Archive - Sep 2014

What follows is the most powerful recorded police checkpoint scene we have witnessed...

Doesn't get any simpler than this chart showing global monetary policy response to "secular stagnation", i.e., the situation the world finds itself in right now.

In an apparent attempt to advise investors on how they can take advantage of America’s transformation into a neo-feudal oligarchy in a 50-page research report, Morgan Stanley has put together some very interesting charts. We will be sharing many of them in the next few days but none is more telling and depressing than the one that shows how the U.S. leads the developed world in the share of low wage jobs...

While careful to note 'no specific threats' have been found, it appears the FBI and DHS have decided it's time to show why local police departments needed to be fully militarized after all. In the first bulletin, according to Bloomberg, US security officials warned federal and local police to watch for “homegrown violent extremists” who may be motivated to attack by airstrikes in Syria. In the second bulletin, the FBI and DHS assess that disgruntled and former employees pose a significant threat to US businesses due to their authorized access to sensitive information and the networks businesses rely on (no doubt inspired by today's dreadful occurrences at UPS in Birmingham). It's just a good thing all those local police forces have MRAPs, don't you feel safer already? However, don't forget, as The UK made clear, the definition of terrorist is a tricky one since even viewing ISIS propaganda constitutes a criminal offense.

Sad, but true...

History may not repeat exactly because technology, resource discoveries, and political dynamics change the nature of society, but it does rhyme because the human foibles of greed, lust for power, arrogance, and desire for conquest do not vary across the ages. The corruption, arrogance, hubris, currency debasement, materialism, imperialism, and civic decay that led to the ultimate downfall of the Roman Empire is being repeated on an even far greater scale today as the American Empire flames out after only two centuries. The pillars of western society are crumbling under the sustained pressure of an immense mountain of debt, created by crooked bankers and utilized by corrupt politicians to sustain and expand their welfare/warfare state. Recklessness, myopia, greed, willful ignorance, and selfish disregard for unborn generations are the earmarks of decline in this modern day empire of debt, delusion and decay.

"We're suffering from central-bank-induced bipolar disease, bouncing from joy to despair number by number."

China is increasingly relying on 'student interns' to make gadgets like iPhones in Western China, according to The Wall Street Journal, where lower wages make it harder to attract 'real' migrant workers. As the following brief clip explains, the government has created 'vocational' schools in very rural areas of China for high-school students but the quality of education (and 'jobs') is not what they had hoped...

The Fed, by raising its rates and relinquishing its downward pressure on the US dollar, is about to kill off most of the emerging markets. That’s a whole lot of misery in one pen stroke. That’s a whole lot of millions of people who will see their dreams of better lives shattered, just as they were beginning to think they had a chance. It’s how the game is played. The weak must be sacrificed so the strong be stronger.

"His" alternative reality...

Every media outlet, newspaper, ant TV channel has a simple message for you, dear retail investor: please come back already, and buy, buy, buy... what every bank, prop desk, hedge fund, mutual fund, pension fund, and central bank, is so desperate to sell.

Any system that has no way to measure, much less prioritize opportunity costs (i.e. what else could have been done the capital, labor and resources) and maximization of utility is not just flawed - it is terribly misguided and structurally destructive.

If a picture paints a thousand words, these three charts should write an entire book about the "market's" earnings...

Believing they are filling the macroeconomic bathtub with aggregate demand and full-employment jobs, Janet Yellen and her merry band of Keynesian money printers are simply blowing chronic, giant, dangerous bubbles on Wall Street. Easy money is always the wrong medicine, but most especially for an economy that is already and self-evidently saturated with too much debt. The implication of all of this, of course,is that our monetary politburo is out of business; that “monetary accommodation” is nothing more than a one time parlor trick of central bankers.

The next time your friendly, local, asset-gathering, commission-taking, wealth-transferer explains that "you should BTFATH because stock valuations are supported by the fundamentals" - show them these two charts.