What’s great about Jim Grant writing for the unwashed minority (those who toil in official positions in Washington) is that you can re-link and comment without running into the Wrath of Grant’s for violating his confidence as a paid-up subscriber. Our point here is that he is echoing our current belief that the current level of government mandated interest rates is a disaster for the economy in many ways, one of which is the depressive nature on the spending habits of the saving class.

On a similar note, one of the other two paid subscriptions we have for outside research comes from the desk of Jim Bianco. “Simply, the actions of people like Ben Bernanke or Mario Draghi matter far more than any specific fundamental of a company. It’s as if every S&P 500 company has the same Chairman of the Board that only knows one strategy, resulting in a high degree of correlation between seemingly unrelated companies. Massive central bank/government involvement in markets risks returning us to a de facto centrally planned economy. Every time the Federal Reserve opens a swap line, or the ECB hints at another program to stem the crisis the central banks/governments are trading a short-term fix that raises all boats, even the bad ones, for an even more inefficient capital allocation process.