Archive - Dec 2013 - Story

The following seven minutes of mayhem look eerily reminiscent of the violent pre-ambles to the middle-east's recent coups or non-coups. As anti-government protesters demonstrated against the shunning of a European trade agreement (President Yanukovych - "I will not allow any serious economic losses and decline of living standards"); the clashes became ever more violent as the police cracked down. Following heavyweight boxing champion (and opposition leader) Vitali Klitschko's call for a new government - "our main task is Yanukovych’s resignation. But the first step is the resignation of Azarov’s government" - the clashes left at least 265 people injured. The crackdown followed Interior Minister comments that they "won’t allow Ukraine to become another Libya or Tunisia, where uprisings toppled governments in recent years." Of course, the main difference is the Ukraine is now squarely under Putin's sphere of influence.

The implicit, and ever more explicit, institutional acceptance of the dominant cryptocurrency Bitcoin (we say dominant because as we pointed out last week, there has been an unprecedented spike of digital currencies one can pick and choose from) continues when following the surge in vendors willing to transact in BTC over Thanksgiving, the latest news comes from the birthplace of the modern central bank, the UK, where we learn that none other than the UK Royal Mint has been working on plans since this summer to issue physical Bitcoins in collaboration with the Channel Island of Alderney. But where the story gets downright surreal is that as the FT reports, the same symbolic Bitcoin token issued by the Royal Mint "would have a gold content – a figure of £500-worth has been proposed – so that holders could conceivably melt and sell the metal if the exchange value of the currency were to collapse." In brief: a perfect, and utterly incomprehensible, fusion of (opposing) hard, soft and digital currencies all rolled into one...

More promises...

If CNN was doing its best this morning to prove that the second coming of healthcare.gov is fixed, it... failed.

As Mike Maloney forecast in the mid-2000s, the roller-coaster ride continues in world markets and economies. His - so far - spot on projection that "first the threat of deflation (1), followed by a helicopter drop (2), followed by big reflation (3), followed by a real deflation (4), and then followed by hyperinflation (5)," appears to be rotating from stage 3 to stage 4 (as we noted here). However, as Maloney explains in this brief clip, while we have seen great deflations before, in the '30s one-third of the monetary base was backed by gold, now we virtually nothing as "people do not understand the scale of the emergency that's going on right now."

Only one-third of Americans say their fellow countrymen can be trusted according to a recent AP-GfK poll, down from over half 40 years ago. Americans are suspicious of each other in everyday encounters and who can blame them with the government appearing to bless any and all surveillance and intervention in the interests of the status quo. "I'm leery of everybody," warns one respondent, and as AP reports, this is a potential problem for economic growth as "social trust" brings good things. A society where it's easier to compromise or make a deal; where people are willing to work with those who are different from them for the common good, appears to promote economic growth. Distrust, on the other hand, seems to encourage corruption and there's no easy fix.

UPDATE: BTC has rallied 26% off its lows in the last 55 minutes

From it's gold-matching highs at $1242 on Thursday night, the price of Bitcoin has collapsed over $400 (32%) to $840 on heavy volume. Of course, this is only a one-week low for the exuberant digital currency but still a significant plunge (as its smaller brethren Litecoin has collapsed 51% from its highs). Interestingly, this drops the price of Bitcoin in USD below the 'arb'-based price of Bitcoin in China ($965). It seems, all coincidence aside, that the BIS infamous plunge-protection-team has been re-trained...

The concept of the business cycle and its un-natural intervention-inspired boom-bust process is at the core of the following three minutes of dueling quotes from two of the most infamous public proponents of change (Ron Paul) - "Printing money is not an answer... Like all artificially-created bubbles, the boom... cannot last forever"; and the status quo (Paul Krugman) - "Cut interest rates a couple of percentage points, provide plenty of liquidity, and call me in the morning." You decide who "was" right, and who "will be" right again...

If somehow the scramble to open stores earlier and earlier on Thanksgiving day, until such time as the very Thanksgiving dinner had to be interrupted early for the annual rush out to the (un)friendly neighborhood Thug-Mart (Toys'R'Us opened at a ridiculous 5pm on Thanksgiving day) and punching people in the face just to get that 42 inch, 2010-model Plasma TV for $99, was supposed to boost overall sales instead of merely pulling them forward (see cash for clunkers), it didn't work. According to ShopperTrak, total Black Friday traffic plunged 11% and total sales fell 13.2%, the second consecutive year of declines following last year's 1.8%. The reason, as largely expected, is that a substantial portion of Friday shopping was pulled back to Thursday: as ShopperTrak founder Bill Martin said, "if retailers continue to promote Thanksgiving as the start of the holiday buying season, he thinks the holiday will eventually surpass Black Friday in sales. "We're just taking Black Friday sales and spreading them across a larger number of days," Martin said."

On the heels of his recent appearance pouring cold water on Jim Cramer's housing recovery exuberance, recent Nobel Prize winner Bob Shiller unloads another round of uncomfortable truthiness (presumably on the basis of his future-proofing tenure guaranteed by the Nobel). "Bubbles look like this," Shiller tells Der Spiegel, adding that he is, "most worried about the boom in US stock prices." As Reuters reports, Shiller is concerned since "the world is still very vulnerable to a bubble," and with stock exchanges around the world at record highs despite an economy that is "still weak," the Nobel winner proclaimed, "this could end badly."

While even the most naive private sector cyber-experts knew well in advance that an effective rewrite of Obamacare's 500 million lines of code would take a "little longer" than the month promised by the government in advance of the November 30 fix deadline, the Obama administration went ahead with its much touted healthcare.gov relaunch anyway. The results have been mixed.

As reported yesterday, in the aftermath of the violent crackdown on a pro-Europe rally, and the resulting call by the opposition for president Yanukovich's resignation through nationwide strikes, the situation in the Ukraine is increasingly more unstable. Moments ago Reuters reported that Ukrainian nationalist protesters broke into Kiev's city hall and were occupying at least part of the building during mass protests that drew several hundred thousands out on the streets to protest the government's decision to forego an EU deal. Nationalist leader Oleh Tyahniboh told Interfax that representatives of his party had taken over the building. "Today literally 40 minutes ago, our boys took the Kiev Council," he told crowds on Kiev's Independence Square.

Shortly after 7 am Eastern time on Sunday, Metropolitan Transportation Authority police confirmed that a Metro-North train derailed near the Hudson river in the Bronx. The accident occurred near Palisade Avenue near the Spuyten Duyvil railroad station. Photos taken of the accident scene show eight cars derailed.  Edwin Valero was in an apartment building above the accident scene when the train derailed, the WSJ reports. He says none of the cars went into a nearby body of water, but at least one ended up a few feet from the edge. Rebecca Schwartz was at a nearby park when the accident occurred. She says she didn't see or hear the derailment but looked across the water when she heard emergency vehicle sirens. She says numerous emergency vehicles have responded to the scene.