Archive - Jun 2015 - Story

Put this one in the awkward file: just hours after the EPA released yet another massive study (literally, at just under 1000 pages) which found no evidence that fracking led to widespread pollution of drinking water (an outcome welcome by the oil industry and its backers and criticized by environmental groups), the director of the California Department of Conservation,  which oversees the agency that regulates the state's oil and gas industry, resigned as the culmination of a scandal over the contamination of California's water supply by fracking wastewater dumping.

It’s the breakdown of jobs by age that really screams out. It is a known fact that people in the 45 to 54 age bracket are in their prime earning and spending years. In the last year the number of employed 45 to 54 year olds has DECLINED by 67,000. It DECLINED in May by 51,000. It has DECLINED by 187,000 since February. It is a known fact that people over 55 dramatically reduce their spending as they approach and enter their retirement years. The Boomers have added 824,000 jobs in the last year, or 28% of all the new jobs added.

One way to ensure that Californians cut back on watering their lawns is to simply encourage households to remove the grass altogether and replace it with something that needs far less water — like rocks. "California’s love for lawns is wholly unsuited to the state’s dry climate," one professor tells The Guardian. It's an “'inherited historic aesthetic' that comes straight out of the British Empire."

When governments find themselves in financial trouble because of the stupid decisions that they’ve made, their first response is to award themselves even more power to make even stupider decisions. And among the stupidest decisions that any government can make is imposing capital controls… something that Argentina has in abundance.  Capital controls are like the Matrix; you can’t really explain what they are. You have to show people. Argentina does not disappoint.

"The hackers who stole personal data on 4 million government employees from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management sneaked past a sophisticated counter-hacking system called Einstein 3, a highly-touted, multimillion-dollar and mostly secret technology that’s been years in the making [but is] already obsolete," Bloomberg says. Unfortunately, bureaucratic delays, Presidential pettiness, and Congressional paralysis likely mean no improvements are forthcoming.

"The balance of power is beginning to shift. We are witnessing the emergence of a post-terror generation, one that rejects a worldview defined by a singular tragedy. For the first time since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, we see the outline of a politics that turns away from reaction and fear in favor of resilience and reason. With each court victory, with every change in the law, we demonstrate facts are more convincing than fear. As a society, we rediscover that the value of a right is not in what it hides, but in what it protects."

It is not so much that Greece and other nations are facing severe financial difficulties. At the end of the day, most man-made problems are solvable, especially in finance. What truly worries us is that this widely diverse group is required to come up with robust solutions to very sensitive political and economic problems, with wide reaching implications. Accordingly, this Greek saga has been going on for five years, and we are now deeply in the realm of unpalatable solutions – if indeed one can actually be found.

While the Greek government believes it may have won the battle, if not the war with Europe, the reality is that every additional day in which Athens does not have a funding backstop, be it the ECB (or the BRIC bank), is a day which brings the local banking system to total collapse. And another day, or two, like today, and it may all be over:  According to banking sources, the Greek bank outflows on Friday soared to 700 million Euros from 272 million Euros on Thursday.

Earlier this week, using hacked and leaked documents and pdfs created by, among others, George Soros' most recent wife who is less than half his age, we showed something fascinating: the puppetmaster behind the entire Ukraine conflict may be none other than George Soros himself.  Despite the limited distribution of this very fascinating story which casts a vastly different light on the Ukraine conflict than one shone by the mainstream, it did catch the attention of one person: Ron Paul. In the following clip Ron Paul looks at the stunning implications of Soros' involvement behind the scenes in Ukraine, how he may be pulling the strings in this most critical proxy war between East and West, and what he stands to gain.

Doesn't get any simpler than this.

The Fed sees no risks of bubble trouble because they are looking at it all from the 2008 perspective. That is completely wrong-headed; if there is a “next one” it will have nothing to do with subprime mortgages, or even mortgages and real estate. Everyone seems to simply assume that the subprime problem ended in 2008, if only by crash. That is true but only of mortgages. Deleveraging is myth as debt has still expanded, and greatly, just not in the same exact places. There are certainly auto and student loans that have exploded exponentially, especially in subprime categories, but if there is another credit bubble now, the third, it is undoubtedly corporate debt.

The last time the Establishment Survey was as robust as the past year or so was 1999; then, the average productivity was 3.7%! That number actually makes sense intuitively, since businesses would have good reason to go on a hiring spree. Porting that to the current period, as in the mathematical construction of productivity here, would mean, holding output constant, that total hours in the past five quarters would have been not +2.7% but -1.7%. These numbers literally do not add up.

This is the end game of unfettered capitalism. The signs are all here. When you cast aside reasonable restraints, the unscrupulous among us will rise to the top and exploit everyone else. What we have left is a new American feudalism where CEOs move around like a pack of ruthless Somalian warlords. Riding behind the banner of efficiency, they replace employees with robots, outsource their work to foreigners and tell their employees to train their own replacements, and collude with hedge fund managers to strip companies of their most valuable assets to temporarily boost the stock price.

In yet another sign that Beijing's neighbors in the region (who have competing claims in the Spratlys) are seeking to guard against what they view as Chinese aggression, Vietnam is set to bolster its defense capabilities and deepen its security relationship with the US.