Tag: globalization

QUOTES OF THE DAY

“Fraud and falsehood only dread examination. Truth invites it.”

Samuel Johnson

“Financialization is profit margin growth without labor productivity growth. That sounds like a small thing, but I tell you it is everything.

Financialization is squeezing more earnings from a dollar of sales without squeezing at all, but through tax arbitrage or balance-sheet arbitrage.

Financialization is the zero-sum-game aspect of capitalism, where profit-margin growth is both pulled forward from future real growth and pulled away from current economic risk-taking.

Financialization is the smiley-face perversion of Adam Smith’s invisible hand and Joseph Schumpeter’s creative destruction.

Financialization is a global phenomenon. In China, it’s transmitted through the real-estate market. In the U.S., it’s transmitted through the stock market.”

Ben Hunt

“God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”

C. S. Lewis

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COMMON SENSE – 2017 (PART TWO)

In Part One of this article I explored Thomas Paine’s critical role in the creation of our nation. His Common Sense pamphlets inspired the common people to uncommon acts of courage and heroic feats of valor; leading to the great experiment we call the United States of America. Paine, Franklin and the other Founding Fathers produced a republic, if we could keep it.

John Adams championed the new Constitution precisely because it would not create a democracy, as he knew a democracy “soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself.” Their herculean efforts, sacrifices, and bloodshed have been for naught as we allowed our republic to devolve into a democracy and ultimately into our current corporate fascist warfare/welfare surveillance state. Sadly, we were unable to keep the republic Franklin and his fellow revolutionaries gave us.

“From the errors of other nations, let us learn wisdom.” – Thomas Paine, Common Sense

Some might contend Paine’s Common Sense arguments against a despotic monarchy two and a half centuries ago, with an audience of two and a half million colonists, couldn’t be pertinent today in a divided nation of 325 million people. But when you examine the events, actions and catalysts inspiring Paine to pen Common Sense, you see the parallels with the events, decisions and facilitators of our current Crisis.

Continue reading “COMMON SENSE – 2017 (PART TWO)”

WTF CHART OF THE DAY

The chart below is simply horrifying. Not only are these median net worth figures scary, realize that 50% of the households in the country have less than these figures. Having a a net worth of less than $200,000 as you approach or enter retirement is a recipe for disaster. When 70% to 80% of that net worth is tied up in your house, you are nothing but a dead retiree walking. You should acquire a taste for cat food and learn how to panhandle for money.

The $25,000 to $45,000 of non-home related net worth would also include vehicles, furniture, electronics, and appliances. The amount of this net worth in usable cash or investments is microscopic. How can people expect survive for decades on virtually no savings? This chart reveals that a huge percentage of American households will face miserable retirement years and/or having to work until the day they die. They will have to sell their homes to live off the proceeds. Who will they sell to? You can see the younger generations don’t have a pot to piss in. This does not bode well for home prices over the next couple decades, despite the artificial boom engineered by the Fed and Wall Street since 2012.

The unequivocal facts in that chart are the result of globalizing good jobs to foreign lands, the utter failure of our educational system, the success of Wall Street/Mega-Corporation propaganda in convincing a vast swath of America to live for today using easy money credit, politicians squandering the national wealth on the welfare/warfare state, and a Federal Reserve that has debased our currency by 96% in just over 100 years.

This chart will look even worse when the stock/bond/housing bubble implodes for the third time in the last sixteen years. We are sitting down to a banquet of consequences.

median-net-worth-by-age_large

 

THE FED INDUCED FARCE

The minutes from the last Fed meeting were released on Wednesday afternoon. The minutes, along with a squadron of jabbering Fed heads lying about the economy doing great, pretty much locked in the most talked about .25% interest rate increase in world history.  Evidently the Wall Street titans of greed have convinced the muppets higher interest rates are great for stocks, as the market soared by 250 points. As institutional money exits the market on these rigged up days, the dumb money retail investor buys into the market with dreams of riches just like they did with Pets.com in 2000, McMansions in 2005, and Bear Stearns in 2007.

The Fed has lost any credibility they ever thought they deserved by delaying this meaningless insignificant interest rate increase for the last three years, so they will make this token increase in December come hell or high water. They want to give themselves some leeway for easing again when this debt saturated global economy implodes in the near future. The Fed is trapped by their own cowardice and capture by the Wall Street cabal. If they raise rates the USD will strengthen even more than it has already. The USD is already at 11 year highs. It has appreciated by 25% in the last year versus the basket of world currencies. The babbling boobs on the entertainment news channels authoritatively expound with a straight face about the rise in the dollar being due to our strong economic performance. It’s beyond laughable, as the economy has been sucking wind since the day the Fed turned off the QE spigot in October 2014.


Chart of the Day

Continue reading “THE FED INDUCED FARCE”

MAFF

Guest Post by starfcker

OK, doomers, this is the big one I promised you. Fighter jet America is plunging to earth, engines aflame, all anybody can imagine is the big smoking crater when this bitch hits the ground. 18 trillion in debt, federal deficits as far as the eye can see, unfunded liabilities at as high a numbers as the scaremongers can imagine them, our very place in the world threatened by crushing debt and political ineptitude. America’s time has come and gone. Right, doomers?

Wrong. We’ve got one thing on our side. Math. All of our problems stem from one flawed premise. The flawed premise? Globalization. That we can’t make decisions in our own interest, that there is some greater good that we must sacrifice ourselves and our families and our country to. Horseshit. If you believe that, you are truly a brainwashed idiot. Each of us can change that right now, and as a country we can change that next November. Why is Donald Trump so confident that he can turn our economic trajectory on a dime? Because he can do the math. We have to start somewhere.

So let’s start at the same point as Trump. First, some baseline numbers, all from 2014. United States GDP, 17.4 trillion dollars. Total tax revenue, just over 3 trillion dollars, or about 17.5 % of GDP. Federal deficit, 483 billion dollars. National debt, 18 trillion dollars, more than 100% of GDP. Number of working age Americans not in the labor force, 94 million. Sounds pretty horrible, right? Not if we focus on the root of the problem. Globalization.

Continue reading “MAFF”

WOULD YOU LIKE FRIES WITH THAT?

Thank God for obesity and stupidity. Without it, there would be no job growth in America. We always need more teachers – it’s for the chilruns. It requires more and more union government drones to make our chilruns dumber. With 13% of the population obese and growing, we need more healthcare workers to supply them with drugs and help them tie their shoes and wipe their fat asses. But the real growth industry in America is feeding the rotund masses. In 1990 there were 17.5 million manufacturing workers in the U.S. and 6.2 million waiters & bartenders. The gap was 11.3 million.

Today there are 12.3 million manufacturing workers and 11 million waiters & bartenders. The gap is 1.3 million.

Hmm. I wonder which jobs pay more?

The American transformational success story in all its glory.

Thank you NAFTA, globalization, corporate fascists, corrupt politicians, Harvard MBAs and the insatiable appetites of the average American.


MASS DELUSION – AMERICAN STYLE (Featured Article)

“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.” – Charles Mackay – Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

 

The American public thinks they are rugged individualists, who come to conclusions based upon sound reason and a rational thought process. The truth is that the vast majority of Americans act like a herd of cattle or a horde of lemmings. Throughout history there have been many instances of mass delusion. They include the South Sea Company bubble, Mississippi Company bubble, Dutch Tulip bubble, and Salem witch trials. It appears that mass delusion has replaced baseball as the national past-time in America. In the space of the last 15 years the American public have fallen for the three whopper delusions:

  1. Buy stocks for the long run
  2. Homes are always a great investment
  3. Globalization will benefit all Americans

Bill Bonner and Lila Rajiva ponder why people have always acted in a herd like manner in their outstanding book Mobs, Messiahs and Markets:

“Of course, we doubt if many public prescriptions are really intended to solve problems. People certainly believe they are when they propose them. But, like so much of what goes on in a public spectacle, its favorite slogans, too, are delusional – more in the nature of placebos than propositions. People repeat them like Hail Marys because it makes them feel better. Most of our beliefs about the economy – and everything else – are of this nature. They are forms of self medication, superstitious lip service we pay to the powers of the dark, like touching wood….or throwing salt over your shoulder. “Stocks for the long run,” “Globalization is good.” We repeat slogans to ourselves, because everyone else does. It is not so much bad luck we want to avoid as being on our own. Why it is that losing your life savings should be less painful if you have lost it in the company of one million other losers, we don’t know. But mankind is first of all a herd animal and fears nothing more than not being part of the herd.”

Continue reading “MASS DELUSION – AMERICAN STYLE (Featured Article)”