Demographics

Six months ago the topic of click fraud at Facebook hit the headlines but was rapidly dismissed as the company's share price rose implying that the world is great and we should not worry. With Facebook increasingly becoming the advertising outlet of choice for many of the world's companies, MIT Technology Review reports on a study to dig deeper into just where the "likes" come from. As the authors note, recently, the number of likes of a Facebook page has become a measure of its popularity and profitability, and an underground market of services boosting page likes, aka "like farms," has emerged. While careful to avoid pointing the finger too aggressively, the findings show that one "like" is not like another as the use of "honeypot" pages to generate "likes" attracts 'users' (bots) that are significantly different from typical Facebook users (i.e. non-human money-spending users).

Given that all the leading candidates for Global Hegemon are hastening down paths of self-destruction, perhaps there will be no global hegemon dominating the 21st century.

There are plenty of things to worry about these days. However, with enough intelligence, political will, common-sense and perseverance, most challenges we face as a species can be overcome (maybe providing some hope that we can tackle whatever we are facing right now.) So why worry? Well, what will happen if we start losing those qualities and values as a global society? Which is why we believe that the following graphs are the scariest in the world today...

Today is a rather peculiar public holiday in Japan: “Respect Old People Day”. And judging by the official demographics, an increasing proportion of the population should be revered today. One in eight Japanese is aged 75 or older. People over 65 will reach 33 million, the largest ever, roughly 25.9% of the population. The thing about demographic trends is that they’re like a huge oil tanker - once they’re on their course it’s very hard to steer them around in another direction. These are monumental, generational changes that are very hard and slow to reverse.

A look at new arguments suggesting that globalization is fragmenting.  Are they really new?  Are they true? 

"Washington is absolutely correct, in my opinion, to want to boost American consumption, but the Fed seems to be trying to boost consumption by igniting another asset bubble in the hopes that, like before 2007, Americans will feel “richer” and so will consume more. This isn't sustainable, however, and will leave us, as Paul and Druckenmiller fear, even more heavily indebted and more dangerously exposed to the underlying weakness in demand."

The term “jobless recovery” is itself an oxymoron since the main function of any economic advance is to broaden participation. Thus a “jobless recovery” is nothing of the sort, indicating more so the re-arranging of numbers rather than full achievement – the hallmarks of redistribution.

As financialism spreads, so does disharmony, not just in function but in breaking correlations among economic accounts and statistics that were once seemingly so unconquerable.

So let us get this straight. The average Philadelphia teacher is receiving compensation and benefits of $112,700 and 50% of their students dropout; while of the remaining students only 45% can do math, 35% can read, and 30% can write. But at least they have some nice murals dotting the decaying schools. Furthermore, every new year will bring higher 'fairer' pension payment requirements. This is a crisis that grows larger by the day and is willfully ignored by politicians beholden to these government unions. The sheer idiocy of the following plan to "save" the schools this year is lost on the brainless media twits mouthing the teacher's union talking points.

Mark Spitznagel: "Mises will ultimately be right yet again about the inevitable final collapse of the current asset boom brought about by credit expansion. The term “black swan” (the surprising, unforeseen event) used for bursting financial bubbles has been and will remain a misnomer - we can and, indeed, should expect such tumults to occur at some point as a consequence of massive central bank intervention and economic distortion."

Ron Paul: "As to the unwinding of this mess, I’m convinced that when the current expansion ends it will be abrupt, gigantic, and worldwide. The 43-year expansion of Fed credit and debt, delivered to us by a fiat dollar standard, and held together artificially by an undeserved trust will end badly."

Given that this is 'officially' the worst-recovery-ever, one wonders why does the abysmally failed and dangerous monetary experimentation continue unabated — as Yellen will undoubtedly confirm at Jackson Hole? Self-evidently, it is irresistibly convenient to both Wall Street and Washington. Yet these screaming juxtapositions are lost in the recency bias of the mainstream narrative. Invariably, the “in-coming” data is tortured and rationalized to prove that just a few more doses of money and debt will do the trick. Consequently, the pattern and signal is obscured amidst the immediate noise. It is therefore perhaps useful to consider a more advanced case of this Keynesian debauch from elsewhere in the world. Consider Italy.

Curious how the demographics of an aging world increasingly impact the economy, the spending, consumption and saving patterns, the earnings and wealth potential of various age groups, and the amount of pension funds available to satisfy an ever growing pie of future welfare recipients? Then the following 18 charts are for just you.

Despots, dictators, and power hungry presidents arise in an atmosphere of fear, scarce resources, hopelessness, and misery. As the power of the central government grows; the freedoms, liberties and rights of the people are diminished and ultimately relinquished.

Along with Incrementum's 94-page extravaganza on gold, this infographic, the final in our 2014 Gold Series (part 1, part 2, part 3, & part 4 here) looks to the future, covering gold trends that investors should be watching through the rest of the year and beyond. With input from some of the most important names in gold such as Brent Cook, Doug Casey, Frank Holmes, Bob Moriarty, and James Fraser, we aim to cover the broadest and most important signals for investors to watch. Those include Chinese wealth, Indian demographics, money printing, debt, and a lack of significant gold discoveries.

Just as the Federal Reserve cannot directly force you to stick the needle of monetary heroin (debt) into your arm, it also can't force employers to pay employees more. The ultimate hubris of the Keynesian Cargo Cult (which includes the global economy's central banks) is the naive notion that they can manipulate an entire system with a few levers such that the desired outcome--and only the desired outcome--is the output. The idea that you can change one input in an interconnected system of systems and only affect the one output you want is not just naive and simplistic: it requires a level of blindness and incompetence that is off the charts.

Professor Krugman is at it again - conjuring fairy tales about a benign long-term fiscal outlook. Notwithstanding that the public debt has surged from 40% to 75% of GDP during the six short years since 2008, he claims there is no reason to fret and that there is no debt spiral anywhere in the future. In part that’s because the Keynesian priesthood has declared that interest rates have down-shifted on a permanent basis. Under a regime of even modest monetary normalization over the next quarter century, current fiscal policy will lead to interest rates that are far higher, not lower, than the growth rate of nominal income. So its time to put Greece right back into the front and center of the US fiscal picture.