Unemployment

"It is incompetence or dishonesty for my fellow economists to deny these two effects of minimum wages: discrimination against employment of low-skilled labor and the lowering of the cost of racial discrimination."

President Barack Obama’s final State of the Union address came up short of the facts on several topics. Obama apparently omitted part of his presidency in boasting of nearly 900,000 manufacturing jobs “in the past six years.” Over his entire time in office, manufacturing jobs have gone down by 230,000.

The Islamic State's play for Libyan oil could lead the warring governments to speed up a power-sharing agreement to end the civil war and unite them in the face of an even greater threat. Or, they could lose all to ISIS, which would allow the terrorist group to seize control of an OPEC country.

As the towering forces that are prevailing against failing global economic architecture and the pit of debt beneath that structure, as laid out below, it is clear that the 'Epocalypse' - encompassing the roots "economic, epoch, collapse" and "apocalypse" - is here, and it is everywhere. The Great Collapse has already begun. What follows are the megatrends that will increasingly gang up in the first part of 2016 to stomp the deeply flawed global economy down into its own hole of debt.

The state of our nation under Obama has become more bureaucratic, more debt-ridden, more violent, more militarized, more fascist, more lawless, more invasive, more corrupt, more untrustworthy, more mired in war, and more unresponsive to the wishes and needs of the electorate. Most of all, the government, already diabolical and manipulative to the nth degree, has mastered the art of "do what I say and not what I do" hypocrisy.

While the President will do his best to put a positive spin on the current economic environment, and the success of his policies, when he gives his “State of the Union” address, it would be worth remembering whom he is actually addressing. It is also worth considering that much of this is likely the reason that Donald Trump is surging in Conservative polling. As with all things – it is the lens from which you view the world that defines what you see. For Wall Street, things could not be better. For Main Street, most everything could be better. The President has a lot of “convincing” to do if he expects to change voter’s attitudes between now and the 2016 Presidential election.

On Tuesday, it was announced that over seventeen million new vehicles were sold in 2015, the highest it’s ever been in United States history. While the media claims that this record has been reached because of drastic improvements to the US economy, they are once again failing to account for the central factor: credit expansion. The auto bubble has yet to burst, but its negative effects are already starting to gradually appear.

Initially both European stocks and US equity futures were grateful that China has picked at least one asset class to prop up overnight, and rose in an extremely illiquid market with European shares gaining for first time in 4 days, as S&P futures rise even as the MSCI Asia Pacific ex-Japan index just fell to the lowest level in more than 4 years. However, as of moments ago the Stoxx 600 had faded all its earlier gains and was trading near the flatline, as an algo takes out all stops on the top and bottom once more, and looks set to move on to US futures shortly.

An unseen bubble at the heart of the financial system is deflating with unknown consequences. When bubbles deflate, and here we are talking about one in the hundreds of trillions, bad debts are usually exposed. Even though much of the reduction in outstanding OTC derivatives is due to consolidation of positions following the Frank Dodd Act, much of it is not. When free markets reassert themselves, and they always do, the disruption promises to be substantial. We appear to be in the early stages of this event. If so, demand for physical gold can be expected to escalate rapidly as a financial crisis unfolds.

"It’s no secret that Alberta’s economy is closely linked to the peaks and craters of oil prices—nominal GDP (not adjusted for inflation) swings in tandem with crude prices. It’s why Fort McMurray is like a wounded beast these days. MacKay’s neighbour got laid off this fall. “I watched the bank come and take his truck,” he recalls—it was that or not feed the kids."

As we noted in the jobs preview, only a super strong number had any chance of prompting a market reaction, and sure enough, the just announced December print of +292,000 smashed expectations of +200K, surging from last month's upward revised 252K. So time for another rate hike, right? Not so fast: as usual, the fly in the ointment was a well-familiar one: wages simply did not grow, and with Wall Street expecting a 0.2% increase in average hourly wages, in December not only was there no wage growth, but in fact, average hourly earnings posted a tiny decline from $25.25 to $25.24.

Now that the Fed has commenced its rate hike cycle, the jobs report suddenly takes on far less significance because only a massively "outlier" print will have an impact on Fed thinking, thinking which so far appears undented despite a raging manufacturing recession across the US. This means that the December jobs could be the "most important ever" only in retrospect.

The half-life of the latest "market supporting" intervention by the Chinese government: just about 12 hours.

• Weakness in the Canadian Economy driving its currency lower
• Inverse relationship between commodity prices and USDCAD exchange rate
• Why there could be a reversal in trend

How did the Canadian currency reach a twelve year low?

The US Dollar reached a recent high against CAD at 1.41081 on January 6^th a level not seen since August 2003. The general bull trend the green back has been in picked up momentum since talk begun by the Fed of a return to higher interest rates.