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The Non-GAAP Revulsion Arrives: Experts Throw Up All Over "Made Up, Phony, Smoke And Mirrors" Numbers
One of the recurring stories on Zero Hedge has been the increasingly more blatant fabrication of corporate bottom line "earnings" with the explicit blessing of both accountants and regulators, in the form of non-GAAP results. Our most recent observation conducted two months ago showed that the variation between GAAP and non-GAAP EPS has stretched to the widest degree since the financial crisis.
The chart below shows total S&P non-GAAP EPS with the GAAP component broken out in Green.
Specifically, the data revealed that the amount of non-GAAP addbacks and various other accounting and financial engineering gimmicks has been higher just once in history: in Q4 of 2008.
Furthermore, as we have shown every single quarter, nobody has fabricated their bottom line more than Alcoa:
After years of crusading against this clear farce of misreporting "earnings" by management teams who are engaging in a great fraud against their shareholders, one in which both accountants, bank advisors and regulators are all complicit, we are delighted to see that finally the mainstream press has taken the bullshit that is non-GAAP "EPS" to task.
In a report by AP's Bernard Candon, titled "Experts worry that 'phony numbers' are misleading investors" and subtitled, in case there is any confusion what the punchline is, "Experts worry about 'smoke and mirrors' in earnings reports as stocks hit record after record" we read that the "record profits that companies are reporting may not be all they're cracked up to be."
AP adds that "as the stock market climbs ever higher, professional investors are warning that companies are presenting misleading versions of their results that ignore a wide variety of normal costs of running a business to make it seem like they're doing better than they really are."
And as we started warning about this "misleading" spin on reality in 2011, we are happy to report that this time it took the media only 4 years to catch up.
Here is what else the AP found, which we repost in its entirety because alongside blaming HFTs for the next market crash, so too after the next crash, it will be management teams who have gravely abused their non-GAAP fugding privileges will be put on trial in a public court to appears shareholders who have lost their life's savings believing "record" corporate earnings were real and accurate.
The financial analysts who are supposed to fight corporate spin are often playing along. Instead of challenging the companies, they're largely passing along the rosy numbers in reports recommending stocks to investors.
"Companies are tilting the results," says fund manager Tom Brown of Second Curve Capital, "and the analysts are buying it."
An analysis of results from 500 major companies by The Associated Press, based on data provided by S&P Capital IQ, a research firm, found that the gap between the "adjusted" profits that analysts cite and bottom-line earnings figures that companies are legally obliged to report, or net income, has widened dramatically over the past five years.
At one of every five companies, these "adjusted" profits were higher than net income by 50 percent or more. Many more companies are in that category now than there were five years ago. And some companies that seem profitable on an adjusted basis are actually losing money.
* * *
It wasn't supposed to be this way. After the dot-com crash of 2000, companies and analysts vowed to clean up their act and avoid highlighting alternative versions of earnings in a way that could mislead investors.
But Lynn Turner, chief accountant at the Securities and Exchange Commission at the time, says companies are still touting "made-up, phony numbers" as much as they did 15 years ago, perhaps more, and few experts are calling them out on it.
"The analysts aren't doing enough to get behind the numbers that management gives them to find out what's really going on," Turner says.
Offering an alternative view of profits that leaves out various costs is not new. It's perfectly legal, and sometimes helpful as a tool for investors to gain insight into how a business is doing.
But with stocks breaking record after record and the current bull market entering its seventh year, there's more money riding on the assumption that the earnings figures being touted by companies and analysts are based on sound calculations.
"The longer the rally, the bigger the downside because of all the smoke and mirrors," says money manager John Del Vecchio, co-author of "What's Behind the Numbers?" a book on how profit reports can mislead.
In its study, AP compared bottom-line profit figures that follow rules called generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP, to the adjusted profit figures calculated by financial analysts and collected by S&P Capital IQ. AP looked at companies in the Standard & Poor's 500 index.
Most of the time, the adjustments made companies look better by leaving out things like costs related to laying off workers, a decline in the value of patents or other "intangible" assets, the value of company stock distributed to employees, or losses from a failed venture. Critics argue that these are regular costs and shouldn't be excluded.
Key findings
- Seventy-two percent of the companies reviewed by AP had adjusted profits that were higher than net income in the first quarter of this year. That's about the same as in the comparable period five years earlier, but the gap between the adjusted and net income figures has widened considerably: adjusted earnings were typically 16 percent higher than net income in the most recent period versus 9 percent five years ago.
- For a smaller group of the companies reviewed, 21 percent of the total, adjusted profits soared 50 percent or more over net income. This was true of just 13 percent of the group in the same period five years ago.
- Quarter after quarter, the differences between the adjusted and bottom-line figures are adding up. From 2010 through 2014, adjusted profits for the S&P 500 came in $583 billion higher than net income. It's as if each company in the S&P 500 got a check in the mail for an extra eight months of earnings.
- Fifteen companies with adjusted profits actually had bottom-line losses over the five years. Investors have poured money into their stocks just the same.
- Stocks are getting more expensive, meaning there could be a greater risk of stocks falling if the earnings figures being used to justify buying them are questionable. One measure of how richly priced stocks are suggests trouble. Three years ago, investors paid $13.50 for every dollar of adjusted profits for companies in the S&P 500 index, according to S&P Capital IQ. Now, they're paying nearly $18.
In a crackdown after the dot-com crash, regulators required companies to lay out clearly in their financial reports how they arrived at alternative versions of their profits. The bottom-line figures have to be prominently reported, too. But it's not clear the extra details have helped.
"The data is more confusing than it's been in a long time, and the reason is all the junk they put in the numbers," says fund manager Michael Lewitt of the Credit Strategist Group. He says analyst reports don't help, and finds himself spending too much time sifting through the same "nonsense" figures he confronted back in the dot-com days.
Michelle Leder, founder of Footnoted.com, which produces detailed analyses of financial statements, says most investors don't even bother to sift, preferring instead to seize upon a single number, often the wrong one.
"People just want to know the number," she says. "They don't care how the sausage is made."
Frequent adjustments
Boston Scientific, a maker of medical devices like stents used to prop open arteries, had adjusted profits of $3.6 billion in the five years through 2014, according to analysts' calculations. But if you include a write-off for a failed acquisition, various "restructuring" charges and costs stemming from layoffs and lawsuits, it's a different picture entirely: $4.9 billion in net losses.
In a brief talk to analysts in April, the chief financial officer at Boston Scientific used the word "adjusted" in referring to results 34 times, twice every minute, on average. The word is also littered throughout the company's presentations and financial reports. In recent years rivals Medtronic, Stryker and Zimmer have also highlighted their results this way, says Raj Denhoy, an analyst at Jefferies, an investment bank.
Aluminum giant Alcoa has taken "restructuring" and related charges in 20 of the past 21 quarters. The company reported net losses of more than $900 million in the five years through 2014, but analysts have largely shrugged them off because they're tied to a strategic shift that involves getting rid of unwanted businesses. Analysts prefer to point to the $3.1 billion in adjusted profits during that time.
To be fair, analysts see the adjusted figures more as a tool for helping estimate future profits than as a judgment on the past. They say many losses and charges are not likely to recur and shouldn't be included in their calculations.
But in an age of constant change, when some companies revamp their business repeatedly, many one-time items are starting to seem not so one-time anymore.
"If you have to reinvent the company every couple of quarters, then it's not a one-off," says accounting expert Jack Ciesielski, longtime publisher of The Analyst's Accounting Observer, a newsletter.
What to count
For their part, Boston Scientific and Alcoa say the extra figures they provide help shed more light on their companies. Boston Scientific says the numbers allow investors to see the company "through the eyes of management" because they are the same ones its executives use in making decisions. Alcoa says its financial results reflect a "significant transformation" to make it more competitive.
Another number often missing in adjusted profit figures is the value of stock awarded to employees. This stock-based pay, the argument goes, requires no exchange of cash, so it doesn't affect a company's earnings power. Critics say stock distributions are a part of compensation and should be counted as an expense.
"What if they said they're going to pay for rent by issuing stock?" asks Brown of Second Curve Capital. "Would you then (exclude) rent" in calculating earnings?
Salesforce.com, a leader in cloud computing, routinely excludes the cost of stock compensation from figures it touts to investors, and analysts largely do the same. Analysts say the company earned $1.2 billion in adjusted profits in the five years through 2014. Its bottom-line result, including stock pay and other costs, was a $712 million loss.
Brian Rauscher, chief portfolio strategist at Robert W. Baird & Co., says stocks can continue to rise based on an inflated account of company profits for months or even years, but not indefinitely. He says it's like a bomb no one can see has been placed under the market: You know it's there, but you're not sure when it will go off.
"We don't know if the fuse is a few inches or a few miles," he says.
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Bottom line is the dividend of any mature stock.. When are people going to get it?
There is no spoon..
""What if they said they're going to pay for rent by issuing stock?" asks Brown of Second Curve Capital. "Would you then (exclude) rent" in calculating earnings?"
Don't give them any more bad ideas, please. They've got plenty of their own already.
They already do that all over the place.
One of the dot.com companies I worked for in NYC had an office on Rector street, for the floor it was about a million a month. It wasn't anything special either, to be honest it was a dump but it had a Manhattan address. The owners of the startup paid half their rent in OTC stock for three reasons. 1) It was a no risk for them since they just had to grab some shares from the roll and make an announcement to the shareholders. 2) The tax accounting practices allowed for it. 3) Shareholders liked the idea that a building manager thought their shares were worth NYC prime real estate by the optics. Long story short, when dot.com went and dot.bombed, the building owners were SOL and holding years worth of these shares that wouldn't buy a pack of gum.
What??? You mean this shits all made up??? I want my money back.
Didn't the SEC take unkindly to this kinda stuff some years ago?
Where's the way back to Mayberry RFD and the Cleaver family?
With no mark to market they can issue OTC bonds that carry the same 'credibility' as any debt note. All without public knowledge of course, not even governments.
Understand the same people that set this up 100+ years ago were going to eventually kill all the heads of government without any question. They are just 'useful idiots'. I know it's not sane or rational, but observe the situation and ask yourself if anything offered was 'real', even to partner groups. You must understand these are incredibly 'faithful' religious zealots that really want 'zion', their ultimate target number is 144,000. The other 7 billion are disposable.
Tsk, the best and the brightest have deigned to notice the giant, steaming pile of shit sitting in the middle of corporate America. Now we come to the part where they talk about maybe, kinda, someday taking a shovel to it. More than likely they'll repackage it as fertilizer and sell it as derivatives.....
The only GAAP that matters is the big empty gaps I see in between the folds in my wallet.
Dividends are also phony, that's the illustration of the red in the charts. Those dividends/'profits' are being paid from TARP/QE/Kickbacks. The western business world priced itself out of it's own market space decades ago. It is it's own worst enemy. It should have collapsed in the 90's but with the ECB/EU allowed the opportunity (scam) to kick the can a little longer.
Dividends are being paid by ISSUING JUNK DEBT by companies in normal rate environment would never get any underwriter. LEGAL FRAUD is the US of Arsewholes way.
Part of the TARP agreements with FASB to remove mark to market to allow the smokescreen to happen so the pensions would run 'just' a little longer. The fact is the pensions weren't going to be paid anyways given the fundamentals. A country can hardly offer a pension system with no production combined with an import gap that gets wider every year by off shoring every available job that's backed by a dollar that buys less and less by the day because the system is constructed to produce inflation. Even all that effort to export the inflation eventually fails because no one really wants to inherit another person's shit sandwich.
What will eventually happen is all that exported inflation in USD and Euro's will just roll back in a tidal wave of IOU's and flood the market with the nearly 1 quadrillion dollars in derivatives and credit notes. See the fact is the game was over the second they went into debt, after that it is just a matter of waiting for civil servants to revolt because they start to feel the noose of the people they work for tighten around their necks. Because that's how it always happens with jew confetti and why every single time in history they all get run out of town. They just can't help themselves, not smart enough to change their ways. Too broken, too dumb, too much of a liability for a stable system. This time however, they've shit in everyone's sandwich. There just isn't anywhere to run anymore with central banks being franchised.
It's for the best that this be allowed to run it's course without assisting it. The math alone guarantees the outcome, the history highlights the result of every time it's been done.
"pensions weren't going to be paid anyways"
"Part of the TARP agreements with FASB to remove mark to market to allow the smokescreen to happen so the pensions would run 'just' a little longer. "
just bumping
I don't read very fast so maybe I missed other posts.
I'm trying to look at the logic a little.
If I wanted Success, I might say "You have to be a Businessman". Okay fine. You can't get rich working for the government usually and you can't get rich working for someone else usually.
- So Start a Business
- But you ask what is the biggest payoff?
- What business is the Richest Profits, Best Opportunities?
- Engineering of any kind, if you have the business skills
- Real Estate, Insurance, Finance, but you work for others usually to work into your own business (FIREs)
- Lawyers have little Regulation, but you need education and experience through practice
- Best way to Rob a Bank is to Own One
- Banking moved into Engineering, Computer Algos, High Level Accounting, Tax Consulting, and Financial Consulting
But the Law & Legal Traps are there.
If you conduct a meeting to go around the Law, then you have Broken the Law.
Lots of Young People don't know this. They can be lead to break the Law. Probably this is why Banks hire service companies and other Tranche Packagers to put things together. It is a CIA or Banking Meme, "plausible Deniability."
In Big Government the meme is stretched to include all Agency Heads or Secretaries...
Laws are broken, Financial Statements are Fraudulent, but it only requires careerist, loyal people, willing to do whatever it takes for the fake business/fraudulent business.
The place with the biggest money is the place of the most corruption or fraud. Old Businesses Dominate since they know how to game the system.
COI...we have an entire system with CONFLICT OF INTEREST at its heart
Don't care how the sausage is made. BTFD
9 ways companies fool you with earnings http://www.marketwatch.com/story/for-traders-and-reporters-earnings-seas...
Companies can learn all they want about bottom lines from Kim K.
They can learn whatevver they want about radical transformation from BruceCaitlyn...
And from the mother Jenner, they can learn how to you can have SHIT for products and still convince people to love and buy them, ie....modern day bernaysiams....
In case you, like me, like Hendrix, totally OT but yet not in some strange way, check out his latest interview, 7 days before he died.....
The man practically foretold the future of music...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7P0cJhQ1200
Jimi H died a couple of years before I quit piano and picked up the guitaR at age 11. Didn't realize it would become a lifelong love affair. But it wasn't until I was in my twenties that I went back to the music of the 60s. A lot of 60sand 70s music is now just self indulgent or embarrassing but it was original. Nowadays we're into peak music. We've run out of melodies and so even though there is more talent than ever, the innovations are much less revolutionary.
Seriously mijev, utter, weird, heavily satanic tripe today...
I am on a discovery of my musical roots trip and discovered this...the song and the voice....mind-blown...
Eddie Veder and All along the Watchtower...superb energy and rendition...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHBSvpzI7Tw
Catch the date of that interview?
Perhaps this is a big reason why CNBS's numbers keep bottoming out.
Real investors know the truth, and are ignoring Propaganda central, while regular Mom and Pop investors look around their neighborhoods scratching their heads saying What Recovery?
Fortuntately, things like the Jim Cramer Bear Stearns video will reside on the internet forever... yet unfortunately, it is too late for most Americans because they still trust their company's 'financial advisers' and spend about as much time studying their retirement portfolio as they do buying a car.
Dovie'andi se tovya sagain (It's time to toss the dice)
Got Karatbars?
No matter how many tinfoil hat conspiracy theories the Tylers prove true (and the pile is getting pretty damned high at this point), they will never be accepted by the main stream. But as a distant early warning system, they do a decent job.
My praise is not to be confused with an endorsement of what they think will happen in the "market". Nobody can figure that out.
"The analysts aren't doing enough to get behind the numbers that management gives them to find out what's really going on," Turner says.
And she is the chief accountant at the SEC. I think she answered her own question, didn't she?
If you're not comfortable swimming around in absurd levels of hypocrisy every day of the week, it's best not to work for the government.
Yeah, banks accused us of "tinfoil hat theories" regarding our two foreclosure cases. Three years later we, Pro Se defendants, beat them as both banks dismissed their cases against us. Both attorneys (two different firms) quit their companies. Guess they got tired of being beat by the Pro Se folks and they got tired of working for lying criminals, the banks.
It's sad so many people walked away out of fear of these banks when they probably could have kept their houses and not gone through bankruptcy. My brother (an insurance investigator) is still doing mortgage fraud cases 6 and 7 years later and you are entirely correct. The paper trail is indeed a cesspool of fraud and corruption.
You are not getting the house 'free and clear'. The Note may be unenforcible, however
the mortgage lien remains on the title.Won't be going anywhere either.
So you have an unsellable house, but you can rent it.
An interesesting grey market about to start in this area.
Some could bargains by quit claim,then clear title after seven years of adverse posession under
color of title.The 'owner' or relative cannot do it though.Has to be arms length, and clean
hands.
Imagine submitting a tax return to IRS with non GAAP or seasonally adjusted income
They'll seize assets and throw you in jail quicker than Halley's Comet flies.
That tells youthe government doesn't believe its own bullshit nor corporation's bullshit.
"The financial analysts who are supposed to fight corporate spin are often playing along. "
Say it ain't so.
"It is hard to get a man to understand something he is paid to not understand."
"The financial analysts who are supposed to fight corporate spin are often playing along. "
Sacre Bleu!
Everyone will now use "mark to fantasy" accounting...
moral hazard is a real bitch like that.
What do you mean 'now'?
Since Shortly After LehmanTM
Started with the savings and loan scandals in the 1980's actually, it's been the only reason that license was given so often. What's changed between now and then is the entire media chain is now centrally run to frame, develop, hide, omit or censure the content of the message being delivered. Wagging the dog as it were.
That's a good point about the S&L scandal. I dismiss that as the starting point to some extent because banks always had free license to manipulate their reported earnings. I mean, honestly, manipulating earnings is what banks DO. It's who they ARE. And it had been like that for a long time even before the S&L crisis and everyone knew it. But a bread-and-butter, brick-and-mortar company like Alco doing it EVERY DAMNED QUARTER FOR YEARS... that was new.
I know, the only way to let collapse is just like every other time in history. It just falls apart from the usual stupidity and greed of a handful of jackasses. Afterwards people get a little wiser for being such idiots and believing any of them then the entire system reboots. Just the way things happen.
Just wait until all the spooks, mercs and soldiers start getting letters about pension adjustment allowances. Whatever they pay tripling or quadrupling with no return on investment. Eventually they'll catch wise that when they see these banker asspicks snorting blow, buying private islands and covered in 10k a night hookers; the connection will be made that's their money, their time in, the piggies are pissing away. That's their 'carrot' gone. For most of them its the only reason they stand on the wall put up with the bullshit. Once that reason is gone, like everywhere else in history, it's done quietly and without hesitation. "Crowns" have, can and do get removed for very little. Messing with another person's wallet, that's a big one and typically unforgivable.
Moral or ethical rationalization? That's been gone a long time in the rear view mirror. There is no merit in any of the companies listed at this point because they don't provide anything of value. Even to their shareholders. As far as Mark to market goes, it was replaced in 2009 by the FASB ruling committee. This guy has a clip of the bunch of weasels clapping each other on the back about how mark to market fantasy would be for the best. You can literally visualize them happily making their own noose to hang from.
http://taylorfrigon.blogspot.ca/2009/03/big-news-on-mark-to-market-accou...
Enron made a lot of people rich!!
Then, it didnt.
It's all perception management at this point. TPTB know that if the truth was told, heads would roll, and they'll do anything to prevent that.
I'm not at all shocked by this - I've long believed that companies make up numbers just to meet the analysts' expectations. Liars figure, figures lie.
"Don't tell me the facts, lie to me. Tell me I can retire early and live well. Let me see a big print on my statement.
Never-mind that 2001 and 2008 down 60% crap, I want bigger and bigger dominoes like that commercial on the T.V."
Let me try this, after all, a silly salesman ought to be able to do it...
Sales = Revenue
Revenue - Costs = Profit
Profit divided by outstanding number of shares of stock = earnings per share
Of course , this would be too easy, an army of bean counters and book cookers would be unemployed, if the BLS would ever bother to count them...
Recently too, Walgreens has no time for the poor anymore..took closed store inventory and sent it to a landfill. Of course the reason here amongst many other things is that there's no personal data to sell if from the sale of the merchandise as Walgreens makes 1-2 billion a year selling personal data.
http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2015/06/walgreens-no-time-for-charity-moves.html
Boston Scientific is over there in business paying United Heatlhcare/Optum money to shift through all your insurance claims and medical records. Untied is in business with the Mayo Clinic (and you might think differently of them after reading a few posts). Boston Scientific pays Optum for the luxury of searching through so called de-identified medical records supplied by Mayo Clinic and a few other members. Optum/United builds apps to help them and through all of this we are supposed to have great breakthroughs with "big data"..nope. Little items, sure but not what's being sold. There's a lot of "fake" going on over in this direction as well.
http://ducknetweb.blogspot.com/2014/05/boston-scientific-joins-optum-united.html
These "adjusted" numbers are as the $100 billion in "temporary" reverse repos by the NY Fed. Those too will never go away and grow and grow...
This is nothing new. I have a pal whose Silicon Valley company shipped, at quarter-end, Products to distributors - - into 18 Wheeler trailers out back. After qtr-end, they SOLD THEM by force.
From hiding 100 locomotives to derivatives manipulations, GE is still my personal favorite for accounting schemes ... from a dozen years ago.
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/aug2009/db2009084_567813.htm
"Mommy, what's a stock?"
"Well, it used to be a means for people to invest their savings in the capital of other businesses. That enabled those businesses to grow and prosper, and for the stock buyer to prosper as well. Now a stock is a means of plunder, stealing, by the banksters for their Zionist owners."
"Mommy, what's a Zionist?"
"Well, you know Swiper the Fox..."
Liberty is a demand. Tyranny is submission..
"Well, you know Swiper the Fox..."
OK, that's legit funny.
Mark to market is a bitch too
But many things that are hard to accept are still the right thing.
I always thought the idea of a business was to MAKE MONEY. It amazes me, how after the first dot.com bubble that everything that was done illegally was then implemented by Wall St as legitimate.
You mean to tell me that accounting practices are a scam? You're saying that Clintons "budget surplus" was all accounting Hocus-Pocus? Its seems soo legitimate to have to owe yourself money. You're saying ACA hasn't brought down the price of health insurance. That there's no need for mark to market.
Don't worry I'm sure all Wall St economists, analysts and accounts know what they're doing and just like the people that own the FED, are looking out for YOUR best interests.
Universities should offer training in a vocation which is gaining in popularity and offer degrees. The kind of profession which will enable students to pay off student loans in a few months if they can get a career with one of the organizations listed here. They are not much different than fortune 500 companies, they supply a demand and will use any means possible to get their way.
http://www.cheatsheet.com/business/crime-does-pay-5-of-the-richest-crime-groups-in-the-world.html/?a=viewall
Reposting: Committee of 300.
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=R9HZvsliT5E
lulz. The abacus group in a digital world, and people wonder why they can't get their shit together.
It's bullshit when the pension misses are added back to non-gaap. Wake me up when that farce ends.
Waiting for the first pension default.
And then the next. And the next. And the next after that.
Sorry folks,... but TPP will make 'non-GAPP' obsolete? a day late and a laughable curiousity at bes`t'est, being painted as of a post`concern? This discourse-of-abandonment by the admirality of MSM's finest...now brought back to a lazarusian fait`accompli comatose life, be it only a couple of 'Scores' to late[?!?] is all butt[t] folly!
[?] Tis but a seque into the 'Neo`Great Game', where Hinduistan, Atheist`China, RussoPhobia and Anglo Dykes duel for a square of post-colonialism long past...?
The Gubmint wants it's cut, and it wants it now. You stingy corporations better start coughing up your "fines" so the "regulators" can have their parties and piece of the corruption pie, too - or they'll sell you out to the Ministry of Propaganda also known as the "media"....
... and at the end of the day, still, nobody goes to jail for the same shit that would send a regular guy to a gulag for a million years.....
Corporate rabbits have to Zig Zag .... when the Socialist Keynesian hounds .... are snapping at their cotton tails .... it's called survival .... the unexpected consequences of Keynesian Socialism !
Accounting:
1 +1 = 2
Non-Gaap:
x + x = y.
Yeah! That’s it!
All of the above events are major contributions to the credit bubble that is bursting now...
http://www.globaldeflationnews.com/anatomy-of-a-bubble-how-the-federal-r...
Same practice in nearly every facet of our civilization. Example: 'climate change', which used to be called 'global warming', only that period of warming ended in '98 (on a global scale, per the Brit Met). Every EQ listing by the USGS is downgraded to the lowest reading if possible, volcanic activity is mostly ignored here in the States and all the rest of the 'unexpected' or 'surprising' weather activity is just used for nightly entertainment and in general is ignored. The patterns of these events are all going parabolic. Even NASA is talking about the lack of activity on the sun, which means our EM field goes quiet as well in response, thus any sudden activity results in major cataclysmic damage... using the Star Trek analogy: We are losing our shields captain!
The solar activity goes quiet only when facing our planet, but that hasn't stopped all the rest of the EM field related activity, which have gone parabolic in the last decade. We live in a planetary civilization falling fast into the rabbit hole. Global warming was a major 'sign' of our times... as that late '70s Newsweek article on the Coming Ice Age attests to... GM was the 'shot across the bow' or the red flag warming us of what's coming our way, something very wicked indeed, the return of the 'old gods'.... comets, whose number have also gone parabolic.... just as our civilization has gone parabolicly pssychopathic. History tells us this never ends well.
From Victor Clube,4 June 1996, 'The Hazard to Civilization from Fireballs and Comets': "The Christian, Islamic and Judaic cultures have all moved since the European Renaissance to adopt an unreasoning anti-apolcalyptic stance, apparently unaware of the burgeoning science of catastophes. History, it now seems, is repeating itself: it has taken the Space Age to revive the Platonist voice of reason but it emerges this time within a modern anti-fundamentalist, anti-apocalyptic tradition over which governments may, as before, be unableo exercise control.... Cynics (or modern sophists), in other words, would say that we do not need the celestial threat to disguise Cold War intentions; rather we need the Cold War to disguise celestial intentions!"
From Laura Knight-Jadczyk, 2012, 'The Apocalypse: Comets, Asteroids and Cyclical Catastrophes', p21: "So, the question is: if there is even a 10% chance that we are facinga Shoemaker-Levy-type event, why isn't anybody doing anything about it? Well...maybe they are. Maybe all of this 'War on Terror' business and getting control of resources is, at its root, the psychopaths way of handling a threat to their survival. Since it is obvious that the 'War on Terror' was created as a direct replacement for the 'Cold War', maybe it is true that "we do not need the celestial threat to disguise 'War on Terror' intentions; rather we need the 'War on Terror' to disguise celestial intentions!" Maybe it isn't the 'Twilight of the Psychopaths' as Dr. Kevin Barrett might like to think, but the Twilight of Humanity; if we don't wake up."
We see the same pattern on Wall Street don't we? Forget GAAP, forget reality, just use some more revision, some more hope, some more imagination, keep dreaming and maybe this nightmare can be ignored? It is said that we don't have much time left before our 'dark star' signals its flyby and after that noise passes by, this comet cluster, newly recharged, will come through our system to give us untold number of cosmic kisses.... as our EM field shifts, ice age kicks in and in general the game changes. School is about to be let out for summer... how many are prepared for that? It seems our economic farce is just a mirror of all the other farces in our civlization, like this 'War on Terror' or our new 'Cold War', nothing ever changes, and they always end the same way.... history will be destroyed and rewritten after all the chaos restores a new world order, one in which we will have become merely a passing memory, quickly forgotten in our quest for survival.
'Here's looking at you kid.'
'Hold on, it's gonna be a bumpy ride.'
'Alcoa can't wait'...
Could the GNP number be phoney?
Here are some more signs of a coming recession.
http://michaelekelley.com/2015/05/29/mergers-and-acquisitions-set-record...
http://michaelekelley.com/2015/02/20/fed-warns-of-two-bubbles/
http://michaelekelley.com/2015/02/24/would-you-pay-39-more-than-asked/
Here is the starting point.
http://michaelekelley.com/2015/04/28/next-recession-will-start-with-this-country/
Here is how to prepare.
http://michaelekelley.com/2014/10/16/8-things-to-do-when-recession-happens/
Here is how to get your mind off this stuff.
http://michaelekelley.com/category/humor/
Good luck!