Archive - May 2014 - Story

While every state has at least some residents who are looking for greener pastures; as Gallup reports, nowhere is the desire to move more prevalent than in Illinois and Connecticut. In both of these states, about half of residents say that if given the chance to move to a different state, they would like to do so (against an average 33% of all Americans who would prefer to live in another state than their own). The 'greenest pasture' or least disliked, according to Gallup, is Hawaii and Montana (where only 23% would prefer to leave). The biggest factor driving the desire to leave the current state - unsurprisingly - jobs (or business opportunities)... and Nevada residents (thank you Harry Reid) the most anxious to leave in the next 12 months.

As tensions between all parties in Eastern Europe boil over, Chris Martenson provides a brief tour through just some of the antics surrounding the US' involvement in bringing about change (you can believe in!) in Ukraine. We raise these items to counter the usual clutter and complete lack of context being provided in the US press and to illustrate that the US is already in pretty deep and therefore unlikely to back down now. Before we move on, do you not find it at all strange that the US media, usually extremely sensitive to anti-semitism, has given the McCain and Nuland support of the Svoboda party a complete pass? I find it to be like the case of "the dog that did not bark", meaning the silence reveals a very fickle moral compass at the heart of the western press. The demonization of Putin as the bad guy here is near complete in western media. But there’s plenty of mischief all around and, as usual, the US finds itself with some pretty strange bedfellows as it seeks an outcome it likes.

After 3 months of range trading, Treeasury yields have resumed their year-to-date downtrend. The Friday Bearish Outside Bar (a bearish chart pattern indicating further downside) and closing break of the 2.591% range lows says lower 10yr yields are coming (targeting 2.40%)for 10Y Simply put, BofA's Macneil Curry warns - Don't Fade This Breakdown... Watch US equities.

Did you know that there are nearly 102 million working age Americans that do not have a job right now?  And 20 percent of all families in the United States do not have a single member that is employed.  So how in the world can the government claim that the unemployment rate has "dropped" to "6.3 percent"?  Well, it all comes down to how you define who is "unemployed".  For example, last month the government moved another 988,000 Americans into the "not in the labor force" category.  According to the government, at this moment there are 9.75 million Americans that are "unemployed" and there are 92.02 million Americans that are "not in the labor force" for a grand total of 101.77 million working age Americans that do not have a job.  Back in April 2000, only 5.48 million Americans were unemployed and only 69.27 million Americans were "not in the labor force" for a grand total of 74.75 million Americans without a job.  That means that the number of working age Americans without a job has risen by 27 million since the year 2000.  Any way that you want to slice that, it is bad news.

Now that the situation in Ukraine has officially been upgraded to "war", what really happens on the ground will remain largely wrapped by the fog of war on either side, with just one thing assured: a war it may be but more than anything it is a proxy war - one in which both western and Russian interests are manifest in the fighting, and killing, of mostly innocent civilians in Ukraine - a carbon copy replica of what happened last year in Syria.  The latest reminder of just this comes from AFP which reports, citing Germany's Bild, that "dozens of specialists from the US Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation are advising the Ukrainian government."

China is a case of bastardized socialism on credit steroids. At the turn of century it had $1 trillion of credit market debt outstanding—-a figure which has now soared to $25 trillion. The plain fact is that no economic system can remain stable and sustainable after undergoing a 25X debt expansion in a mere 14 years.

For 364 days of the year, the theater that the press and the administration are on the opposite sides of the table, continues without a glitch. However, one day a year, during the annual White House Correspondents' Association dinner, the facade falls and Obama, together with his fawning press corps, have a night of laughs in an Oscar-inspired night of self-congratularoty excess. Which, just like every other night in Washington, is at the taxpayers' expense. Here are the highlights from last night's festivities.

It may be a long weekend.

While there may be some confusion about why massive bond buying greeted yesterday's "better than expected" loss of 209 jobs in the 25-54 age group, dragging stocks down, the answer is actually very simple: there is a war in the Ukraine.

Could it really be that peripheral countries’ interest rates are plunging and borrowing costs have converged to pre-crisis levels, Greece is issuing debt, and the euro crisis is over forever, but Mario “Whatever-It-Takes” Draghi is musing about starting QE now? Have policymakers lost touch with reality to such a startling degree that they now reach for the QE bottle like it is some 1850s cure-all nostrum, regardless of what is wrong with the patient? All we can imagine is the good doctor, handle bar moustache and full regalia, sitting behind his desk: “You have the vapors? Take this QE, you’ll feel better. Ma’am, you have a little hysteria? QE is just the thing! Sir, this QE will cure that headache! Son, you need some inflation, so QE is just right for you.” There is nothing – we repeat, nothing – that is being done at present to enable Europe to perform better economically, to encourage its unemployed to get off the dole, or to empower its peripheral countries to deal with their underperformance on a sustainable basis.

A day after over 40 anti-government protesters died brutally in Ukraine's Black Sea town of Odessa, and Kiev resumed its "anti-terrorist" military offensive in Slavyansk and Krematorsk in what now even Ukraine officials admit is essentially a civil war, Ukraine has escalate its operation against pro-autonomy activists in the city of Mariupol, southeastern Ukraine, as well as the town of Konstantinovka, according to local self-defense activists. But for now, perhaps the most dramatic footage of the night, is this clip from Mariupol, where a branch office of PrivatBank has just burned down to the ground. At this point US bankers are slaying various animals to their assorted idols hoping nobody in the US is watching this clip and getting any ideas.

Just when it seemed like investors might have lost some of their appetite for initial public offerings of companies that lose money . . . yeah, right. Papa Murphy's Holdings Inc. priced its IPO today at $11 a share. The stock closed up a nickel. We've grown accustomed to seeing IPOs by profitless technology companies. But this is a pizza chain that had net losses of $606,000 in 2011, $2.1 million in 2012 and $2.6 million in 2013. Now it has a stock-market value of about $187 million, or about 2.3 times its revenue last year... "I can somewhat understand the appeal of speculating on some unproven Internet company that loses money but promises to change the world. But a 33-year-old pizza chain? Come on."

This is the list of the top 15 US companies that have the bulk of accumulated offshore profits, amounting to roughly $1 trillion in cash, which is never subjet to US taxation, and which financial engineers try to generate the highest shareholder returns on.

"The crisis doesn't destroy wealth, it merely evidences the extent to which wealth has already been destroyed by stupid investments made in the boom." This is critically important, as banking (or financial) crisis do not start the day the market collapses but years before, and as Punk Economics' David McWilliams explains, this is usually driven by banks (central or otherwise) beginning to lend recklessly using other people's money to ramp up asset values. So, with that in mind, what have we learned from the 2008 banking crisis? (spoiler alert - nothing good).