The Hill

New parties, Pimco’s Bill Gross and Tibetan Prayer Flags as economic indicators

By Bernie Quigley

For on 8/15/11

As liberals flee Obama and conservatives flock to Perry, expect a new “no name” party of Obama conservatives and Bush liberals to rise against a virtually brand new conservative life force starting with Perry (and Romney now!), Palin, Giuliani, Trump, (and maybe David Petraeus?). Bloomberg money may go behind the new no names; he was first mentioned three years back in first rumors of a third party in a Unity ’08 scheme from Maine’s former governor Angus King and actor Sam Waterston.

But if so, maybe Virginia Senators Mark Warner and Jim Webb with General Wesley Clark, Elizabeth Warren, Russ Feingold of Wisconsin and indeed, he who has earned his place among the venerables, Rep. Dennis Kuchinich of Ohio, should also think of going alone and leave the Democratic party an abandoned skin of Clinton nostalgicos and Kennedy relatives. Think ahead to 2016 to build again from scratch. The Democrats should have run Mark Warner for President in 2008 in the first place. 2016 is not too late.
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Would be nice to see Perry and Romney transcend the debates entirely and run on their records, on their resumes, on their lives, character and experiences. Leave the American Idol-style debates to the amateurs. End these painful pretentions. Debates do not tell how one would govern. They tell how one would teach.
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Today does indeed mark the critical turning. The most succinct analysis of the economic crisis goes perhaps to Pimco's Bill Gross in Thursday's Washington Post. As he explains, change is here to stay but it may not be what we expected.

“But while our debt crisis is real and promises to grow to Frankenstein proportions in future years,” he writes, “debt is not the disease — it is a symptom. Lack of aggregate demand or, to put it simply, insufficient consumption and investment is the disease. . . We and our global market competitors are and have been experiencing a lack of aggregate demand for several decades. It is now only visibly coming to a head, as the magic elixir of leverage is drained and exhausted.”

Economist Harry Dent has been saying as much for the last 20 years. War babies, born all at the same time, will recede and die all at the same time. Starting now. All 40 million of us with another 40 million behind. And half of us forgot to have children, depending instead on government and corporation for elderly support. As Dent said on Cavuto a few weeks back, old people do not buy things.

Explained in this column on October 27, 2008: As economic indicators, the sequence of Tibetan prayer flags reflects the human progress of rise and decline from birth to death in individuals and in cultures as well. The flags fly in this sequence: white, red, green, gold, dark blue. As we began with white in 1946, we enter now dark blue or as Tibetans see it "the between" – end of the life cycle and return to the Earth Mother. The cycle begins again with white – rebirth - 20 years later.

Not to worry, the new “greatest generation” will save us, just as it did in 1946. But as the downturn began then in 1929, the “greatest generation” was only nine years old. So we may have to sit awhile.