My Master Plan to Enslave the World

It became apparent in a previous post that someone was on to me -- they realized that what I have been trying to do is to create a real estate bubble in Marin. That is not entirely correct. Puhleeze. I have in fact been striving to create a real estate bubble not only in the entire country but also over the entire face of the globe! Hannibal, Alexander, Caesar, Khan...they're all panzies by comparison.

It would be an understatement to say that it has not been easy. You see, to pull this off I realized very early on that a shrewd understanding of human psychology was required. I know from personal experience that administering pleasure for a brief period of time and then abruptly taking it away only heightens that pleasure later when it is again applied. It's called "priming the system". Therefore, to accomplish my ultimate diabolical goal I had to first create the impression of great wealth and then abruptly take it way. So my evil plot began by engineering the tech bubble. This required talking to my buddies at the Fed to crank up the printing presses and flood the U.S. financial system with liquidity. They were all too happy to oblige as they owed me a few favors; Greenspan was my poodle you see. A few anonymous letters to Gates, Ellison, Jobs, etc. and the foundations of a tech bubble were laid.

Anyway, after the tech bubble got really hot and everyone and their brother fancied themselves a stock investing genius I told Greenspan to bring it to an end which he did. Unfortunately, the financial aftermath of the tech bubble collapse was a little harsher than I would have liked so Greenie (as I am fond of calling him) had to drop the over night lending rate to frighteningly low levels. Everyone was feeling really poor and thus desperately ready for the next bubble...the real one...The Big One...the Bubble to End All Bubbles...but those dang Muslim extremists had to go and try and spoil it for everyone. It was touch and go for a while and I thought I might fail but fortunately American ingenuity, economic flexibility, and all that economic dark matter floating around prevailed in the end. And Greenie's further dropping of the interest rates to the point of almost making money free didn't hurt either.

Once the system was holding it's own, Greenie's interest rates made the carry trade an obvious winner. All part of the plan my friends. Banks started lending to everyone as anticipated, even to corpses (I admit that I didn't see that one coming but it's all good)! What with the cheap money, all the tax savings associated with mortgages, etc. people were buying up houses like crazy as predicted. The fact that they are illiquid, depreciating assets didn't matter. The fact that fraud was rampant didn't matter either. And I knew I could count on denial, cognitive dissonance, self-justification, and the typical American's ignorance of history to supercharge the bubble to heights unseen. As a result, it got so frenzied it even scared me a little; sort of like how Dr. Frankenstein must have felt when his creation first rose from the slab..."it's alive, ALIIIIIIIIVE!". And everyone was so giddy with greed and so convinced that they were real estate investor geniuses that no one bothered to stop and think about it.

But chaining Americans to their mortgages wasn't enough you see. I needed more; something was missing. Ah, I know -- credit cards. American's love their credit cards almost as much as they love the TV. My connections in the credit card industry run deep and they agreed to give out cards like they were candy. And when I asked them to lobby for that bankruptcy law they were aquiver with delight. My pals in Congress caved like the spineless jellyfish they are (don't you just love America?) and now the final stage of my Master Plan is in place...crash the bubble, wipe out trillions in paper wealth, enslave the populace with debt that neither they nor their grandchildren will ever be able to repay, and do it the world over. This blog is but a means to an end you see. The noose is around the neck of America and I'm tightening it down. Almost there. And then you are mine.