Okay, first things first. Every time I try to google something from my laptop, all the links google comes up with are links to spammy pages. Doesn't happen on the desktop, only on the laptop (it's a standard corporate issue model). What gives?

Next - I was going to write a really good post regarding our current economic conditions. Scratch that. I DID write (what I thought was) a really good post regarding our current economic situation, and it got disappeared away. This is my attempt to reconstruct it.

If you want to go into the causes, I'd be glad to send you a sourced and cited email. But if you're looking for a finger to point, you're probably looking to point a partisan finger; and what I have to say won't satisfy your needs. So let's just skip the whole "Who's fault is this whole thing" debate by saying - The fault lies with more people than you have fingers to point.

What really matters is how we tackle what lies ahead. The fact of the matter is that we're in for a good 12 months of tough times. That's not the optimistic timeline, but it's not the pessimistic one either; it's the shankonomical estimate of our future pain from this point in time. Expect unemployment to hit maybe 10% or so, and as of right now; I'm not really sure whether we're going to experience deflation or inflation. Either way, save your cash and be glad that gas prices have dropped recently.

Advice? My advice, crappy as it is anyways; is brief: Conserve capital, reduce debt exposure. What this means to you and me is that we:
1) take a good hard look at the money we're spending, or we want to spend. Do we really need a new car/house/TV/PS3 that costs that much? What else could we do with that money to insure our future? Do you have 6 months of easily accesible cash saved up?
2) develop a plan to be debt free. "Debt free? My GOD, how is that possible!?" I know, seems impossible. Well, make an extra principle payment on your mortgage every year that's equal to your monthly payment. That should take a good ten years or more off your loan. If you bought a good car, it will be paid off long before you actually need to replace it. The money you want to spend on everything in step 1 up there could be used to pay down credit cards and HELOC's. I mean, you were going to pay cash for it, right?

Yes, if things start heading towards deflation, this could be a shadow of the Great Depression. Will people be selling apples by the side of the road? No, probably not. They'll be selling their LCD's and SUV's on Craigslist. They will lose their jobs and their homes - but only because they or the companies they worked for made foolish decisions. American Express is going out of business, you know why? Because they are stupid. Did you know they offer an AMEX Black Card that has no limit? What kind of dipshit loans an unlimited amount of money to someone? I guess AMEX does. They're stupid, and they're going to put their employees in a pinch. GM, Ford, Bear Stearns, Lehman, and AIG are stupid too.

Unfortunately for you and me, all these stupid fucks want us to pay them for being stupid. They're so stupid, in fact; that they think you and I are even stupider. They call it a bailout, I call it giving people money for being so damn stupid they fucked up almost the entire world. You shouldn't give people money for acheiving such feats; you should be slapping them in the pillory and making a pastime of throwing kitchen scraps at them. Okay, that might be counterproductive. You should at least be making them work for free to right the ship they made a living drilling holes in, though.

It's important to remember that to get through this, we have to go through this. When the excess is burned out of the market, just like a pine forest after a fire; a much healthier environment will have evolved. Hopefully this is the rebirth of austerity, and at least for a generation or so we'll note that rampant consumerism has long term consequences that are, by all accounts, poopy.

And a big thanks to Todd Harrison and Minyanville for letting me totally ripoff their philosphy. Without telling them.