Archive - Nov 8, 2014

Russian President Vladimir Putin believes that a serious confrontation with the West is coming. In a recent speech at the Valdai conference in Sochi, laced with geopolitical and historical references, he stated that “changes in the world order – and what we are seeing today are events on this scale – have usually been accompanied by if not global war and conflict, then by chains of intensive local-level conflicts.” What type of conflict is he referring to?

Yesterday, when we presented what we thought at the time was "The Strangest Number In Today's Jobs Report" namely the near record surge in workers aged 16-24, which amounted to 528K, or the vast majority of job additions in the month of October we may have been a bit premature. As it turns out breaking down the job surge from September to October by gender provides an even more peculiar result then an age distribution. Because as the chart below shows, of the 416K jobs added in the 20 and over category, a meager 10% of these went to men: some 90%, or 370,000, went to women! Men aged 20 and over were the recipients of a paltry 48,000 jobs, or 10% of the total increase.

What if global capitalism is not about to collapse?  What if the sun rises next week, and the great apocolypse called for and predicted does not materialize yet, what then for the dollar?  

Two days ago we quoted an ex-CIA officer who warned that the "Saudis Have Good Reason To Be Concerned" as a result of what appears to be a redirection of ISIS tactics, and attacks, toward the one country which has, at least for public consumption purposes, been - together with the US - at the forefront of the anti-ISIS campaign in the middle east. End result: a crackdown by the Saudis to prevent any future attacks by alleged Jihadists, and as Al-Arabiya reported earlier, overnight authorities in Saudi Arabia arrested 33 people with reported links to the al-Ahsa killings, disrupting plans of another attack by the same cell, Al Arabiya News Channel reported.

"Sample issues: we aren’t controlling for changes in the quality of job growth when measuring average hourly earnings"