Open Choke

Hottest Unconventional Oil and Gas Plays- September 2010

I was visiting Drillinginfo yesterday and they have a series of blogs published by their engineering/geological team about various resource plays. It turns out that they monitor the hits on these public blogs and keep an ongoing "heat index" from those hits. I get the privilege of publishing them!

September 2010 Unconventional Play Heat Index.... drumroll, please...

Arizona and Godwin's Law...

Believe it or not, I am trying to figure out where I stand on the whole immigration brouhaha spotlighted by Arizona's recent legislative efforts.  While researching the many facts of this issue, I was exposed to something called "Godwin's Law",http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law, which states that "The first person in a debate to associate the opposite position to (Nazi/Hitler/Fascism) automatically loses the debate".

I thought, and still think, this is both funny and a good rule of thumb, albeit one I break from time to time.

Here are some facts of the Immigration/Arizona debate:

1.  Arizona's law mimics Federal law, and the conditions by which law enforcement can "ask for papers" are in the case of a "legitimate arrest, questioning, or detainment" for the enforcement of laws other than immigration laws.  Opponents say that the law gives law enforcement authorities the capability of questioning people for "walking around while brown", as our President so eloquently stated last week.  Proponents state that this KEEPS law enforcement from improperly questioning for "walking around while brown".  Thus, diametrically opposite conclusions from the same fact set. Clearly, the intent of the wording was to prevent questioning of people merely because of their ethnicity, otherwise it wouldn't have been addressed at all in the law, so apparently the difference between the two conclusions merely reflect ones opinion on how well the existing language protects against illegitimate questioning of Hispanic-looking individuals.

2.  The Arizona law, in substance,  only mimics the Federal law already on the books.  If one is legitimately opposed to the substance of the Arizona law, then one must be opposed to the Federal law.  The potential hippocrites, then, are the Senators and congress people that voted FOR the Federal law and protest AGAINST the Arizona law.

3.  The Feds have said they are not obligated to prosecute people under turned over to them by state officials for violations of Federal law in Immigration cases.  http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/05/21/official-says-feds-process-illegals-referred-arizona/.  Also, the Feds are apparently not obligated to prosecute or repatriate undocumented aliens, even if detained by Federal officials.  This allows the Feds to do, essentially, whatever they want, ie the law as written allows the Feds to either detain, arrest, and deport undocumented immigrants or NOT detain, arrest, and deport undocumented immigrants, depending upon how they feel that day, week, month, or administration.  This means the law was intentionally written in a way to NOT be law.  The concept of "Rule of Law" is meaningless if laws are written in a way that they are entirely subjective and arbitrary.  I don't think this concept of law can be supported by any left or right ideology, can it?  Was the passage of this Federal law nothing more than venal political theater? If so, who is responsible for that?

4.  Undocumented immigrants presumably come here for jobs.  We are told that the jobs they take are low wage jobs that no US citizen would want.  The obvious benefit of this is that these workers keep our society's cost of living low, and, depending on industry, without them, these costs would rise up to 30% or more.  The benefits are primarily in construction, maintenance, and hospitality. In other words, by taking low wage jobs (perhaps lower than minimum wage in many cases), they keep our cost of living down, which serves exactly the same effect as increasing income for the rest of us.

5.  Another benefit is that they pay money into dummy social security accounts from which they they will not recover benefits, thus enabling our currently unstable social security system to be further supported from the "fruits of labor" of our undocumented brethren.

6.  If these are the primary cases for non-enforcement, what reason would we have to want to "legalize" these jobs?  Would "legalizing" these folks entail mandatory minimum wage?  Union representation? If that is the result, don't the "benefits" disappear?

7. Or is the defining argument a Human Rights argument due to our current constitutional interpretation that if you are born in the US, you are automatically a US citizen.  Thus, when an undocumented parent is deported, the family can be potentially split.  Of course, the splitting of the family is only one of two potential outcomes, the other being the family going back with the deported member.  Although I think I understand why a US citizen or legal worker would not want to return with their undocumented spouse or parent, the individual choices made typically appear to support that being in the USA is more important to them than family cohesion.

8.  Undocumented immigrants are apparently very much over-represented in our prisons as violent criminals.  Why is that?  What does that mean for those that fit the stereotype of "looking for a better future"?  What is the relative percentage of each end-member demographic? What can we do to reduce the criminal component?  This is a hard issue to dismiss, if true.

9.  Clearly the US CAN protect its borders and sovereignty.  The question is cost and will.  Given that we are adequately terrified of Islamic terrorists, and we guard our airports and immigration stations at airports to a degree considered ridiculous by many (including me), what is the logic behind making an entirely physical border porous otherwise?  Is the fear of Islamic terrorism hugely overstated and propagandized?  Alternatively, what is the logic behind the kabuki theatre of airport security?  The reality is that illegal immigration has evolved from the story book families looking for a better tomorrow to a very well organized international system of undocumented human transport into the US from all over the world, and where Mexicans are no longer the overwhelming  majority of those transported (see these previous posts for a 1st and 2nd hand perspective on this....)

http://openchoke.blogs.com/open_choke/2007/11/no-country-for.html

 http://openchoke.blogs.com/open_choke/2008/04/more-drug-runne.html

Does this image concern you at all?  Should we ignore this and the attendant crime?  

10.  Another conservative bogeyman is the Reconquista Movement.  Is there merit to this concern?  Who, exactly, constitutes this movement and how many are there?  Are they merely a radical fringe element in numbers like the KuKluxKlan or is this a real movement?  If it is, have any of these folks actually LIVED in Mexico?

11.  Given the very tough immigration laws that Mexico "enjoys", what reason, other than economic ($21 billion per year of US dollars wired to families in Mexico, the second largest legally recognized industry in Mexico next to petroleum and the third biggest real industry next to drugs and petroleum and bigger than tourism... interesting really, that Mexico depends on illegal immigrants and illegal drugs as the 1st and 3rd largest industries), could Calderon have for making the speech he did to the US Congress?  How can he claim Human Rights when Mexico's immigration and work laws are far more draconian to non-citizens than the US's?  It would be nice to have someone admit that yes, it is primarily an economic issue between the two countries rather than a clearly ludicrous Human Rights issue.

12.  Do legal residents and citizens of Hispanic heritage, many of which predated Anglos, and, indeed US and Mexico, in Texas, NM, Arizona, and California, relate more strongly to the plight of the illegal immigrants or to sovereignty and benefits of US citizenship?  For either answer, why?

If I have left anything out, please let me know.  Let's get a discussion going on this to help me decide what I think is the best solution....

Dreaming of a Better Way...

For as long as I can remember, I have had a peculiar way of processing information... I slept on it.  The more abstract or mathematical, the better.  I have a terrible memory, which served me poorly in memorizing formulas or remembering what the name of the well was on the east flank of the structure.  Those that have worked for Big Oil can attest that knowing the names of the wells and their locations is taken as your oilfield IQ, never minding the fact that it only sometimes coincidentally overlaps with you ability to find oil and gas.

In any case, my problem with math was that I couldn't memorize formulas.  I had to be able to derive them from "first principles", for lack of a better term.  I would read over my Calculus/DiffEq/Complex Variables texts, try, usually to no avail to work some problems, then go to sleep.  Fortunately, I would dream about them.  I would find, when I woke up, that I understood how to derive the equations I needed to ace the tests.  Magic, somehow.

Later, in my professional life, I was messing with an emerging oil field technology that I had, like an idiot, bet my future on.  Spent a load on it, and it didn't work.  I woke up in the middle of the nigh one night, prior to our final field experiment, with an insight that the thought leaders in this technology, which I was not one, had forgotten about it's "first principles"... ie they had become so invested in solving the 2nd and 3rd order problems associated with this technology that they had forgotten to solve for the first order problem, and further, by solving for the 2nd and 3rd order problems first, you made it practically impossible to solve for the first order problem!  A co-worker and I tried the solution in this order reverse of popular published opinion an viola, it worked.  Today, that technology is core to the success of a nice, little independent that successfully produces American oil and gas, and has spawned a handful of patents.

The power of sleep.  I thought I was some sort of unique case.  As it turns out, a recent Harvard study returned results that suggest that my case is a NORMAL case!  They asked 100 volunteers to take a test involving finding their way around a maze.  Five hours later, they were asked to do it again.  Those that had not slept in the interim improved their results by 26 seconds.  Those that had a 90 minute nap averaged 188 seconds.  The 4% that actually dreamed about the test improved their times 1880 seconds, or 10 times the non-dreamers! 

This explains why I am an email man.  I usually like to make big decisions after sleeping on it.  In any case, I think I need to take a nap.  Instead of chores, heh heh.

Trust the Easter Bunny

Our healthcare system is pretty munged up.  It's costs have skyrocketed far beyond inflation, and now consumes huge chunks of responsible families income.  It is and was pretty unsustainable.

Insurance was one of the many factors that cause it to be so.

So now we have mandatory insurance for everyone.

Certain kinds of expenditures we like... buying cars, televisions, food... things that give us joy.  Other kinds of expenditures piss us off.  Replacing a failed septic system. Automobile mechanics.  Health Care.  Stuff that occurs when it is not convenient, to just get us back to a starting point.  I think this is a human condition.

Without making insurance mandatory, and remember, this whole debate was not about access to health care, it was access to health insurance, young, healthy people would still not pay to be part of it.  In fact, in a perfectly efficient market, we wouldn't get insurance until we needed health care. 

Insurance only works when enough people that don't need it right now pay into the system.  It is because of this fact that insurance companies have lobbied states and feds for years to make various insurance mandatory.  Vehicles.  Home (as long as you have a mortgage).  Now Health.

Insurance owns America.  Once again, big business uses government to make rules to force people to buy things that they don't choose to buy on their own.  In this case, because it is one of those non-enjoyable purchases, and it is, arguably, for the collective benefit, it gets through.  Now lets work on septic systems.  Or not.  I just bought one, and I won't need another for 20 years.  But last year, I would have been all over it.  Especially if I couldn't be denied coverage for having a irreparably munged septic system.

Oh well.  The biggest problem I had with the legislation that passed is the same I have with EVERY piece of legislation passed by EITHER party.  It is written by special interests and then edited by chimpanzees and then amended by pork barrel specialists and then becomes "The Business Plan of How We Do Something".  Unlike a regular business plan, you can't adjust as you go along, fixing the operating problems with bad original assumptions so that you can create an efficient working model.  Your only recourse is to throw more money at it if it doesn't work as planned, and you can rest assured , it won't.  How do I know?  Because NO PROGRAM , in history, instituted by Congress with heavy hands on control, HAS EVER WORKED as advertised.  They have all evolved into monstrosities unrecognizable to their architects.  Cancers fed with the nutrients of ever expanding piles of Vitamin Cash.

The best laws are ones that say "everyone is created equal" or some such, and the only agencies that deal with it are courts.  No overhead laws.  Of course, that's just my opinion.

I had a great program for Health Care Reform.  We just enslave the Doctors, Nurses, and Pharma folks.  Since we were choosing to go down the road of taking from some without their desire or recourse, why not take exclusively from the providers?  Isn't that some sort of equivalency?  

Wouldn't it be cool if everyone who worked paid income tax at some level?  Make us ALL stakeholders in society?  Since we essentially confiscate some percentage of  the remuneration of 50% of working Americans without, necessarily, their permission, does this mean that I am 40% slave and 60% free person?  We seem to agree that 100% slave is bad.  At which percentage of our labor is it considered Slavery?  Indentured Servitude?  Is there a magic line?  

Just wondering this Easter Morning, as my dog found all the real Easter Eggs while the kids focused on the ones with candy and money...

Thoughtlets...

The FBI has closed its case with a finding that the fellow who sent officials anthrax-o-grams acted alone.  In its findings, it showed that the anthrax was sourced from a US bio-weapons laboratory, where the now-deceased defendant worked (he committed suicide while the indictment was being prepared), and that the defendant had a long history of mental illness.

Which begs the question.

Why do we have people with long histories of mental illness working in bio-weapons laboratories?  How many more of these do we have?  Does the Government, who we want to trust with more and more of our lives, apparently, do ANYTHING right?

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Shades of the movie "Falling Down", a frustrated software engineer burned his house down and crashed his Piper into an Austin, TX IRS Center.  The blogosphere and punditry was inflamed in this story, with the left citing it as insane behavior and the far right citing it as a martyrdom against the tyranny of the State.  

The IRS operates in a way that most Americans would find appalling.  Guilty until proven innocent. Extra constitutional powers to attach assets.  Laws (ie tax structure) that are incomprehensible and that no expert can agree on.  An entire tax schema that preys on the working man or woman who has valuable job skills but doesn't really affect the mega rich.  A system that is at its tipping point, where more people DON'T pay anything than those that do.  The systemic death knell of a Democracy, where the majority, that bear no cost, can loot those, the minority, that do.

As the Scottish joke goes, perhaps we need to "Stitch that!"

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I redid a couple of slides from a post a couple of weeks back and added natural gas to the mix to show a fairly "Inconvenient Truth" to Peak Oil types... ie the US is adding more production capacity since Prudhoe Bay, and the rest of our Peak Oil started declining in the mid 1980's.  

Green is times of increase, yellow times of stasis.  The last 5 years are anomalous and seem to indicate an increased production capability stemming from fracs/laterals and unconventional resources.  

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Apparently, the athletes in the Olympic Village have shagged through the 100,000 condom allotment, 14 per every athlete, coach, judge, and official hanger on, causing the host committee to send an "emergency shipment".  I wonder how many were used by the Curling Teams?  Anyone care to venture a per capita "over/under"?

McCain/Feingold Redux

So,  given the discussion in my post the other day about the Supreme Court's decision to overturn McCain/Feingold, am I right in stating that:

1.  The law defines some particular associations of people as too dangerous or unworthy to have the right to spend money to expound their political ideas?

2.  Those associations are Corporations, both profit and non-profit, and Unions, but does NOT include media corporations?

3.  Political speech, if it is paid for by said associations, in any way, shape, or form, regardless of medium, even if the association was founded to promulgate that speech, is thus illegal and the individual members of the association subject to prosecution?  Thus, if someone gave a speech on the street, and the soapbox was bought or donated by the association, the association and individuals therein subject to prosecution?

4.  The Supreme Court decided, 5-4, that this was unconstitutional?

5.  That either the 5 members, or the 4 members, or both were motivated by partisan bias?

If the above points are a correct encapsulation of the issue, can anyone tell me what the core value of either side is that supports such a disparate reading of First Amendment Rights?

Mean Greens?

A recent University of Toronto study has determined that those who buy "environmentally-friendly" products are more likely to than others to cheat, steal, and engage in other unethical behaviors. 

Apparently, buying green is a common component in a practice called "moral self-regulation", where those that have not so good behaviors balance it with good behaviors.  

Or, turning this concept on its head, perhaps buying green makes you an antisocial jerk.  Hard to tell which is cause and which is effect...

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091007103030.htm

The Whole "Eating Local" Thing...

As a confirmed foody, I am certainly aware of the "Eat Local" movement, and even know a couple of "locavores".  The first time I was made aware of this was an article I read in a magazine somewhere about the chefs at Google's campus in California seeking locally-grown food.  My inner Texas oilman said "I wonder when the hunting season is on cartoon songbirds that flit around the heads of Google Chefs".  My inner hippy cosmonaut said "that's kinda cool".  Then the inner oilman tried to stomp the inner hippy in a kind of "Easy Rider" ending.  It was ugly.

In reality, although, as a Texan, I am often guilty of applying the "Everything Californian Is Complete BS" filter, the local food movement was something I couldn't throw out whole cloth.  The major premise is that the closer the food is to market, the more resource you can save.  There is a whole Local Economy thing also tied up with the movement that I don't get, since they don't build cars and TVs anywhere around where I live, and I doubt if I would buy a locally produced TV from the local commune even if I could.  In any case, "Local Food" has stuck in the back of my head until I decided to do some "ciphering", as Jethro Bodine, my own personal icon, might put it.

The whole "Local Food" resource saving argument falls apart if you are dealing with a local hippy farmer who drives his pickup to the farmers market, loaded with 500 lbs of produce, for Saturday sales.  18 Wheelers are just much more efficient.  The fuel burned per pound of food is the same moving 500 lbs of 50 miles as it is moving a tractor trailer containing 60,000 lbs of food 2000 miles.  Of course, this efficiency shows up in cost.  In this case, the environmental impact is proportional to the economic impact, since transportation is the only metric being measured.  The answer in both cases is around 0.005 gallons per pound of food delivered.  In reality, the local comparison looks twice as bad if the pick up truck is driven back to the farm empty, since the big rig will likely pick up a load of something at destination for delivery elsewhere.  

The only way to make the Locally Grown case work, at least from a "resource consuption" point of view, is to move it via big rigs the 50 miles to market, which implies a lot more than a local farmers market and a few restaurants.  It demands scale, on both the farm and market side.  A lot of storage logistics then need to be implemented that require "hidden" resource consumption.

In reality, a lot of our hyper-efficient, just in time delivery world is nearly, by definition, the best steward of environmental resource.  Maybe not all, but the majority for sure.

Points of View...

It isn't facts that are important anymore, it is your Point of View. 

For example, let's take mortgages and debt.

The "Progressive" point of view- Evil mortgage bankers exploited the ignorance of hard-working lower and lower middle class Americans by selling them time-bomb debt in the form of a diabolical financial instrument called an Adjustable Rate Mortgages that reset rates at a higher price than what was originally locked in.  Poor folks were pushed into buying much more house than they could afford because the bankers got the fees on these mortgages.  Ergo, a failure of Capitalism.

The "Free Market" point of view- Politicians, always eager to share other people's wealth, founded Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac as markets and defacto government subsidies of mortgage loans that would never have otherwise been made, since people don't risk their own money out of proportion to the risk they incur.  By "de-risking" these loans, the government set up the engine for the systemic failure of the economy.  Ergo, a failure of Government Interventionism.

Which side is right?  

Like all things, it's somewhere between the absolutes that the rigid idealists espouse, but I think the truth is probably closer to the Free Market argument than the Evil Capitalist argument.

The "Progressive" point of view is that debt should be widely available, not just to the rich.  In fact, it is the poor that need access to capital MORE than the rich.  I get this idea.  I actually like it.  

(Digression- The very far left branch of the "Progressive" point of view; the Code Pinko Commie side, would argue that money should be given outright to the poor... screw "loaning".  A clean prescription to be sure.  All one has to do is convince themself and enough others that state sponsored theft of property is a-ok.  In societies where there are few stakeholders and a lot of real serfs and no upward mobility or potential thereof, the marketing of this ideal has been pretty easy. In a society like ours, you have to do a lot of psychological shucking and jiving  in order to make "haves" without  historical antecedent feel like "have nots".  Given enough time and an educational system sympathetic to such a message, it seems to work).

The "Progressives" then make laws that limit how much interest can be charged, since it looks exploitive to make the poor borrowers pay  more than the rich.  That the risk of`non-repayment from the poor is much higher is given lower if any consequence.  

The "Free Marketeer" approach is that debt should be priced based on risk of repayment.  The higher the risk, the higher the interest, because no rational person would choose to loan money for the same rate if the risk was substantively higher... in essence how many people would bet on double zero on the roulette wheel if it paid the same as Black or Red? The devil is in calculating the risk.  If you manipulate the market by fixing all risks being priced the same, you will find that people will not bet on the high risk pool, so no action there at all.  The unintended consequence of Usery Laws.  If you make a player bet on all risks at the same price that are presented to them, then they will either not play at all or demand that the overall odds be changed to reflect a return on investment. Therefore Black and Red, and all other potential bets on the roulette wheel would be priced at 6:1 to make the overall, evenly proportioned bet slightly break even.

In our Real Life case, we got the government to guarantee payment of those loans via Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.  The loans are now either priced lower than the real risk in the interim, because the risk has been mitigated by guaranteeing the loans or the original risk was not correctly measured.  Maybe, the risk was calculated all wrong in the first place, and the Government won't really have to pay out!  The best of all possible outcomes, this is the "pray the bankers are stupid" scenario.  Usually, when you get a choice between "the bankers are all stupid" and "the politicians don't know what they are doing when they manipulate markets", choose the outcome that depends on "the politicians don't know what they are doing" option.

Mortgages are among the easiest debt instruments to price because they have a term, and you can easily determine if the borrower income is enough to repay the loans as per the conditions.  Now that we have de-risked the loans, the poor can now buy homes!  Yay!

Except now they all buy homes, and the supply shrinks, and the home prices get higher because a lot of cheap capital is chasing fewer homes.  That is the result of the pesky supply/demand equation, that some deny as vehemently as they accuse others of denying climate change and evolution, never mind that it has been proved in practice countless times, which does exactly what it always does.  The definition of a physical law, really.  

So now what?  Interest rates are about as low as they can go, so lets create a mortgage that gives a nonlinear payment schedule... lower than straight interest and principal to begin with, ie "Below Market" payments for some initial period of time that resets later to an above market payment later, in hopes that your employment situation improves or your house appreciates.  Or how about a simpler "interest only" note that only depends on home appreciation? And let's top it off with a Zero Down, No Equity policy?  Why not?  The government WANTS us to do this... everyone should have a home... and government policy is to insure that risk so the public gets what it wants.

Lower income people can have homes!  Great times ahead!  Progressive policies seem to be working! Homeownership is on the rise!  But then...

Interest rates increase, as they always do.  Or the price of homes gets so high that no amount of restructuring payment schedules can yield a defensible cash flow scenario for approving loans.  Or both.  Those people that had low rates to begin with are seeing them reset to higher rates  They can't refinance because this is happening broadly... interest rates hit the market everywhere.  Prices fall, as supply and demand dictates if no one can buy.  No equity turns into negative equity. Homeowners now owe more than their house is now worth.  Not a problem in the 1930's or 1940's, where people still had some integrity about their debt.  A real problem today, where no shame is attached to walking away from debt, and societal scorn is instead heaped on those stupid enough to extend it to people who refuse to honor it, with the only defense offered as  "I was too stupid to know what was being offered me".  

The "Progressive"  THEN blames the mortgage bankers for making loans that were affordable, but because of their very affordability, caused home prices to bubble.  Some bankers weren't stupid.  Goldman Sachs, while securitizing and selling crappy debt obligations to pension funds et al, used their fees to short these same securitized debt obligations they sold to others.  They saw the big picture, even when the politicians and the dumber bankers didn't.  

In reality, if we hadn't had government policy to reduce the cost of debt below market conditions, ie had debt had been priced at market conditions, where the debt wasn't guaranteed by big bro, and the financial institutions were placed in a position to get a return on their capital, would this still happen?  The answer is "Probably not to the extent it did".  Yes, the securitization of the debt obligations certainly played a big part, but the risk was much more knowable.  20% down payments, plenty of equity, and not a flood of buyers bubbling up the pool to the extent it was bubbled wouldn't have happened either.

Bankers did exactly what the rules told them to do... they just had a set of risks that the government took off their hands and a system that allowed them to scale debt out like never before.  Proper regulation, like not allowing a single asset to be insured for 13 times its value, would have helped a lot.  Funny.  I cannot insure my house for 13 times its value and then burn it down.  That is called fraud.  The allegorical equivalent, though, is business as usual for the insurance industry.

Want to fix it all?  Don't let the government guarantee debt obligations. If you let insurance guys and bankers be paid on fees generated at closing, and not on full cycle economics, then you must escrow the amount that a full meltdown would require to fix.   Let's see how that works.

The Foundation Crumbles...

What a year.  During the bleak GWB years, we saw $50 billion a year in deficit spending; enough to cause even "free-spending" Democrats to cry "Fiscal Irresponsibility".  This year, year one of the Obama generation, we saw $1.5 trillion in deficit spending, and a prognosed $2 trillion in deficit spending for year 2.  30 bush years in year one and another 40 bush years in year two.  70 "fiscally irresponsible" bush years of spending in just two years.  Wow.

This year, due to this huge increase in spending, we will spend 30% of tax income on interest.  40% is spent on already fixed costs such as social security and medicare/medicaid.  We double that debt next year.  Ironically, were this a mortgage, we wouldn't qualify for the loan.  Even with an ARM. Even in the old days... the "free money days".

Where are we getting the money to pay our debts?  Treasury bonds has been our historical choice.  Nobody really wants to buy these today, and interest rates have quadrupled over the last year in order to get dumbsh... I mean our international financial and trade`partners to buy them. These are what would otherwise be known as "Non-Collateralized Debt Obligations".  Think what THAT will do the interest portion above, when 40 years of historical spending is jammed down our gullet in one year at 4 times historical rates?  

Chinese have said they will quit buying.  So who is buying our increasingly less plush T-paper?  This year, it was the Fed.  They bought half our scratchy T-paper.  With what?  The new money they printed.  How much?  They doubled the money supply this year.  Yep.  100% increase in the money supply.  When a company does that on Wall Street, the value of their stock usually gets cut in half, especially if their economic output stays the same.  Our economic output, however, is LOWER while we have DOUBLED our money supply.  Guess what this means?  Yep.  A dollar is worth about 40 cents, but the treasury and feds have been pulling timing shenanigans to keep us from recognizing this catastrophe all at once.

Change and Hope are fine, but taking the monetary handgun, placing it in our collective mouth and blowing our society into the third world is the work of weak and worthless politicians.   Sorry kids.  We f**** you again.  Heh heh.