From David and Eric Coffin'e most recent Hard Rock Analyst Advisories, "The main driver of global trade has shifted from export from low wage economies, to providing for enhanced consumption in emerging economies"

Now, I advise you to do this, change one word of this. Change the word economies to pizza businesses. You then get this:. "The main driver of global trade has shifted from export from (in) low wage pizza businesses, to providing for enhanced consumption in emerging pizza businesses."

So lets say I'm going to start a new pizza business. In the old days, its purpose would be to produce as much pizza at as low a cost as possible. In this new age of American Business, its purpose would be to cook and internally consume as much pizza as possible.

I being someone who is trying to grow such a business, wouldn't look for employees who were skilled in getting pizzas baked and shipped in large numbers as much as I would be looking for those who could get them eaten in large quantities. I wouldn't be looking for smart and diligent people, but very, very fat people. As I grew my business, my employees would keep getting bigger and fatter. I'd have to hire more to help them eat all the pizza they were making.

Those of you who have read me know that I think the entire concept of a service economy is basically ridiculous, a cannard fabricated to try and rationalize an intuitively ridiculous sytem of overconsumption.

Still, in our pizza business example, ultimately the accountants would need "something" to measure. Seeing that the business would no longer be selling anything, since all the employees would be literally eatiing up all the potential profits, so the business would have to find some other way to cosider itself successful. Why not start measuring the productivity of the janitorial staff?

Ultimately such a pizza business economy cannot last, because ultimately the Iceman would cometh, so to speak, and say, "Wait a mintue, you guys arent really doing anything here of value. All you are doing is eating pizza and borrowing quarters from the cash register to play your own video games in the arcade."

Sooner or later that iceman is a person who is being hurt by the pizza shop operators behavior. He might a be a Chinese worker who has been busting his butt for forty years not realizing that there have been a bunch of fat people on the other side of the planet eating pizza the whole time at his children's expense. Basically, he gets tired of footing the bill, and the power gets shut off to the Pizza business as a result.

This is very surprizing to the proprieters , because they feel they are very good at eating pizza, their job, and in truth, they are very good at this. But the new rule is now, "No more Pizza without sales. These guys are so fat now and used to just eating everything. They don't know how to sell. They don't even care about selling. They get depressed and guess what happenes. A DEPRESSION!

I believe we are closer to the pizza shop economy collapsing in some way or another than most people think. What is the sign that we are close. In a word, "gold". Sure gold is backing off a little bit, but so what? Look at where it is. As James Dines once said, "The end, signaled by the rise of gold and silver is not immanent. It is upon us. The rise in gold clinches it for me."

The profligate pizza business is failing, as it has been for a long time. The time is coming when no one will be able to pay the bills. The lights will get turned out and these pizza makers will have to start doing what they were founded to do, sell pizza to the public. It will probably take a generation to relearn how to do this and get good enough to beat the Chinese who don't even like pizza but are churning it out at alarming rates and working their butts off and making very little and saving half of what they make in the process. When the Chinese think of a service economy, they think, "Yes sir, here I am at your service." Bull