Archive - Aug 7, 2015

There are two ways to win, at any game: One is by improving one’s own performance. The other is by weakening the performances by all of one’s competitors. The United States is now relying almost entirely upon the latter type of strategy.

Strangely enough, every easily foreseeable financial crisis is presented in the mainstream media as one that "nobody saw coming." No doubt the crisis visible in these three charts will also fall into the "nobody saw it coming" category.

In April, we brought you the "FAKE-O" score or, as we delicately described it, "banks' brilliant plan to lend to deadbeats." Essentially, the "new score" will determine how creditworthy someone is by asking the utility company if the lights are still on and asking the phone company if the phone is still connected. But because that wasn’t (nearly) absurd enough, Facebook has a better idea...

In a murky world of market fantasy, our first guideposts are the fundamentals themselves. Supply and demand can be misrepresented for a time through manipulated statistics, but the tangible effects of decline cannot be. Our secondary guideposts are the paths that internationalists and central banks bulldoze through the fiscal forest. To anyone with any sense, the endgame is clear: Total centralization is the goal, and economic fear is the tool they hope to use to get there. We have written on numerous solutions to this threat in past articles; but the first and most important action is for each of us to acknowledge, wholeheartedly, that the system we know is ending. It is over. What replaces that system will either be up to us or up to them. Only by admitting that there is an end to the fantasy, a painful end, will we then be able to help determine our future reality.

"Does this country need a hug?" Well, Jon, actually, yeah, it kinda did.

"It isn’t for nothing that again and again, countries abandoned the gold standard when they went to war. We rarely pause to consider what that tells us. If they needed to abandon the gold standard to go to war, that means the gold standard was a barrier against war. Of course, the ease with which governments could abandon the gold standard serves to remind us of the need to separate money and state altogether, and that the state cannot be trusted to maintain a sound money standard."

The truth hurts... especially permabullish CNBC anchors. But when David Stockman explained why "the top is in," and warned that the world is overdue for an "epochal deflation, like nothing it has ever seen," one should listen. The "debt supernova" of the last decade or two has created massive over-capacity and this commodity deflation "is not temporary, it's the end of the central bank bubble." The catalyst has already happened -"It's China," Stockman exclaims, "China is the most lunatic pyramid of credit and speculation.. and capital is now fleeing the swaying towers of the China ponzi."

Busted ...

August 6th and 9th of 2015 mark the 70th anniversary of the U.S. dropping two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This was the first and only time a state used a nuclear device on cities (or civilians) of another state. Some conservative estimates put the immediate death toll of the two bombs at 200,000 people. This is more than the total number of American soldiers killed in the Pacific front of World War II. Since the bombs were dropped, the U.S. government, U.S. high school history texts, and the American public have asserted that dropping the bombs was necessary. But was it?

"You wake up one morning and think 'I’m in prison.' And that’s when it hits you, and you suddenly realize that you are no longer in control of your life."

"I’ve just slogged through all ninety-two pages of Donald Trump’s financial disclosure submission to the Federal Election Commission, and I can’t make heads or tails of it. I cannot tell how much Trump is worth, if anything. His empire, if he has one, is as mysterious as his haircut, and as impervious as his skyscraper in Chicago - a gigantic phallic mirror named after himself."

It looks like it is time for Warren to get on the Obamaphone and make it clear this is unacceptable... Berkshire Hathaway announced a $2,367 (Adjusted) EPS, missing estimates of $3,038 by 22.09% - the biggest disappointment since Nov 2008...

A study by the Illinois Policy Institute shows just how dramatic the impact of the so-called "welfare effect" can be. In one of the most startling findings for instance, if a single mother raising two children were to accept a pay raise from $12 to $18 per hour, her total resources would fall by nearly 33%.