ETC

Here's what's obvious, but unacceptable: we need a new system. Not a system modified with tiny tweaks and a feeding trough filled with borrowed money--an entirely new system designed from scratch to be sustainable and with opportunities to build capital for all.

In very raw terms, if a man wanted to buy a house and a car in 1975 he had to work just under five years to pay for them.

If he wants a house and a car today, he has to work almost 11 years...

There's been no shortage of discussion about the weather among economists this year as "snow in the winter" took the blame for a bevy of bad data in H1 while summer is Citi's new scapgoat for any weakness in August and September payrolls. Meanwhile, unseasonably mild temps took the fall for poor October retail sales and now, going into the winter, it's all about El Nino.

The world of Bubble Finance economies created by the Fed and other central banks is fundamentally different than that prevailing under the “Lite Touch” monetary policies which preceded the Greenspan era. The problem today is that the PhDs running the Fed have an economic model which is a relic of the Lite Touch era. It is not only utterly irrelevant in today’s casino driven system, but is actually tantamount to a blindfold. It causes them to look at a dashboard full of lagging indicators like jobs and GDP components, while ignoring the explosive leading indicators starring them in the face on CNBC. The clueless inhabitants of the Eccles Building do not recognize that they have created a world in which Wall Street supersedes main street.

The recent new highs on the Nasdaq accompanying the surge off the August and September lows have been accompanied by bullish headlines, and it is true the action in some stocks is truly awe inspiring. Yet all the action has an oddly familiar ring to it and it may not be bullish. While most traders today haven't really lived through the 2000 bubble, older hats have institutional memory.

The perennial hopes of a strong retail shopping season are once again upon us. Given the current deflationary backdrop, small business spending pessimism, the sharp decline in imports and weak wage growth, it is quite likely that actual retail sales will likely disappoint the NRF's forecast of a "shopping season significantly above the 10-year average." But it is truly important to remember that for retailers all #BlackFridaysMatter

Angered that Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc. pay very little tax, an entire town in Wales decided to employ the exact same tax strategies used by big companies to reduce their own tax burdens. As the proprietor of the local smokery put it, the plan is "jolly clever." Doing this is not immoral or unpatriotic.

"This will most likely drive a drawdown much like the one we saw in 2009 and 2010."

Prepping has not only gone mainstream, it's infected even the billionaire culture as referenced recently on a ZH article:

There is a driving desire among weaker-minded people to seek control over other people in the name of arbitrary standards of safety as well as arbitrary standards of “civil” conformity. While such people proclaim publicly that they do what they do for the “greater good,” in reality they seek only to satiate a private lust for power. Any fight for freedom from collectivists will require the removal of command and control. This is the only way that humanity can be given breathing room to rebuild without remaining under constant preplanned threat.

As we noted previously, for the first time ever, primary dealers' corporate bond inventories have turned unprecedentedly negative. While in the short-term Goldman believes this inventory drawdown is probably a by-product of strong customer demand, they are far more cautious longer-term, warning that the "usual suspects" are not sufficient to account for the striking magnitude of inventory declines... and are increasingly of the view that "the tide is going out" on corporate bond market liquidity implying wider spreads and thus higher costs of funding to compensate for the reduction is risk-taking capacity.

Believers in "technology always creates more jobs than it destroys" never address the knotty issues of taxpayer subsidies, secular trends of higher labor costs, the eradication of low-skill jobs that pay enough to live on without taxpayer subsidies, or the structural surplus of conventional labor and capital--the scarcity value of both are dropping to zero. While many hope that every low-skill person can become a high-skilled worker, training people doesn't create jobs for them.

Behold! More shark jumping as BofA, Citi blame warm weather for weak October retail sales: "We believe abnormal weather patterns may have biased retail ex-auto sales lower in October."

To compare someone like Bernie Sanders to bloodthirsty monsters like Stalin and Pol Pot is too ludicrous for words. I've heard of slippery slopes before, but good lord, this guy must be totally off his rocker