Transcript of the above video: 

As the title of this video suggests, we are sort of posing the question: "stimulus is not the same thing as an albatross." What are we talking about here? 

I thought of making this video after reading a recent article from the Bangkok Post, bangkokpost.com, the article is titled: Cabinet approves plan for 2024 budget boost to fund B500 billion handout. You know, the first thing I would say is when did Thais ever need a handout? This whole notion of ‘well we just need to give them a handout’. Well when you start taking the dole, it starts becoming a problem, and I do understand, there are people that are in a position unfortunately where they may need a little help and I certainly sympathize with them and empathize with them and if I was in that position, I would just do what I had to do as well. That said, one thing that we can see from quite honestly what's going on in the west is what the end of the road is if you will, when you have a bunch of "handouts" and it's not a good place. 

That being said, quoting directly: "The Cabinet on Tuesday approved a plan to boost the 2024 fiscal budget by 122 billion baht to help finance its delayed household stimulus scheme, Deputy Finance Minister Paopoom Rojanasakul said." The long story short is one, how is this stimulus really? When you think about it, as we have discussed in other videos, one, they're going to create two orders of magnitude more liquidity; they are going to print two times more than the amount of money that currently exists in the banking system. We did the videos on that in the past where I cited one of the writers from the Bangkok Post that I admire quite a bit. His analysis is generally pretty well spot on, hits the nail on the head and if he may be a little bit more of a Keynesian than I am, but that said, the analysis was pretty spot on where he brought up the fact that we are going to create two orders of magnitude more money than is currently in the system. Then on top of that, the actual benefit that he noted was pretty negligible. So it really does pose the question, is this stimulus or is this going to be like in the rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, I believe by Samuel Taylor Coleridge if I am not mistaken wrote that poem, The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner where the albatross eventually is darned near about to pull the Mariner under the waves and subsume him, basically pull him down to a watery grave. Is this so-called "stimulus" something akin to that, wherein it looks good at first as something that people sort of say "oh that's something nice" and then later when we have printed and indebted the nation to the tune of two times more money than is currently in the banking system, doesn't it stand to reason that that's going to be some sort of a problem down the road? I mean I would think it would be and quite honestly, I remember in the '90s in the United States, it was anathema to have the Government intervene the way in the United States especially, it has intervened especially since the great financial crisis going back 2006, '7, '8, and '9 and we saw all of this Government intervention, all this so-called ‘quantitative easing’ - just another word for money printing - and all these the 'operation twist' and all of this stuff that has come along since then as well as, I can't remember what the acronym stands for but SOFR and all of these later plans. At the end of the day, printing money and creating more debt generally speaking, unless you can see tangible societal benefits; if you go into a bunch of debt to create new infrastructure, well there are benefits that come to society from that new infrastructure. In this situation, as we've talked about in many other videos, they're just creating digital tokens and indenting the nation for those tokens which can't be spent on anything, they can't be spent anywhere and they have an expiration date. There's a timing mechanism which turns them off if you will. On top of that, it creates a situation where there's a full-on surveillance network over private transactions. Again, what are we getting out of this? A great line in the movie Beverly Hills Cop 2, where he says "where's the bad guys at the end of this rainbow? I've been signing off on all of these expenses, what are we getting out of it?" And that's what I would say is, they say it is stimulus, but what's it stimulating? As we have discussed, all it does is move goods and services around. It doesn't create new value; it just moves it around in the system and then creates taxable events thereby. 

So at the end of the day, I really do pose the question "Is it stimulus or is this thing an albatross?"