Student Loans

Debt-serfs who make the difficult and risky transition to small-scale business owners find they have simply moved to another class of serfdom. The net result is a system in which the vast majority of productive assets are owned by the few who then have the means to exploit the many.

UPDATE: Full SOTU Speech released - "THE SHADOW OF CRISIS HAS PASSED"

By now it is well known that The State of The Union tonight will be about President Obama's Robin-Hood Agenda. Furthermore, it is entirely clear that his proposals have no chance of becoming law. As WaPo's Marc Thiessen notes, Obama is not delusional, his move is completely and transparently political... And just as Eric Cantor suggests will merely serve to inflame the GOP. From taxes to cyber security and from community college to housing... in 50-65 minutes, all will be clear...

When the citizenry cease to believe the lies, the nation suffers a nervous breakdown.

There is overwhelming evidence that the rampant money printing of the past decade or two has done nothing to generate sustainable growth in mainstream living standards and real wealth. Yet the monkeys keep rattling the cage, promising and demanding more ZIRP(and now N-ZIRP) and more fraudulent purchase of government debt with fiat credit congered by their printing presses. Consider some striking proof of failure...

Yesterday, to much shock and dismay, Obama revealed his latest "noble" grand vision: provide a free community college education to millions of folks. Apparently now, far too late, even the community organizer-in-chief realized that with $1.2 trillion in student loans the Millennials will never be able to take their rightful place as the dynamo of US economic growth. What is Obama's solution? Another free lunch. Socialist unicorns and Marxist rainbows aside, what will Obama's "free" plan cost taxpayers? The answer: $60 billion over 10 years, according to a White House official.

The surreal nature of this world as we enter 2015 feels like being trapped in a Fellini movie. The .1% party like it’s 1999, central bankers not only don’t take away the punch bowl – they spike it with 200% grain alcohol, the purveyors of propaganda in the mainstream media encourage the party to reach Caligula orgy levels, the captured political class and their government apparatchiks propagate manipulated and massaged economic data to convince the masses their standard of living isn’t really deteriorating, and the entire façade is supposedly validated by all-time highs in the stock market. It’s nothing but mass delusion perpetuated by the issuance of prodigious amounts of debt by central bankers around the globe. But now, the year of consequences may have finally arrived.

Einstein advised “We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them”. Yet that’s mostly what I see happening today on many levels.

2014 may go down as the year when gold and silver conspiracy “theories” became conspiracy “facts” as banks globally were found to have conspired to rig the prices of gold, silver, currency and many other markets.

Since about 2001, several sectors of the economy have become increasingly inefficient, in the sense that it takes more resources to produce a given output, such as 1000 barrels of oil. This growing inefficiency explains both slowing world economic growth and the sharp recent drop in prices of many commodities, including oil. The mechanism at work is what I would call the crowding out effect. As more resources are required for the increasingly inefficient sectors of the economy, fewer resources are available to the rest of the economy. As a result, wages stagnate or decline. Central banks find it necessary lower interest rates, to keep the economy going. What we seem to be seeing recently is a drop in price to what consumers can afford for some of these increasingly unaffordable sectors. Unless this situation can be turned around quickly, the whole system risks collapse.

The key is to understand why real median household incomes continue to decline and then how to correct it.  It all comes back to financial policies that incentivize investors to avoid economy-boosting investments and toward financial investments that have no economic benefit.  The result is a narrowing of income distribution exasperating the down spiral, while inflating wealth to the already wealthy.  As long as these policies remain intact the American quality of life will continue to spiral downward while the wealth at the top continues to accelerate until one day when the top pops off and all that wealth goes abroad.  And that Mr. Liesman is what we call economics.

"...so many still maintain that America is the greatest nation in the world.  They swear that America represents all that is good; freedom, democracy, merit based capitalism and the rights of the individual.  That is true America does represent such things.  However, it is fraudulent to consider our current nation America.  America was a concept that promoted all that is good.  And so it would seem that the nation in which they find themselves cannot be America.  Their nation today represents the will of the political class at all costs, period.  Their sole motivation is themselves.  Very different from America.  And so perhaps a renaming on the nation is required, at least until or if the people decide to take it back and reintroduce the world to the concept that is America for as discussed below you cannot destroy a concept and so there is hope to bring her back.  But until then we need a name for this geographic region and its new societal system... It seems"Neoconica" is most fitting."

You know the Central-Bank-driven wealth-creation narrative has gone too far when... CNN Money - the bastion of personal financial advice introduces us to Mohammad Majd, graduate who opines "I changed my entire philosophy on debt. I started making minimum payments on my student loans, picked up a "Stock Investing for Dummies" book, and put whatever extra money I made into the stock market." It's great any muppet can win... "It was a really good feeling knowing that I could wipe away my entire student loan debt with just a few mouse clicks." This is how broken the market (and the mindset) has become...

After years of exposing, month after month, the truth about the US labor market - its conversion into a part-time (in 2010!), low-paying job market where Millennials refuse to work (as the job market reality is gruesome so instead they opt to load up on record amount of student loans) and where older Americans, instead of enjoying retirement are forced right back into the labor force leading to record numbers of workers over the age of 55 (thanks to ZIRP crushing the value of their savings and a refusing to participate in an HFT- and central-bank rigged stock market), the mainstream media, having tired of spinning the bullshit optimistic propaganda, has finally moved to the "tinfoil" side, and has done something it normally wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole. Tell the truth.

Sometimes I wish I could just passively accept what my government monarchs and their mainstream media mouthpieces feed me on a daily basis. Why do I have to question everything I’m told? Life would be much simpler and I could concentrate on more important things like the size of Kim Kardashian’s ass... The willfully ignorant masses, dumbed down by government education, lured into obesity by corporate toxic packaged sludge disguised as food products, manipulated, controlled and molded by an unseen governing class of rich men, and kept docile through never ending corporate media propaganda, are nothing but pawns to the arrogant sociopathic pricks pulling the wires in this corporate fascist empire of debt.

"... If the unemployment rate were to edge up after reaching a trough in two years and the gap between U-6 and unemployment remains as wide as it is today – in excess of historical norms – the size of the program would be expected to reach roughly $3.3 trillion in 2024, $1.7 trillion more than in the base case." - TBAC