New York Times

Waste and Fraud Are the Real Causes of the Deficit

All Capitalist Systems Have Some Inequality.  We Don’t Want To Prevent All Inequality … Just Economy-Wrecking Levels

As we speculated from the very beginning, and as was reaffirmed in "Is Nigeria, And Its Light Sweet Crude, About To Be Drawn Into The Mali "Liberation" Campaign?", the "French" (with complete and fully-comped US support) Mali campaign is slowly but surely migrating to its intended target: Nigeria, and rather its holdings of light sweet crude. And while the US presence in this latest resource land grab, this time in Africa, was so far rather stealthy, it appears the time for foreplay is over and moments ago Obama told congress has has dispatched 40 more American troops to Niger this week, bringing the total U.S. military presence in the west African country to 100. Let's hear it for the full retroactive transparency demanded by the War Powers Resolution.

• China drains cash to curb liquidity (FT) - no longer just a New Year issue...
• Hilesnrath speaks (but nobody cares anymore) - Fed Split Over How Long To Keep Cash Spigot Open (WSJ)
• Chasm opening between weak French and strong German economies (Reuters)
• JPMorgan Said to Seek First Sale of Mortgage Bonds Since Crisis (BBG)
• China's Bo Xilai not cooperating on probe, been on hunger strike (Reuters)
• Fed minutes send warning on durability of bond buying (Reuters)
• Sony Seeks an Extra Life in New PlayStation 4 (BBG)
• Rajoy pledges fresh round of reforms (FT) - and by reforms he means kickbacks?
• Doubts loom over eurozone recovery (BBG)
• China Extending Zhou Stay Seen as Aid to Financial Overhaul (BBG)
• King Pulls Out Stops to Energize Economy in Carney Handover (BBG)
• Central Banks Discussed Nominal GDP Targets at G-20 (Businessweek)
• Grand Central Owner Opposes IPO of Empire State Building (BBG)

Timing is a bit inconvenient, however.

America and China are on a collision course and the battleground is Asia. The new Cold War will impact U.S.-China trade as well as intra-Asian trade.

According to dictionary.com, Deflation is “a fall in the general price level or a contraction of credit and available money.” Falling prices. That sounds good, especially if you have set some cash set aside and are thinking about a major purchase. But as some additional research with Google would seem to demonstrate, that would be a naïve and simple-minded conclusion. According to received wisdom, deflation is a serious economic disease - St.Louis Fed: "...discourages spending and investment because consumers, expecting prices to fall further, delay purchases, preferring instead to save and wait for even lower price..." The problem with deflation, then - we are told, is that it feeds on itself, destroying the economy along the way. Deflation is far worse than its counterpart, inflation, because the Fed can fight inflation by raising interest rates. Deflation is nearly impossible to stop once it has started because interest rates can only be cut to zero, no lower. In case you’re not already scared straight, the deflationary doomsday has already happened in America when (according to the New York Times) it caused the Great Depression. I hope that everyone is clear on this. Now that you understand the basics, I have some questions for the people who came up with this stuff.

• Obama Paints Wider Role for Government in Middle Class Revival (BBG)
• Obama to Seek a New Trade Deal With EU (WSJ)... or this is strawman why 2016 GDP will be higher
• Mobile phone sales fall for the first time since 2009 (Telegraph)
• Sequester Looms, No Deal in Sight (WSJ)
• Neither US party swallows a compromise (FT)
• Embattled Economies Cling to Euro (WSJ)
• For China, Spending Is Harder Than It Looks (WSJ)
• Bank of England's Sir Mervyn King says recovery in sight (BBC) - just a little more inflation first
• G7 fails to defuse currency tensions (FT)
• Japanese Leader Urges Firms to Boost Wages (WSJ) - so does the US one
• Fed Bank Chiefs Back Money-Fund Overhaul (WSJ), or force everyone out of MMFs and into stocks

The economic collapse is not a single event.  The economic collapse has been happening, it is is happening right now, and it will continue to happen.  Yes, there will be times when our decline will be punctuated by moments of great crisis, but that will be the exception rather than the rule.  A lot of people that write about "the economic collapse" hype it up as if it will be some huge "event" that will happen very rapidly and then once it is all over we will rebuild.  Unfortunately, that is not how the real world works.  We are living in the greatest debt bubble in the history of the world, and once it completely bursts there will be no going back to how things were before. But other than that, everything is rainbows and lollipops, right?

As the chart below shows, in some 200 years of history, when expressed as a ratio of total sovereign debt to tax revenues, the empirical data as compiled by Reinhart and Rogoff ranges from 2x to 16x. This is shown by the blue bars in the chart below.  So where are we in this cycle as the debt clock counts down? As the red bars show, we are in a very uncomfortable place, with Japan now at the highest such ratio in history, well above the highest recorded which always ended up in default, while the US, whose such ratio is over 600%, is above the long-term average of about 520% public debt/revenue. The problem is that every current and subsequent attempt to reflate merely pushes both of these higher, until one day the marginal growth creation of every dollar in new debt becomes negative. How much higher can consolidated global debt go before global GDP is not only no longer growing, but every incremental dollar in debt has a negative impact on GDP, as was the case for the US in the fourth quarter? Keep an eye on global economic growth: if and when the world enters outright recession: the most feared outcome by all central bankers who realize they are out of weapons and their only recourse is much more of the same, that may be cue to quietly leave town.

Governments Move to Destroy Online Anonymity ... Google Helps

The below article, recreated in its grotesque entirety, is a real, serious Op-Ed written by a supposedly real, non page-view trolling, Nobel-prize winning economist, in a serious paper, the New York Times. It can be classified with one word: jaw-dropping:"We’re not going to resolve our long-run fiscal issues any time soon, which is O.K. — not ideal, but nothing terrible will happen if we don’t fix everything this year. Meanwhile, we face the imminent threat of severe economic damage from short-term spending cuts. So we should avoid that damage by kicking the can down the road. It’s the responsible thing to do."

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” – Aldous Huxley

The entire system is corrupt to its core. Both political parties, regulatory agencies, Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, and mainstream media are participants in this enormous fraud. They grow more desperate and bold by the day. The lies, misinformation and propaganda being spewed on a daily basis become more outrageous and audacious. They are using the Big Lie method on a grand scale. They frantically need to lure the muppets into the stock market and the housing market to keep the game going a little longer. You can sense we are reaching a tipping point. The system they have created is mathematically unsustainable. Therefore, it will not be sustained.

As the world's economic powers squabble over the intricacies of cause and effect in a vicious cycle of currency devaluation and domestic economic defense; it appears, NYTimes reports, that the US is leading the way in another direction. A secret legal review on the use of America’s growing arsenal of cyberweapons has concluded that President Obama has the broad power to order a pre-emptive strike if the United States detects credible evidence of a major digital attack looming from abroad - i.e. if we 'suspect' someone is going to hack us, we can hack them. In what appears to be Stuxnet's bigger (and scarier) brother,one official noted, "there are levels of cyberwarfare that are far more aggressive than anything that has been used or recommended to be done." New policies will also govern how the intelligence agencies can carry out searches of faraway computer networks for signs of potential attacks on the United States and, if the president approves, attack adversaries by injecting them with destructive code - even if there is no declared war. Cyberweaponry is the newest and perhaps most complex arms race under way, based in Cyber Command at The Pentagon, with the unspoken question being, ‘What are we going to do about China?’

Government Prosecutes and Harasses those Who Expose Criminal Wrongdoing