Archive - Dec 2015 - Story

Taken together with the rather steep drop in US industrial production, the risks of a full-blown and perhaps severe recession have undoubtedly grown. Unlike what the FOMC is trying to project via the federal funds rate, a rate that isn’t being fully complemented, either, at this point, visible economic risk is not just rising it is exploding.

Fukushima radiation just off the North American coast is higher now than it has ever been, and government scientists and mainstream press are scrambling to cover-up and downplay the ever-increasing deadly threat that looms for millions of Americans.

FIRPTA was implemented during a better era for Americans in response to international investors in the late 1980s and early 1990s buying U.S. farmland, as well as the more publicly visible buying of trophy U.S. property by the Japanese.  The US government has now expediently waived FIRPTA.

This weekend the force was strong with thirty (and forty, and fifty) year-olds, wishing to awaken memories of their youthful days with an admirable redo of the first Star Wars movie, first released nearly 40 years ago. But the force has never been stronger with Disney which is expected to rake in a record-breaking $238 million in opening weekend box office sales in the US and Canada, and a near-record $279 million overseas, a grand total of well over half a billion around the globe.

The premises of the rate increase are several: that the Fed knows best what interest rate is good for the economy... that a recovery is sufficiently established to permit an end to the emergency micro rates of the last seven years... and that otherwise everything is more or less hunky-dory. And they are all false!

With Hillary Clinton cast as their arch-nemesis, the new 'avenging superheroes' - some the same as the old avengers - of the GOP presidential nominee race each have their own unique skills...

The American people are asleep at the wheel. The blame is not totally their’s, but they do bare the brunt of the blame. The mainstream media does not report what is happening within our economy or the geopolitical arena, unless they can spew on and on about the endless rainbows, unicorns and how “America is the greatest and Putin is the devil." As Paul Craig Roberts warns, we are facing a world in change and the pace is quickening.

While world leaders signed the 'historic' agreement signed in Paris to fix the world's "greatest threat," a natural gas storage site in southern California is belching 145,000 pounds per hour of Methane - a greenhouse gas 70 times more potent than carbon dioxide. What is worse, while official proclaim this a "top priority" a fix won't arrive until spring as emergency crews recognize "the leak was far from routine, and the problem was deeper underground."

The problem with all of this is that it’s now becoming apparent to everyone. The amount of mal-investment along with just how intertwined all the subsequent carry trades and more is becoming frightfully obvious and can no longer be hidden from view. The real problem now facing the Fed. which I believe they themselves did not fully comprehend was the extent in which all of this was: so blatantly obvious. Again: to anyone who truly wanted to look. Without the Fed’s interventionism – there is (and was) no market. And now with the raising of rates; no one will be able to miss or avoid that fact any longer. No matter how hard they try.

With the unprecedented surge in unicorns and incessant faith in the ever-increasing productivity of a globalization-crushed American worker, it is perhaps a surprise that the "office space" provided to the intellectual capital-providing, wage-stagnating middle-American, has never been smaller...

On the heels of Hillary Clinton's comments during the third Democratic debate regarding the appropriateness of America's pursuit of regime change in Syria, Vladimir Putin is out reiterating Russia's position that "outsiders forcing change of legitimate powers in other countries is intolerable."

The Fed is now - for the first time in adult memory for half the world’s traders and money managers - tightening rather than loosening monetary conditions. A quick look at financial history is all it takes to lead anyone with leveraged money at risk to lighten up. Equally important - and vastly more strange when you think about it - this tightening comes at a time when major parts of the global economy are either grinding to a halt or imploding.

“If you’re pushing for lower management fees to save minimal basis points on a fund where you are unhappy with performance, as a fiduciary, you have to decide whether you want to keep that fund at all.”

"My minions in the Federal Reserve - such loyal servants! - continue feeding an orgy of leverage and debt, spreading ruination under the false guise of prosperity. What a delicious irony, that the fools doomed to eternal damnation in my Empire believe themselves prosperous as they absorb the poison of exponentially rising leverage and debt."