Courtesy of Tyler Durden
From the latest Things that Make you Go Hmmm:
"On March 14th Bear Stearns collapsed and the first real domino of the financial crisis (at lest as far as public recognition of the situation was concerned) had toppled. However, it wasn’t until September, as Lehman Brothers tottered on the brink of insolvency, that a group of highly influential bankers and politicians decided to take the red pill. The failure of Lehman Brothers was the catalyst that plunged the world deep into The Matrix – an alternate reality in which, everywhere you looked, things were happening that a mere 24 hours earlier, would have seemed unthinkable. We all know about the TARP, we remember wild swings in markets, plummeting oil and commodity prices, frantic deleveraging and nervous Central Bankers and politicians telling us that everything was going to be OK. But as the days and months have ticked by, the reality inside our own Matrix has become more and more skewed. Markets recovered, an eerie calm was gradually restored and slowly things began to return to a semblance of normal. But what is normal in this new paradigm? Is it normal for the Fed to be buying 70% of all Treasuries? Well it certainly wasn’t until we took the red pill and entered The Matrix…It surely must be clear to anybody that, regardless of the fact that the unemployment situation has stopped deteriorating quite so rapidly and has even begun to show signs of improvement in places (‘green shoots’ anyone?), regardless of the fact that corporate results have actually been, for the most part, quite good and the S&P is trading on decent multiples and regardless of the fact that ‘core’ inflation apparently isn’t a problem – the real world inside The Matrix, the one many vested interests would rather we NOT focus on, is an altogether different story."
Full report:
