ANTIESTABLISHMENTARIAN

Motley Fool has Brunswick Corp. on death watch. This is no surprise to me; the only thing that is surprising is that they’ve managed to hang on this long, and that anyone would be stupid enough (GE Credit) to lend them the money to hang on. They’ve rated Brunswick, based on S&P data, as among the top five most likely to start pushing daisies in the near future.

Whistling past the graveyard

Perhaps it’s not surprising that a number of these companies are tied to the housing sector, and when you think about how many speedboats people will actually be able to buy these days, it’s understandable that Brunswick has shown up here as well. While MarineMax (NYSE: HZO) and West Marine (Nasdaq: WMAR) also report sliding sales, Brunswick’s stock has fallen 60% over the past year as it has piled up losses and simply rolled over its long-term debt. That’s led to liquidity concerns at the ratings agencies.

I have made the case for nearly two decades that boat building should never have been organized into s corporate kingdom, and that it was pure stupidity to do so. Of course, without their friends in the financial mafia, this could never have been done. The banker’s strategy is, and always has been, to suck every last dime out of a national economy and put everyone in debt slavery to them. Unfortunately, they have succeeded to a very large degree, thanks to the hotshots who succumbed to the allure of easy credit on their quest to monopolize boat building.

Greed leads to a virile form of self-induced blindness that is now playing out in this and other nations. This is just one more in an endless stream of historical cycles of the rise and fall of nations and empires. The process playing out now is called debt liquidation, a process that has only just begun. It has a very long way to go because the mountain of unserviceable debt has never in history been bigger.