Archive - Nov 14, 2015

The trifecta has emerged: just as expected, the link between Syrian refugees, ISIS, and Terrorism has now been set in stone.

The paradox of the current global crisis is that for the last five years, all relatively responsible and independent nations have made tremendous efforts to save the United States from the financial, economic, military, and political disaster that looms ahead. And this is all despite Washington’s equally systematic moves to destabilize the world order, rightly known as the Pax Americana. But the US needs to think fast. Their resources are shrinking much faster than the authors of the plan for imperial preservation had expected. The point of no return will pass once and for all sometime in 2016, and America’s elite will no longer be able to choose between the provisions of compromise and collapse.

USA! USA! USA! Exceptional America is #1 once again... oh wait!

The low interest rates and relatively low inflation rates we’ve had recently aren’t going to last. They will soon be replaced by wildly fluctuating markets and rapidly depreciating currencies. We could have a catastrophic deflation, where trillions of currency units are wiped out; or a hyperinflation, as governments create trillions more of them; or both phenomena in sequence. But, as bad as they are, those are just financial phenomena; what will be much, much more serious are things looming on the political, economic, social, and military fronts of the Greater Depression. The bottom line is that you want to get out of the dollar before everyone else does.

"Back in 2008, in the midst of a crisis of global proportions, Ernst Stavro Paulson and the enigmatic Dr.Yes brought SPECTRE out of the shadows and into the collective conscious of the world. They did so by seemingly offering a cunning solution to the fears that gripped mankind in the wake of the GFC—free money!"

We like the fact that college students are angry enough to revolt against the massive debt being piled on their backs just because they want to get a college degree and a good job. They should be protesting because the expenses involved have gotten ridiculous. Then, if they do graduate, a great many of them can’t find employment. Too many are forced to remain living with their parents without a chance at the American Dream, which has now become just that - a dream. Unfortunately, too many of these young people are also upset about ridiculous things. They are part of a hypersensitive, hyper-politically correct group known as ‘Social Justice Warriors.’

Here's what's obvious, but unacceptable: we need a new system. Not a system modified with tiny tweaks and a feeding trough filled with borrowed money--an entirely new system designed from scratch to be sustainable and with opportunities to build capital for all.

"Clients are quick to point out similarities between the current low breadth environment and the narrow breadth regime that emerged during the tech bubble in the late 1990s. Our Breadth index currently equals 1, one of the lowest levels in the 30- year series. The typical episode lasted four months, with past episodes ranging from two months in 2007 to a high of 14 months during the tech bubble."

In a bipartisan bid to encourage commercial exploitation of outer space, the U.S. Senate this week unanimously passed the Space Act of 2015. The Extraterrestrial ‘Finders Keepers’ law allows US citizens and companies to legally claim ‘abiotic’ natural resources including water and minerals. However, the bill could be a direct affront to an international treaty that bars nations from owning property in space.

If there is one 'winner' from last night's terrible events in Paris, it is France's anti-EU, anti-immigration far-right wing Front Nationale party leader Marine Le Pen. Having already ascended to the lead in yet another poll ahead of France's 2017 elections, Le Pen came out swinging this morning call for France to "re-arm itself," stating that radical Islam must be "eradicated" from France. She further demanded that border controls be made "permanent" and binational Islamists must be depreived of their French passport.

How much did the PBoC spend propping up China's stock market in Q3? By how much did they overpay? How likely are they to take an outsized loss? BofAML takes a look.

Ignorance about recessions has taken hold because of a simplistic idea that a recession is two successive quarterly declines in GDP or, more broadly, a situation where we see some, but not all, of the typical markers of recession. While the final determination of recession might be delayed by a year of more, our leading indexes have never been this weak outside a recession. If this is indeed a recession, policy makers would be remiss in assuming that this is an economic slowdown rather than a recessionary vicious cycle.

Marijuana is quickly becoming a very important part of the economy and of pop culture.

When asked if ISIS was gaining in strength, President Obama rifled back, "I don't think they're gaining strength... what is true is that from the start, our goal has been first to contain and we have contained them."

Brutal news is pouring in from pretty much everywhere. The world, in short, is rolling over. Debt monetization on the scale so far attempted has failed to stop the implosion of tens of trillions of dollars of bad paper, growth has stalled and geopolitics has begun to turmoil. And none of this is a surprise. It’s just what you get when you put monetary printing presses in the hands of governments and/or big banks.