Archive - May 2015

This is what “justice” looks like in the Oligarch States of America. If you’re a pleb who gets caught having consensual sex on the beach, you’re immediately convicted and face up to 15 years in the gulag. Meanwhile, if you’re a banking executive responsible for crashing the global economy, you’re rewarded with trillions in taxpayer bailouts and backstops and given free reign to continue your crime spree.

"If you were to ask me, since we’re making forward-looking statements, what will the second quarter look like in Las Vegas? Weak. Do you hear me? Weak. So I’m trying to lower expectations here. This notion of a big recovery is a complete dream," Steve Wynn says, underscoring not only the weakness in gaming revenue from the Vegas strip to Macau, but also the fact that there simply is no economic recovery in the US.

And the 'incidents' just keep coming for Japan. Lax safety checks at Kwai Chung container terminal - the only sea entry point for food from overseas - have allowed banned imports from Japan to enter Hong Kong, according to Democratic Party lawmaker Helena Wong Pik-wan. As The South China Morning Post reports, radioactive contaminated food may have been entering the city unnoticed for years because of deficiencies in safety controls on fresh produce since the ban following the Fukushima nuclear power plant incident in 2011.

With the Federal Reserve now indicating that they are "really serious" about raising interest rates, there have come numerous articles and analysis discussing the impact on asset prices. The general thesis, based on averages of historical tendencies, suggests there are still at least three years left to the current business cycle. However, at current levels, the window between a rate hike and recession has likely closed rather markedly.

China is faced with a new reality wherein the very conditions that have supported the country's rapid economic growth may now be set for a wholesale reversal, as the "migrant miracle" gives way to a consumer-driven economy characterized by rising wages, decreased savings and investment, and falling export competitiveness. Meanwhile, what was once a "demographic dividend" is quickly becoming a "demographic deficit" as the number of working-age Chinese begins to decline. Beijing's response to this new reality will go a long way towards shaping the country's economic future.

On Saturday night, a man whose name still seems to be unknown, but who was wearing a “F##k the Police” t-shirt, came out in front of police past the official curfew. This is what happened next...

As is almost always the case, the price of gold was leaned on at the standard PLAN A time in London when The Gold Cartel traders reported for work, but their nudge was thwarted pretty quickly. Gold took off again going into the Comex trading hours and managed to reach $1200 where it was stopped dead in its tracks. James Mc early this morning…

Wall Street's Council on Foreign Relations has issued a major report, alleging that China must be defeated because it threatens to become a bigger power in the world than the U.S. This report urges: "The United States should invest in defense capabilities and capacity specifically to defeat China’s emerging anti-access capabilities and permit successful U.S. power projection even against concerted opposition from Beijing. … Congress should remove sequestration caps and substantially increase the U.S. defense budget.” In other words: the Government should spiral upward the U.S. debt even more vertically (which is good for Wall Street), and, in order to enable the increased ‘defense’ expenditures, only ‘defense’ expenditures should be freed from spending-caps.

The bigger issue concerns the fact that bond yields are rising across the board. The UK’s Gilts, US Treasuries, and German Bunds have all dropped sharply in the last month, pushing their yields higher.

Despite record-er stock prices, weather excuses for current economic weakness, and The Fed promising that growth is here and everything will be awesome, it appears the message has not reached the US Consumer. Gallup's U.S. Economic Confidence Index plunged 9 points last week (the largest week-to-week drop since last July) to its lowest weekly score since December. The main driver was a collapse of hope as 'outlook' fell to November lows.

Blogger Ben: Not all information is beneficial...

"Deutsche Bank’s illegal conduct involved nearly a decade of lying, cheating, and stealing. This criminal conduct was pervasive and widespread, involving dozens of employees from Deutsche Bank offices including New York, Frankfurt, Tokyo, and London. Deutsche Bank’s traders engaged in a brazen scheme to defraud Deutsche Bank’s counterparties and the worldwide financial marketplace by secretly manipulating LIBOR. The conduct is appalling. It was a complete criminal fraud upon the worldwide marketplace." 

- SEC Commissioner Kara Stein

Are you ready for rioting, looting and mindless violence in major U.S. cities all summer long?  According to a brand new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, 96 percent of all Americans believe that there will be more civil unrest in America this summer.  That leaves only 4 percent of people that believe that everything will be just fine.  In this day and age, it is virtually impossible to get 96 percent of Americans to agree on anything.  So the fact that just about everyone agrees that we are going to see more civil unrest should really tell you something.

On July 12 of 2014 as part of Operation Protective Edge, Israel launched a ground assault into Gaza which promptly led to a mini-war in the Strip that left more than 2,100 Palestinians dead and reduced vast areas to rubble: a "war" which many speculated was nothing but a massacre by highly skilled, trained, and ethically drained Israeli soldiers who used civilians for target practice. Yesterday we got confirmation of just that. In a 242-page report, soldiers recount how they fire artillery at random houses to avenge fallen comrades, shoot at innocent civilians because they were bored and watch armed drones attack a pair of women. That and much more.

"I am not very optimistic about the fate of mankind as while our problems tend to evolve in exponential ways, our attempts at solving them move in linear fashion. That is true as much for the problems we ourselves create as it is for those that – seem to – ‘simply happen’. I think it would be very beneficial for us if we were to admit to our limits when it comes to solving large scale issues, because that might change the behavior we exhibit when creating these issues. The human capacity for denial and deceit plays a formidable role in this. We’re simply not smart enough to acknowledge our own limitations. Therefore, as Meadows says: "we are going to evolve through crisis, not through proactive change.""