Consumer Confidence and Powerball

Fox Business reports the highest level of consumer confidence since February, 2008. 

That's great news.  We know that nothing bad happened after that in 2008, so consumer confidence must be a good predictor of future economic growth.  Right? 

We are playing a rigged game against the House.  The House intends to win, and the House will win, or at least end the night with the most markers.  In this case, the House not only controls the roulette wheel, it can manufacture chips as long as it wants, so it seems, without anyone being able to actually cash in. 

It is one thing for people to buy Powerball tickets when they have -- or should have a good idea of what the odds are.  When governments in collusion with central banks publish bogus reports and manipulate, excuse me, adjust numbers to make things look better than they can possibly be, that is equivalent to declaring that any given 2-dollar Powerball ticket has a 50-50 change of winning half a billion dollars.  It just ain't so. 

This is not to say that the ECB, the Fed, the Bank of China, et al, cannot force a "deal" on Greece and Germany or Congress and the Whitehouse or whatever party is out of control at the moment and keep the ponzi scheme afloat for a few more days/months/years.  They have and they will as long as they can.  It's the only game they have, and they desperately want everybody to keep playing.  Just like the casino, no one minds if you and I "win" a little now and then.  In fact, the casino wants the gambler to win -- some -- often enough, in fact, that he keeps gambling.  The casino does not wish to see the gambler broken completely, just skinned.  They only make money and stay in business when people lose just a little more often than they win. 

I have stopped playing for the most part, and I have no doubt suffered loss as a result over the last four or five years.  Inflation has been the penalty I have paid, the tax that has been levied against me through the Federal Reserve.  Still, I think I can weather a collapse better than the majority of the professionals down at the casino -- maybe better than the casino itself.  We'll see, I suppose. 

The main caution I would give at this point is to understand that we are being gamed, that nothing in the fundamentals has changed, that arithmetic still rules in the end.  Do not believe the lie that stocks are worth "what someone will pay for them."  That is true enough in a rigged market for the short-term.  A soap bubble is "real", after all.  It just will not last.