Archive - May 23, 2015

“The world economy is like an ocean liner without lifeboats ...” - HSBC.
Fail to prepare ... Prepare to fail ...

Lately, not a day seems to pass without news of NATO jets being scrambled to intercept/reroute a Russian warplane or reconnaisance jet. As a result, David Cenciotti's The Aviationist blog has compiled the recent history of all the "close encounters" between Russian and NATO warplanes since 2013. Here are the results.

As the US moves closer to putting boots on the ground in Iraq and Syria to counter an ISIS "offensive", The New York Times is out with a series of graphics which document the group’s spread.

The financial world today is now an island on its own – separated from the real economy, as can be seen by the paradox of record high valuation in the stock market coinciding with record low inflation, employment , productivity and no hope. There is asset inflation, but deflation in the real economy. When the world has been this long at the zero-bound, the misallocation, the inability to reform, and a toolbox without new tools creates a mandate for change. "I expect stocks to trade sideways for the balance of 2015 and have now sold all my fixed income, increased my gold exposure, and I’m looking to buy mining companies and overall to increase my exposure to commodities beyond the normal allocation."

But tell me, who wants to be surrounded by garbage?--Imelda Marcos

While an extension of the Patriot Act, that landmark bill which ushered in the America's Big Brother, "turnkey totalitarian state" (previewed here long before Edward Snowden's shocking revelations), is just a matter of time, supporters of the Fourth Amendment scored a brief victory last night when following yet another marathon 10 hour filibuster and refusal to play by the script by Rand Paul, the Senate failed to extend the Patriot Act, leaving the future of America's "war against terrorists" but really against "enemies domestic", i.e., anyone who uses email, has a cell phone or in any other electronic way communicates with others, in limbo.

The present Chinese leadership appears to be trying to gain (regain?) more - if not full - control over the country’s economic system, while at the same time (re-)boosting the growth it has lost in recent years. President Xi Jinping, prime minister Li Keqiang and all of their subservient leaders – there are 1000?s of those in a 1.4 million citizens country- apparently think this can be done. We truly doubt it. We don’t think that they ever understood what would happen if they opened up the country to a more free-market, capitalist structure. That doing so would automatically reduce their political power, since a free market, in whatever shape and form, does not rhyme with the kind of control which the Communist Party has been used to for decades, and which the current leaders have grown up taking for granted.

One year ago, we explained "How The Market Is Like CYNK." Earlier this week, China's richest man found out how right we were, in the hardest way possible

The first rule of “Project Bookend” is that you don’t talk about “Project Bookend.” In retrospect, maybe the first rule should have been “you don’t accidentally e-mail ‘Project Bookend’ to a news agency.”

The US is now considering the possibility of sending so-called "spotters" to Iraq, a move ostensibly aimed at making airstrikes against ISIS more effective. Meanwhile, the militant group has claimed responsibility for Friday's suicide bombing in Saudi Arabi that killed 21.

It looks like US dollar's two-month downside correction ended.  Is the bull market resuming?

It's official: after seeing it work so well for years in China, the US Department of Commerce's Bureau of Economic Statistics has officially replaced all of its excel models with just one function. The following.