Pivotfarm's blog

There are some out there in the economic world that believe that banknotes are detrimental to the health of the economy and that they are currently stifling the recovery of the markets. Their solution: burn the damn things and let them go up in smoke. Replace them with electronic money and then the central banks around the world will be able to do more than just providing alternatives that don’t work to revamping the financial markets and boosting economic growth.

Well are you?

I heard it said one day that I would never be as rich as my parents. They were baby-boomers, the people that benefited from the expansionary Thirty Glorious Years of the post-Second-World-War period.

The annual human trafficking report has just been published by the US State Department in the Trafficking in Persons (TiP) report.

Christine Lagarde of the International Monetary Fund has told the European Central Bank that they need to consider Quantitative Easing if inflation continues to remain low, which it will. She stated: “If inflation was to remain stubbornly low, then we would certainly hope that the ECB would take quantitative easing measures by way of purchasing of sovereign bonds”.

Walmart, Tesco, Aldi, Morrissons, Carrefour, Costco. What do they all have in common, apart from the fact that they are supermarkets? They all sell products that are produced under slavery to the people that shop there.

We all knew just how wrong it was as we sat there and listened to the World Bank going on in January about how world economic growth would top 3.2%. Today the World Bank has downgraded economic growth to 2.8%, which some might say is even over the odds

Promises, promises! We’ve heard it all before. ‘We’re gonna get you, guys’. We know the song it’s just the words that get changed from time to time, but anyone can hum along to it these days. The bankers, those banksters are gonna get their comeuppance. Trouble is: they never do. It’s just getting boring now.

Oil prices are set to hike in the next few days with the growing fear that fighting in the northern city of Mosul will spread southwards in Iraq.

There’s an old adage that the rich try to pooh-pooh and say that it’s not at all true and that’s: ‘Money makes you happy’.

Isn’t it fitting that the original story was Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves? But, this time round the modern day version of the Chinese story with Alibaba and the Initial Public Offering that has been programmed for in or around August 2014 will be the biggest IPO this year and will bring in the staggering sum of $40 billion for its employees.

Crunch time will hit in Spring 2016 according to some economists in the UK. That’s the time when the British will suffer the consequences of the rising annual house-price rate in the country standing at 17% per year. Oh, the people are rejoicing that their houses are worth hundreds of thousands and increasing every year.

With the advent of unions in the USA in the 19th century, they were once synonymous with downing tools and walking out to hold the management and the company they were working for to ransom. Collective bargaining and across-the-board pay rises were high on the agenda back then.

Flies are pesky things buzzing around that leave you infuriated and frustrated as you try to swat them; but nine times out of ten you miss the things. Today, it’s flies that are at the center of a row that may be far more than just economic and may damage relations diplomatically-speaking between India and the EU.

Every wondered why the rest of the world envied the US middle-class? There were many reasons once, a long time ago and one of them was their affluence, their wealth, their ability to be able to afford whatever they wanted.