The Ether Bunny's Goodies

Have you been scarfing up dubious assets with easy money?

Apr 05, 2024

Issue #165

Recently my community had its annual Easter egg hunt. Many years ago, we took our young child to it. For at least some of the past years, a helicopter carrying the Easter Bunny dropped hundreds of eggs onto a field. The kids were then turned loose to run around and quickly scarf up as many eggs as possible. Within ten seconds, it was all over. Invariably, the older, bigger kids would run roughshod over the younger, gentler kids and wind up with most of the haul.

We live in a world of scarcity where we have to compete for everything from food to mates, so it's a good lesson for kids to learn at some point. But I thought the way the egg “hunt” was run was too crass and vulgar. It wasn't for us, so we didn't participate in future years, after which I referred to the event as a “greedy grabfest.”

When I saw the announcement for this year's event, I noticed the inducement, “Get the most eggs and win a prize!” I thought about that. Is that how we want to be conditioning our children, to frantically run around, stampeding over dainty little dollies to snatch up cheap plastic crap made in China that's filled with lots of sugar (and who knows what else) that's terrible for our health? How does that differ from, say, the Visigoths who sacked Rome?

I thought about how I (or even better, Thoreau) would run the event. First of all, there would be just one egg per child. It wouldn't be a Fabergé egg, but it would be heirloom quality, something that could be used every year and passed on to future generations. It would have the child's name on it, and would be adorned with decorations that were unique to that child.

The child would actually have to spend time and energy hunting for it, not in an open field, but in a clever, well-concealed place, such as when you find eggs in a nest. Humans are hunters, so this is what our bodies expect of us. Dopamine is not about the kill, but the thrill of the chase. The Declaration of Independence states that one of our unalienable rights is the pursuit of happiness, not happiness itself. This is why something like government welfare is so alienating and robs people of their humanity.

Once found, the child could then retreat to a quiet spot, either alone or with her parents, and spend some time admiring the beauty and quality of the egg, appreciating its time-worn blemishes, and thinking about what it must have been like when a parent or grandparent found it decades earlier as children themselves.

Inside the egg would be something cool and valuable that could become part of a collection and also passed down to future generations—a bit of opal, a small fossil, or an old silver coin—and a piece of 90% cacao. While savoring the dark, velvety taste of cacao as it melted in her mouth, she could just sit there, astonished by the green grass and blue sky of a gorgeous spring day, and grateful to be alive and part of a loving family with such a memorable and timeless tradition.

My wife would probably tell me, “Nobody would want to go to an Easter egg hunt like that.” And that sums up our problem, doesn't it?

Getting back to reality, the so-called Federal Reserve Bank is like the Easter Bunny, dropping tons of “money” from a helicopter to a large crowd waiting expectantly below. On CNBC, Jim Cramer leads the cheer and provides his standard sage advice to the masses: “Hooray, free stuff for everyone! Buy everything!” The hoi polloi swarm the field, harvesting on an industrial scale the cheap, plastic eggs made by Chinese slave labor. Many of the more clever and sophisticated scroungers use margin loans and/or call options to increase their take.

To the delight of investors, inside the eggs are a wide variety of treasures that everyone has been talking about that seem valuable: fiat currency, U.S. Treasury securities, cryptocurrencies, pot stocks, AI stocks, Mag7 stocks, call options on Nvidia, SPACs, NFTs, commercial real estate, and Buy Now Pay Later loans.

But in a world of cheap money, there are lots of treats for consumers, too: products from Big Pharma (including a ~$1,000 monthly annuity for the lifetime of each patient on a weight loss drug) and Big Food (mostly sugar, carbs, wheat and other items on the World Economic Forum's food pyramid), houses that are either astronomically priced or that cost only $1,400, billions of dollars of forgiven student loans, jobs for the incompetent, $20 minimum wage for fast food workers, etc.

Thanks to this digital cornucopia that Ben Bernanke reminded us about, there's also plenty of cash for non-Americans, including hundreds of billions of dollars for perpetual war against Eurasia. Tens of thousands of ~~illegal aliens~~ “newcomers” in New York City get put up in Manhattan hotels for several weeks and receive $53 million in prepaid debit cards. There's also plenty of money for Chinese imports such as TikTok, Fentanyl, Tranq, secret bioweapons labs, enough ~~possible saboteurs~~ “newcomers” to field about ten army divisions, spy cranes, etc.

Most of this would not be possible without the artificially low interest rates and trillions of dollars conjured up out of the ether by the geniuses at the Fed. Most of the rest are the moral consequences of perpetuating an immoral currency.

And just like the diarrheal reckoning that occurs after binging on too much sugary crap inside plastic Easter eggs, America's financial day of reckoning has finally arrived (gold hit an all-time high of $2,303.95 this afternoon). “The runs” could start with a run on a bank. If you've been binging on easy money, I hope you have enough toilet paper on hand. If not, perhaps you could supplement your stash with some U.S. dollars as they revert to their intrinsic value, as Voltaire predicted in the 1700s.

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The Ether Bunny's Goodies

Have you been scarfing up dubious assets with easy money?

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