Archive - Mar 24, 2015

In recent years we have seen an increasing number of Americans strategically relocate to another region of the country. They can see our society breaking down and they can see the storm clouds on the horizon and they want to do what they can to prepare themselves and their families for what is ahead. So is there a “best place to live” in the United States? Are there some areas that are preferable to others? The following are 9 maps to consider...

Very unwelcome clarity on the Eurozone recovery, from investment bank Natixis.

The New Silk Road, actually roads - boosted by a special, multi-billion-dollar Silk Road Fund and the new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), which, not by accident, has attracted the attention of European investors - symbolizes China’s pivot to an old heartland: Eurasia. Beijing has been quick to dismiss any notions of hegemony. It maintains this is no Marshall Plan. China, on the other hand,  is focused on integrating “emerging economies” into a vast, pan-Eurasian trade/commerce network. And that, crucially, would have to include Russia, which is a vital part of the New Silk Road through an upcoming, Russia-China financed $280 billion high-speed rail upgrade of the Trans-Siberian railway. This is where the New Silk Road project and President Putin’s initial idea of a huge trade emporium from Lisbon to Vladivostok actually merge.

The best spots for riding out a zombie apocalypse are sparsely populated areas of Montana and Nevada, which remain untouched even four months, according to a new study by researchers at Cornell University who have developed a statistical model for simulating the spread of a fictional zombie epidemic. Stay away from Scranton, PA!

"There's a liquidity conundrum in fixed income markets facing policy makers and investors: how it’s resolved will have long term investment implications across banks, asset managers and infrastructure players," a new report from Morgan Stanley and Oliver Wyman notes. The joint effort is an attempt to dig deep into the all important issue of credit market liquidity (or lack thereof) and determine the short term and long term implications.

If the US intervention in Iraq created the “unintended consequences” of ISIS and al-Qaeda, how is it that more US intervention can solve the problem? A war based on lies cannot be fixed by launching another war. We must just march home. And stay home.

In the same week as Japan unveils its Pacific-Rim-esque anti-tsunami wall public works project, and Japanese government auditors say the operator of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant has wasted more than a third of the 190 billion yen ($1.6 billion) in taxpayer money allocated for cleaning up the plant after it was destroyed by a March 2011 earthquake and tsunami; Science Journal reports, Fukushima won't be truly safe until engineers can remove the reactors' nuclear fuel. But first, they have to find it... And so, in February of this year two muon detectors were installed outside the Fukushima Daiichi unit-1 ruins at reactor vessel height for the purpose of finding that ‘missing’ reactor fuel.

"I'm not sure [European QE] is going to do anything - certainly, nothing that's good. The fundamental problem here, as I see it anyway, is that the European banking system is still broken... I think, increasingly, bankers are discomforted more than anything else (it's not just the ex central bankers but increasingly the people that are still holding the levers)... they are starting to ask whether they have somehow been backed into a place where they don't really want to be.... Unfortunately, [it] is getting bigger and bigger. There is a possibility at least that this whole exercise could end very badly."

Energy accounts for 10% of Canadian GDP and around 25% of exports and the swift fall in oil prices is having a profound effect in the nation’s oil producing regions where home sales are collapsing by as much as 65%.

Basically, investing in the gold/silver shares has been a waste of time and money for the last 17 years. If you had told me that when The Café opened for business in September of 1998, I would have said, "No Way!" … especially since gold went from below $300 back then to $1900+ and silver was below $4, and would rise to $49+..

The global debt glut, plus the related money printing efforts by the world's central banks to try to stimulate further credit growth at all costs, leads us to conclude that a major currency crisis -- actually, multiple major currency crises -- are practically inevitable at this point. To understand better the anatomy of a currency collapse, Philip Haslam - author of the book When Money Destroys Nations, and an authority on monetary history, who more recently spent much time in Zimbabwe collecting dozens of accounts of the experiences real people had as the currency there failed - explains the six 'gorge' process to hyperinflation.

Echoing the grave concerns of no lesser 'maestro' of manipulation than Alan Greenspan, Wells Capital Management's Jim Paulsen notes that while the U.S. stock market has risen by about 3 times from its crisis low in March 2009; much of this advance has been against a backdrop of disappointing productivity gains... should productivity growth remain subpar, stock market risk seems to be rising.

Amid firey austerity protests at the site of its new headquarters, the ECB has a job opening available.

Holy Hegemoney!