Archive - May 29, 2015 - Story

Meet Gulmurod Khalimov, the US-trained and funded former commander of Tajikistan's special forces, who, as Reuters reports, has now gone to Syria to fight with ISIS. He has a message: "Listen, you American pigs, I’ve been three times to America, and I saw how you train fighters to kill Muslims...God willing, I will come with this weapon to your cities, your homes, and we will kill you." The big question is - was he 'recorded' as a moderate when America considered funding and training his elite special forces unit?

Following today's "successful" vote confirming Sepp Blatter's 5th term running the farce called FIFA, and amid soccer's governing body being investigated by US and Swiss authorities over claims of corruption, we thought a summary of just where the money comes from and (apart from the $150 million in bribes and kickbacks to 14 executives) where it goes for the Swiss-based entity...

 "Not knowing how to start"...

To avoid a violent militaristic clash with China, or another cold war rivalry, the United States should pursue a simple solution: give up its empire.

Candelia is one of a number of so-called “Potemkin” companies operating in France. Everything about these entities is imaginary from the customers, to the supply chain, to the banks, to the “wages” employees receive and while the idea used to be that the creation of a “parallel economic universe” would help to train the jobless and prepare them for real employment sometime in the future, these “occupations” are now serving simply as way for the out-of-work to suspend reality for eight hours a day.

Yesterday, New Yorkers walking by the Ocean Luxury Rental apartment building at 1 West St around 10:40am, were greeted with a gruesome sight: a 29-year-old man had just jumped to his death from the 24th floor. Today, we learn that the tragic incident was merely the latest banker suicide, when according to the NY Post the still unidentified jumper was the latest in a long series of investment bankers who have decided to take their own life.

Humans desperately need a new story to live by. The old one is increasingly dysfunctional and rather obviously headed for either a quite dismal or possibly disastrous future. One of the chief impediments to recognizing the dysfunction of the old story and adopting a new one is the most powerful of all human emotional states: Denial. But here we are, 40 years after the Club of Rome and 7 years after the Great Financial Accident of 2008, collectively pretending that neither was a sign warning of the dangers we face -- as a global society -- if we continue our unsustainable policies and practices that assume perpetual growth.

"U.S. surveillance imagery shows China has positioned weaponry on one of the artificial islands it is developing in the South China Sea," WSJ reports. US Defense Secretary says the US will "fly, sail, and operate" wherever it wants.

LendingClub is offering a "no collateral required" $35,000 P2P loan to those looking to refi their credit card debt. Does this prove the P2P bubble is official?

And you thought the preliminary 0.2% Q1 GDP print from last month was bad. Moments ago, just as we warned, the BEA released its latest, first, revision of Q1 GDP (pre second-seasonal adjustments of course), and we just got confirmation that for the third time in the past four years, the US economy suffered a quarterly contraction, with the Q1 GDP revised drastically from a 0.2% growth to a drop of -0.7%: the worst print since snow struck, so very unexpectedly, last winter.

Ross Ulbricht, the convicted founder of Silk Road, has been sentenced to life in prison for running the underground online drug bazaar. The punishment is a heavy price to pay for the 31-year-old, who had pleaded with the judge to spare him his old age and “leave a small light at the end of the tunnel.”

According to Gallup, America is now fatter than it has ever been before.  But how can this possibly be?  After all, Americans spend an astounding 60 billion dollars a year on weight loss programs and products.  After putting so much time, effort and energy into losing weight, shouldn’t we be some of the healthiest people on the entire planet? 

Q. How else does this period of apparent equity overvaluation compare to equity booms in the past?

Robert Shiller: This time around, bonds and, increasingly, real estate also look overvalued. This is different from other over-valuation periods such as 1929, when the stock market was very overvalued, but the bond and housing markets for the most part weren't. It's an interesting phenomenon.

Central banks took over everything and thus changed everything; they cannot simply declare themselves successful and just give it all back. That might (stress might) have been possible had it actually worked, a true and robust economic recovery to smooth the shift, but the majority part of that November 2013 recoil was the growing acceptance, throughout 2014 and into 2015, that it was never coming in the first place.