Archive - Nov 2014 - Story

What these voters said with their votes was “I’m in favor of making it illegal for people with low productivity to get a job. Teenagers, people who were poorly educated by failing public schools, people who have never had a job, and people who are not very intelligent, should all just stay home and do nothing because we want to make sure that no one can afford to hire those people.”

This week's 'shellacking' of the administration suggests all is not well among the people of the Land of the Free. While headlines crow of plunging unemployment rates and record high stock prices, middle-class incomes remain stagnant at best (and sliding in most cases) and job quality continues to tumble. There is, however, a silver lining... as Bloomberg reports, "in a sign of lower income and middle income consumer stress, some prostitutes are dropping prices." Of course, this is terrible news for GDP (now what happens if the price of 'blow' also drops). This confirms our previous note on the deflation of prices in the oldest profession in the world... question is, will Yellen abhor this price drop too?

"Weakness, indecision and unreliability are terrible characteristics in a dangerous world. Strength does not mean bombing everyone. It means having capabilities, choosing one’s spots, and doing what you say you will do." The West might be war-weary, but the jihadis and other combatants in the Middle East are just getting started.

Just for fun, let's look at one chart and ask one question: is this stock continuing its downtrend or is it in the process of reversing?

After a brief hiatus the previous week, speculators have piled back into the most-over-crowded trade in the world - Long The US Dollar. As Goldman Sachs notes, overall USD speculative net long positioning increased $2.0bn to $45.7bn - a new record high.

"What I’m describing here is a sea change in investor attitudes that has profound implications for the rest of the market. What you do with that information is up to you."

Russian President Vladimir Putin believes that a serious confrontation with the West is coming. In a recent speech at the Valdai conference in Sochi, laced with geopolitical and historical references, he stated that “changes in the world order – and what we are seeing today are events on this scale – have usually been accompanied by if not global war and conflict, then by chains of intensive local-level conflicts.” What type of conflict is he referring to?

Yesterday, when we presented what we thought at the time was "The Strangest Number In Today's Jobs Report" namely the near record surge in workers aged 16-24, which amounted to 528K, or the vast majority of job additions in the month of October we may have been a bit premature. As it turns out breaking down the job surge from September to October by gender provides an even more peculiar result then an age distribution. Because as the chart below shows, of the 416K jobs added in the 20 and over category, a meager 10% of these went to men: some 90%, or 370,000, went to women! Men aged 20 and over were the recipients of a paltry 48,000 jobs, or 10% of the total increase.

Two days ago we quoted an ex-CIA officer who warned that the "Saudis Have Good Reason To Be Concerned" as a result of what appears to be a redirection of ISIS tactics, and attacks, toward the one country which has, at least for public consumption purposes, been - together with the US - at the forefront of the anti-ISIS campaign in the middle east. End result: a crackdown by the Saudis to prevent any future attacks by alleged Jihadists, and as Al-Arabiya reported earlier, overnight authorities in Saudi Arabia arrested 33 people with reported links to the al-Ahsa killings, disrupting plans of another attack by the same cell, Al Arabiya News Channel reported.

For some reason, the Council of Foreign Relations, where ex-Fed-Chief Alan Greenspan spoke last week, decided the following discussion should be left out of the official transcript. We can perhaps understand why... as Gillian Tett concludes, "comments like that will be turning you into a rock star amongst the gold bug community."

They say a picture is worth one thousand words.  And so here’s a twelve thousand word equivalent essay that quite clearly depicts how the policies of the new millennium are shaping the new world order.  The powers that be have looked at these same charts, understand their implications and yet continue on the current path.  The objective then is clear.  The death of the working class.

Economic forecasting is a dangerous job. As Mark Twain put it in his novel Pudd’nhead Wilson, “October. This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August, and February.” Every wrong prediction could doom a career, or a bank account. Prudence and humility are the only sound tools for building one’s reputation. The talking heads on CNBC appear to know neither. They pledge allegiance to the flag of the tinkering bureaucracy. It explains the loss of ratings, and loss of confidence in the ability of “experts” to see what’s coming down the tracks. Refusing to learn from mistakes will lead to future blunders. Pundits that don’t heed this message are doomed to fail.

"If a third party person gets anywhere along, they are going to do everything they can to stop that from happening," blasts Ron Paul, explaining to RT's Erin Ade that the 'monopoly' system run by the leaders of the two main parties was all too evident as Americans went to the polls this week. "It's a monopoly... and they don’t even allow a second option," Paul concluded, lashing out that "here at home, we don’t have true Democracy."

The upper middle class in the US, defined as everyone in the top half below the richest 20 percent, owns 11.9% of the wealth. Indonesia at 10.5% and Russia at 7.5% are worse off, but in all other nations the corresponding upper middle classes own 12 to 27%of the wealth. America’s bottom half compares even less favorably to the world: dead last, with just 1.3% of national wealth.