The Grand Unified Conspiracy Theory - Part I

We here at TILB have been referring to our Grand Unified Conspiracy Theory for well over a month now. What follows is the first in a two part series on The Grand Unified Conspiracy Theory. Part I outlines The Theory. Part II will show its applicability to nearly every government intervention to date.

As previously discussed on TILB, many of the governmental actions to date have the strange feeling of a coordinated effort to disembowel corporate America while burking free will into its perverted death throes.

Some may say it seems harsh to label this ugly trend a "conspiracy," yet it has many of the classic hallmarks. As Kurt Cobain said, sometime before hollowing out his head, "just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you." While conspiratorial path began under President Bush, it has accelerated at a sickening pace under President Obama.

As with all conspiracies, the ability to decipher the actions begins with understanding the end goal.

We believe the goal is simple: control cash flows and direct them as desired to gain political ends. Whether or not it's a full fledged conspiracy, that goal seems obviously applicable and deceitful enough to create discomfort.

Working from the end forward, if we were conspiring to accomplish the aforementioned goal, we would want to do it in the least overt manner possible so as to maintain plausible deniability.

So the Chavez/Venezuela model, despite its appeal to ill-minded politicians, fails the basic sniff test of the average American and would be difficult to employ in The States. While that overt model meets the end goal, it does not fly in America, so we have to look for a path with lower resistance.

What if, rather than simply taking assets from owners against their will, we actually set up a structure that caused those owners to willfully surrender to our control?

That would seem to be the ideal.

As the legendary algebrist Jacobi is famed for saying, the secret to problem solving is to "invert, always invert." So, with our understanding of the end desires and a method that would work in America (get them to willfully give you their assets) well in mind, we can begin to imagine a means of accomplishing the goal:

1) Identify a big industry that is suffering from weakness, ideally a cyclical or temporary weakness. A lot of debt would be helpful as well. One final condition is key: many industry players need to be suffering from some weakness, not just one particularly poor player;

2) Identify the weakest sizeable player;

3) Deem that player "too important to fail" due to traits that are easily deliverable by the media and easily consumed by Joe Sixpack (e.g., "huge employer", statements of "systemic importance" such as "its collapse would cause the collapse of others", etc.);

4) Once we reach the brink of that important-but-weak company's collapse, step in as a funding provider of last resort in exchange for dominating control;

5) Prop up the failed company (FailedCo), disallowing its failure in a traditional sense thus preventing its competitors from absorbing the marketshare that would have been forfeit by FailedCo. This marketshare grab would have improved the health of all the remaining players but instead the opposite happens because...

6) ...the government, lacking a natural profit motive and supported by a theoretically infinite funding supply (a printing press and taxing authority), will operate FailedCo without a particularly profit driven motive. These non-economic behaviors harm competitors. Running the business in this manner will be easily justified with statements such as, "we need to ensure that FailedCo continues to operate at scale so that when we sell it back to private hands it generates enough proceeds to payback tax payers" or "we are not in the business of laying people off. We want to maintain the corpus of FailedCo until we find a permanent home for it." Countervailing voices can easily be surpressed with the mantra that they are greedy capitalists trying to benefit from the pain of the Average American.

7) In a world without interference in the markets when FailedCo actually failed, the competitors would have been strengthened in two ways: 1) marketshare grab from the disappearance or absorption of FailedCo; and 2) improved pricing as the surviving companies all endeavor to rebuild their balance sheets. However, in the conspiracy world, these participants continue to weaken as they compete with an overwhelmingly funded, non-economic competitor. This leads to the failure of the next weakest competitor (NextCo);

8) NextCo voluntarily comes to the government for its own bailout.

9) Rinse and repeat.

The process of having the government compete with private capital without a classic return-driven framework means that it will pound already weakened competitors into capitulation and these competitors will actually come to the government of their own volition for bailout, helping to further consolidate the government's power and control over cash flows.

This is elegant because most people will not be able to understand or simply will not believe the cause and effect.

While it has the exact same end game as simply nationalizing companies against their will (ala Chavez), it accomplishes that outcome in an obfuscated and seemingly voluntary manner.

Some people may say, "hey, TTB, that's ridiculous. Get off the Crazy Train."

In Part II of The Grand Unified Conspiracy Threory, we will address our sanity by walking through virtually every governmental interference in private companies and show its applicability.

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Let us know what you think? Are we crazy? If so, like a fox, or like a crazy person? If the latter, like John Nash or Kurt Cobain? If Kurt Cobain, like him before or after he off'd himself?