Archive - Mar 2015 - Story

Sometime next year Social Security’s $150 billion disability-insurance program will become insolvent. Congressional loosening of benefit requirements, and more-importantly allowing people to remain on disability effectively for life once they gain it (less than 1% of the people on disability return to the workforce in any given year) make the problem one that is utterly intractable without major changes. And so Congress' bipartisan Social Security Advisory Board has urged change...like shifting funds to the Social Security disability fund from the Social Security retirement fund.

How much does a ________ cost in ________ ?

Following a speech at Delft University in Holland, Eurogrpup head Jeroen Dijsselbloem was confronted by a calmly-spoken, rational-thinking Greek student, who explained the misery and insanity of what the EU is doing to Greece... "1000s of Greek have committed suicide because of your policies... you keep on giving loans to Greece to pay back the same loans... its like going one loan shark to another loan shark to get more loans to pay back another loan shark."

Do derivatives confuse you? Do you hate bond math? We feel the same way! So we simplified your life with headache free QE math. Compounded rates, equivalent rates, production functions: who needs old math?

Biotech stocks continue to make new highs on the back of aggressive M&A and pre-revenue IPOs. Bloomberg suggests the bubble may be about to burst.

With all eyes squarely on the ECB as Mario Draghi prepares to flood the EMU fixed income market with €1.1 trillion in new liquidity starting Monday, Soc Gen’s Albert Edwards reminds us that “another type of QE” is drying up thanks largely to the relative strength of the US dollar. "The bottom line is that in a world of over-inflated asset values, the strength of the dollar is resulting is a rapid tightening of global liquidity as emerging economies (and indeed the Swiss) stop printing money to buy the US dollar. This should be seen for what it is — a clear tightening of global liquidity. Investors ignore this at their peril."

The US population grew from February 2008 to February 2015 by 16.8 million persons, or a 5.5% increase in total population, and on a net basis, not a single one of those 16.8 million persons got a FT (full time) job… while a net 2.7 million were lucky enough to get a (or multiple) PT (part time) job.

This absence of moral values is something Europe in its present form will never be able to claim back. Never. The EU has shown itself to be a gross moral failure, and that’s it: the experiment is over. What will undo Europe from within is its economic policies. Which are strongly linked to the same moral values issue: inside a union, you cannot let thousands of people go without food and health care while others, a few hundred miles away, drive new Mercs and Beamers over a brand new Autobahn. That’s not a union. That’s a feudal society. And those don’t hold.

To some, gold is merely a tradition; to others, such as the first secretary of the North Korean embassy in the capital of Bangladesh, it is one of the easiest ways to smuggle $1.7 million. Or at least should have been on paper. Instead, what happened on Thursday night when Son Young-nam landed in Dhaka on a flight from Singapore, carrying a ridiculous amount of physical gold and hoping to get through customs without a glitch due his diplomatic status, things went downhill fast after Young-nam's baggage was searched and almost 27 kilos, or 59 pounds, of gold bars and ornaments were recovered.

Following Benjamin Netanyahu's speech to the US Congress last week, Israel's former intelligence chief voiced his displeasure. As The Hill reports, Meir Dagan, a former Mossad director, strongly disagreed with many of Netanyahu’s assertions, stating that "Iranian missiles will never be able to hit the United States," and that comments that Iran could producer nuclear weapons within a year were "bullshit." But, as Mike Krieger notes below, it's not just just Dagan that is disappointed, a large protest against him erupted in the nation’s section largest city, Tel Aviv. It appears “Bibi” is far more popular with crazy American neocons than he is with his own fellow citizens.

"Low oil prices threaten the ability of inefficient, corrupt states to service their debts and may curtail the government spending that keeps the masses content. This may in turn ignite demands for a fairer distribution of these dwindling oil proceeds and, possibly, regime change."

Could it be that one of the key factors motivating the West’s apparently illogical and self-defeating desire to constantly confront Russia is simply revanchism for WWII? Most people in the West want to live in peace and are completely unaware of these undercurrents of the war in the Ukraine. While the apparent Russophobia and revanchism is only relevant to various minority groups, the problem is that taken together and when they act in unison, these minorities end of wielding a lot of power and influence. The best way to stop them, is to shed a strong light on them and their real motives.

On the fourth anniversary of the Syrian War, Al Jazeera is out with a new documentary that explores why young, Western Muslims feel increasingly compelled to join the fight and also looks at the ideological divide between al-Qaeda’s Syrian arm, al-Nusra and ISIS.

One of the biggest debates happening at the intersection of technology and privacy at the moment revolves around the U.S. government’s fear that the American peasantry may gain access to strong encryption in order to protect their private communications. Naturally, this isn’t something Big Brother wants to see, and the “solution” proposed by the status quo revolves around forcing technology companies to provide a way for the state to have access to all secure communications when they deem it necessary. “It’s stunningly shortsighted for the FBI and NSA not to realize this... By demanding backdoors, these US government agencies are putting everyone’s cybersecurity at risk.”

"Secret" documents and power struggles aside, regulators are just as inept now as ever and bank stress tests are completely meaningless, as the Fed neither then, nor now, has any methodology for how to calculate capital in case of the same kind of counterparty failure chain as happened during Lehman, and when no amount of capital would have been sufficient to preserve the financial sector.