Archive - Aug 2015

A decline in the desire to own products conferring and announcing one’s high social status happens close to, or hand in hand with fairly severe economic downturns. People no longer want to stand out as rich when times are getting tough. This effect can be observed in numerous areas, even in the colors and shapes people choose when buying cars.

Four days after we showed a video in which Nation of Islam leader urged black Americans to "rise up and kill those who kill us", two days after we reported that "Black-White Race Relations Under Obama are the Worst In The 21st Century", shots were fired, according to Reuters, on Sunday during a march in Ferguson, Missouri to mark the one year anniversary of the death of Michael Brown. More troubling is that none other than the potential future president of the US was adding gasoline to the fire yesterday, when in an interview with Al Sharpton Hillary Clinton discussed "criminal justice reform" and said the following: "in convicting of crimes, in sentencing of crimes, you compare African-American men to white men: it is unfortunately clear as it could be that there is a bias in favor of white men."

"If Greece collapsed and Grexit would be tomorrow’s reality, we would lose 3-4 billion euros more or less at once. So I hope that the EU and euro zone, that in due course, we can face the facts and say enough is enough and that we must do something else."

5 effective ways to deal with "naysayers" (Paul Krugman including)

We've been brainwashed into financializing the human experience. This is not a problem that can be fixed by tweaking state-cartel policies (Obamacare, banking, etc.) i.e. fake fixes. This is a problem that requires a complete rethinking of centralization, money creation, empire, wealth, prosperity, consumption and how we live.

On Saturday, we got what we called a stark "reminder of just who is lying hunched over, comatose in the driver's seat of global commerce" when China reported that exports fell 8.3% in July, far more than consensus and the most in four months. On Sunday, we got still more evidence of China’s economic malaise as producer prices plunged 5.4%, the largest Y/Y decline since 2009.

Here is an overview of next week's events and data placed in the larger context.  

With the usual two year delay, others such as Reuters, are starting to notice that under the Tesla hood there are nothing but cockroaches. And now that the growth "story" has taken a back seat following the latest guidance cut in deliveries, fears that the company will have to dilute shareholders to keep the "story" afloat, are rapidly emerging. Case in point, Reuters calculation of a fact that was known to most observers but certainly not to retail enthusiasts who "bought the stock just because others bought the stock", i.e., that Tesla loses about $4000 on ever car it makes.

China: "I wish that I could be like the cool kids. 'Cause all the cool kids, they seem to fit in."

... in under a minute, the hateful script had taken offline the entire system in much the same manner as chucking a spanner into a running engine might stop a car. The databases, as always, were flushing their precious data onto many different disks as this happened, so massive, irreversible data corruption occurred. That was it, the biggest computer system in the bank, maybe even the world, was down. And it wasn't coming back up again quickly. At the time this failure occurred there was more than $12 TRILLION of trades at various stages of the settlement process in the system. This represented around 20% of ALL trades on the global stock market.

The police and surveillance state predicted in the forward-looking 1940s classic “1984” by George Orwell, has slowly, but steadily, come to fruition. However, like a frog sitting idly in a pan of steadily-warming water, too many Americans still seem unaware that the slow boil of big government is killing their constitutional liberties. The latest sign of this stealth takeover of civil rights and freedom was epitomized in recent Senate testimony by FBI Director James Comey, who voiced his objections to civilian use of encryption to protect personal data – information the government has no automatic right to obtain.

If Tesla doesn't start to get its act together with respect to delivering new products and getting their service back into its former tip-top shape, I suspect the symbol TSLA will make a long, tortured trip back down to the double digits.

"The risk could be that brokers may not be able to execute forced liquidations in case of sharp declines in the overall stock market. It can be positive if they are using the funds to develop new businesses but negative for China’s financial market if they keep lending out for margin financing."

"There's a saying, 'if there's peace, it will start from Cizre, and if there's war, it will start from here as well.' And we can say we have a civil war in Turkey."