Archive - Dec 2014 - Story

"I find it extremely odd and troubling that starting with January 2013, the Establishment Survey started moving in nearly an exactly straight line (benchmarks are important). That observation is made more curious by a memo that was just sent out by the Census Bureau to its field offices (the BLS crunches the numbers, but contracts out with the Census Bureau to actually conduct the surveys)... In other words, they were told that there would be penalties for cheating on the surveys, which apparently is tied to suggestions of a rash of field workers completing surveys for people never actually surveyed. The reason for doing so, spelled out by the New York Post, is that compensation is tied to a 90% completion rate."

Be careful what you wish for... Russia matters. It mattered in 1998 when the shock waves from its debt default reverberated around the world. And it would matter again should the plunging oil price lead to economic collapse. That’s despite the fact that Russia is a massive land mass with a relatively small economy. It accounts for only 3% of global GDP and it is dominated by an energy sector that is responsible for 70% of exports. But there are at least five ways in which a crisis for Russia could spread.

Currently there is probably no other great divide in opinions than the current state of oil and all it entails. Not only do many not remember the early 80’s when U.S. oil producers went haywire, but they seem to have forgotten just how quickly in the sheer speed of panic, bankruptcies, and more that took place in the southern regions of the U.S. and Texas in-particular.

A few nations may indeed be forced to sell some of their official gold reserves as a result of plunging oil prices. It seems however not likely at this juncture that Russia will be one of them, there is a good chance that Venezuela will eventually be forced to sell some of its official gold holdings. However, the impact - short term psychological impact - on the gold market should be quite limited.

At the end of 2012, 'economists' looked to 2014 as the year global growth would break out above the 3% trend and the world could rest back in Utopia... that never happened. At the end of 2013, 'economists' looked to 2015 as the year global growth would break out above the 3% trend and the world could rest back in Utopia... that expectation has now collapsed back to a mere 2.88%. And now, at the end of 2014, guess what...

The last time Israel ignored Syrian sovereignty and attacked Bashar al Assad's nation without fear of reprisals was in the spring of 2013, when the US was eager to launch an all out war, and tear apart the last country that stood in the path of the Qatari natural gas pipeline to Europe. As a result of last minute Russian intervention, the war was avoided in the last summer, but not before Syria had declared Israel's attack An "Act Of War.' Moments ago, following a year and a half hiatus, Israel, which had not made many headlines on the geopolitical arena in recent months, launched another bomb raid on Syria, and as AP reports, Israeli warplanes carried out two airstrikes Sunday near Damascus, one near the city's international airport and a second outside a town close to the Lebanese border, Syria's state news agency said.

"... we seem to have miscalculated..."

You almost have to step outside of economics, even out of the financial world as a whole, to pose what is the most elementary question about our economy today. That can’t be right.  The most elementary question is not how we can achieve growth, it’s whether we need growth, and what we would need it for that is important enough to destroy our entire societies and economies for.... We’re in dire need of fresh blood and smart new ideas to clean up the mess the present ideologies and their puppets and puppetmasters have created.

... It is hard to sum up a conference featuring fifty-eight different sessions spread across eight different streams: everyone’s impressions will inevitably be personal. Ours, though, is that investors remain united in their faith in the central banks – if not for their ability to create growth, then at least in their ability to push up asset prices. And yet the limits of that faith are increasingly on display. Not only are there signs of trouble at individual corporates on the ground. There is also a growing realization that the central bankers themselves – be it the ECB today, or the past and present Chairs of the Fed – subscribe to different theologies.

The cult of egalitarianism demands equal treatment of unequal circumstances, a model that can lead only to tyranny and oppression. We have to stop thinking of equality as a necessary feature of a healthy society. The only sense in which people are truly equal is in their right to life and the control of their own actions. Any interference with these must be closely guarded against, but the politically correct imposition of equal outcomes on diverse personalities destroys individualism and abolishes freedom.

Having raised money at a mind-numbingly bubblicious $40 billion valuation this week (which as a reminder is triple the value of the entire NYC tax medallion business), we thought the pushback from the world's tax-driving unions was at least worth noting as they resist 'disruption'. Nowhere is that pushback more evident than in Greece, where as KeepTalkingGreece reports, the President of Attica Taxi Association (SATA) said that taxi drivers cooperating with Uber “should be hanged at Syntagma Square” for being traitors.

Presented with no comment...

Much has been said about Goldman's control over the most important Federal Reserve of all, that of New York, where the all important Markets Group is located, which does as the name implies, "influences" markets.And while it is very clear by now that nothing will change under the current corrupt and compromised executive, legislative and judicial system, because at the end of the day, Goldman has indirect control over all three branches of government , here is the one anecdote which, in a non banana republic, would be the straw that finally broke the camel's back.

We don’t see a whole lot of comprehension out there, so let’s try and link the obvious: employment to shale to plummeting oil prices to the debt the shale industry was built on (and which is vanishing). We know, people look at the US jobs report yesterday, and at the stock markets (Europe up some 2% across the board), and think salvation has landed on their doorstep, but the true story really is very different. We’ve been saying for weeks that lower oil prices would not be a boon but a scourge for the US economy, for several different reasons, and this is a big one. The losses to investors, the restructurings and bankruptcies, and perhaps even the bailouts, are a very much interconnected and crosslinked other. There’s no resilience – left – in a system like this, it bets all on red, and that makes it terribly brittle.