Archive - Aug 2015 - Story

When it comes to the complete economic and social devastation of Venezuela, lately the only thing readers seem attuned to is when will the social implosion lead to renewed political tensions which will likely result in another violent political overthrow, one which may or may not involve the local military. Today Venezuela took a step in that direction when its president Maduro declared a state of emergency in a border region near Colombia following an attack by smugglers in which three soldiers and a civilian were injured, resulting in 60 days of martial law in five municipalities of the state of Tachira. He also said the closure of the border, announced on Thursday, will be extended until further notice.

After a dizzying 500+ point drop in the Dow on Friday, should we brace for impact? There are plenty of fundamental and technical reasons to view the swoon this week as the initial downturn that presages a crash landing.  But if we look at the last equivalent spike down in October 2014, we're not so sure. Both spikes (October 2014 and August 2015) smashed through the lower Bollinger band, but the volume in last week's plummet was nothing special compared to the 2014 swoon.

The following story is guaranteed to make you sick. Once again, we’re shown that following trillions in taxpayer funded bailouts and backstops, TBTF Wall Street banks immediately went ahead and focused all their attention obtaining loopholes in order to transfer risk and make billions upon billions of dollars in the financial matrix, as opposed to adding any benefit whatsoever to society.

How bad is America's $1.3 trillion student loan problem, you ask? As WSJ reports, "nearly seven million Americans have gone at least a year without making a payment on their federal student loans, a staggering level of default that highlights how student debt continues to burden households despite an improving labor market."

Should the dispute between China and its neighbors over Beijing's land reclamation efforts in the South China Sea escalate from a war of words to a war of missles and bullets, how do the potential combatants match up from a maritime military perspective? The Pentagon explains.

"Believe it or not, many economists argue that the economy needs a sufficient amount of public debt out there to function well. And how much is sufficient? Maybe more than we currently have. That is, there’s a reasonable argument to be made that part of what ails the world economy right now is that governments aren’t deep enough in debt."

America is a gulag. We are ruled by a government that is devoid of all morality, all integrity, all compassion, all justice. The government of the United States stands for one thing and one thing only: Evil. You are part of the new Captive Nation.

Apparently, someone at the Pentagon thought that between the four-year civil war in Syria, the heightened violence in Turkey, the proxy war in Ukraine, and the threat of a new war in the Korean Peninsula, the geopolitical situation wasn’t unstable enough, because on Thursday the DoD issued a report entitled "Asia Pacific Maritime Security Strategy," in which a considerable amount of space is spent discussing China’s land reclamation efforts in the Spratlys.

Imagine that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was a corporation, with its shares owned by the nation's major pharmaceutical companies. How would you feel about the regulation of medications?  Whose interests would this corporation be serving? Or suppose that major oil companies appointed a small committee to periodically announce the price of a barrel of crude in the United States. How would that impact you at the gasoline pump? Such hypotheticals would strike the majority of Americans as completely absurd, but it's exactly how our banking system operates.

As the great EM unwind continues unabated, we’ve noted that in some hard-hit countries, the terrible trio of falling commodity prices, decelerating Chinese demand, and looming Fed hike has been exacerbated by political turmoil. Now, we turn to Malaysia where an already tenuous situation just got worse as PM Najib Razak is now facing calls for a no-confidence vote amid allegations he embezzled some $700 million from the country's development fund.

Coincidence? As China enters the currency wars, crushing carry around the world, it just happens that it also conducted a flight test of its new intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) this month (and China’s acquisition of a MIRVed capability is one of the most dangerous nuclear weapons developments that no one is talking about).

Donald Trump is holding a campaign rally at a football stadium. Enough said.

We’ve posted a lot of “dismal’ stuff today, but since it’s better to laugh than to cry, we give you the following...