Paul B Farrell, "Spend, Spend, Spend!"
"Spend, Spend, Spend!"by Paul B Farrell, JD, PhD
"Wall Street, Washington, Corporate America and the Forbes 400—the ‘Happy Conspiracy’— they all want consumers, spenders and taxpayers, not savers and informed investors. Their number one strategy is to tap into the consumer’s addictive “buy button” in their brain using neuromarketing technology. That’s the target of their daily ad blitz—creating anxiety, doubt and suspicion about the future and dull any real hope of retirement. Anything to feed America’s desire to increase spending, consuming and adding more debt today, while holding down America’s savings rate.
Yes, Wall Street wants the top ten percent of Americans—the high-networth wealthy folks—to let them manage their assets for a juicy fee. But they also want the masses, the other 90% of Americans, to keep consuming and spending rather than saving because they are the consumption engine that keeps the economy and the stock market running—and the super-rich in the top 10%, with absolute control of America, as a plutocracy, not a democracy.So let’s stop the charade, admit the truth. Why does America have a zero savings rate? Why? Because America has no savings policy, none, it’s hoax, propaganda, a total con job on the public. The truth is, Corporate America, Wall Street, Washington secretly want you to spend, spend, spend, not save.
For over a decade, Washington, Wall Street and Corporate America have been quietly pushing a “national spending policy” at the expense of a national savings policy. Put simply, when our policymakers and financial pundits urge us to “save more,” they’re actually happy-face hypocrites, hiding their real goals—they really want you to spend, not save, they don’t want rational investors, they want irrational consumers, spending, driving the economy. To do that they have to kill the natural desire to save and squirrel away acorns for tomorrow—the future is sacrificed to today’s economic “growth god.” In pure economic terms, Wall Street’s choice is simple. If you’re saving a too much you’ll cut back on spending. So, since the 2000-02 recession, our policymakers have consistently voted to encourage spending, and encourage borrowing so the masses will spend even more.
Big hoax—no national saving policy, only a “spending policy!” So read my lips: America’s savings policy is a hoax, bogus, fake, phony, fraudulent, bankrupt and, oh yes, non-existence. Why? I’ll say it again, because our Wall Street, Corporate America and Washington really don’t want you to save, they want you to spend, spend, spend no matter how deep you go into debt—a policy that’s parallels the Fed’s “easy money” policy that fueled the housing bubble, the credit crunch, contributed to the rise of private equity, rising foreign trade deficits, a weak dollar, massive Federal debt, and other greed-driven out-of-whack financial trends in America.
Forget the rhetoric, watch their actions. The truth is Wall Street’s insiders, the controlling ten-percent, secretly want you to spend—and they are brainwashing you to kill your capacity for long-term thinking.
A 2006 Securities Industry Association (SIA) report on Retirement Savings brings this into sharp focus: From the 1950s through the 1980s, Americans were saving over 10% annually. Since then, our spirit of thrift rapidly evaporated, spiraling into negative territory. Today “nearly half of all American households are not saving at all and only about one-third of all U.S. families are saving enough to maintain their standards of living in retirement.” And don’t tell me that 401k’s, home equity and stock appreciation aren’t included because they are. You’re in denial, stop rationalizing.
So let’s repeat SIA’s conclusions: Two-thirds of American families will not have enough saved in order to retire comfortably. Period. And yet, this is not news. We’ve heard this a million times. You’ve heard it. So have all your Senators and Representatives, Congressional Accountability Office, the President, Wall Street and Corporate America. But the problem is so enormous, nobody’s doing nothing! Not individual investors. Not the government. Not the free market. In denial, ignoring the oncoming train—and irresponsibly passing our failures on to future generations, as we slip deeper into a bottomless tar-pit of debt and deficits.
Marketing “studies” prove investors are “clueless consumers” Reading the same ol’ disaster warnings, over and over makes me mad-as-hell. But still the financial industry cranks them out, over and over, painting demeaning portraits of America’s 95 million investors as “clueless,” as “paralyzed,” as “unrealistic dreamers” … and yet, that’s exactly how Wall Street and Washington want us, uninformed, naïve and irrational. The last thing they want are educated independent thinkers because they can’t be manipulated.
Once again, here’s the crux of the problem: America has no savings policy because Wall Street, Corporate America and Washington simply do not want a saving policy! Why? Because too much savings competes with their #1 priority, which is short-term spending, consumption, expansion, production, debt and growth. They secretly hate savings. A savings policy would kill their spending programs. You can’t have both and push endless “growth” too. So America’s 300 million citizens are doing exactly what our policymakers really want us to do; not save, but spend, spend, spend! And nothing will change until everyone wises up … or a major crisis calling for draconian solutions."
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