Corruption

That didn't take long. BBC reports that "Military bases in South Africa have been placed on high alert for the first time since the advent of democracy in 1994, defence officials have confirmed. The move comes as firebrand politician Julius Malema prepares to address disgruntled soldiers near Johannesburg. The defence minister accused him of trying to "mobilise against the state"." In other words, striking miners are about to be considered enemies of the state, if they hinder record high profit margins at various international precious metal conglomerates. Hopefully South Africa does not test the theory that the worker exterminations (as a reminder tens of striking workers were previously killed by local police) will continue until worker morale improves, because i) it won't, and ii) it will lead to a complete shut down of commodity extraction in the country.

"Trenton makes, and the world takes", but the mob has dibs on everything. And by mob we mean the city's mayor, who in collaboration with a convicted sex offender, were just arrested by the FBI. At least we now have a reason why jobs in New Jersey are "confirming" the stock market "recovery."

A few months ago when the new French socialist president gave details of his particular version of the "fairness doctrine" and said he would tax millionaires at 75%, we said that "we are rotating our secular long thesis away from Belgian caterers and into tax offshoring advisors, now that nobody in the 1% will pay any taxes ever again." While there was an element of hyperbole in the above statement, the implication was clear: France's richest will actively seek tax havens which don't seek to extract three quarters of their earnings, in the process depriving France (and other countries who adopt comparable surtaxes on the rich) of critical tax revenues. It took three months for this to be confirmed, and with a bang at that. The WSJ reports that Bernard Arnault, the CEO of LVMH, and the richest man in France, has decided to forego hollow Buffetian rhetoric that paying extra tax is one's sworn duty, and has sought Belgian citizenship.

I was recently interviewed by a journalist for a local newspaper who was developing a story on the exponential rise of the “prepper lifestyle” in America, most especially in Western Montana.  Being an outsider to the Liberty Movement, she was naturally curious as to what motivated us to make what some in our culture would see as a drastic and bewildering leap away from the mainstream.  She was equally fascinated with our willingness to travel great distances and make substantial sacrifices to live in regions like the American Redoubt.  I will not deny, Montana has indeed become a “hotbed” of survivalism and Constitutionalism, or what the Southern Poverty Law Center would call “extremism and domestic terrorism”.  I lived in Pittsburgh for years while writing for Neithercorp and Alt-Market and rarely ran into like minded individuals aware of the tenuous status of our society.  Within days of moving to Montana, I was being recognized by complete strangers in supermarkets excited to discuss the inner workings of Keynesian monetary corruption, precious metals investment, and Alinsky disinformation tactics.  Yeah…I know…it’s weird. After living for a while in the Redoubt, you begin to forget that there are still many people in this country that are utterly oblivious to the epic dangers around them, as well as painfully helpless in knowing what to do when those dangers land on their doorsteps.  Speaking with the newspaper reporter, and my experiences at Paulfest in Tampa, Florida, reminded me that the world has yet to be reminded of the value of survivalism.  There is still a gap, a disconnect, a psychological twitch of the masses, and it compels me to explain, yet again, what they are missing.

The chart below by way of Grant Thornton shows something rather disturbing: in recent months, the number of IPOs that are trading "at or above their issue price 30 days after IPO pricing" has been collapsing in virtually a straight line since the early 1990s, and in 2012 was just shy of all time lows (which have been recorded during periods of great market crashes, not when the S&P is about to hit its yearly highs). As such the lack of success of such prominent recent names as FaceBook, Zynga, Groupon and many others, is not simply a function of valuation and investor sentiment, but related to the ongoing deteriorating in the underlying market structure for a variety of reason, many of which have been written about here in the past.

Are you ready for some.. free-money? With 15 minutes until the NFL season opens this evening, we thought this little gem from Bloomberg was perfect to stoke the fires of Giants-Cowboys fanatic antagonism. That’s because the 80,000-seat Cowboys Stadium was built partly using tax-free borrowing. The resulting subsidy comes out of the pockets of every American taxpayer, including Giants' fans. The money doesn’t go directly to the Cowboys’ billionaire owner Jerry Jones. Rather, it lowers the cost of financing, giving his team the highest revenue in the NFL and making it the league’s most-valuable franchise. "It’s part of the corruption of the federal tax system, subsidizing activity that the private sector can finance on its own." This is not just the Cowboys but such tax-free public borrowing 'municipal' debt helped build structures used by 64 major-league teams, including baseball, hockey and basketball. As Bloomberg concludes, “You come back to this thin line of, ‘What is a legitimate municipal government undertaking?’ If the owner can get away with the public putting up part of the money, he’s going to do it.”

There are three key factors to modeling trade flows - or relevance - in a post-globalization world. While competitiveness is important, countries gain from being generally 'Technology-rich', 'Labor-rich', and/or 'Resource-rich'. The following chart, from Deutsche Bank, shows where the world's countries fit into the Venn diagram of give-and-take in a post-globalization market. The red oval highlights where Italy, Greece, Portugal, and Spain (and Argentina sadly enough) do not fit into this picture. Two words - Euro-sustainability?

And NOTHING Has Changed ...

That the SEC is the most incompetent, corrupt, irrelevant and captured organization "serving" the US public is known by everyone. And while the details of the SEC's glaring lack of capacity to do anything to restore investor confidence in the capital markets, which has become a casino used exclusively by Wall Street to defraud any retail investor still stupid enough to play (which lately a moot point as there have been no material retail inflows into mutual funds in over three years), are scattered, courtesy of Bloomberg we now have the best summary of just how the utterly clueless SEC is a muppet plaything of Wall Street, and together with it, the "grand regulation" that was supposed to keep Wall Street in check, is nothing but what Wall Street demand it to be, and forced the SEC, way over its head on regulation, to accept every change, that the very banks that are supposed to be regulated, demands as part of Dodd-Frank reforms. In short: everything we know about Wall Street 'regulation' has been a farce, and a lie, exclusively thanks to corruption rampant at the now documentedly incompetent Securities And Exchange Commission.

My blood pressure is up, my nails are bitten down to the quick, I haven’t slept in days. I’m ready for Ben.

While The Brits are about to tax their Super-Rich, it appears one of the old colonies remains in full anti-Robin-Hood mode. Nothing surprises us much anymore but this note from Bloomberg too the proverbial biscuit. In the "most mean-spirited, ruthlessly executed corruption," India's politicians and their criminal syndicates have looted as much as $14.5bn in food from one province alone. 57,000 tons of food meant for the devastatingly poor of the Uttar Pradesh region is sat in a government storage facility five football fields long. The 'theft' has blunted the nation's only weapon against mass starvation and as Supreme Court commissioner Naresh Saxena notes: "What I find even more shocking is the lack of willingness in trying to stop it," as the Minister for Food, who stands charged with attempted murder, kidnapping, armed robbery and electoral fraud, has diverted more than 80 percent of the food. "Who is a person who holds a below poverty line ration card? A person of no influence; you can just tell him to buzz off." But there is growing tension "We could just storm the place, and every one of us could get a bag of rice each. Who would stop us?"

“If you receive the memo” about radioactive contamination, “don’t send it to us.”

Political pressure, fake moral outrage, and ridicule.

Forget Merriam-Webster. The Mario-Webber dictionary is where it's at these days...

Up to his neck: the Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia—the latest in a series