Archive - Dec 2015 - Story

Uncivil disobedience...

The "Jobs Friday" ritual is getting truly absurd. So it can’t be repeated often enough: These artifacts of the BLS’ seasonally maladjusted, trend-cycle modeled, heavily imputed/crafted and five times revised “jobs” numbers have precious little to do with the real health of the main street economy. Indeed, the six-year run of job gains since early 2010 primarily represent “born-again jobs” and part-time gigs. In economic terms, they do not remotely resemble your grandfather’s industrial era economy when a “job” lasted 40 to 50 hours per week all year round; and most of what the BLS survey counted as “jobs” paid a living wage. Not now. Not even close.

The market is now officially so broken, that the biggest HFT-player no longer even makes any sense.

Draghi’s Friday talk of a “no limit” ECB balance sheet must have Weidmann and responsible members of the ECB at their wits end. It’s the nature of monetary inflations that there’s always a need for more. Throughout history, it’s been ‘just one more round of ‘printing’’ or ‘just one more year and then we’ll rein things in’. But things spiral out of control – and there’s a lot of currency with a lot more zeros. It can end in hyperinflation, at least when monetary inflation is afflicting the real economy. Today’s strange variety is inflating securities market Bubbles. It will end with Bubbles bursting and confidence collapsing. Integral to the bursting Bubble thesis is that policymakers are losing control. Granted, such analysis has about zero credibility when markets are in melt-up mode. But perhaps the markets’ response to Draghi is a forewarning.

"Two soliders of the Khilafah executed an attack on the Inland Regional Cener in San Bernardino, California on the 20th of Safar. Light weapons were used, which led to the deaths of 14 disbelievers."

Can an economy thrive if it doesn’t make or move physical things? Intuitively the answer is no, because most of the services either maintain the status quo (like healthcare and restaurants) or (like houses) consume rather than build capital. The US, in short, is engaged in an experiment to see how long an economy can function with services growing and manufacturing contracting. As with so many of today’s monetary and fiscal experiments, no one knows when definitive results will come in. But the data so far aren’t encouraging.

After being threatened with expulsion from the Schengen borderless Europe zone, Greece has grudignly accepted an offer from the European Union to "bolster its borders with foreign guards as well as other aid, including tents and first aid kits." In doing so it has last its last shred of state sovereignty.

For the hundreds of thousands of warehouse, retail and storage workers who will soon be made obsolete, please meet your nemesis: the robot who will do your job without complaints, asking for a pay raise (or salary), or ever threatening to unionize.

Stop swallowing the overblown scaremongering of the government and its corporate media cronies. Stop letting them use hysteria over small menaces to drive you into the arms of tyranny, which is the greatest menace of all. Overthrow the reign of terror the State has installed over your mind. Else the days ahead may be terrible indeed.

"Not really... well, of course."

"As the founding editor-in-chief of the Today's Zaman, I have sincerely tried to fulfill my job to the best of my ability, maintained the paper's integrity and tried to resist all kinds of pressure from the government as much as I could."

The vicious Isis attacks in Paris represent yet another unpardonable offense; and through war, Cameron and Hollande seek to avenge the innocents who were killed and wounded. But as the humiliating outcome of the Suez war reminds us, there are some problems to which war is an unsuitable response. Across much of the greater Middle East today, we confront one such problem. For western governments to reflexively visit further violence on that region represents not a policy but an abdication of policy. It’s past time to think differently.

"In the year ahead, geopolitics likely poses the greatest potential to disrupt markets in terms of event risk. There is also the potential for geopolitical risks to intersect with economic fragility in the event of a downturn, amplifying both."

Enter The Donald. His popularity is traceable to the fact that he rejects the moral authority of the media, breaks their commandments, and mocks their condemnations. His contempt for the norms of Political Correctness is daily on display. And that large slice of America that detests a media whose public approval now rivals that of Congress, relishes this defiance. The last thing these folks want Trump to do is to apologize to the press.