ETC

The "engine of our economy", the "cradle of innovation", the "land of tomorrow" -- whatever breathless hyperbole the fawning media is using this week -- is a sham. Silicon Valley has become a factory of hype, funneling gobs of early-stage capital into whatever half-credible concepts it can think of, and then pimping the artificially-inflated initial results of those tarted-up ventures to whichever "greater fool" is willing to acquire it or buy its IPO. Let that idiot figure out if it will ever turn a profit...

"You thought it was safe to drive 90 miles an hour on a rain-slicked narrow road while you were tipsy because the airbag would save you, but it still hurts when you crash." This is the Paradox of Risk: the more risk is apparently lowered, the higher the risk we are willing to accept.

Venezuela’s economy is in desperate trouble. The country is highly dependent on oil reserves and has no significant substitute for black gold in the near term. That reality makes Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s recent efforts to tout the country’s technology industry laughable.

It is America the Herd that is keeping America the Civilization from feeling and being prosperous and safe. For too long, we have let our rulers ride us roughshod, using us to trample the economy and global tranquility with its economic and military interventions. Make America good again, and the kinds of greatness actually worth having will naturally follow.

“I can’t even say with conviction that I’m sure, looking strictly on a cost-benefit basis, that FATCA’s... benefits are going to outweigh the cost.” FATCA constitutes theft. The US government is generating a little bit of revenue and the great expense of foreign banks and governments (not to mention the thousands of Americans who have had to renounce their citizenship because of FATCA’s idiotic rules).

Over the years of watching the democratic process we’ve noticed something important. People tend to reject democracy, indeed, fight it tooth and nail, when it doesn’t go their way. But when it does, well, it is the tops. Most democracy-praisers are never really democrats at all but merely opportunists who make use of the power of the majority over the minority’s rights. But should the majority not wish to go along with this plan, well down with democracy - it is the enemy of higher principles in which democrats believe only sporadically, however.

The US is in decline. The US government is overloaded with debt. The US financial system is losing is dominance. And even the banking institutions themselves are losing relevance. This isn’t bad news. It’s tremendously exciting.

In a stunning move towards the elites' endgame of 'banning cash', Greek authorities unveiled stricter capital controls for civil servants and pensioners this weekend. By drastically limiting cash withdrawals and forcing the more 'controllable' compulsory use of plastic money, Greek authorities hope to stop tax evasion through the use of 'fake cash registers'.

"We believe that the path of least resistance would be to effectively ban capitalism and by-pass banking and capital markets altogether. We gave this policy change several names (such as “Cuba alternative”, “British Leyland”) but the essence of the new form of QE would be using central banks and public instrumentalities to directly inject “heroin into blood stream” rather than relying on system of incentives to drive investor behaviour."

Israel lacks a national motto. If its leaders are looking for a Latin one, “carpe chaos” would be an apt and honest choice. “Seize the chaos” is half of Israeli foreign policy in a nutshell (the other half being the instigation of that chaos in the first place). But “Seize the chaos” is not a new doctrine: neither is it limited to Israeli halls of power. A veritable “carpe chaos” manifesto was written in 1996 for a Washington think tank by David Wurmser, an Israel-first neocon who would later play a key role in the Bush administration’s drive to the Iraq War. And now that Russia has been drawn into the Syrian war, where its bombers and troops operate at cross purposes with American bombers and proxy fighters, the chaotic sea threatens to become a thermonuclear lake of fire engulfing the whole world.

This globalization of regional housing markets is pricing the middle class out of housing in areas that also happen to be strong job markets. Many commentators are concerned that a nation of homeowners is being transformed into a nation of renters, as housing is snapped up by hedge funds and wealthy elites fleeing China and the emerging markets. But will current conditions continue unchanged going forward?

“Capitalism is not primarily an incentive system but an information system.” Prices are the information. And the price of time itself is the single most valuable piece of information. Time, as we intuitively know, is money; they are two sides of the same coin. Mess with time and money, and you mess with everything else. Yet as with central planning in general, the central planning of either money, or time, cannot possibly work. Hayek warned the economics profession of precisely this in the 1970s. They didn’t listen, ensconced as they still remain within their interventionist Keynesian paradigm. Well that paradigm is about to be blown apart, time and money are about to return to the market, where they belong, and real, sustainable economic progress is about to restart once again.

If you make it so burdensome to operate a legit business, then you're basically giving people without big lines of credit and capital few choices but to work in the cash-only underground economy.

When things are going especially poorly, sometimes all it takes is the slightest glimmer of hope to ignite a rally, and between a poor NFP report in the US (and yes, EM FX is clearly one place where bad news in the US economy is most definitely good news, as it forestalls an FOMC liftoff), “better” than expected trade data in Malaysia, a deceptively low read on capital outflows from China, and dovish FOMC minutes, this week has brought several such glimmers and so, everyone has apparently begun backing up the truck on Asia EM optimism.

Long before Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden were being castigated for blowing the whistle on the government’s war crimes and the National Security Agency’s abuse of its surveillance powers, it was Lennon who was being singled out for daring to speak truth to power about the government’s warmongering, his phone calls monitored and data files collected on his activities and associations. For a little while, at least, Lennon became enemy number one in the eyes of the U.S. government.