Archive - Nov 9, 2015 - Story

A busy night in Asia began with a total collapse in Philippines Exports (-24.7% YoY - the biggest miss since Lehman). This was quickly followed by a 0.3% drop (deflation) in CPI MoM (thanks to a drop in pork -1.9%, eggs -6.9%, and veggies -5.6%) which sparked buying in stocks (because moar stimulus). Chatter of a few large fund houses under investigation stymied the rally quickly but as nobody was summoned stocks recovered, then rallied strongly back into the green on renewed chatter of Stock Connect occurring sooner than expected. With CSI-300 (China's S&P 500), up at the break, this is the longest winning streak since the peak of the bubble in May. And finally Shanghai Copper and Nickel tumbled to new multi-year lows, dragging Bloomberg's Commodity Index to fresh 16-year lows.

Free speech is not something that people would normally see as a realm of economics, but in many ways, an economic understanding of the support and opposition to free speech can shed a lot of light on what’s happening now in the West.

Are we in for another nuclear standoff with the Kremlin?

With the third quarter earnings season almost over, and 90% of companies having reported, here is a quick look at where we stand and what has emerged as the 4 main themes during earnings calls.

"...middle-aged whites have lost the narrative of their lives. ... while universal health care, higher minimum wages, aid to education, and so on would do a lot to help Americans in trouble, I’m not sure whether they’re enough to cure existential despair."

As one witty observer noted over the weekend, "no one with an IQ greater than their shoe size, save corrupt, captured American economists, buys the fake October unemployment report," and while we agreed with the pretext of his thesis, we thought a quick sanity check on the sudden surges in Retail employment and Construction jobs and wage growth would help clarify a few things for those who 'believe' in miracles. As the following two simple charts show, we have seen this odious pattern of mal-investment, mis-allocation, and erroneous executuve extrapolation before... and it did not end well.

Having very recently pointed out the growing epidemic of "online begging," seeing a mother use an online donation platform to raise funds to "lay her son to rest" seems like a laudible and donation-worthy cause. However, as ABC7 reports, the 'grieving' mother of murdered Chicago 9-year-old Tysham Lee used the funds to purchase a 2015 Chrysler 200 and after facing a torrent of abuse attempted to defend her seemingly callous act - "Y'all don't know nothing about me."

For months, black student groups have complained of racial slurs and other slights on the overwhelmingly white (79% white and 8% black) flagship campus of the Missouri's four-college system. Today, amid a campus in open revolt and at least 30 black football players announcing that they would not play until the president was gone, AP reports that Mizzou President Tim Wolfe has resigned effective immediately urging students and faculty "to heal and start talking again to make the changes necessary." Protestors demanded that Wolfe "acknowledge his white male privilege," that he is immediately removed, and that the school adopt a mandatory racial-awareness program and hire more black faculty and staff.

The re-enserfment of Western peoples is taking place on several levels...

"Overnight if we were to eliminate tariffs on imports, we would likely see the dairy sector in Canada, and perhaps the poultry and egg sectors, collapse overnight."

The failure of the Fed’s policies of massive money creation, corporate bailouts, and quantitative easing to produce economic growth is a sign that the fiat money system’s day of reckoning is near. The only way to prevent the monetary system’s inevitable crash from causing a major economic crisis is the restoration of a free-market monetary policy.

While ridiculous, Venezuela's decision to liquidate some of its gold is perhaps understandable under the circumstances: Venezulea relies on crude oil for 95% of its export revenue, and with prices refusing to rebound, the only question is when do all those CDS which price in a Venezuela default finally get paid. What is even more understandable is what Venezuela should have done in the first place before dumping a fifth of its gold, but got to do eventually, namely raiding all of the IMF capital held under its name in a special SDR reserve account.