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Open Thread
Due to an intensive travel schedule over the next 24 hours, posting will be limited (and if prior travel experience is any indication, Greece riots over the next week may be anticipated). Please consider this thread open to mock, ridicule, debase and taunt the now completed Stress Farce, as well as to brainstorm anything and everything else that may be of interest.
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yep . . . lots of bartering as well.
Now that the fix has been in for the shorts being squueezed; it will be the longs turn next week to get the shit kicked out of them after they're finished with the shorts.
amazon isn't just a store. It's a data collection operation. So it's protected by the powers that be.
I find the following encouraging..it's all the rage here in the Pacific Northwest.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8KQmps-Sog
1pc of the view count of that video could bring DC to a halt
Remember, The Very Thing that Makes Her Rich:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRAg7ixYaeE&feature=PlayList&p=C5C8B01E7F...
Make that a double, Ry. Tell me how can a poor man stand such times?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6efQ_GyQW3o&feature=related
Who could junk good tunes like this???
Some people junk for the same reason a dog licks his balls.
Made my day.
Because they can't make a fist???
Obviously if you see any cheap Gold coins for sale you,ll be letting us know ................. Cheers
Meanwhile - today's Friday News Nobody Will Read Tomorrow dump comes from The Teleprompter:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100723/ap_on_bi_ge/us_budget_deficit_2
Somehow this doesn't seem to rate a mention at Yahoo! News or Finance. I guess the story about The First Daughters tackling the daunting task of babysitting was too important to bump.
Funny, that.
Another form of 'divergence'.
It can go on for a very long time. The age of the new media has just started.
Once you've realized this ain't Kansas anymore, you cannot go back to being ignorant. Next step is to disengage and seek a lifestyle that is polar opposite of everything you've ever experienced or seen on main stream media. The key is not to become too suspect in the process and pulling things away and out of sight over time. There's a growing community of people that are "in the know" and they pretend to be regular Jones' for as long as necessary.
My family has grown completely immune to anything government or other officials say, or whatever is reported as news or shown to be a statistic of some sort.
When you do your own math and things don't add up, don't question yourself. Your math is usually correct.
+1, walkure.
No, there will not be a budget deficit... because there is no budget! See how easy that is?
24ct.
Most responsible Congress...EVAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/USPRIV?cid=11
We're back to the same total private sector jobs that we had back in July of 1999. Unfortunately, the population has since increased by 39.5 million people. Happy Friday!
ECRI is -10.5 but the market dismissed it completely (as well as yesterday's ugly macro news).
http://www.businesscycle.com/resources/
It will be interesting to see LIBOR EUR 3M on Monday.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/quote?ticker=EE0003M:IND
Nothing but the algos and market makeriacs squeezing the stops that the shorter thought were hidden. Up squeeze should end be soon then it will be the longs turn for their "hidden" stops to be squueezed on the way way back down.
I agree, the market makers have been lately activating and catching the stops in stocks with high ratio of shorts sitting on margin -- perfect opportunity for them to gap up, trap the shorts, and keep the constant squeezing pressure, knowing that the margin clerks are always very active on Thursdays and Fridays (calling and forcing the shorts to cover before the weekend).
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2010/07/23/pentago...
Pentagon workers, troops viewd kiddy porn, exposed network to cyber attacks.
http://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/mt/page15.pdf
In the event anyone still thought P/E ratios had anything to do with the S&P 500.
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/TERDT?cid=32218
QE2 is totally not going to happen, I swear!!!
Heeeeeeyyyy, wait a second....
"Term deposits are intended to facilitate the conduct of monetary policy by providing a tool for managing the aggregate quantity of reserve balances."
I guess I shouldn't worry that this has quadrupled in the past few weeks. Time to put on the swim trunks and take a nice weekend vacation in coastal Mississippi! Haley Barbour says the water is fine!
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/WSEFINT?cid=32215
Nothing to see here, move along.
"
Federal Reserve Bank New York, on behalf of the Federal Reserve System, provides correspondent and custodial banking services for central banks, monetary authorities, and certain international organizations to facilitate their official financial operations. This item indicates the face values of marketable securities held in custody for these accounts."
Yeah, definitely, definitely don't audit the Fed. Think of all the hours we'd miss watching "So You Think You Can Dance"!!!
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/WSECOUT?cid=32215
LOOK HERE SONNY, THE SYSTEM IS NOT BEING PROPPED! NOW SIT DOWN, SHUT UP, AND EAT YOUR FRUIT LOOPS!
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/BORROW?cid=122
So what you're saying is, the institutions tied to the Fed borrowed 700 billion dollars, right at the same time we passed the 700 billion dollar bailout? So... uhhh... yeah, just not seeing the connection here. Besides, we get that money back, right?
Travel bummer: I have to travel next Friday. Lucky me, I have a connecting flight in Detroit.
Do any of you watch Louis on FX?
This week's episode has him flying to Birmingham to do a comedy gig.
The scene where he has to explain his bottle of lube to airport security had me ROTF.
Enjoy this standup.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzbURUrgQao
Hey asshole! Suck a bag of dicks! The next guy that gets in my way - good stuff.
Five more US banks just failed the local stress test. Not big enough I guess. What a bizarre week. Almost like last week didn't exist. More Foxconn workers being hired to feed iPad and iPhone to indebted Americans
I'll be traveling next week to Greece. I really hope the Greeks don't riot while I'm there my tax dollars are bailing their lazy asses out.
Oh boy, did you buy solars too?
Speaking of What happened to the Greek rioters? How do they just disappear like that. Do they know Greek 10 yr Ylds are 10.35.%
Strange little Country.
"Almost like last week didn't exist."
My sentiments exactly. Talk about high anxiety.
I first heard of Webster Tarpley in the early ninety's when he was commissioned to write a book on Bush the elder.
Since then I've been aware of his writings on economics and finance and have come to think of him as some kind of mental giant compared to most of what we are exposed to, although he is of course marginalized.
I follow him at his website www.tarpley.com. For several years now I've found him to be spot-on in his analysis of the geopolitical realm.
Of particular interest here are his changing thoughts about any possible attack on Iran, something he has been rather prescient about for many years.
Such an event would of course trigger the long-awaited moonshot for gold, and send the markets to their doom.
This is much longer than his usual articles, not as easy to follow - probably reflecting the importance he gives to this topic:
http://tarpley.net/2010/07/22/obama-preparing-to-bomb-iran/
ex-NSA Wayne Madsen
ex-mil intel Steve Kangas
ex-CIA John Stockwell
WWII vet Emile de Antonio (Chomsky's hero)
Michelle Alexander "The NEw Jim Crow"
Last 3 on YouTube.
If you really want to know what really happened.
http://archive.wbai.org/allshows.php
.
Guns and Butter Friday, July 16, 2010 9:00 am.
webster tarpley interview concerning this day and the 3 legs of the
great depression.
Is the writing style in comment-486314 similar to his?
My my, hey hey
Rock and roll is here to stay
It's better to burn out
Than to fade away
My my, hey hey.
Out of the blue and into the black
You pay for this, but they give you that
And once you're gone, you can never come back
When you're out of the blue and into the black.
The king is gone but he's not forgotten
This is the story of Johnny Rotten
It's better to burn out than it is to rust
The king is gone but he's not forgotten
Hey hey, my my
Rock and roll can never die
There's more to the picture
Than meets the eye
Hey hey my my.
I'll go short again, it may go up again, but we're always going to send it down.
I'll go short again, it may go up again, but we're always going to send it down.
I'll go short again, it may go up again, but we're always going to send it down.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZ-fDxfUD58
Chumba's happy.
Tyler is not overseas...operation mayhem is in effect, repeat, operation mayhem is in effect.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_odd_darth_vader_bandit;_ylt=ApAFGkzc4Uar7JjBRDdI.bUDW7oF;_ylu=X3oDMTJ1MzR1OXFyBGFzc2V0A2FwLzIwMTAwNzIzL3VzX29kZF9kYXJ0aF92YWRlcl9iYW5kaXQEcG9zAzIEc2VjA3luX2FydGljbGVfc3VtbWFyeV9saXN0BHNsawNtYW5kZWNrZWRvdXQ-
Note to self: avoid the soup.
...And the anti-mayhem insurance company...
Naa, that was just the Chase mascot. Bernie told the big banks that this is just another way that they can use to recycle money into treasuries.
Not sure if this has been posted already, but the FDIC closes 6 more banks on "bank close Friday".....That's 2 weeks in a row! If you want to have some fun, click on the link and start at the bottom of the page and look at the year closed and start going up the page. We are in for a record bank closing year! Horray for the Recovery Summer!!!!!
http://www.fdic.gov/bank/individual/failed/banklist.html
Add 1 for a total of 7! Fun stuff! I can see why the stock market has been on a rip! Plus we broke 100 bank closings for the year!
http://money.cnn.com/2010/07/23/news/economy/bank_failures/
Best quote from the article:
Meanwhile, there is evidence to suggest that the banking industry has recovered from the worst of the financial crisis.
Bill Murphy from GATA on The Corbett Report
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4shd9pT4xUw&feature=sub&videos=1P71_IKkTbY
Love FDIC Friday!.. at 6 already- maybe we can get 9!
I think 8 is the record- anyone know for sure?
Burn Baby Burn
Ben, get the chinooks in the air!
Get your motor runnin'.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhw2V2Xt03w
Harry Reid says he is dropping the insane cap and trade carbon tax legislation, but beware of an attempt to pass this favorite bill of rich elitists and Malthusian fanatics. The attempt to bootleg cap and trade into law may come during the November-December lame duck session, with the votes of 30-40 dead souls, not of Gogol but of defeated Democrats. Politicians who have lost their seats will be looking to Wall Street for jobs or to Obama for patronage, and they will vote for anything. In the meantime, the world’s first Renewable Energy Ministerial Conference took place in Washington earlier this week. This was the usual Malthusian litany of gimmicks — solar, wind, batteries, and the like. This conference of 24 nations admitted that the world needed 500 new power plants, but decided they should not be built; only windmills and solar cells should be considered, in their grotesque view. This means there will be no development, and only genocide, for Africa and south Asia. The conference was attended by “stakeholders,” in reality rent seekers. The problem with their wind and solar gadgets is that they are uneconomical and require onerous government subsidies unless the price of oil rises far above the current level. (Maybe the idea of an attack on Iran and the closing of Hormuz, which would get oil to $500 per barrel, was discussed during the closed session of the first day — like the Bilderbergers at Saltsjobaden in 1973, when they discussed a 400% increase in the oil price, which arrived soon after.) The big news at the conference was that, for the first time ever, China has surpassed the United States in energy consumption. Ten years ago China consumed half the US total, and now they are ahead by 4% as of 2009. This signals the looming energy decadence and the thermodynamic decline of the US. China is also about to surpass the US in manufacturing, with the US losing the top spot it has occupied since passing Britain in this department in the 1890s. The Chinese will build 1,000 gigawatts of electric generating capacity by 2025, an amount equal to the current total US production. This includes 21 modern nuclear plants; the US is still building none. A rational US government would respond to this emergency by commencing the construction of 100 ultra-modern HTR reactors to replace the aging US reactors. But the US delegation was led by Energy Secretary Cho, who has embraced the crackpot idea of painting roads and roofs white to promote cooling. Such schemes are no substitute for US energy modernization after 30-plus years of stagnation and decay. Obama’s energy czarina Carol Browner, an expert profiteer and lobbyist, was also on hand. The insane ban on offshore drilling is an example of her handiwork. Nor should we forget Obama science adviser John Holdren, a quackademic and charlatan whose tenure in this post is a national scandal. These Malthusian bureaucrats hate real energy production, and want the price of energy to be as high as possible. As long as these sociopaths run US energy policy, it can be assumed that the US will continue to fall behind China, since there will be no modern energy production there can be no recovery from the current depression. We are headed for the ROAD..
I agree that white roofs are a bad idea, and I'm unsure of my view on Holdren (trending negative, fast)...
But really -- "The problem with their wind and solar gadgets is that they are uneconomical and require onerous government subsidies unless the price of oil rises far above the current level."
You must be joking. I mean really joking. The subsidies received for ancient sunlight (ala fossil fuels) dwarf those of renewable energy. That's not to say the renewable energy crowd is right - conservation and reduction of demand can reduce energy requirements by at least 90% (at least for buildings and communities), not merely trying to generate more "clean" power. But as the Gulf toxifies, and fossil fuel subsidies increase, really? Those are facts, not opinions - it's easy enough to count up to the decimal point, the subsidies going to ancient sunlight versus those to current sunlight.
Dark-
Ya gotta run the numbers. Above is a good assessment. Takes more electricity to build a chinese solar panel (just the silicon and doping, let alone batteries, inverters, switchgear, O&M costs) than it will make in its life. Add in <<50% capacity factor and you've got yourself an economic sink-hole.
- Ned
I agree with the economic sinkhole thought, but apart from my belief that economics is mostly fiction, there's of course deeper thoughts worth considering.
I appreciate the life cycle assesment (LCA) consequences of solar, as well as the high cost/long financial payback of active renewable systems. I am adverse and against the simplistic climate change crowd, though as an emerging planetary boundary, climate change is part of the descending dark age, that is ahead. For a good summary of how we must redefine the numbers, check out: www.nature.com/news/specials/planetaryboundaries/index.html
Certainly traditional solar electric production is ecologically damaging and economically costly (from a first cost perspective in conventional economics). Solar thermal is more cost-effective, but I'm unsure of its LCA. But there are some interesting and potentially transforming solar technologies out there - the dysensitized solar, nano and thin-film stuff may transform the market, particularly the ones designed on Biomimetic principles. As example, check out the company Konarka. There are a few others in the space.
There are different scales to compare. With coal, when one develops a LCA, you have to consider what's happening in Appalachia (http://e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2198 or the recent article in the journal Science) and with natural gas, the effects of hydrofracking (google Dimock, PA or Dish, TX). The wholesale disintegration of ecosystems, cultures, health, fertility, ecosystem services, etc...that cannot be repaired on any recognizable human time frame. Some have estimated it will take anywhere from 5 to 30 million years for living systems to evolve the same levels of biodiversity and health, again, that we've already destroyed, largely by thinking only in economic terms.
Any true accounting of costs must eliminate these externalities, before these externalities eliminate us.
Regarding subsidies, the numbers do speak for themselves. Check out, for example, a recent Environmental Law Institute study:
http://www.eli.org/Program_Areas/innovation_governance_energy.cfm
Thanks for the references, good weekend reading.
And back atcha, look over the legacy of the Carter era windfarms (Altamont Pass, [ed. and the farm] above Palm Springs). My primary points are if thermodynamic/physics efficiencies are not to the good, then the green technology will fail into disrepair, so its "promise" will not be achieved. Lot of that going around.
And the AGW reasoning fails as well, due to darker albedo and i-squared r losses in the user load [ed. and the actual work performed].
I appreciate your thoughts,
- Ned
Absolutely Ned, your points are fantastic, ones that most everyone misses. These laws of nature, like those of thermodynamics that you cite, are an absolute jurisdiction, in which there is no negotiation. Most fail to recognize our technology is exactly that, a negotiation for our continued survival. It is our evolutionary strategy for existence, and now at least a majority is funded, incentivized, subsidized merely to generate paper profit for leaders of fictional entities.
As it stands, that "promise" as you recognize will most certainly fail. The "green" community and movement is failing, miserably, and not just because of Al Gore as primary hero. I'm referring both to traditional environmentalism, and this more recent "bright green" bullshit, of mostly technology-fused "sustainability." That's mostly just for the politicians, universities and corporations (and their consultants), to so-called greenwash the world, profitably...even as it continues to die.
Most claimed green stuff, technology, design, education, only destroys living systems, health and fertility, and future generations of all species more efficiently. Virtually none operates as functionally restorative, preserving, let alone mutually enhancing in human and living systems. Most does not respect basic laws of thermodynamics, let alone key, non-negotiable laws of ecology.
The Planetary Boundaries are compelling, if we are in fact in the midst of an ecological market crash not seen for 65 million years, we must realign our design, technology, laws, even our cosmologies with fundamental, absolute laws of nature. As two quick examples that should matter to all of us personally, no matter how rich or impoverished -- 1) testing one's blood and surveying environmental causes for things like autism, cancer, ADD, etc. fast reveal that we've saturated ourselves and our children in industrial chemicals with harmful health consequences and 2) regarding nitrogen, human-created nitrogen is as ubiquitous in natural systems as human-made carbon is in the air -- about 40% of all of the nitrogen in your body and mine comes from human/"artificial" sources. And that is scary shit.
Janine Benyus of the Biomimicry Guild might have said it best -- "After 3.8 billion years of research and development, failures are fossils, and what surrounds us is the secret to survival."
I appreciate your thoughts as well, as I'm more on the policy side than actual engineering, which it looks like you know quite well.
I'm off to dinner, can we continue here with back-and-forth? I need to study your suggestions and see if the "policy" side also considers equivalent of the "social cost" thingie (all I've seen there is, well, political apples vs. meatloaf kinds of discussions).
I'll leave messages here and link w/message no. if that suits you.
- Ned
The back and forth here would be both great and appreciated.
Yeah, I suppose I'm more lost in some translation between law and biology, headed toward policy...on the whim of this article by Donella Meadows (PDF) -www.sustainer.org/pubs/Leverage_Points.pdf
So I can't as much speak for the policy crowd as I could law, biology and those that design, build, and engineer the human-built environment.
reading more-thanks.
tomorrow, after I absorb.
Do you have any familiarity with Friedmans?
http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=friedman&sts=t&tn=%22fr...
I was just teaching young skulls full of mush how to lend dignity to what would otherwise be a vulgar brawl when Milton and Rose ran their series. Then read Milton's and Anna's book, and 'cha got it after Jimmy Peanut.
Back with thoughts, thanks.
- Ned
Ned, I don't - just the name essentially. I hold only passing familiarity with most things economics - just a few random courses here and there tied to law, corporate and tax.
I'll definitely pick up a copy of their work, linked.
Dark-
I agree that the numbers do speak, as well as the assumptions. Refer to: http://www.eia.gov/FTPROOT/electricity/034808.pdf and Figure ES-1, the obligatory pie chart (pretty, non?). I read carbon-based at ~75% and "renewable" at 3.1%. So, normalize on % of total energy production and I get (using their even fancier pie chart) $72.5BB/75% or $1B/% total for carbon and $29B/3%=$9.6B/%. That it 10x subsidy.
But wait, there's more:
Thus, they disregard capacity factor measures that at the start are <<50% effective vs. conventional plants (that is up to 20X disadvantage). Capacity factor in its broadest is "amount of power actually made"/"amount of power that could have been made in a perfect world," expressed as a percentage. The sun is only up on average 12h/day. Windmachines have a range of wind speed (zero=no available energy, some maximum wind speed=feather the blades to avoid overtorque/overstress).
The going concerns in the conventional energy complex pass our purchase costs (marked up with local, state, federal taxes) back to the government, and a lot more than the $72BB "subsidy". XOM, for instance (but watch the maneuvering as they get taxed more they make adjustments).
http://politics.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2009/02/11/exxon-big-oil-pro...
I'm not going much further with this, except to note:
http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?sts=t&tn=how+to+lie+with+s...
And Spain's operating experience:
http://www.juandemariana.org/pdf/090327-employment-public-aid-renewable.pdf
Loss of 2.2 jobs for every 1 "green" subsidized job created.
- Ned
Fascinating stuff. This is the world I walked away from, corporate/entity tax.
For the green counterargument -- http://climateprogress.org/2010/04/06/exxon-mobil-paid-no-federal-income...
Or here, just as good samples of the murkiness that is the federal tax code
My innate sense goes to "...the power to tax involves the power to destroy; that the power to destroy may defeat and render useless the power to create...", itself paradoxically found in McCulloch v. Maryland, 17 US 316 (1816).
Regarding the ephemeral nature of current sunlight and its derivatives, your point about capacity factor relative to subsidy is well taken. Yet save for perhaps the methanotrophs and other extant or extinct undiscovered life, all
Wendell Berry writes, excellently, about 'biological energy systems', about how Life creates fertility against the gradient, by using energy of a higher number of smaller steps (while we, humanity, degrade large amounts of energy over fewer steps)...all right back to your point about honoring the tenets of thermodynamics. Another researcher, Julian Vincent, surveyed how we manipulate energy versus other species in problem solving. He concluded that we manipulate amounts of energy more than 70% of the time to solve challenges. Yet facing virtually identical challenges for survival, "nature", i.e., other species, manipulates energy in less than 5% of solutions. Instead, other species use shape and structure, for example, rather than digger deeper and deeper to extract ancient sunlight.
But back to humanity, about Spain's experience, I agree that using public subsidies to create alleged "green" jobs is truly a farce. to take private money, launder it through government economic development agencies and quasi-public/private entities at substantial cost in terms of salaries, learning curves, etc. - any benefit is minimal at best, and generally these well-compensated people end up down dead ends, and destroying local markets and competition. Most private actors can't compete with the level of public-subsidized "green" funding. In fact, a whole cottage industry of "green" companies has sprung up, flourishing only because of their political/academic connections rather than any meaningful talent or service or "green" product. This entrenching industry of political "green" itself almost virtually ensures that 'it will end badly for us.'
This goes back to your earlier point, I think, that most lack a rudimentary understanding or definition of what "green" or "sustainable" means. For hope to meaningfully exist, it must both emerge only when optimism fails, and when the fight and scale of our shared fight is truly acknowledged. I tell people to check the dictionary - last I looked, both words have been clearly defined for hundreds of years.
That said, truly "green" jobs do exist, are competitive even in today's stunted (externalized and first cost focused) markets, and which are holistically profitable when one starts actuallly counting externalities.
I believe, instead, that we collectively are seeking a novel cosmology. One that starts by recognizing this - http://www.mpch-mainz.mpg.de/~air/anthropocene/Text.html
The conclusion that matters - Humankind has become a biogeologic force, a force of Nature. This has led some, as luminary as Stuart Brand, to proclaim (paraphrasing), "We are as Gods, and may as well get good at it." In my humble mind, we are not God, but rather have grown to become a force of death in living systems. And as with the power to tax, we hold only the power to destroy. The power to destroy, of course, does not imply any power to create, save for creating space for novelty to emerge. Think asteroids, dinosaurs, and the rise of mammals here.
But as human nature now functions as force of nature, for example, Greed is now geologic. Gluttony, a global force, literally.
Sorry for that rant, on a simple matter of subsides!
Dark-Leverage is an interesting read, thanks. Starts a bit simplistic, but long dead-time processes are the hardest deterministic processes to control. Greg Shinskey wrote the book(s): http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=shinskey&sts=t&x=0&y=0
My dealings at Tech were with Sheridan, Rasmussen, and Kadak. I’ve always been leery of Forrester, and this paper crystallized my feeling. He says that not subsidizing something resulting in less of it is counter-intuitive. Friedman makes an excellent case that if we subsidize something, we get more of it, tax something, get less. Present day implications all over the place here.
The belief that these “systems analysis” folks have that they can a) predict the future path of a system that is b) non-linear, time-varying, and stochastic under c) conditions of limited observability (e.g. Dark Pools as a minor example), observation error (e.g. continually revised economic statistics), and interpreting random variables through individual sampling (Taleb)—well, I find that belief breathtaking.
Then we add competition.
Boyd made great strides in the realm of complex competing systems and made decisive progress in just the military realm. His insight is that centralized control fails when it competes with decentralized control (and with equally competencies on both sides. Description at e.g.:
http://www.military.com/opinion/0,15202,151577,00.html
FD: I just front-ran
http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=Frans+Osinga&sts=t&x=72...
and I don’t feel dirty at all ;-)
Then we extend this to all of the economic, commerce, political, etc. realm.
But the systems analysis is uncoupled from any value system. The conclusion frightens me, “In the end, it seems that power has less to do with pushing leverage points than it does with strategically, profoundly, madly letting go.” Cloward and Piven anyone?
But in the DONK Fin Reg bill as well as in “Health Care” bill, we have to read the bill to find out what is inside it. Sowell has analyzed why these things all end up with “unintended consequences.” I challenge the “unintended” wording that the apologists will be using.
Thanks for a good read and a good workout. And my homework load just went up.
- Ned
Thank you for the Shinkey reference - I'll be adding him to my Friedman order.
My verdict on Forrester is out, as my experience is too limited to offer any intelligent thought there. Your point about subsidies spurring more rather than less is well taken. However, I do believe that many have offered a plausible counterpoint, roughly summarized as -- powerful minorities with strong incentive and the power to preserve the status quo (Tyler writes cunningly well about these every day here) can prevent change. Also, I could speculate but would be unsure of the cause, but consider your subsidy argument relative to Spain or any sovereign's subsidization of "green" jobs. It seems the more it's subsidized, the fewer are created, and more fictional that green jobs feel to the public. I'd argue that these subsidies are more about preserving dependency in a broken, dependent system of companies and people to the politicians that secure the subsidies.
And a truly wonderful point, you make, that gets to the heart of the matter about "profoundly, madly letting go." As good a systems theorist as I have personally read is CS Holling - you've probably already read a good deal of his work, but most relevant here is - Understanding the Complexity of Economic, Ecological and Social Systems - http://74.125.155.132/scholar?q=cache:PydOKbo40VIJ:scholar.google.com/&h...
Worth the read, especially his insight into the forces of Remember and Revolt within Panarchal structures. My future work, hopefully, will be in "Remembering".
And to "profoundly, madly letting go," I admit I'm well into the murky social science and philosophical realm here, full of bias and all that blinds reasonable thinking. But I've not read anything better than GK Chesterton's "Orthodoxy" for how men of reason, who are purely and absolutely reasonable, are also entirely Mad. They have, in this context, profoundly and madly let go, and discovered nothing -- nothing being as you write, being "uncoupled from any value system." That's where as you identify that Forrester and Holling fail. All of the power of reason they've brought to bear, concludes only that you must detach from value, madly and profoundly. Holling says as much when he recommends to experiment in diverse ways of living.
That's uh hum bullshit, and ripe for those that take private money, for a fee that's called economic development, and fund bad ideas that are not really green.
That's where reason brings one. But the alternative, truly terrifying, is to profoundly release from Reason, and instead accept a paradox of Spirit and Science. Here I mean Wade Davis, Filkret Berkes, and others that speak both the traditional ecological knowledge of shamans, hoyane, and chiefs as well as the PhD/university pattern of thought.
As examples, the Wade Davis resources I posted elsewhere in this thread are good, as is Berkes' book Sacred Ecology. There is much more on that, including how one ancient culture "Asks the Stars What to Plant," and indeed, the Stars provide the answer - if interested, I can track down that link. But for now, I'm out for the night.
Thanks for the compelling thoughts.
But the ancient sunlight provides such tasty profits while fueling my car, house, grocery store....
No argument there. Ancient sunlight facilitates much fantastic stuff.
It's the hidden but accumulating costs that sicken and kill you and your family! As example, if you have children, check out cancer rates. That's just one variable in a really terrible pattern that's taking life, caused by our use of ancient sunlight.
Off shore drilling? The U.S. Peaked 40 years ago, offshore GOM production is only a fraction of the present oil extraction. Conventional Nuclear Power is not going to provide "too cheap to meter" energy as perpetually promised. You call them "Malthusian", but in reality there are limits to growth.
"The U.S. Peaked 40 years ago, offshore GOM production is only a fraction of the present oil extraction."
Peak Oil...lol
http://www.gasresources.net/index.htm
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/raymond-j-learsy/why-does-abiotic-oil-theo...
"You call them "Malthusian", but in reality there are limits to growth."
Limits to growth indeed. Are you a club member?
http://www.infowars.com/club-of-rome-behind-eco-fascist-purge-to-crimina...
Abiotic oil is junk science.
http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=MCRFPUS1&f=M
What do you call that?
Junk propaganda.
A history of the collection of stratigraphically shallow low hung fruit (structurally captured upseepages...(Arabian carbonate reef replenishments notwithstanding)) is the basis of Peak Oil.
The technology for petroleum detection available today is primarily in the hands of an elite industrial specific few. Unfortunately they have a vested interest in selling Peak Oil and clean energy.
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/Once-a-government-pet-BP-now-...
“...since there will be no modern energy production there can be no recovery from the current depression.”
The suppression of modern energy production goes way back.
Back to the hermetic cartels that specialized in keeping revolutionary scientific advances occult (or hidden).
No better example is the case of Willard Gibbs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willard_Gibbs
He of thermodynamic law fame whose essential maxim is reduced to an available energy as a closed system:
Closed Systems
In a closed system, no mass may be transferred in or out of the system boundaries. The system will always contain the same amount of matter, but heat and work can be exchanged across the boundary of the system. Whether a system can exchange heat, work, or both is dependent on the property of its boundary.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermodynamic_system
What is lost to Gibbs’ story is the emphasis on the importance of the work of James Clerk Maxwell:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Clerk_Maxwell
“James Clerk Maxwell (13 June 1831 – 5 November 1879) was a Scottish[1] theoretical physicist and mathematician. His most important achievement was classical electromagnetic theory, synthesizing all previously unrelated observations, experiments and equations of electricity, magnetism and even optics into a consistent theory.”
What Gibbs did was essentially a lobotomization of Maxwell’s original high level Hamilton Quadratics and Quaternions to effect his vector analysis.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josiah_Willard_Gibbs :
Later years
In 1880, the new Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland offered Gibbs a position paying $3000. Yale responded by raising his salary to $2000, and he did not leave New Haven. From 1880 to 1884, Gibbs combined the ideas of two mathematicians, the quaternions of William Rowan Hamilton and the exterior algebra of Hermann Grassmann to obtain vector analysis (independently formulated by the British mathematical physicist and engineer Oliver Heaviside). Gibbs designed vector analysis to clarify and advance mathematical physics.
From 1882 to 1889, Gibbs refined his vector analysis, wrote on optics, and developed a new electrical theory of light. He deliberately avoided theorizing about the structure of matter, a wise decision in view of the revolutionary developments in subatomic particles and quantum mechanics that began around the time of his death. His chemical thermodynamics was a theory of greater generality than any other theory of matter extant in his day.”
It is interesting to compare the official history of Gibbs with that of Maxwell around the same time:
http://www.valdostamuseum.org/hamsmith/QOphys.html
What Did Happen after 1879:
In 1887, according to Collective Electrodynamics by Carver Mead (MIT 2000), "... W. Voigt published a little-known paper in which he showed that ... Maxwell's equations, in space free of charges and currents, are not altered by a ... Lorentz transformation. ... This transformation was reinvented in 1892 by H. A. Lorentz ...[who]... derived his result independently ...".
Maxwell's Quaternions were thrown away from Electromagnetism by Josiah Willard Gibbs at Yale and Oliver Heaviside in England. As Saul-Paul Sirag quotes from the biography, Sir William Rowan Hamilton, by Thomas L. Hankins, Johns Hopkins Press, 1980, pp. 316 - 319:
"... in 1888, Gibbs explained how reading Maxwell's [1873] Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism led him to devise his system of vector analysis: "My first acquaintance with quaternions was in reading Maxwell's E.&M. where Quaternion notations are considerably used. ... I saw, that although the methods were called quaternionic the idea of the quaternion was quite foreign to the subject. ...
I therefore began to work out ab initio, the algebra of the two kinds of multiplication, the three differential operations [del] applied to a scalar, & the two operations to a vector, & those fuctions or rather integrating operators which (under certain limitations) are the inverse of the said differential operators, & which play the leading roles in many departments of Math. Phys. To these subjects was added that of lin. vec. functions which is also prominent in Maxwell's E. & M."
From the same link:
What Might Have Been in the late 1800s:
Since Maxwell's equations for U(1) electromagnetism have Conformal Spin(4,2) = SU(2,2) symmetry, and since Gravitation can be described (through the MacDowell-Mansouri mechanism) by gauging the Conformal Group = Spin(4,2) = SU(2,2), Clifford's Gravitation could have been unified with Maxwell's Electromagnetism, giving a theory that included GraviPhotons; and Clifford Algebras could have been combined with Maxwell's Quaternionic Electromagnetism to produce the Dirac Equation; and Maxwell's Quaternionic Electromagnetism and Compressible Elastic Aether could have been extended to describe not only U(1) Electromagnetism but also photons with mass and longitudinal polarization, thus anticipating the massive neutral weak boson with gauge group SU(2), the ElectroWeak U(1)xSU(2) = U(2) model, and the Higgs Mechanism, and Torsion Physics.
Further, you could condsider
Maxwell's geometric imagination (he visualized Vortices in the Aether, and made stereoscopes to view images in 3-dimensions and zoetropes to view images in motion), as well as his mathematical/mystical worldview (he said: "... [the aether] is fitted ... to constitute the material organism of beings excercising functions of life and mind as high or higher than ours ..."; and "... cubic surfaces! By threes and nines Draw round his camp your seven-and-twenty lines The seal of Solomon in three dimensions. ... we the form may trace Of him whose soul, too large for vulgar space, In n dimensions flourished unrestricted. ..."), and you could consider that Maxwell's 27-dimensional structure is simiilar to the 27-dimensional geometry based on the exceptional Jordan algebra of 3x3 Hermitian Octonion matrices and that the 27-complex-dimensional symmetric space E7 / (E6xU(1)) describes, at the Nearest Neighbor lowest level of Interconnectedness, the Super Implicate Order, or MacroSpace, whose Geometry produces Jack Sarfatti's nonlinear Back-Reaction Quantum Theory of Matter and Mind.
With that in mind, you might conjecture that:
Since the symmetry of the 27-line configuration is the same as that of the Weyl group of the Octonionic E6 Lie algebra; and Since Octonions (the next, and final, Alternative Real Division Algebra beyond the Quaternions) had already been discovered; and Since 8-dimensional Octonions can be a representation space for the 8-dimensional Lie Group SU(3):
The late 1800s might have seen an Extension from Quaternions to Octonions,
resulting in an extension of Gravity and SU(2)xU(1)
to a Unified Theory of
Gravity plus the SU(3)xSU(2)xU(1) Standard Model
such as the D4-D5-E6-E7 Model.
BUT WAIT, HERE’S THE KICKER. THIS POST STARTED OUT WITH THE THEME ‘HERMETICALLY SUPPRESSED AND HIDDEN OCCULT SCIENCE'. TO THAT END HERE IS SOME VERY UNDER-REPORTED BACKGROUND ON GIBBS, ONE OF THE FATHERS OF THERMODYNAMICS (i.e. the lobotomized non-aether closed energy corral)
http://www.alterinfos.org/article.php3?id_article=184 :
"At the same time, the faculty of Yale decided to follow the trend. Six years after the creation of the Skull and Bones, six members of the faculty elite met in the “Club”, that quickly began to be called the “Old Man’s Club”. Among its six founder members were the professors Josiah Willard Gibbs and Theodore Dwight Woolsey. The organization would have soon as member William Howard Taft, the future Chief Justice of the State of Connecticut Simeon E. Baldwin, the university graduate Thomas Bergin, the neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing and the founder of the Skulls & Bones, William H. Russell. From this group, Thomas Bergin and Harvey Cushing would not become members of the Skull & Bones."
It seems perhaps it is not just the remains of Geronimo that are secreted in the bowels of that elite institution known as the tomb and Yale itself.
Perhaps the Holy Grail of ‘free energy’ from the aether and the GUT itself resides in those original uncorrupted Maxwell equations that languish in limbo overshadowed by the simplistic reductions of a controlling elite.?
I checked out your website http://www.valdostamuseum.org/hamsmith/QOphys.html
My first impression is that this is quack science; however, the more I looked at it, the more hooked I became. I have a feeling many established physicist would not have a kind word to say about your version of physics. Nevertheless, not being a physicist myself, who has to worry about the opinions of my peers, I frankly found your site fascinating, indeed, thrilling. It's quite an intellectual excursion and I recommend to others to visit the site with an open mind. You may wish to zoom in if your eyes don't like small typefaces.
For instance, if I hadn't already read out of "The Emperor's New Mind" by Penrose, I would have thought that your discussion of nano-tubules as a basis for consciousness was pure quackery. I notice you also to cite Wolfram's book "A New Kind of Science". Have you seen John Darbyshire's critical review of it? http://www.olimu.com/Journalism/Texts/Reviews/NewKindOfScience.htm
I also like reading books by the Bogdonov brothers. They meet with a lot of scepticism as well, but they just might have the key to what came before the big bang.
In any event, I was hoping this year to tackle Penrose's "The Road to Reality", but was unable to find the time for it. One of these days!
Addendum:
http://www.halexandria.org/dward004.htm
Maxwell's Equations -- March 20, 2004
James Clerk Maxwell is routinely considered one of the greatest physicists to have ever lived – viewed by most modern day physicists as being on the same rarified level as Sir Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. Einstein himself described Maxwell's work as the “most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of Newton .” This is pretty fair praise.
Fundamental to Maxwell's fame is a set of equations involving electromagnetism, which have come to be known collectively as “Maxwell's Equations”. [2] These equations are discussed in numerous websites, but Wikipedia [1] has one of the best presentations and explanations of the traditional four equations. (4/1/07) Of particular note is the fact that the Wikipedia article includes eight of the original Maxwell's Euqations. The fact there may have been twenty is, alas, not discussed. (See below.) Alternatively, the Hyperphysics site is also excellent, and notes in its introduction the following:
“Maxwell's equations represent one of the most elegant and concise ways to state the fundamentals of electricity and magnetism. From them one can develop most of the working relationships in the field.
“Because of their concise statement, they embody a high level of mathematical sophistication and are therefore not generally introduced in an introductory treatment of the subject, except perhaps as summary relationships.” [3]
In truth the four equations traditionally included in the teaching of physics are more aptly named the “Maxwell-Heaviside Equations” inasmuch as Oliver Heaviside reformulated Maxwell's original equations from a quaternion format into a simple vector format. Maxwell's original paper [4] consisted of 20 equations with 20 unknowns. According to Tom Bearden [5], Maxwell's 1865 paper had its quaternion equations reduced to vector notation -- after a comparatively limited debate among some 30 scientists – a notation advocated by Heaviside, Gibbs, et al – after Maxwell was already dead.
“After publication of the first edition of his Treatise, Maxwell of course also caught strong pressure from his own publisher to get rid of the quaternions (which few persons understood). Maxwell thus rewrote and simplified about 80% of his own 1873 Treatise before he died of stomach cancer in 1879. The second edition of that treatise was later published with that 80% revision done by Maxwell himself under strong pressure, and with a guest editor. But the 1865 Maxwell paper shows the real Maxwell theory, with 20 equations in 20 unknowns (they are explicitly listed in the paper). The equations taught today in universities as ‘Maxwell's equations' are actually Heaviside's equations, with a further truncation via the symmetrical regauging performed by Lorentz.” [5]
Bearden [6] goes on to point out that:
“A higher group symmetry algebra such as quaternions will contain and allow many more operations than a lower algebra such as tensors, which itself contains more than an even lower algebra such as vectors.” [6]
In effect, the reduction of Maxwell's original theory from 20 equations to 4 – purely in order to make the mathematics a bit easier for the poor physicists – severely limits the capabilities of the original theory. This shows up dramatically in the Second Law of Thermodynamics, where the original equations were effectively “regauged” in order to force the theory to obey the law of conservation of energy. In all respects a return to the quaternion format in Maxwell's original equations seems likely to yield astounding results. Quaternions cannot simply be ignored any longer.
What is this pseudo-scientific garbage? If you'd like I have a copy of "Chemistry the 11th edition" by Brown sitting here if you'd like to learn something that is real science.
Pseudo-scientific? Next you'll be telling me electricity is magic...
(There is no more a closed system than a closed mind.)
Dissect Maxwell's Hamiltonian Quadratics and get back to me.
History is written by the victors~ Winston Churchill
The intellectual rigor and imagination of these geniuses is impressive.
Palmereldrich, many thanks for this breath of fresh air. I had no idea that Maxwell had used quaternions, but it makes sense, given that I knew that Gibbs had truncated them to obtain his vector operations. I confess, vectors à la Gibbs certainly do simplify things for us poor mortals. Also, QM certainly uses quaternions. You mention tensors, but you can get around them by using the exterior derivative approach of Elie Cartan, which is a very elegant presentation and is coordinate free.
You have really whetted my appetite to study Maxwell and find out more about his use of quaternions. This is fascinating stuff. Unfortunately, I do not have a physics background and got lost when you went from math to physics. I know that string theory operates in higher dimensional spaces of n =10 or more. Is there any connection between this and the 20 dimensional spaces of Maxwell? Would some of Maxwell's dimensions also be expressed only in curled up form, as in the Calabi-Yau spaces of string theory? Also, physics' reigning genius, Edward Witten--is he onto this hyperphysics stuff you mention?
Edit: what's all this Skull and Bones skullduggery? It sounds like something Dan Brown would come up with. I know someone who got initiated and I have a hard time seeing him as a threat in terms of being a mental giant, though he seemed to have a certain malignness that might correspond. Nevertheless, I would be most interested to learn more about Maxwell's mystical pensées, if you could point me in that direction.
Esapeclaws, Implicit simplicit, New_Meat, greatly appreciate your comments and insights.
WRT to Escapeclaws, specifically: My biggest concern is with regards to Maxwell’s original publication prior to Gibbs’ edit: How reliable is that original formula? I am not being disingenuous, I just hope that history has preserved his original scientific insights notwithstanding the machinations of Gibbs’ ego and IP kidnapping. I hope they are pristine (well... I suspect somewhere in the bowels of Yale, they are) If so, IMO these formulae are the future of free energy.
Regarding the math and physics, it is waaay beyond me. But that said, I like to consider myself a student of human behavior, and on that basis and what I know about the organized forces of intellectual suppression (paging the Holy roman Empire!) I think Skull and Bones and their affiliated forces are a very real and proven impediment to free markets and human potential. Gibbs just happened to be an amazing pioneer of basic human ego and pettiness in this regard at that time.
98% of conspiracy in history is the pettiness of the human condition...thus they are so easily controlled...and THAT SAID...one should always focus a discerning and skeptical eye on those organizations through history (they are a multiplying!) that may have a vested interest in being intellectual sink-holes to PREVENT the best and brightest from bringing their genius to benefit the majority of the human experience (AT THE BENEFIT OF THE ELITE) and thus accordingly, old historical elite learning institutions fit the bill...as so fundamentally and possibly traditionally demonstrated by the Gibbs/Maxwell example cited. Research Skull and Bones, their maxim, mission and charter was enrichment of a self-appointed elite through the death and destruction of lessor mortals...
I hope that someone like yourself or perhaps any budding physicist may be able to exploit the potential of these occult observations...or at least perhaps direct those with a similar empirical mysticism as Maxwell to a reality where energy is free for the taking and the true potential of human civilization can see the light of day...
Thanks for responding to my comment.
Isaac Azimov was drafted after WWII and told the story of a Sergeant testing the class with: "Describe the three basic equations of electricity." So Private Azimuth wrote out three Maxwell's equations, proved that they had complete information to derive the fourth, and submitted his work. The Sergeant was not amused, since the desired answer was: E=IR, I=E/R, and R=E/I. Punishment ensued.
- Ned
Asimov's "The Foundation Trilogy" was a must read classic for students of socio/economic fiction with the scientific flair only an imaginative physicist could offer.
The world is not ready for 4 or more dimensions. Its analagous to what the populace thought of Copernicus and Gallileo. Then, they would try and kill you; the earth had to be the center of the universe.
Perhaps the same would happen today to anyone fortunate enough to understand these theorums, and lucky enough to stumble upon an application for cheap energy; except it be for greed
The world got introduced to four dimensions with General Relativity back in 1913, I believe. String Theory which postulates anywhere from 10 to 23 dimensions has been around since the 1960's.
Here's an easy way to see why we need four dimensions. The universe is expanding as is shown by retreating galaxies red-shifting (a sort of Doppler effect involving light instead of sound), which means that either we are the center and everything is moving away from us or everything is moving away from everything else. How can we imagine this? Well, let's imagine that our universe is like the surface of a balloon. Draw little spiral galaxies on this balloon and then inflate it larger and larger. Notice how all the galaxies move away from each other. If we think of our universe as a three dimensional "surface" of a four dimensional balloon which is inflated, then we can "explain" via inflation why all of the galaxies are red-shifting away from us.
duplicate comment removed
String theory and balloons inside of balloons are the only way to try and imagine what math explains succinctly.
Bringing the conversation down to present day capabilities, why we are not pursuing nuclear energy with a passion shows a serious lack of foresight. Nuclear has been brought to light. It can't be hidden , and it won't go away. Ultimately, we need to process its immense power for survival.
IS-
I concur. Alternative explanation is that this is exactly the intended outcome: squeeze the industrial complex in all respects and from all directions. The long lead times and staffing issues (critical path through vessel fabrication and availability of a certified simulator to train enough SROs) are tough to handle on the Owner's side as is securing long-term financing. Long memories of Jimmy Carter inflation killing plant financial models.
http://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/new-licensing-files/expected-ne...
Other issues are availability of engineers in all disciplines. Evidently the out-of-work financial types can't be retrained into doing real work, we've seen the capabilities of Econ. PhDs.
- Ned
(p.s. I was going to comment on how uncharacteristic the opposition to nuclear power is, since France is so fully committed. But Flameville and Fin5 not going so well, and John Kerry, francophile, doesn't like it).
Red-shifting? They are getting as far away as possible....
They're probably worried about Bernankeism.
Oh crap, you invoked Galileo.
Look out...although they don't usually swarm around here, a cloud of locusts will be looking for your ass just based on that keyword.
If their attack takes its usual form, they will claim you have asserted YOURSELF to be identical to Galileo in every way including IQ, manner of thought and speech, and perhaps even dietary proclivities.
Fear has been on the rise in equity markets, reflecting concerns over sovereign debt, the sustainability of the euro, slowing growth in China and persistent high unemployment in the U.S.
The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index has declined 10 percent from this year’s high back on April 23. The VIX, an index of stock volatility that reflects investor fear, shot up to a level of 45.79 on May 20 from just 15.58 on April 12. The depth of this recession and the slow recovery, set against memories of the breathtaking stock market declines in 2008 and 2009, raise concerns that a rollercoaster-like double dip is next.
The good news is that the current market pullback needs to be viewed as part of a normal correction in the broader context of strong recoveries, not as the start of a new, deep plunge. Since December 1925, I’ve identified six episodes when the U.S. stock market experienced large declines.
In June 1932, the U.S. market had its most severe plunge, losing more than 83 percent of its value from the peak during the previous five years. The magnitude and length of time of this decline have fortunately been unmatched since then.
But the market lows of 2009 come in second place in terms of severity and length. The market fell by more than 51 percent from its previous five-year peak, exceeding the 44 percent decline after the tech bubble crash that started in March 2000 and the 46 percent decline in September 1974.
Market Recoveries
What happens after the market reaches these extreme, multiyear market lows? In the first 12 months the stock market rebounds by 64 percent on average, a number somewhat skewed by the 156 percent surge from the June 1932 market low. Even the smallest one-year rebound of 27 percent, following the September 2002 post-tech bubble bust, well exceeds the typical 12-month return of the stock market. Clearly, strong one-year market returns characterized stock markets following extreme plunges.
The story is similar five years after a major plunge, with the stock market advancing by an average of 161 percent. Thus, while the most dramatic stock market recoveries occur within the first year, the next four years still produce very solid market performance, and in none of these instances have investors come out behind.
Against the backdrop of very positive market performance over one- and five-year periods following market stumbles, the stock market has always experienced pullbacks or corrections during the first two years after a plunge.
Surrendering Gains
For example, in 1932 the market rallied by 102 percent in just 61 days from its closing low; over the next 173 days, the market then retreated 36 percent. While severe, this correction didn’t surrender all the gains from the initial rally.
In 1974, the market bottomed and rallied by 61 percent over the next 285 calendar days. It then entered a correction stage that lasted 78 days and declined by 14 percent.
In each of the five extreme stock market low episodes prior to 2009, stocks backed off at least 10 percent from the initial rally within the first two years. On average, the stock market decline was 17 percent and occurred over 140 days.
So what might one expect in the current market environment? On March 3, 2009, the U.S. stock market reached the lowest level since September 1996. In the following 11 months the market rose 80 percent, making it one of the strongest and longest rallies since 1925. The market peaked on April 23 before falling to its latest low on July 1, a 16 percent fall.
While stocks have risen during the past three weeks, it’s worth asking whether this market-correction phase is finished?
Predicting a Bottom
Perhaps not. After all, the shortest correction period prior to this was 78 days. Still, the correction phase probably will end sometime this summer based on past experiences.
Furthermore, the magnitude of potential stock market losses in the future is likely to be much more limited than those that occurred between April 23 and July 1.
Predicting an exact market bottom is always a tenuous exercise, but past experience suggests that this type of dip, common after extreme market lows, will not turn into another plunge like that in 2008 and 2009.
For patient investors who have waited on the sidelines, the coming few months may represent a very good opportunity to increase holdings of equities as the outlook for the next several years is solidly positive based on 85 years of market history.
Nice article but predictions are worthless.
The past is not pretense for the future.
This market has a long way to go before bottom.
Just another worthless prediction. but hey, everyone is doing it.
What mega bullshit !
And the author claims to base himself on 85 years of market history ?
So why does he conveniently ignore what happened between Oct 1929 and Jul 1932 when there were a total of SIX false bottoms, each one lower than the previous one and each one followed by a misleading bull trap before the market eventually reached bottom ?
That's not market history ?
And what about the NIKKEI during the last 15 years ?
Also not market history ?
Market History according to this moron only seems to include those parts that support his wishful thinking.
Unfortunately for this gink, the parts of history he conveniently ignores (US 1930s and Japan 1990s) are the only relevant ones compared to our situation today : that of debt deflation.
For patient investors who have waited on the sidelines, the coming few months may represent a very good opportunity to increase holdings of equities as the outlook for the next several years is solidly positive based on 85 years of market history.
Market history plays zero UTILITY in this present day conglomerate of spoiled oligarch insanity...
What you said +This recent past was nothing like older recent pasts, and our future will be nothing like the past's futures. The only thing that is certain is change.
And the old those that don't learn from the mistakes of the past are doomed to repeat it just applies to mediocristan events with safely measurable parameters not extremistan events like the economy or the stock market.
Shall we go to the core?? where it works most effectively,,
It's all blended,,how could you not connect these dots? It should be second nature to the informed adults on ZH
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eG2Bx8gA-_M
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omDB0kwBIac&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zb64u0N8_vY&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_kOTt9F4jU&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQNMF_h58iQ&feature=related
Vid five ends casually with this @ 8:08:
The role of GLADIO within the Italian red brigades,, next week @ ten past 8,, terrorists atrocities against civilians orchestrated by the state..!!!!
That comment would not be permitted today.
William Wells as Deputy Director for Operations was a very significant choice. He was a career covert operations specialist who had graduated from Yale a few years before Bush. Wells soon acquired his own deputy, recommended by him and approved by Bush: this was the infamous Theodore Shackley, whose title thus became Associate Deputy Director for Covert Operations. Shackley later emerged as one of the central figures of the Iran-contra scandal of the 1980’s. He is reputedly one of the dominant personalities of a CIA old boys’ network known as The Enterprise, which was at the heart of Iran-contra and the other illegal covert operations of the Reagan-Bush years.
During the early 1960’s, after the Bay of Pigs, Theodore Shackley had been the head of the CIA Miami Station during the years in which Operation Mongoose was at its peak. This was the Howard Hunt and Watergate Cubans crowd, circles familiar to Felix Rodriguez (Max Gomez), who in the 1980’s supervised gun-running and drug-running out of Bush’s vice presidential office.
Later, Shackley was reportedly the chief of the CIA station in Vientiane, Laos, between July 1966 and December 1968. Some time after that he moved on to become the CIA station chief in Saigon, where he had directed the implementation of the Civilian Operations and Rural Development Support (CORDS) progra, better known as Operation Phoenix, a genocidal crime against humanity which killed tens of thousands of Vietnamese civilians because they were suspected of working for the Vietcong, or sometimes simply because they were able to read and write. As for Shackley, there are also reports that he worked for a time in the late 1960’s in Rome, during the period when the CIA’s GLADIO capabilities were being used to launch a wave of terrorism in that country. Such was the man that Bush chose to appoint to a position of reponsibility in the CIA. Later, Shackley will turn up as a “speech writer” for Bush during the 1979-80 campaign.
Along with Shackley came his associate and former Miami station second in command, Thomas Clines, a partner of General Richard Secord and Albert Hakkim during the Iran-contra operation, convicted in September 1990 on four felony tax counts for not reporting his ill-gotten gains, and sentenced to 16 months in prison and a fine of $40,000.
During Bush’s tenure Shackley’s circles were mightliy remoralized. In particular Ed Wilson, a veteran of Shackley’s Miami station, now a retired CIA officer who worked closely with serving CIA personnel to organize gun running, sex operatives, and other activities, plied his trade undisturbed. The Wilson scandal, which had grown up on Bush’s watch, would begin to explode only during the tenure of Stansfield Turner, under Carter.
Another career covert operations man, John Waller, became the Inspector General, the officer who was supposed to keep track of illegal operations. For legal advice, Bush turned first to holdover General Counsel Mitchell Rogovin, who had in December 1975 theorized that intelligence activities belonged to the “inherent powers” of the Presidency, and that no special Congressional egislation was required to permit such things as covert operations to go on. Later Bush appointed Anthony Lapham, Yale ‘58, as CIA General Counsel. Lapham was the scion of an old San Francisco banking family, and his brother was Lewis Lapham, the editor of Harper’s Magazine. Lapham would take a leading role in the CIA coverup of the Letelier assassination case. 1
Typical of the broad section of CIA officers who were delighted with their new boss from Brown Brothers, Harriman/Skull and Bones was Cord Meyer, who had most recently been the station chief in London from 1973 on, a wild and wooly time in the tight little island, as we will see. Meyer, a covert action veteran and Watergate operative, writes at length in his autobiography about his enthusiasm for the Bush regime at CIA, which induced him to prolong his own career there:
I again seriously thought of retiring from the Agency but the new atmosphere in CIA’s Langley headquarters changed my mind. George Bush had been appointed by President Ford to succeed Colby as DCI in January, and by the time of my return he had completely dispelled the fears that had been aroused by his former political connections. Having served in the Congress as a Republican representative from Texas and having recently been chairman of the Republican National Committee, he was initially viewed with suspicion as an ambitious politician who might try to use the Agency for partisan purposes. However, he quickly proved by his performance that he was prepared to put politics aside and to devote all his considerable ability and enthusiasm to restoring the morale of an institution that had been battered enough by sucessive investigations. Instead of reaching outside for defeated Republican candidates to fill key jobs, he chose from within the organization among men who had demonstrated their competence through long careers in intelligence work. He leaned over backward to protect the objectivity and independence of the Agency’s estimates and to avoid slanting the results to fit some preconceived notion of what the President wanted to hear.
On the other hand, his close relationship to Ford [Bush was a regular tennis doubles partner with Ford] and the trust that the President obviously had in him gave Bush an access to the White House and an influence in the wider Washington bureaucracy that Colby had never enjoyed. Not only did morale improve as a result, but through Bush the Agency’s views carried new weight and influence in the top reaches of the Ford Administration. In effect, I found on my return that the working environment at the Agency was far better than I had imagined it to be from my exposed position abroad and I determined to stay on for a period before retiring. Bush and “Hank” Knoche, the newly appointed deputy director, asked me to serve as a special assistant, and gave me as first assignment the task of reviewing the entire structure of the intelligence community to determine the adequacy of the arrangements for providing strategic warning against an attack on the United States and for handling major international crises.
Ah, national security. It allows goverments to do what they want when they want, whether it was/is really national security or not.
Poor Tyler got crushed again on the market. :(
Soon he'll learn that being a bear just isn't very profitable.
Riden this bull-shat, R u cowboy? Good lick with that one.
Bernanke never said....double dip.
Open Thread?!?!
Friday Jam Baby!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fla87qr8mjk
Tyler, dood, you have to get out more often, with correct security, obviously. But, man, this feeding frenzy is great. We all are all over the place, all kinds of new ideas popping up. But not too often, maybe once a month or so. But all y'all need an unjunk feature to feed the flame discussions ... er ... the frank interchange of considered points of view.
Best to ya,
- Ned
Seven fucking banks 103 so far this year. Jesus Christ!
on its way to +200 this year, 500-1000 next. GREEN SHOOTS BABY YEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH
FCK POLITICIANS, ALL OF THEM (EXCEPT RON PAUL)
Peter Thiel is one of Ron Paul’s main advisors (read handler) and Mr. Thiel is a Bilderberger
http://www.nndb.com/people/030/000124655/Just goes to show, nothing exists that can't be 'managed'.
So the real question based on the fact that: the gvt's yet to have a failed auction, earning's although low are not terrible, inflation/deflation's in check, the market's subsiding after the last 2 weeks, gold and silver are affordable, the european debt crisis is behind us??? and unemployment although terrible doesn't matter if you can borrow infinitely to keep these people on life support. Am I too bearish or am I right to get openly ridiculed by my family and friends who use these arguments against me???
You might want to reframe your question.
But more importantly, you might suggest to your family and friends that the question of "if you can borrow infinitely" has a fairly well-established history of inquiry (esp. here on ZH).
On sale:
http://www.buy.com/prod/lego-atlantis-gateway-of-the-squid-8061/q/loc/20...
I'll guess that LEGO could have made this more popular if DC was the target of the squid. The Treasury being attacked with the connivance of Turbo-Timmah would be more believeable.
Federal Reserve Action Figures Sold Separately!
How the hell can we let them get away with not even attempting to propose a Federal Budget this year? Hopefully enough in Congress can get the balls to block extending the federal debt ceiling. Then we should see some scrambling.
Dedicated to P-Krug.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjxfwBHdvmo
Anyone on this site like to speculate?
Two comments coming out of the noise for me today were "many beats were on lowered earnings guidance" and "earnings were at least partially better because corporations pulled earnings forward out of concern for changes in tax rates." I only heard a couple of people talking these points.
Valid?
Village-not an Idiot. Art Laffer agrees with you.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870411350457526451374838661...
Wait for cap gains selling, although perversely, if I'm sitting on a loss, I'm waiting until 2011 to sell.
- Ned
thanks, ned.
Open Thread - Random thoughts on Where we stand, first 'On the hill' :
-now it's OK to get by without a budget
-it's OK to 'deem' that a bill has passed
-and after the bill has been passed, then it's Ok to read it and find out what it contains
where is this heading ?
And then On the financial side, I'll leave it to Lennon :
Risk Off / Risk On - pools of sorrow / waves of joy
European stress tests / yellow matter custard, drippin' from a dead dog's eye
As for the MSM : just gimme some truth !!
Thank heaven for ZH.
feel like speculating? please see above.
We'll call it Fortune-Cookie Legislation -- crack open your cookie and out pops a simple, concise 2200-page message about the rest of your life...
...between the sheets.
John Kerry skips out on taxes
http://bostonherald.com/track/inside_track/view.bg?articleid=1269698
Biden 08 campaign fined quarter million by FEC...soooo glad he's in charge of stimulus spending...LOL.
"It found that the campaign accepted an illegal corporate contribution in the form of a round-trip flight between New Hampshire and Iowa in June 2007 for three people (the report does not indicate whether Biden, then a Delaware senator, was among the passengers) on a private jet owned by GEH Air Transportation. Federal Aviation Administration records show that GEH is owned by the Clinton Group, a New York hedge fund controlled by George E. Hall."
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0710/39875.html#ixzz0uasIZiThThey should be persecuting Biden in the main stream media like they are Charlie Rangal.
They are all crooks. Some are better at not getting caught because they stay within the "law" which is corrupt in itself. Basically, the whole premise of lobbyists and politcal contributions is infected. However, it would take a team of lawyers and accountants an eon to change things because it has become so convoluted; much like the taxc laws. Its just the way they want it.
Yes, both persecute and prosecute. Maybe water boarding followed by required to watch Olberman on a continuous loop. That would also get K.O.'s ratings up.
- Ned
"However, it would take a team of lawyers and accountants an eon to change things because it has become so convoluted; much like the tax laws. Its just the way they want it."
True, but we should start somewhere. We can work our way to special interests and lobbying after cutting off some of their oxygen...just a thought.
http://www.taxfoundation.org/blog/show/23367.html
The Fair Tax would be a good start in my opinion.
"Teresa, that is one sweet looking sailboat...thanks for buying it for me"
John
And the Stressless TestII was a great success as 7.23.10 rolled towards its inevitable close. And all the electronic Yen, and Dollars, and Euros, and other blobs of electrons hummed across the internets keeping the Ponzi system of payments sloshing about the globe. The central banks like the little batteries that could maintained the potential difference across the circuit. All was hunky dory.
open thread?? here we go:
Obama Bumper Sticker Removal Kit
http://www.youtube.com/user/FiatLux8888#p/a/f/0/201pgTaEseQ
Good one!..."Well, you've already proven that you don't make very good decisions."
Tyler at the Hamptons with about 10 quant strippers
Just a final late night musing, but if a bankster puts up mirrors on the walls of the vault, does the mere appearance that his assets have doubled count under FASB? Does he need to even store the used TP in the vault, or can he just store a picture of it on his iPhone? If he emails the picture to the discount window, but does not delete it from the iPhone, can he resubmit the image again for more discount window goodness?
These are things I ponder when I get tired and think about QE2.0Build045417.
bank assets do not show in mirrors, nor do they like sunlight.
ZH, still disgraced yourself by letting Fiderer post
whats up with futures, +1.15%
Things are about to get, munch munch, worse. ..this is not something that can be fixed. Is it really so far-fetched that governments and businesses, with their terrible behaviour, would collapse? Anyone with four months of savings should stop working. Really (i've done this) it's the smartest way to bring the system down without bloodshed. Because riots will only get messier if governments believe that they can pretend for a little while, if mainly to themselves, that they are working. They are not; the 'system' is not based on comptence or intelligence or wisdom. If you want to force a change, people have to act as one and use their strongest tool, their willingness to participate as cannon fodder... cities have become our prisons, oil our drug. in the 21st century we can't afford food or shelter! this is not economic progress...in India before the british, one could walk across the breadth without needing to buy food (fruit trees, temples) - johnny appleseed in the US... presently our governments are proud, this is a failing not acceptable in the topmost decision-makers. You want a second coming, isn't this it? -the corruption of man is being struck down, paving the way for coming of the kingdom of the most high counselor. ..whatever your belief, whatever your income and however it is derived- we are not changing the economy for the better. ..the legislature has not done it, the presidency has cut taxes, the banks have front-run their clients, the central banks have expansively interpreted their mandate..the already wealthy have grown their riches but the workers, the bulk of humanity, the 70% of Demand, the brainwashed and miseducated, have not reacted one iota. Not one iota. ..
well many of us know now that 9/11 was an inside JOB....but many of us would never think that WW1 and WW2 were HUGE illuminati false flag....if the UN has been falsely spreading and exagerrating the GLOBALWARMING lie to the world......then we are sure that the UN is controlled by very powerfull people who are conspiring against the people....if that is the case then the UN was also in the grip of these same ELITES when it was formed...now that brings us to the cause...WW2....was it staged to form the UN and form ISRAEL.....i dnt know about u guys but i have no doubt that was the case....
below are some very interesting read...
Hitler - The Ultimate Zionist
False Flag Operation
http://www.rense.com/general89/htl.htm
Martin Bormann was Rothschild Agent -- Damning Evidencehttp://www.henrymakow.com/martin_bormann_was_rothschild.html
now i really want to read "OPJB" by christopher creighton
Considering how many semites now control our government, plus the quintillions of global pelf, gelt and media outlets, even if it wasn't a false flag op, it sure appears so.
Ken Feinberg decided that the billions in bonuses that the Investment banksters got, mostly all semites, is not to be clawed back because they have 'been shamed' and taking back the money they got from the taxpayers, for failing, would be piling on.
Mr. Obama, you are a disgrace and those in your admenstruation suck the biggest and dirtiest cocks in the world.
Well, I'll be go to hell. I always thought Dubya Dubya Two was staged as a fashion show!
You know it's true- Germany went for the sado-masochistic look with their shiny leather boots, black SS uniforms and that snappy feldgrau for the Wehrmacht. America on the other hand opted for the sloppy, utilitarian look, no leather or shiny silver death's-head accessories for our boys, but an olive drab color that didn't show the mud stains.
Das Reich folded because they couldn't field units whose uniforms matched after the fall of France.
Market Structure in the US is broken...
In an attempt to get US investor confidence back, the US Government has been playing games. First Obama tells the US investor in March 2009 that it is a good time to invest. Then the US banks pass the stress test with flying colors (of course their bad debt dissapears onto the Fed's books).
Confidence is also trying to be boosted via investment banks which are allowed to borrow from the Fed at 0% interest rates. They borrow this money and invest part in US treasuries (profiting on the spread) and part into US equities through the S&P (this is evident by the increasing correlation between the SPY and individual stocks)...instead of buying individual stocks, they are supporting the market by buying it all through the ETF. The government is hoping to lure the retail investor back into the markets by making them feel they have "missed the boat."
So far these attempts have not worked as Trim Tabs research continues to show over the past year and a half that the retail investor is still pulling money out of equity funds and into the safety of bond funds.
What's next? I think the "Flash Crash" is evidence. Some event, soverign default, Middle East War, or something unseen will cause the investment banks to sell the market, and there will be no bidders left. It surely won't be the Fed raising interest rates as the housing industry would not be able to withstand the hit, and the investment banks carrying cost would go up forcing them out of the carry trade that has eleveated the US equity market. The retail investor will continue to pull money out of the market as evidence of further weakening in the US economy continues to be reported (jobs, housing, industrial production).
I will not be an investor in this broken market structure, but am staying nimble as a trader.
So you have borrowed all the money you possibly can and sold S & P 400 puts which cash you used to load up on TZA?
That about it?
The assassination of Sokratis Giolias is not a news item that would concern this blog much, not normally: his mafia-styled execution has absolutely nothing to do with the morality of the social antagonist movement, to which we belong. Neither of course had Giolias himself; a far cry from an “investigative journalist”, he has been much more accurately described by his own lawyer on the night following his death: Yiannis Maraκakis, interviewed during the news-show of Mega TV news on July 19th 2010, described Giolias as a “collaborator of the anti-terrorist unit” and assured the presenter that Giolias was close to all police sergeants and could have therefore asked for protection, if he had so wished (source: Athens IMC, in Greek).
Yet still, if we were to believe the correspondents of major international media outlets in Athens, Giolias was an “investigative journalist” (BBC news) who “sought to illuminate Greece’s seamier underside” (Helena Smith, The Guardian – Ms Smith failed to get his lawyer’s name right, even on her second attempt). Most international media outlets also carried the news that Giolias was about to publish an investigation into corruption… Whatever Giolias was, he was not an “independent” investigative journalist by any means: his blog had very often carried news items which could only been sourced directly from the police HQ – and often, he had exceeded the police themselves: for example on April 12th, 2010, only hours after the police had started making the arrests in connection to the “Revolutionary Struggle” case, his blog carried an “investigative” post (in greek with screen-shots on Athens IMC) falsely informing about the arrest of four well-known anarchists in Athens.
Filed in news | | Comments (10) #336 | Tabloid journalist assassinated outside his house in Athens with 16 bullet rounds Monday, July 19, 2010Tabloid journalist Sokratis Giolias was assassinated outside his house in the suburb of Ilioupoli, Athens at approximately 05.25 local time on Monday morning. According to media reports Giolias was shot by three men who fired at least sixteen times. Giolias was allegedly a main contributor to “troktiko” (rodent), a popular news blog with ties to the police and far-right groups.
According to the police, Giolias was shot with weapons that have been previously used by the group “Revolutionary Sect” – and so this group is so far treated as the main suspect for the attack.
Filed in news | | Comments (16) # 335 | Anarchist prisoner Nikos Maziotis goes on hunger strike Monday, July 19, 2010Nikos Maziotis, an anarchist imprisoned in relation the Revolutionary Struggle case , has gone on hunger strike. Below is a translation of his letter announcing the commencing of the hunger strike.
Filed in news | Tagged revolutionary struggle case | Comments (1) #334 | Little stories from IMF-run Greece: record number of debt-related suicides in Crete Thursday, July 15, 2010The following news item made it to the back pages of Athens daily Eleftherotypia (Greek original).
I think it's a pre-requisite of 'Democracy' that no-one else can ever be right. And... what is the issue with the large banking dynasties!? ..who do you think the bond viligantes are, for instance? The rothschilds, for example, pulled a lot of money from the deriviatives markets some years before this crisis. The New York banks decided to game the system for all it was worth.. the rest of the world considers the making of this crisis as purely anglo-saxon. Watch monday newspapers, the european news is going to spin the bank stress tests as american-inspired lipstick. ..equity outflows are ramping up, the market is going higher !! who owns the equity funds, who's taking the money out? Who's painting the market up? The rest of the world is pulling their investment out of the US because the New York banks are stealing everything they can lay their hands on - it's like having a thief as king - his courtiers are in on the swindle, or worse, believe he has the right, or even worse, believe that their country must be this way - some people are such stupid fucking spineless pigs.
DOW/SP500 daily chart is bullish for now ...
http://stockmarket618.wordpress.com
Anyone care to comment on NK's NUKE threat?
What would be the impact of an explosion over there or an attempt to launch towards US west coast??
How would that affect our global society?
Would it totally destabilize our fractured and unstable political system?
Would our financial system be thrown into chaos never before seen?
Not an event any half normal person would ever really want but what if.....
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Why the European Stress Test is Meaningless
The Main Flaws of the Test
1. Under the most severe scenario, banks were tested on how they would cope with a moderate recession,
not a severe depression. Notice the fact that in Greece, Spain and Ireland we already defiantly in
Depression conditions (Deflation, Unemployment north of 15%, Contracting credit, etc.)
2. Some of the banks dodged full disclosure full disclosure of their foreign debt holdings.
3. The test demanded a Tier 1 capital ratio of 6 percent or above by the end of 2011, an extremely low and
inefficient amount.
4. Government bond losses were only applied to trading books, and not hold-to-maturity bonds, as the test
did not consider there was a risk of any sovereign default.
The true exposure of European banks
Please notice that banks in Germany and France alone have a combined exposure of $119 billion to Greece and $909 billion to Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain. And overall, European banks have $253 billion in Greece and $2.1 trillion in the so-called PIGS. (This data excludes Italy which has a gross external debt of 2.3 trillion dollars, mainly to European banks.)
Why the European Stress Test is Meaningless
Open thread so ...
Helicopter Ben outlining his plan for USD at last Bilderberg meeting
http://video.mail.ru/mail/shaminpavel48/223/3368.html
Entertainment at last Skull & Bones party at Deer Island.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_U1eWRyqWhw
hahahhahhhahahah!!
"FIRE!!!! I bring you to BURN!!!"
that's a keeper, one from the deeeep vaults, yes.
I like yer mind.
relative nube question: do the j. crammer banner ads come from bukkake porn site cookies?
sure. why not. both involve wankers.
As a public service to all you ZH fans, the following is a fantastic business model with very little competition at the moment.
http://vegetariansineater.blogspot.com/
How could you possibly junk that?
Really, a man agreeing to come and eat a vegetarian feast off the corpse of your dead loved one (nonviolently) to take their sins away while jamming to Elvis tunes is waaayyyy beyond priceless.
Here is a potentially big story down the road.
US confronts China on South China Sea claims
http://www.generationaldynamics.com/cgi-bin/D.PL?xct=gd.e100724
If we need another war that is on par with WWII scale to get us out of deflation, then China is our enemy.
http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-10317-San-Diego-County-Political-Buzz...
How about that.