The chart below, showing the historical change in the IMF's periodic revisions of world growth and revised for today's just released latest World Economic Outlook, shows that much taxpayer money can be saved if the monetary fund's staff was replaced with dart-throwing chimps.

There is a profound disconnect between the Higher Education cartel and the economy and what higher education should cost in a world where information, instruction, and knowledge have fallen to the cost of bandwidth; i.e., near zero.  What was once costly and scarce (knowledge and instruction) is now nearly free and abundant, readily available on any digital device anywhere in the world with a connection to the Web.  There is no need to concentrate students in a campus with a library; every web-connected digital device is a library and university combined. The Higher Education cartel is perfectly happy to encourage degree inflation (at enormous expense, of course), but this zeal for issuing student-loan-funded diplomas fails to address two structural disparities: the one between the skills needed to prosper in the emerging economy and the skills colleges are providing students, and the widening income/wealth/education gap between the wealthy and the non-wealthy.

UPDATE: *GEITHNER STILL DOESN'T WANT TO BE CONSIDERED FOR FED CHIEF: WSJ

The next chairman's main job is going to be deciding how soon and how aggressively to pull back on Fed programs; and as none other than Fed whisperer John Hilsenrath notes, Larry Summers' withdrawal increases the likelihood of continuity in central-bank policy for the next few years - meaning any Fed wind-down of its easy-money programs will be slow and gradual. Of course he posits Yellen and Kohn as potential front-runners but throws Tim Geithner and Roger Ferguson back into the mix. Business-as-usual is back and the doves are in control - all the Fed needs now is bigger deficits to enable it to keep the pumps primed...

A month ago we reported that US fast food workers in several US cities, namely New York City, Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit, Milwaukee, Kansas City, Mo., and Flint, Mich., walked out Monday in a one-day strike demanding a doubling of their pay. Not unexpectedly, even though the president himself has been a strong proponent of rising the minimum wage, the corporations balked and the strikers achieved nothing and just in case there is some confusion, there is a lot of minimum skills, minimum wage applicants (not to mention robots) out there which translates into two words for the strikers: no leverage. However, these concepts may be foreign to a fast-food labor force that probably just wants a day out in the nice weather and to take a break from hard work for a change.

But the U.S., Britain and Israel have Used Chemical Weapons within the Last 10 Years

NSA has free access to your passwords when you back up your account on Google’s ‘back up my data’ featured on Android

While hardly a surprise, following recent speculative punditry (which failed miserably in forecasting Mark Carney as the next BOE head, something Zero Hedge predicted half a year ahead of the event due to one simple variable - he is from Goldman) and numerous trial balloons on Bernanke's successor coming hot and heavy from every direction, it was time for the Fed's own mouthpiece, Jon Hilsenrath, to speak, and bring back much needed drama and confusion.

"In the last week of June, the dollar value represented by ARM applications accounted for 16 percent of mortgage requests, the highest share since July 2008, two months before Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. collapsed, according to Mortgage Bankers Association in Washington." Oops.

How do you change the direction of the country when power has been seized by the ultra-wealthy criminal class? When the financial, economic, political, military, judicial, and media organizations have been taken over by criminals who are looking out only for their financial interests, the few citizens who have the courage to speak the truth become enemies of the state. There is no non-violent solution to this state of affairs. This is what Fourth Turnings are all about. 

Many of us have worked with or for individuals who have confidence in wild disproportion to their actual talent.  They bubble endlessly with exaggerated claims of their skills and achievements, and congratulate themselves publicly for even the most trivial of accomplishments. It’s as if by broadcasting the certainty of their own superiority, they can somehow possibly mask their own often lackluster record of performance and dearth of talent. Yet of course, it works quite well! The specter of watching mediocre self-promoters brashly stomping their unremarkable way to the top of some pecking order, org chart, or political office is overfamiliar to most all of us...

While everyone is focused on whether Mr. Burns, aka Larry Summers  will take over for Ben Bernanke (he won't), lots of peripheral resignations are flying around. the most recent one: that of the U.S. secretary of the $60-billion budget and 240,000 employees Department of Homeland Security - Janet Napolitano, who will be named the next president of the University of California system. As the LA Times reports, "nothing was pushing her out of Washington now, although the Senate’s recently approved compromise plan on immigration faces an uncertain fate in the Republican-controlled House." The good news: we await for UCLA to be promptly upgraded to AAA and issue bonds inside of the US.

Why did the U.S. government spend 2.6 million dollars to train Chinese prostitutes to drink responsibly?  Why did the U.S. government spend $175,587 "to determine if cocaine makes Japanese quail engage in sexually risky behavior"?  Why did the U.S. government spend nearly a million dollars on a new soccer field for detainees being held at Guantanamo Bay?  This week when we saw that the IRS was about to pay out 70 million dollars in bonuses to their employees and that the U.S. government was going to be leaving 7 billion dollars worth of military equipment behind in Afghanistan, it caused us to reflect on all of the other crazy ways that the government has been wasting our money in recent years.  So we decided to go back through my previous articles and put together a list.  We call it "The Waste List".

Are Emergency Plans Meant Only for Nuclear War the Real Justification for Spying?

Would you like to know what America's young people are actually learning while they are away at college?  It isn't pretty.  Yes, there are some very highly technical fields where students are being taught some very important skills, but for the most part U.S. college students are learning very little that they will actually use out in the real world when they graduate.  Some of the college courses listed below are funny, others are truly bizarre, others are just plain outrageous, but all of them are a waste of money.  If we are going to continue to have a system where we insist that our young people invest several years of their lives and tens of thousands of dollars getting a "college education", they might as well be learning some useful skills in the process.  This is especially true considering how much student loan debt many of our young people are piling up.  Sadly, the truth is that right now college education in the United States is a total joke... and still a generation of jobless youths borrow from a feckless Fed to indenture themselves...

• Record unemployment, low inflation underline Europe's pain (Reuters)
• The ponzi gets bigger and bigger: Spanish banks up sovereign bond holdings by more than 10% (FT)
• California Lawmakers Turn Down Moratorium on Fracking (BBG)
• China’s Growing Ranks of Elderly Beset by Depression, Study Says (BBG)
• Tokyo Prepares for a Once-in-200-Year Flood to Top Sandy (BBG)
• Morgan Stanley Cutting Correlation Unit Added $50 Billion (BBG)
• IMF warns over yen weakness (FT)
• Rising radioactive spills leave Fukushima fishermen floundering (Reuters)
• India records slowest growth in a decade (FT)