much lower standard of living and, if you haven’t already done so, have a look at last week’s New York Times story – The Way Greeks Live Now. I finally got around to reading it the other day and it’s well worth a look.