So much for "store of value."

Moreover, in the same, two-generation period up to the present, the US dollar has lost 98% of its gold and over 99% of its silver value, with the franc putting up an even poorer showing beside it.

Even in CPI terms, the US dollar buys only 8% of what it did in 1945 . . . .

In case this is insufficiently unsettling, Mr. Durden writes of another manifestation of financial breakdown:

[On our trading computer screens] we can also see the full, epileptic frenzy of our broken financial markets, no longer evidence of the rational allocation of hard-spared capital . . . .

Financial markets are supposed to do that, send capital to the most productive activities, not be playgrounds for speculation.

Nor should clueless government officials substitute their judgments about utility, risk, return, and feasibility for those of entrepreneurs and market experts. But it's what Mr. Obama and his acolytes do – play God with other people's money. After they've done their utmost to take that money outright and parcel it out to political cronies and the underclass.

What's left, they play with or cripple. E.g., green energy "investments," health care, the fossil fuel industry, "tax the rich" schemes.

Here's a question especially for Obama and the Democrats but only slightly less pointedly for all the others who've run our federal government since 1932 – Are we being governed by loyal Americans . . . or is this an occupation government?

"The Sun Chairman, What's Future Is Prologue, And Why The Second French Revolution Is Coming To America." By Tyler Durden, Zero Hedge, 8/14/11.