Government Can’t Prevent the Next Financial Disaster – Here’s Why

munknee.com / by Lorimer Wilson / June 12, 2012

Even as I write these words, the world’s largest economy — the E.U. — is coming unglued at the seams, the world’s second largest — the U.S. — is careening headlong toward a fiscal cliff that promises to gut its GDP, nearly all of Asia — including Japan, China and India — is slowing…and yet most investors still don’t get the message. [Let me go on to explain just what that message is.]Words: 1357

So says Martin D. Weiss, Ph.D. (www.moneyandmarkets.com) in edited excerpts from his original article*.

Weiss goes on to say, in part:

Investors are continuing to:

• invest as if nothing has changed
• take risks that, in prior eras, would have been deemed wildly imprudent
• hold massive sums in banks that are akin to gambling casinos and even when they DO rush to safety, they often jump from the frying pan into the fire,
• buy the bonds of some of the most fiscally bankrupt governments on earth.

Why? There can only be one possible explanation for this pathological complacency – die-hard faith in the supposedly “limitless power” of government to prevent financial disasters.

The origins of the complacency are not hard to see:

• every time a major financial disaster has struck in recent years, Big Government has swooped down like Superman to supposedly rescue the victims and,
• every time global financial markets have come to the brink of a total meltdown, Big Government has pulled them back from the abyss.

It’s only natural for investors to sit back in a state of semi-eternal bliss, assuming governments will continue to do the same, but there are three major flaws in that assumption:

Flaw #1: Governments rarely prevent financial collapses — they almost invariably intervene only AFTER the collapse has struck.

History proves that it’s only at an advanced stage of the crisis that governments can gather the political and financial capital to respond. Result: By the time the official rescue squad finally reaches the scene of the disaster, countless investors are already buried under the rubble.

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Lorimer Wilson, editor of www.munKNEE.com (Your Key to Making Money!), has edited the article below for length and clarity –
see Editor’s Note at the bottom of the page. This paragraph must be included in any article re-posting to avoid copyright
infringement.