Krugman

Slumping crude prices are weighing heavily on Norway's economy as the government looks to its $830 billion sovereign wealth fund to plug budget holes and pay for fiscal stimulus. Officials hope a weaker krone can serve as a shock absorber but with Mario Draghi stuck in easing mode, that may prove to be an increasingly dubious proposition.

 by a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens

Maybe because not enough people caught the dire warning the first time, moments ago Bloomberg reported that Han Jun, the deputy director of China’s office of the central leading group for financial and economic afairs, spoke at an event at the Chinese consulate in New York and practically reiterated the anonymous source's warning practically verbatim. To wit: "There won’t be a strong economic stimulus and people shouldn’t expect a V-shape recovery; instead long period of L-shape growth path is likely" said Han, who participated in the drafting of China’s latest five year plan.

Look out Stefan Ingves, the 2 and 20 crowd smells blood: "The market seems eager to challenge the Riksbank and there are rumors that many foreign hedge funds are long kronor and see a weakening of the krona after a possible intervention as a good buying opportunity.”

Timing a crash can be a fool's errand, and fortunately such efforts are largely irrelevant if you are tail hedging (though they are quite relevant if you aren't). But this doesn't mean that exercises in timing are without merit. Without a doubt (or at least with over 99% confidence), bad things happen with increasing expectation when conditioning on higher Q ratios ex ante. Factoring time into the equation, and again based on history, the confidence interval around the median time would point to an expectation that the crash should commence right about now.

It appears that a main preoccupation of economists – the self declared “behavioral economists” prominent among them – is to show how dumb people are as consumers and in assessing risks. Drawn to logical conclusion, this implies that economists, advising benevolent dictators are the solution. In ancient Greece people flocked to oracles and sought guidance.; today, Councils of Economic Advisers, IMF, OECD, Nobel prizes sustain perceptions that "macro- strology" and much else of what economists do is "science."

A closer look at Star Wars economics highlights that any hope for Galactic harmony does not come from the return of the Jedi, but from embracing capitalism. After all, a true market economy would make the construction of a Death Star nearly impossible in the first place.

Over the last few months, in a prime example of currency failure and euro-defenders' narratives, Finland has been sliding deeper into depression. Almost 7 years into the the current global expansion, Finland's GDP is 6pc below its previous peak. As The Telegraph reports, this is a deeper and more protracted slump than the post-Soviet crash of the early 1990s, or the Great Depression of the 1930s. And so, having tried it all, Finnish authorities are preparing to unleash "helicopter money" to save their nation by giving every citizen a tax-free payout of around $900 each month!

Yeah, No ...

While the lifespan of affluent whites continues to lengthen, the lifespan of poor whites has been shrinking. As a result, in just the last four years, the gap between poor white men and wealthier ones has widened by up to four years. This was not supposed to happen. For almost a century, the comforting American narrative was that better nutrition and medical care would guarantee longer lives for all. So the great blue-collar die-off has come out of the blue and is, as the Wall Street Journal says, “startling.”

“From the mass psychology perspective, Gold is very close to putting in a bottom.  Sentiment investors, contrarian investors and investors who are familiar with the concept of mass psychology should consider taking a closer look at the precious metal’s sector now”.

It’s quite interesting indeed when both progressives and conservatives seem to be nostalgic for those good ol’ days in the 1950s, for different reasons, of course. Conservatives want to go back to the nuclear Leave It to Beaver family and what not while liberals like to talk about those 90-percent tax rates that we owe our prosperity to. Or something like that. However, what a tax rate is and what is actually paid are two very different things.

It seems it is high time for a strategic rethink in the Global War On Terror, but powerful forces are arrayed against it. Apart from the fact that a truly huge racket is at stake, the situation is also reminiscent of the proverbial guy with the hammer – everything looks like a nail to him. So we should reasonably expect more of the same, only in even grander style (as the so-called “surge” has shown, any successes tend not only to be temporary, but have a habit to soon give way to even greater disasters).

The institutional academic system is broken. We need less systemic, traditional education that only provides knowledge of low utility and more alternative education that provides the right high-utility knowledge to thrive during today's global currency wars.