Six More Years of Fraud and ZIRP
“If you will not fight what is right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than live as slaves.”
Winston Churchill
With all the negative news out of Europe, how do you find a positive story? Is there a way to structure a portfolio that gives you permission to be more aggressive when there are danger signs all around? Everyone is worried about being blindsided by a significant downdraft in the markets when maybe we should be thinking about making sure we don’t miss a bull market somewhere. These and several dozen other topics were on the table when the Mauldin Economics writing team gathered here in Dallas for 3½ days of intensive talk, interviews, and planning. Today we’ll go over a few of the highlights of this last week, and I’ll share a few reasons to be optimistic about 2015.
Continue reading “Portfolio Strategies 2015: Investing in an Age of Divergence”
A massive fire that engulfed a tire plant in Thailand’s Chonburi province caused about $40mn in losses for one of China’s largest tyre exporters, officials said on Monday.
So let me get this straight. Facebook stock is trading at $75 per share, not far off its all-time high. It has an astronomical PE Ratio of 66. And it had a drop in active users of 9% last year. They generate all their revenue from ads. If they continue to lose users, the ad revenue will decline. They have peaked and are headed south. Young people are abandoning it rapidly. Only middle aged women use Facebook now. Stick a fork in these ass clowns. Anyone owning this stock at this level is a fool.
According to research conducted by Global Web Index, Facebook was the only large social network suffering a drop in active usage last year.
You will find more statistics at Statista
But just a week ago, the government in Yemen fell to a Shiite militia movement thought to be friendly to Iran. The US embassy in Yemen’s capitol was forced to evacuate personnel and shut down operations.
If Yemen is any kind of model, it is a model of how badly US interventionism has failed.
In 2011 the US turned against Yemen’s long-time dictator, Saleh, and supported a coup that resulted in another, even more US-friendly leader taking over in a “color revolution.” The new leader, Hadi, took over in 2012 and soon became a strong supporter of the US drone program in his country against al-Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula.
But last week Hadi was forced to flee from office in the coup. The media reports that the US has lost some of its intelligence capability in Yemen, which is making it more difficult to continue the drone strikes. Nevertheless, the White House said last week that its drone program would continue as before, despite the disintegration of the Yemeni government.
And the drone strikes have continued. Last Monday, in the first US strike after the coup, a 12 year old boy was killed in what is sickeningly called “collateral damage.” Two alleged “al-Qaeda militants” were also killed. On Saturday yet another drone strike killed three more suspected militants.
The US government has killed at least dozens of civilian non-combatants in Yemen, but even those it counts as “militants” may actually be civilians. That is because the Obama administration counts any military-aged male in the area around a drone attack as a combatant.
In the January issue of BIG GOLD, I interviewed 17 analysts, economists, and authors on what they expect for gold in 2015. Some of those included what we affectionately call our Casey Brain Trust—Doug Casey, Olivier Garret, Bud Conrad, David Galland, Marin Katusa, Louis James, and Terry Coxon. The issue was so popular that we decided to reprint this portion.
I think you’ll find some very insightful and useful reading here (click on a link to read his bio)…
Jeff: The Fed and other central banks have kept the economy and markets propped up longer than you thought they could. Has the Fed succeeded in staving off crisis?
Doug: I’m genuinely surprised things have held together over the last year. The trillions of currency units created since 2007 have mostly inflated financial assets, creating bubbles everywhere. There’s an excellent chance that the bubble will burst this year. I don’t know whether it will result in a catastrophic deflation, extreme inflation, or both in sequence. I’m only sure it will result in chaos and extreme unpleasantness.
Jeff: Are we still going to get rich from gold stocks? Or should we face reality and start exiting?
Doug: The fact so many people are discouraged with gold and mining stocks is just another indicator that we’re at the bottom. Gold and silver are now, once more, superb speculations. And I think we’ll see some 10-to-1 shots in gold stocks—if not this year, then 2016. I can afford to wait with those kinds of returns in prospect.
Continue reading “2015 Outlook: What You Really Need to Know”
Guest Post by Jim Kunstler
As a political psychoanalyst I find the Super-bowl halftime show the best concise index of how psychotic American culture is becoming from year to year, and the 2015 version signaled a complete break from reality, a nightmare of twerking robots in a hall of mirrors, as if America had utterly surrendered its tattered soul to some rogue motherboard pulsing deep within Dr. Evil’s subterranean palace of sin. Hence it is the perfect analog for understanding otherwise incomprehensible happenings such as the USA’s role in fomenting further chaos and mayhem in Ukraine.
How otherwise to explain things like this morning’s New York Times report that the USA “now supports providing defensive weapons and equipment to Kiev’s beleaguered forces, and an array of administration and military officials appear to be edging toward that position….”
Earth calling New York Times readers: I regret to inform you that this decision was already reached a year ago when we paid for the coup d’état against the elected President, Viktor Yanukovych, after the poor sap decided to not sign up with EU but rather the Russian-backed Eurasian Customs Union. Whoops! You’re so out of here, Bub, State Department Under Secretary Victoria Nuland burbled in a clandestinely recorded phone call to the American ambassador. Will somebody please find Yats! Yes Yats! [UKR politician Arseniy Yatsenyuk] and plug the Bluetooth earpiece of power into his skull!
Let the spin begin. The country has clearly entered recession, but the government bureaucrats, corrupt politicians, criminal Wall Street bankers, and their corporate media mouthpieces refuse to acknowledge the truth. They have too much wealth at stake to report the facts. They need to exit the markets before the muppets.
Consumer spending in December collapsed at the greatest rate in five years. Remember 2009? It wasn’t a great year for the economy.
That always happens when the economy is growing at 4%. Right? That always happens when the unemployment rate has plunged to 5.6%. Right? That always happens when the weather was downright balmy compared to the Polar Vortex December last year. Right? That always happens when consumer confidence is supposedly at 7 year highs. Right?
I thought the massive savings from the collapse in gasoline prices was supposed to translate into huge spending gains and boost the economy to new heights. That was the MSM storyline, and they are sticking to it.
Despite the absolutely dreadful data, the spin started immediately. They grasped onto the 0.3% increase in personal income as a straw of positivity. One problem. The increase wasn’t driven by people with jobs getting higher wages. And the increase was actually only 0.28%. The press release reveals the truth you won’t get from CNBC or any of the other corporate shill networks.
http://www.bea.gov/newsreleases/national/pi/2015/pdf/pi1214.pdf
Here are my observations, which you won’t hear elsewhere:
I guess doing stupid shit crosses generations. Even though Millennials are saddled with hundreds of billions in student loan debt, have either no jobs or shitty low paying jobs, live in their parent’s basement, and already waste what little money they have on electronic iGadgets, they still manage to eat out at restaurants at an astoundingly stupid level. Boomers, who should have accumulated a significant nest egg after 30 or 40 years in the workforce, spend 10.6% less per year at restaurants than supposedly broke, negative net worth Millennials. I guess marketing propaganda and complete lack of math skills taught in our public schools have worked their magic. The delusion of getting something for nothing and debt based consumption lives on.
Millennials love their restaurants.
Never mind the burden of student-loan debt and those low paychecks. Millennials—or at least those between 25 and 34 years old—spend more money on food outside the home than Boomers do.
Millennial households spent an average of $2,639 a year on their burgers, pizza, coffee and more in 2013, according to The Food Institute, a food-industry group. That’s 10.6% more than the $2,386 that the average Boomer household spends eating away from home.
Continue reading “MILLENNIALS DO SOMETHING BETTER THAN BOOMERS”
Citigroup: $2.5 trillion ($2,500,000,000,000)
Morgan Stanley: $2.04 trillion ($2,040,000,000,000)
Merrill Lynch: $1.949 trillion ($1,949,000,000,000)
Bank of America: $1.344 trillion ($1,344,000,000,000)
Barclays PLC (United Kingdom): $868 billion ($868,000,000,000)
Bear Sterns: $853 billion ($853,000,000,000)
Goldman Sachs: $814 billion ($814,000,000,000)
Royal Bank of Scotland (UK): $541 billion ($541,000,000,000)
JP Morgan Chase: $391 billion ($391,000,000,000)
Deutsche Bank (Germany): $354 billion ($354,000,000,000)
UBS (Switzerland): $287 billion ($287,000,000,000)
Credit Suisse (Switzerland): $262 billion ($262,000,000,000)
Lehman Brothers: $183 billion ($183,000,000,000)
Bank of Scotland (United Kingdom): $181 billion ($181,000,000,000)
BNP Paribas (France): $175 billion ($175,000,000,000)
Continue reading “RAND PAUL REINTRODUCES BILL TO AUDIT THE FED”
A little truthiness from a Fed Gov and the always truthful John Hussman:
“The history is that monetary policy is not ultimately a very effective tool at solving real economic structural problems. It can try for a while but the problem then is that it’s only temporarily effective, and when you can’t do it anymore you get the explosion yesterday in the Swiss market. One of the things I’ve tried to argue is look, if we believe that monetary policy is doing what we say it’s doing and depressing real interest rates and goosing the economy, and we’re in some sense distorting what might be the normal market outcomes, at some point we’re going to have to stop doing it. At some point the pressure is going to be too great. The market forces are going to overwhelm us. We’re not going to be able to hold the line anymore. And then you get that rapid snapback in premiums as the market realizes that central banks can’t do this forever. And that’s going to cause volatility and disruption.” – Charles Plosser
For all the Fed chasing lemming investing geniuses who think the Fed keeping interest rates low guarantees investment riches, think again:
“Imagine some national (and probably global) volcanic eruption, initially flowing along channels of distress that were created during the Unraveling era and further widened by the catalyst. Trying to foresee where the eruption will go once it bursts free of the channels is like trying to predict the exact fault line of an earthquake. All you know in advance is something about the molten ingredients of the climax, which could include the following:
The Fourth Turning – Strauss & Howe – 1997
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 02/01/2015 14:45 -0500
Day after day in modern macro-economics, investors are bombarded with ‘odd’ seasonal adjustments that spuriously lift (in the case of growth-related variables) or reduce (in the case of inflation-related variables) data to ensure a constant flow of “we must keep offering free/cheap money” narrative-confirming news.
However, as The Telegraph reports, it appears this “seasonal adjustment” smoke-screen has reached the just as bifurcated opinioned world of global warming trends and Climate-Gate…
Although it has been emerging for seven years or more, one of the most extraordinary scandals of our time has never hit the headlines. Yet another little example of it lately caught my eye when, in the wake of those excited claims that 2014 was “the hottest year on record”, I saw the headline on a climate blog: “Massive tampering with temperatures in South America”. The evidence on Notalotofpeopleknowthat, uncovered by Paul Homewood, was indeed striking.
Puzzled by those “2014 hottest ever” claims, which were led by the most quoted of all the five official global temperature records – Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (Giss) – Homewood examined a place in the world where Giss was showing temperatures to have risen faster than almost anywhere else: a large chunk of South America stretching from Brazil to Paraguay.
Noting that weather stations there were thin on the ground, he decided to focus on three rural stations covering a huge area of Paraguay. Giss showed it as having recorded, between 1950 and 2014, a particularly steep temperature rise of more than 1.5C: twice the accepted global increase for the whole of the 20th century.
But when Homewood was then able to check Giss’s figures against the original data from which they were derived, he found that they had been altered. Far from the new graph showing any rise, it showed temperatures in fact having declined over those 65 years by a full degree. When he did the same for the other two stations, he found the same. In each case, the original data showed not a rise but a decline.
Homewood had in fact uncovered yet another example of the thousands of pieces of evidence coming to light in recent years that show that something very odd has been going on with the temperature data relied on by the world’s scientists. And in particular by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which has driven the greatest and most costly scare in history: the belief that the world is in the grip of an unprecedented warming.
How have we come to be told that global temperatures have suddenly taken a great leap upwards to their highest level in 1,000 years? In fact, it has been no greater than their upward leaps between 1860 and 1880, and 1910 and 1940, as part of that gradual natural warming since the world emerged from its centuries-long “Little Ice Age” around 200 years ago.
This belief has rested entirely on five official data records. Three of these are based on measurements taken on the Earth’s surface, versions of which are then compiled by Giss, by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and by the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit working with the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction, part of the UK Met Office. The other two records are derived from measurements made by satellites, and then compiled by Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) in California and the University of Alabama, Huntsville (UAH).
Continue reading ““Hottest Year On Record?” Think Again! Meet ‘Seasonally-Adjusted’ Seasons”
Guest Post by Rory Hall at the Daily Coin
Let’s take a slightly closer look at what is actually being perpetrated against us by the ruling class working in concert with corporate America. Since I don’t really have time for theories let’s focus on the crimes that are on going and I will provide you with links in order for you to continue doing some research. These people have become so brazen that it is very simple to expose them and the crimes against humanity that have been unleashed and are currently making there way to your bank account, your cell phone and computer, your neighborhood and your local hospital. Of course, none of this would be possible without some form of camouflage, we’ll call it TV sports, “reality” TV and clown shows like the “State of the Union Address”. Perfect cover in order to keep people distracted, off balance and watching the left hand while the right hand is perpetrating the crime.