Archive - Sep 15, 2015 - Story

Imagine for a moment the sentiment shock for mainstream Americans if Goldman Sachs' Lloyd Blankfein was probed for insider-trading and publicly scapegoated for causing a nation's equity market (and economy) to collapse. While it may be true, it would never happen in America... But in China, as part of what authorities call "purifying the markets," the president of China’s biggest brokerage has been swept up in a widening campaign to root out financial wrongdoing and assign blame for the nation’s $5 trillion stock rout. As Bloomberg notes, shares are falling further in today's markets as the probe of Citic Securities President Cheng Boming comes after the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported last month that four executives at Citic had admitted to so-called insider trading.

No, we're not kidding. We can solve the immigration and refugee crises without more wars, without rounding people up like animals, and while boosting the GDP. It’s not hard. All you have to do is stop thinking inside the same old status quo. Here’s the plan...

Remember when Hewlett-Packard announced it would fire 58,000 in February just so the company could spend even more billions on stock buybacks to make its shareholders filthier rich? Alas, since then things have gone south not only for HPQ stock but also for the company's buybacks activity and so Meg Whitman clearly needed to spend even more on buybacks. But where to get the money? Wait, here's an idea: lets fire another 30,000!

Chinese equity markets are holding modest 'bounce' gains after two days of carnage. After 3 days of stronger fixes PBOC devalued the Yuan but the Ministry of Finance made it clear that "devaluation is not aimed at boosting exports," which makes us wonder, is it aimed at selling Treasuries? No additional direct liquidity injections but anxiety grows as China National Erzhong Group Co. may miss an interest payment later this month after one of its creditors filed a restructuring request, putting it at risk of becoming the second state-owned company to default in the nation’s onshore bond market.

Given the recent admission by the Australian Central Bank that property prices "have gone crazy," it appears new Chinese 'regulations' may just kill Australia's golden goose of 'weath creation' as Aussie's largest trade partner sees its economy collapse. While the Aussies themselves proclaimed a "war on cash," it appears, as AFR reports, that Chinese purchases of Australian property have dropped significantly in the past month, according to agents, as buyers struggle to shift money out of the country following Beijing's move to tighten capital controls. With Chinese banks now limiting any overseas transfer to USD50,000 - in an effort to control capital outflows - and with China dominating the Aussie housing market, one agent exclaimed, "it has affected 70 to 80 per cent of current transactions and some have already been suspended."

While influential voices like the Pope are correct that this is a travesty, the policies promoted by him and other government officials will only make this worse. Offering assistance to migrants by rescuing them when they become troubled or allowing migrants to remain without changing the underlying bureaucratic issue will only create greater incentives for more and more people to take the same dangerous routes. Risk compensation has to be considered — the greater the safety mechanisms in place, the more risky the behavior will become. Unfortunately, the current solutions presented by officials will likely result in boats even more overloaded with people and even greater numbers traversing dangerous jungle passes.

Reports that the official unemployment rate has fallen to 5.1 percent may appear to vindicate the policies of easy money, corporate bailouts, and increased government spending. However, even the mainstream media has acknowledged that the official numbers understate the true unemployment rate. Disappointingly, but not surprisingly, few in Washington, DC acknowledge that America’s economic future is endangered by excessive spending, borrowing, taxing, and inflating. Instead, Congress continues to waste taxpayer money on futile attempts to run the economy, run our lives, and run the world.

"Countries need to put aside geopolitical ambitions [and] direct or indirect use of terrorist groups to achieve goals that include regime change, in order to counter the threat of Islamic State. Elementary common sense responsibility for global and regional security demands the collective effort of the international community."

When we say that the rule of law is dead in America, we are not exaggerating. Civil asset forfeiture is one of the most unethical and barbaric practices routinely performed by law enforcement in these United States today. Naturally, the Department of Justice is doing everything it can to protect the practice.

"Our Investor Desk would comply with a weekly request from (a client) for details of Central Bank activity that Citi had transacted."

"It Does Not Work"

Usually, we don’t stop to think about how the whole economy works together. A major reason is that we have been lacking data to see long-term relationships. What we are doing now is building debt to unsustainably high levels, thanks to today’s high cost of producing energy products. This can be turned around. To do so would require immediate production of huge quantities of incredibly cheap energy products - that is oil at less than $20 per barrel in 2014$, and other energy products with comparably cheap cost structures. Of course, such a low-price, high-growth scenario isn’t really sustainable in a finite world either.

"What became very quickly clear this year was the general sense of deep disgust and repugnance that was demonstrated towards the global banking industry. I can say with some degree of certainty now that a very large number of academics, law enforcement agencies, and financial compliance consultants are now joined, as one, in their total condemnation of significant elements of the global banking sector for their organised criminal activities. Many banks are widely identified now as nothing more than enterprise criminal organisations, who engage in widespread criminal practice and dishonest conduct as a matter of course and deliberate commercial policy."

"It’s fairly obvious that we reached peak trade in 2007"...