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  • How do you get off a tiger moving at warp seven?

    Where to start? I can only simplify and condense matters to a certain point.
    January 3, 2018 MFID will be rolled out.
    Investors be warned: MiFID II and MiFIR could be the work of the devil himself | afr.com
    Armstrong confirms that the bankers will continue to try to dominate the State. https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/f...bank-analysis/
    The too big to fail banks will use MFID to destroy their competition from the smaller banks.

    "The weeks ahead may be most illuminating on this score. The debt ceiling suspension runs out on December 8, around the same time that the tax reform question will resolve one way or another. "
    The Old Songs - Kunstler
    What’s Wrong with the GOP Tax Cut Plan? Everything for OrdinaryAmericans

    Analytics is getting far more accurate and precise. Fasanara has a graph that is more accurate the the Case-Schiller work.
    http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/defau...tybubble_0.JPG
    "However, NIRP and ZIRP has created distortions in bond valuations that have left them extremely overvalued compared with history, meaning that the inevitable regression to the mean will likely take the form of a vicious selloff." They won't find any buyers.

    The bond bubble, http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/defau...5gdpbond_0.JPG
    "China has a huge problem over indebtedness. It is said to be between 300% and 600% of GDP. GDP is $11 trillion. So it is a monumental credit bubble that could give troubles at any point. And if it gives troubles you can expect the whole world to listen carefully like it did in August of 2015 and January of 2016, and even more than that."
    These 2 periods are when China tried to reduce liquidity injections. It remains to be see if XI can ever successfully pull that one off.
    http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-1...eir-own-weight

    Here is a more complex article.
    "Macquarie Capital’s Viktor Shvets, who in this exclusive to ZH readers excerpt from his year-ahead preview, explains why central banks can no longer exit the “doomsday highway” as a result of a “dilemma from hell” which no longer has a practical, real-world resolution, "
    "If the current reflation has strong private sector underpinnings, then not only would it be appropriate for CBs to withdraw liquidity and raise cost of capital,"
    "any meaningful withdrawal of liquidity and attempts to raise cost of capital would be met by potentially violent dislocations of asset prices and rising volatility, in turn, causing contraction of aggregate demand and resurfacing of disinflationary pressures"
    The CBs want and, intend to stop their liquidity injections. They hope that the private sector will buy up their portfolio AND GOV bonds.

    "we maintain that over the last three decades, investors have gradually moved from a world of scarcity and scale limitations, to a world of relative abundance and an almost unlimited scalability. "
    Side note;
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy
    http://captaincapitalism.blogspot.co...-is-scary.html

    "In the meantime, returns on conventional human inputs and conventional capital will continue eroding while return on social and digital capital will continue rising. This promises to further increase disinflationary pressures (as marginal cost of almost everything declines to zero),"

    "As Paul Romer argued in his recent shot at his own profession. a significant chunk of macro-economic theories that were developed since 1930s need to be discarded. Included are concepts such as ‘macro economy as a system in equilibrium’, ‘efficient market hypothesis’, ‘great moderation’ ‘irrelevance of monetary policies’, ‘there are no secular or structural factors, it is all about aggregate demand’, ‘home ownership is good for the economy’, ‘individuals are profit-maximizing rational economic agents’, ‘compensation determines how hard people work’, ‘there are stable preferences for consumption vs saving’ etc."
    Do you see any mention here about automation?

    "Investors and CBs are facing a convergence of two hurricane systems (technology and over-financialization), that are largely unstoppable. Unless there is a miracle of robust private sector productivity recovery or unless public sector policies were to undergo a drastic change"
    Productivity is extremely high Per worker There just aren't many workers. It is consumption that is lagging.
    "We maintain that there are only two ‘tickets’ out of this jail. First (and the best) is a sudden and sustainable surge in private sector productivity" How does this bonehead ignore that fact that there are no jobs?

    "clearly any policy errors by central banks and China could easily cause a similar dislocation to what occurred in 2013 or late 2015/early 2016." Yep, get off the tiger and he eats you.
    "One could ask, what prompted China to attempt a proper de-leveraging from late 2014 to early 2016, which was the key contributor to both collapse of commodity prices and global volatility?"
    There is no saddle on the tiger and it will throw them eventually.
    http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-1...ell-dacing-cbs

    Comment


    • Headlines

      11/26 Council proposes Ł1,000 fines for homeless people sleeping in tents – Guardian Will they put them in stocks if they can't pay?
      https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...A0o_Tronco.jpg
      11/27 114 Italian banks (23%) have NPLs exceeding tangible assets – Mish But, that's OK
      11/26 U.K. faces longest fall in living standards on record – Bloomberg It has only started.
      11/26 Muir: “people are going to be wiped out” by short-VIX ETFs – Zero Hedge
      11/25 Individual investors jumping in as bull stretches to new highs – CNBC


      "This week I was contacted by a person who went to his bank in Zurich, one of the two largest in Switzerland, to get his physical gold out. He had seen my article on the subject. The bank, one of the biggest Asset Management banks in the world, told him that he couldn’t have his own gold because of new rules within the bank."
      https://goldswitzerland.com/11000-kg...10-kg-in-2025/
      The Turks are the largest per-capita gold buyers in the world, https://www.birchgold.com/news/why-t...a3a04-74213181

      Crypto news,
      11/27 Bitcoin blows past $9,000 – Gizmodo
      11/27 Bitcoin – too far too fast? – Forbes
      11/27 Bitcoin cash: a spork – Medium
      11/27 Bitcoin might be the crypto-gold but Ethereum is the crypto-silicon – Medium
      11/27 Cryptos: An idea whose time has come – Wealth Research
      11/27 Exclusive: nearly 4 million bitcoins lost forever – Fortune
      11/27 The bitcoin network is highly susceptible to internet routing attacks – Merkle

      Comment


      • More bumps in the road,,, holding back peace

        Here is a graph of the labor participation force. http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/defau...rce%20Rate.jpg
        Here is labor's share of the national income, https://teamster.org/sites/teamster....laborshare.jpg
        The problem is the status quo has failed 95% of the populace
        What status quo? With wages and employment crashing, the status quo departed a long time ago.
        "The top 5% who have benefited so immensely from the consolidation of wealth and power cannot confess the status quo has failed the bottom 95%."
        If there was a huge consolidation, status quo no longer holds sway. C. H. Smith is a very good writer but, this time he is off-track.
        Of Two Minds - The Problem Isn't Populism: the Problem Is the Status Quo Has Failed

        11/27 Chance of US stock market correction now at 70 percent: Vanguard Group – CNBC Not true. ALL cycles come to an end. The chances are 100%.
        11/27 Why are we addicted to debt? – Forbes Because we aren't addicted to work.

        Post WW II, the chosenites made a great investment buying every U.S. politician of any import. Netanyahooo has made a career out of attacking neighbors AND, scaring the snot out of israelis that they are surrounded by enemies.
        The chosenites had ways of neutralizing politicians who weren't cooperative, "The wife of Yitzhak Rabin, Leah Rabin, revealed in a biography, that Rabin was in Dallas when Kennedy was assassinated."
        The Journal of History
        Israel crashed their bond market and currency in the early 80s. They needed a pipeline to the American taxpayer. to survive. A captive U.S. congress was the answer. Meanwhile, they were hard at work to fragment all of their neighbors.
        In 1990-91, world peace threatened to break out when the U.S.S.R fell apart. Cheney and the neocons just wouldn't let that happen. How could U.S. CENTCOM be enlisted to destroy the Middle East if the world was at peace? Any and every excuse for continuous war had to be found or manufactured.
        Contra Corner » Thanksgiving 2017—Why There Is No Peace On Earth
        This isn't about protection or patriotism. It is strictly about profit and ethnic cleansing. http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/arch...efense-budget/

        So, where has that left us? Our major deficit is $14 trillion. About the cost of all the wars. Just in case that you believe that GOV doesn't know about this OR has some kind of plan to "fix" it, here is a vid that makes our situation painfully clear.
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Rab6_re0Bc

        State corruption, https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/w...ti-trust-laws/
        https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/w...ti-trust-laws/

        BTC charts, http://news.goldseek.com/GoldSeek/1511359380.php

        Comment


        • Work compensation system completely broken

          The parasites of the world depend on constant monetary inflation for their champagne and caviare. The workers of the world depend on their labor for their bread and butter. The parasites get free money. This is the same money that WE have to work for. This worked for centuries because there was some wage inflation to partially compensate us for price inflation. The parasites tried to keep wage vs price inflation tolerable so that we didn't outright revolt. This model is now broken because of low-wage competition by people who are willing to work for basic survival.

          Stockman,
          "no central banking playbook or theory---just a dog-earned revival of Phillips Curve macroeconomics. Yet the latter was discredited 40 years ago at the national economy level; and is a complete intellectual joke in the context of massive, fluid, integrated global markets for labor, goods, capital and finance.
          how much money printing at the Eccles Building does it really take to drain the rice paddies of East Asia and the fecund villages of India of their last increments of cheap labor?

          And given the trillions of worldwide trade in goods and internet enabled services how can it be denied that there is a steeply inclined global labor cost curve with the US near the top?

          That is, an economic dynamic in which the China Price for goods and the India Price for technology-based services causes downward pressures to ripple through the world's labor value chain----even as it causes production on the margin to be shifted to the lowest cost regions of the planet.
          there are approximately 41 million jobs in what we have termed the Part-Time Economy---retail, restaurants, bars, ballparks and domestic services. The jobs generate an average of 27 hours per week of paid employment, according to the BLS.
          Needless to say, given the realities of the global labor market and the domestic gig economy in which work is parsed by the hour, not the standard 40-hour workweek, the Fed's pursuit of domestic wage inflation via Phillips Curve economics is truly misbegotten.
          one which flows from a virtually unlimited worldwide labor supply operating lower down on the global cost curve.

          The Fed is effectively stimulating not the main street economy, but the gamblers and speculators within the canyons of Wall Street. corporate debt now at the highest ratio to income in 70 years.

          But none of this incremental debt has gone into productive assets. More than 100% has flowed back into the canyons of Wall Street in the form of financial engineering.
          VIX danger, "That's right. Since the 2009 bottom, the VXX ETF (adjusted for reverse splits) has gone from $120,000 per share to just $32, thereby recording a 99.99% decline.
          “Shorting VIX, at these low levels, in the size they are doing, is not only dumb, but crazily dangerous, not only to the parties trading it, but also to the stability of the entire financial system,”
          Contra Corner » Don’t You Believe It—-The Melt-Up Madness
          The takeaway from this is; if you blink, you will miss the eventual market meltdown.

          Back on Earth,,,, good charts. https://realinvestmentadvice.com/the...market-crisis/

          "U.S. has become a nation where more than 50 million Americans live below the poverty line; where 48 million of them receive food stamps; where more than one in five children is on food stamps and living in poverty; where an astounding 15% of senior citizens live in poverty; where ethnic poverty rates are 28% for Blacks, 24% for Hispanics, 10.5% for Asians, and 10% for Whites; were being Black lowers one’s credit score by 71 Points; where a new AFL-CIO study on corporate salaries found that CEOs made 335 times more than the average employee who earned $36,875 while the the big company CEOs got approximately $12,400,000"
          https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-am...broken/5620270

          11/27 Keystone’s existing pipeline spills far more than predicted – Reuters Predicted by Who? Most of the protesters were against the particular company who built the pipeline because they had such a BAD history of leaks.
          11/27 German politicians lose knack of coalition-building – Guardian NOBODY wants to build a coalition that includes Merkel.

          Crypto news,
          11/28 Bitcoin mining consumes more electricity a year than Ireland – Guardian
          11/28 The number of new bitcoin accounts is skyrocketing – Bloomberg
          11/28 ‘Bitcoin has gone parabolic,’ and that usually doesn’t end well – CNBC
          11/28 Bitcoin could devour whole financial world, Max Keiser suspects – GATA
          11/28 Bitcoin is still dead – The Weekly Standard
          11/28 How much the Winklevoss twins’ bitcoin balance is worth – 2oceansvibe.com
          11/27 $10,000 in sight for bitcoin as it rockets to new record high – Reuters

          Comment


          • Meltup/meltdown,,, power shortage

            Stockman and many others have written eloquently about the stock market meltup.
            "This Is Why the Powerful Bull Market in Stocks Will Keep Going for 10 More Years
            Bank of America Merrill expert says we're 'not even close' to a top."
            4 Reasons U.S., Global Stocks Will Keep Rising | Investopedia
            https://www.investopedia.com/news/4-...l-keep-rising/
            Sep 14, 2017
            ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
            Central Banks withdrawing stimulus - Markets to collapse? - SG Talk
            sgtalk.org/mybb/Thread-Central-Banks-withdrawing-stimulus-Markets-to-collapse Nov 14, 2017
            European Central Bank unveils plan to ease off stimulus - USA Today
            https://www.usatoday.com/story/money...lus/801885001/
            Oct 26, 2017
            The next financial crisis may be triggered by central banks - Buttonwood
            https://www.economist.com/.../217297...y-stimulus-fra...
            Sep 30, 2017
            ECB official says stimulus withdrawal should be no drama - Chicago ...
            ECB official says stimulus withdrawal should be no drama - Chicago Tribune Sep 20, 2017

            Recent history around the world has proved that the CBs can't let off the gas pedal without a total meltdown.
            Central banks hold a fifth of their governments' debt - Financial Times
            https://www.ft.com/content/ae19e60e-...2-c5b903247afd
            This isn't going to end well.

            Crypto news;
            11/28 Bitcoin bubble makes dot-com look rational – Bloomberg
            Kim.Com is a smart guy and, he has a plan.
            https://www.rt.com/news/411177-kim-dotcom-bitcoin-plan/

            11/28 One in six new cars in the world will be electric by 2025 – Bloomberg
            11/28 Bitcoin mining consumes more electricity a year than Ireland – Guardian

            U.S. Electrical Grid on the Edge of Failure - Scientific American
            https://www.scientificamerican.com/a...id-on-failure/ Aug 25, 2013
            Five Reasons The U.S. Power Grid Is Overdue For A Cyber Catastrophe
            https://www.forbes.com/.../five-reas...for-a-cyber-ca... Aug 19, 2015
            Ageing And Unstable, The Nation's Electrical Grid Is 'The Weakest Link ...
            https://www.npr.org/.../aging-and-un...e-weakest-link Aug 22, 2016
            6 problems with grid-down, http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-0...grid-goes-down

            So, we didn't fix the grid during the best of times. What will we do during the worst of times? What about all those electric cars?

            Comment


            • Jim Rickards lists some of the looming problems, https://dailyreckoning.com/waiting-for-the-avalanche/
              Rickards, "The same mistake is made in financial circles. Financial regulators are no different than military commanders. They fight the last war. The last two global meltdowns, in 1998 and 2008, are cases in point.

              In 1998, a financial panic almost destroyed global capital markets. It started in Thailand in June 1997 and then spread to Indonesia and Korea. By the summer of 1998, Russia had defaulted on its debt and its currency collapsed. "
              https://dailyreckoning.com/feds-buil...-maginot-line/

              Triggers, " Although each of these events can be anticipated, they won’t come with warning notices. Their actual occurrences will be unheralded. (As an example, when a stock market crash occurs, investors will wake up to discover that it’s occurred whilst they were sleeping.)

              And, just as in pinball, the end of the game will come quite suddenly. The moment that the player will know that it’s “Game Over” will be when he goes to his ATM and finds that the screen is dark."
              “Tilt! Game Over” | International Man

              11/29 Suffolk County DA used $3.3m asset forfeitures to fund “bonuses” – Zero Hedge
              11/29 Trump, top Democrats feud as threat of govt shutdown looms – Chicago Tribune
              11/29 Tax reform rush, shutdown threat: messy Dec. in Washington –CNBC

              11/29 China bond rout is ‘early warning signal’ to global debt market – Bloomberg

              Very cool chart on GOV debt per person, Visualizing Your Country's Unsustainable Debt Per Person

              European banks are soon to blow to smithereens, "Europe has entered a phase where it is no longer about trying to create jobs and a sustainable economic growth. This is now all about holding on to power in Brussels."
              https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/i...taff-branches/
              Apparently, the courts are going to kill pensions where they can.
              "Courts are put in place by politicians. When ruling will go against the government, judges are word-smiths. They know how to ignore the law when they must. This is all part of how the system collapses. Once the Rule of Law fails, nothing will SURVIVE. It is time to turn out the lights."
              https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/i...inst-pensions/

              The take-away from all this is; "globalism" for finance brings "globalism" for collapse.

              Comment


              • Retail, solar, crypto

                Third-quarter GDP raised to 3.3% to mark fastest U.S. economic growth in three years
                Remember that GDP is a measure of how much money (debt) is in the economy.
                "What happened: The improvement in GDP was spearheaded by stronger business investment." BS, CAPEX is dead.
                "Consumer confidence is at a 17-year high, unemployment is at a 17-year low"
                https://www.marketwatch.com/amp/stor...0-41CEEA71C61F

                "Did you know that the number of retail store closings in 2017 has already tripled the number from all of 2016? Last year, a total of 2,056 store locations were closed down, but this year more than 6,700 stores have been shut down so far. That absolutely shatters the all-time record for store closings in a single year, and yet nobody seems that concerned about it. In 2008, an all-time record 6,163 retail stores were shuttered"
                We Have Tripled The Number Of Store Closings From Last Year, And 20 Major Retailers Have Closed At Least 50 Stores In 2017

                Not to worry. Things will get MUCH better.
                https://finance.yahoo.com/m/0c585e11...d-kill-73.html

                11/30 China’s growth miracle runs out of steam – Mish
                11/29 When one of history’s ‘greatest trades’ finally blows up, it could get ugly – MarketWatch
                11/30 Nothing about the faang stock rally is normal – Yahoo!
                It never has been.
                11/29 The GOP Tax Bill: fuggedaboutit! – David Stockman Wait! The market already has it priced in.
                11/29 VIX – from fear index to greed index – Forbes Fear will make a return but, for a very short period
                11/29 Senior Saudi prince freed in $1 billion settlement agreement – Reuters. How do you say "revenge" in Arabic?

                11/30 Solar’s tumbling costs start claiming victims – Bloomberg
                11/30 Solar panel prices plunge by a shocking 26% in one year – ThinkProgress
                11/30 Solar deployment in developing countries soars by 54% YoY – PV Magazine
                11/30 Here are solar’s next gigawatt-scale markets – Greentech Media


                OPEC Leader Cites 'New Optimism' With Oil Prices on the Rise
                Crypto news.
                This is very good news. The guy is SMART, https://www.rt.com/news/411177-kim-dotcom-bitcoin-plan/
                11/29 Bitcoin plunges 18% after topping $11,000 in extremely volatile trading – CNBC
                11/29 Bitcoin tops $11,000 – Bundesbank sees no bubble – Zero Hedge

                NOT so good news, https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2017...nsaction-info/
                11/28 Mall malaise drags real estate index to first drop since 2013 – Bloomberg
                "So far this year, more than 300 retailers have filed for bankruptcy, and we are currently on pace to lose over 147 million square feet of retail space by the end of 2017."
                Pox Americana screwed Russia real good by locking them out of the SWIFT system so, the BRICS formed their own system. Russia figures that Pox Americana will soon screw them over via the internet so,
                https://www.rt.com/politics/411156-r...dent-internet/

                Comment


                • Greed & lemmings,,,,

                  David Stockman, "That's right. Three years and $1 of gain. They talking heads blather about "strong earnings" only because they think we were born yesterday. Xi Coronation Stimulus in China. The new Red Emperor and his minions pumped out an incredible $6 trillion wave of new credit,
                  The 19th Party Congress is over, but the Red Suzerains of Beijing wasted no time throttling down China's red hot credit bubble and hyperventilating housing market. The chart below is the smoking gun----and puts the lie to the foolish Wall Street meme of the moment that the world economy is in the midst of an outburst of "synchronized growth".

                  Actually, it's puffing on the exhaust fumes of a veritable housing hysteria during the run-up to China's 19th Party Congress, which saw home mortgage issuance soar by nearly 60% in 2016.
                  Even China's new Red Emperor recognizes that $40 trillion of debt on a purported $12 trillion economy (actually far lower when massive malinvestments are deleted from the reported GDP "flows") is a recipe for collapse.
                  In a word, we do not think you can finance $8.5 trillion of new Federal debt in an environment in which the Fed and its convoy of fellow traveling central banks are also selling bonds by the trillions.
                  Contra Corner » Lemmings In Full Stampede Toward The Fiscal Cliff
                  OK, so the FED wants to shrink the balance sheet and the District of Corruption wants to borrow & spend tons more. The FED has no army and Trump can threaten to just do away with them.

                  Armstrong has a good article on contagion, https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/w...really-matter/
                  "The most destructive fiction of international finance is that all debts can be paid, and indeed should be paid, even when this tears economies apart by forcing them into austerity – to save bondholders, not labor and industry. "
                  "From 1951 through 1971 the United States ran a deepening balance-of-payments deficit, which stemmed entirely from overseas military spending."
                  "U.S. diplomats had let Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries know that they could charge as much as they wanted for their oil, but that the United States would treat it as an act of war not to keep their oil proceeds in U.S. dollar assets."
                  "This was the point at which the international financial system became explicitly extractive"
                  "A conference was convened at Yekaterinburg, Russia, by the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). The alliance comprised Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kirghizstan and Uzbekistan, with observer status for Iran, India, Pakistan and Mongolia. U.S. officials asked to attend as observers, but their request was rejected.

                  The U.S. response has been to extend the new Cold War into the financial sector, rewriting the rules of international finance to benefit the United States and its satellites – and to deter countries from seeking to break free from America’s financial free ride."
                  "To U.S. strategists, what made changing IMF rules urgent was Ukraine’s $3 billion debt falling due to Russia’s National Wealth Fund in December 2015. The IMF had long withheld credit to countries refusing to pay other governments. This policy aimed primarily at protecting the financial claims of the U.S. Government"
                  "this Washington Consensus is extractive and lives in the short run, laying the seeds of financial dependency, debt-leveraged bubbles and subsequent debt deflation and austerity. The financial business plan is to carve out opportunities for price gouging and corporate profits. "
                  "These tribunals, organised under World Bank and UN rules, would have the power to order taxpayers to pay extensive compensation over legislation seen as undermining a company’s ‘expected future profits.’”[2]"
                  The principle that needed to be voiced was the right of sovereign nations not to be forced to sacrifice their economic survival on the altar of inter-government and private debt demands.
                  https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/11...y-imperialism/

                  Comment


                  • Britain poverty, peak gold, killer millennials

                    "I think the EU is so throughly rotten to the core it cannot be reformed; its fatal flaws have been continually baked into the cake for decades. "
                    "We have all seen, in Greece, in Italy, in Libya, what leadership Germany has provided. In economics and with regards to the refugee crisis. It has been an unmitigated economic disaster everywhere but in Germany itself "
                    They're getting there. Their pension system is bankrupt and the far right is getting stronger every day.

                    "First of all, and let’s bold this once again, there is no such thing as sustainable growth. It’s a lie.

                    If we want to do something that can actually save our planet, we have to decouple economic growth from environmental sustainability. We can and will not grow our way out of the disaster we have created with -our blind focus on- growth. This is the most dangerous nonsense story there is out there. We have to pick one of the two, we can’t have both. It’s EITHER growth OR a liveable planet."
                    https://www.theautomaticearth.com/20...otes-disaster/
                    The article has some good parts but, it heavily supports the global
                    warming idea.

                    There are certainly a lot of stupid people writing articles. This article laments the fall in productivity in Great Britain. Apparently, it never occurred to the writer that the fall in productivity was preceded by in a fall in consumption.
                    https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/news...ame/ar-BBFzsWD
                    11/28 London homes are now less affordable than ever before – Bloomberg
                    11/30 Empty homes spike in London commuter belt – BBC News
                    11/30 One in 10 London families relying on food banks to survive – Independent

                    The monetary inflation in the upper loop slowly bled over into the lower loop in anything that could be considered a store-of-value. Rich Arabs and rich Chinese moved their hot money out of dodgy jurisdictions.

                    Interesting article on "peak gold" Gold's Global Supply Artery: Heading for Cardiac Arrest | David Smith | Safehaven.com
                    "If you look back to the 70s, 80s, and 90s, in each of those decades the industry found at least one 50+ million ounce gold deposit, at least ten 30+ million ounce deposits and countless 5 to 10 million ounce deposits. But if you look at the last 15 years, we found no 50 million ounce deposit, no 30 million ounce deposit, and only very few 15 million ounce deposits."

                    The millennials have different tastes and desires in life. This is bringing big changes to commerce.
                    Killer Millennials: The Era Of Destruction Has Started | Zero Hedge
                    The ECB got a silly idea and decided that it had merit, https://www.rt.com/business/411437-e...coin-payments/

                    Comment


                    • Republicans... trickle down... birth rate...WTO

                      Hmmm, the thread has passed 200k views. I never really thought it would get 80 pages of posts. But, the clowns in power continue to create lots of quotable idiocy so, I'll continue to write.

                      "Yet next month, the nation’s third-largest city — whose bonds were downgraded to junk by Moody’s Investors Service two years ago — will start selling as much as $3 billion of debt that another rating company considers as safe as U.S. Treasuries.

                      That’s because Chicago is selling off its right to receive sales-tax revenue from Illinois to a separate public corporation, which will issue new bonds backed by those funds, "
                      A few years ago, California sold "revenue anticipation bonds"
                      https://dollarcollapse.com/pension-f...s-crown-jewel/

                      “There are two ideas of government,” William Jennings Bryan declared in his 1896 “Cross of Gold” speech. “There are those who believe that if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them.”
                      "The crash followed a decade of Republican control of the federal government during which trickle-down policies, including massive tax cuts for the rich, produced the greatest concentration of income in the accounts of the richest 0.01 percent at any time between World War I and 2007 "

                      "Yet the plain fact that the trickle-down approach has never worked leaves Republicans unfazed. "
                      https://www.washingtonpost.com/ampht...t-out-of-1929/
                      Consumer protection is a big problem for corporations that want to sell worthless junk. They have a fix for that.
                      https://www.salon.com/2017/12/01/mic...th-capitalism/
                      The GOV is still hard at work tom put the squeeze on anybody who comes near, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-polit...vil-forfeiture

                      A good article on mean-reversion of stock market profits, https://realinvestmentadvice.com/the...profit-growth/
                      Apparently, Trump has more power than you think.
                      "Donald Trump administration might have given us a soaring stock market, but it has also given us a declining population. "
                      https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-fe...st+Articles%29
                      “Fertility has fallen sharply over the last six months or so, even as the economy has picked up steam."
                      "picked up steam" She is full of feces.

                      America and China have started a pissing contest at the WTO.
                      https://www.upi.com/https:/www.upi.c...9041512149240/

                      Comment


                      • So, how did we get to where we are at?

                        I hope that Y'all have lots of time for reading.

                        We created a god who is indifferent to us,,, at BEST. This god is a born sociopath because it isn't human.
                        "A key difference between a psychopath and a sociopath is whether he has a conscience, the little voice inside that lets us know when we’re doing something wrong, says L. Michael Tompkins, EdD. He's a psychologist at the Sacramento County Mental Health Treatment Center.

                        A psychopath doesn’t have a conscience. If he lies to you so he can steal your money, he won’t feel any moral qualms, "
                        https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/...h-difference#1

                        "These futurists are right to voice their concerns, but they’re missing the fact that humans have already created a force that is well on its way to devouring both humanity and the earth in just the way they fear. It’s called the Corporation.
                        Thomas Jefferson and other leaders of the United States, aware of the English experience, were deeply suspicious of corporations, giving them limited charters with tightly constrained powers. However, during the turmoil of the Civil War, industrialists took advantage of the disarray, leveraging widespread political corruption to expand their influence. Shortly before his death, Abraham Lincoln lamented what he saw happening with a resounding prophecy: “Corporations have been enthroned … An era of corruption in high places will follow… until wealth is aggregated in a few hands … and the Republic is destroyed.”

                        "The tipping point in their path to domination came in 1886 when the Supreme Court designated corporations as “persons” entitled to the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment, Since then, corporate dominance has only been further enhanced by law, culminating in the notorious Citizen United case of 2010, which lifted restrictions on political spending by corporations in elections.
                        Corporations, just like a potential runaway AI, have no intrinsic interest in human welfare. They are legal constructions: abstract entities designed with the ultimate goal of maximizing financial returns for their investors above all else. If corporations were in fact real persons, they would be sociopaths, completely lacking the ability for empathy that is a crucial element of normal human behavior. Unlike humans, however, corporations are theoretically immortal, cannot be put in prison, and the larger multinationals are not constrained by the laws of any individual country.

                        With the incalculable advantage of their superhuman powers, corporations have literally taken over the world. They have grown so massive that an astonishing sixty-nine of the largest hundred economies in the world are not nation states but corporate entities.
                        The result of this corporate takeover of humanity is a world careening out of control, where nature is mercilessly ransacked to extract the raw materials required to increase shareholder value in a vortex of perpetual economic growth, without regard to the quality of human life and with no concern for the welfare of future generations.
                        In fact, the current U.S. cabinet represents the most complete takeover yet of the U.S. government by corporations, with nearly 70% of top administration jobs filled by corporate executives.
                        The takeover of global governance by multinational corporations has permitted them to undermine human welfare everywhere in the pursuit of profit.

                        " it’s been estimated by UN officials that the world’s topsoil can only support about sixty more years of harvests. In these cases, and countless others like them, humans and the earth alike are mere fodder for the insatiable appetite of an amoral, inhuman intelligence run amok.
                        https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/12...e-corporation/

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                        • Capital: what is it?

                          "Today, people think about capital in a one-dimensional way: Whether it’s the savings of private individuals, the capital reserves held by pension funds, the start-up capital of entrepreneurs, or the capital gains taxes on investments, all of these are thought of as money.

                          Yet capital is distinct from money. It is a definite structure, composed of different elements like physical goods, knowledge, and context, as well as peoples’ talents and experience. Money is only the simplifying accounting gimmick that helps us quantify the incredibly complex capital structure in a uniform manner. It serves as a basis for assessing the value of different forms of capital."
                          Banking is an extractive, parasitic industry. They neither produce not hold much capital. They hold money (that they get for free) and parley it into capital and support.

                          "Furthermore, Austrians have correctly recognized that capital does not automatically grow or perpetuate itself. Capital must be actively created and maintained through production, saving, and sensible investment."
                          "One also has to differentiate between two types of goods in the production process: consumer goods and capital goods. We consume these goods"
                          "Capital goods differ from consumer goods in that they are way-stations toward the production of consumer goods that can be used to achieve immediate ends. Capital goods, therefore, are means to achieve ends indirectly. "
                          https://www.theepochtimes.com/we-liv...3_2366623.html

                          Porter Stansberry is a "perma-bear" like Marc Faber. BUT, Stansberry research has some amazing predictions to it's credit. He is predicting another big bankruptcy.
                          Expert Says: “Look who’s going bankrupt next in America”

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                          • Creating liquidity to save the rich

                            I have to do 3 posts to cover 3 distinct subjects.
                            The tax reduction bill boils down to: "Stockman concludes: “At the end of the day, the GOP tax bill boils down to borrowing more than $1 trillion from the American public in order to pay higher dividends to wealthy private stockholders.”
                            Huge Deficit Stumbling Block in Senate GOP Tax Cut Bill
                            https://www.yahoo.com/news/m/2f36fc3...trump-tax.html

                            The tax bill will be followed by a cut to entitlements, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/15/u...s-deficit.html
                            https://www.yahoo.com/news/m/032d449...elfare%2C.html

                            Yellen can speak freely now and she says that the spending has to stop.
                            Take Janet Yellen's warning seriously — The spending needs to stop now | TheHill
                            The world improvers don't want the poor to be poor.
                            "Burry, of the “The Big Short” novel by Michael Lewis and portrayed by Christian Bale in the film, saw 2008 coming. As Vanity Fair reports, Burry noticed that lending standards were not just declining, but bottoming out. The main culprit: “interest-only negative-amortizing adjustable-rate subprime mortgage”. That’s a mouthful. "
                            Everywhere you look, you see that lending standards were abandoned. Banks were penalized for using historical metrics for loan approval. Loaning money to people and companies that could not pay it back was just another form of capital consumption. The Marxists in GOV just figured that they could print money and everything would be OK.
                            capital is distinct from money
                            So, they burned up capital and tried to replace it with money. TRUE GDP is crashing and more money can't take it's place.

                            VERY good charts, https://realinvestmentadvice.com/wee...wake-at-night/
                            "The illusion of liquidity has a dangerous side effect. The process of the previous two debt-deleveraging cycles led to rather sharp market reversions as margin calls, and the subsequent unwinding of margin debt fuelled a liquidation cycle in financial assets. The resultant loss of the “wealth effect” weighed on consumption pushing the economy into recession which then impacted corporate and household debt leading to defaults, write-offs, and bankruptcies."

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                            • Corporatocracy & middle class... dying together

                              Another reason to break up my post; Sometimes I open a page to do excerpts. The page locks up my computer and I eventually have to shut down and lose my post.
                              Most of the QE reportedly went into stock buybacks to save the rich, hoping that there would be some trickle-down to save the middle class. This hopium never worked out. It never has. BUT, any idea that saves the rich and appears to benefit the middle class is a sure bet for lawmakers.
                              The big failing is; almost everything in the American bubbles depends on stability in global capital flows. So, along with contagion from ONE bank failing, we have to account for other States failing.
                              https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/a...ess-the-truth/

                              The side effect of the corporatocracy controlling the State is; the corporatocracy has no use for non-performing assets. They must be liquidated or discarded. BUT, a corporation is both blind and stupid. It MUST grow but it continually diminishes the purchasing power of it's customers.
                              https://sputniknews.com/us/201712031...estigation-us/
                              The corporatocracy isn't focused on a major problem even though it is of primary importance; https://www.yahoo.com/news/m/9e5eee8...te-is-way.html
                              It will continue to squeeze out more profits and blindly wonder why most of the world is slip-sliding away.

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                              • The big squeeze still has a few months left to run

                                Three great charts, Stock Market Acceleration in Final Stage - Kessler We still seem to have a little bit of time left.
                                "All financial assets are just claims on real wealth, not actually wealth itself. A pile of money has use and utility because you can buy stuff with it. But real wealth is the "stuff" -- food, clothes, land, oil, and so forth."
                                "Which means that keeping a tight relationship between 'real wealth' and the claims on it should be job #1 of any central bank. "
                                "Convince everyone that something you literally make in unlimited quantities out of thin air has value"
                                GREAT chart, http://media.peakprosperity.com/imag...2017-11-30.jpg

                                "Bubbles occurred whenever the claims on the economy, the so-called financial assets (stocks, bonds and derivatives), get too far ahead of the economy itself.

                                This is a very important point. The claims on the economy are just that: claims. They are not the economy itself!"
                                "History's largest bubbles have had the exact same root cause: an expansion of credit that causes leverage to go up faster than the income available to service it.

                                Simply put: bubbles exist when asset price inflation rises beyond what incomes can sustain. "
                                We don't need no stinking income.
                                "My view is that the Trump election was a totally unexpected black swan shock for the global central banking cartel, and it freaked out. With the Dow down -1,000 points in the late night hours following Trump's surprise win, the central banks dumped gobs and oodles of money into the equity markets to prevent carnage."
                                " wish I were kidding here. But like a cruel joke re-told at the wrong moment, the GOP is busy destroying the meager and precarious financial situation of our citizens just so it can toss a few more dollars into the already-bloated wallets of the richest people in the country. "

                                "This is the system that the Fed is working so hard to preserve. This is the system that Washington DC is working so hard to sustain. "
                                https://www.peakprosperity.com/blog/...%80%99s-coming

                                Stockman has all the numbers on how the tax cut will (hopefully) save the rich. Contra Corner » Debt, Taxes, Growth And The GOP Con Job
                                It will NOT save them. This isn't even a Hail Mary. The R.O.W. is conspiring to pull out our oil supply. We import 4.1 mbd. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/venez...230000563.html
                                The strife is coming out in the open.
                                https://www.yahoo.com/news/m/27ebad6...oycott-at.html

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