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POPSIs the Economy Recovering? The Curious Case of 1920 vs. 1929
The basic questions we need to ask here are: 1. Why do economies recover? 2. Are we recovering? Q. Why do economies recover? A. They recover because bad investments made during the bubble are liquidated, valuable capital is no longer being wasted on them, new capital is formed from savings, and profitable enterprises attract new capital to expand. Low real interest rates caused by increased savings encourage borrowing, manufacturers use the capital to make new machines, producers of consumer goods buy them, cash goes through the system, consumers see things are getting better, more consumer goods are produced, and consumers buy them. It has to happen this way or the recovery will fail. The difficult part of a recovery is ugly. Bankrupt firms need to fail so that valuable capital resources are not wasted on their continuing activities. This means that unemployment rises (10.2% now) and business bankruptcies are high. Trillions of dollars of asset values are wiped out.
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POPSDIY soap – cleaning up your act Half way recipes (in which you take a pure form of soap and spruce it up) can be easy to do at home. You can use Castille soap to make several varieties of body wash. Here is one recipe: Vanilla Almond Soap 1/3 cup whole almonds 1 4-ounce bar Castille soap 1/4 cup distilled water 1 tablespoon almond oil 1/8 teaspoon vanilla essential oil Grind the almonds in a food processor or coffee grinder. Using a cheese grater or a knife, shred the bar of Castille soap. Boil the water and add the shredded soap, stirring until you get a nice gooey texture. Reduce to a simmer and then add in the almond grinds, oil and vanilla. You can spoon the soap into molds (ice cubes can make little gift soaps) and let it sit for around five hours until it hardens.
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POPSNow Is The Time To Buy Your Building If you are one of the lucky small businesses still doing well in this economy, you should give serious consideration to buying your own building. SBA interest rates have never been this low and will not last. Sellers are increasingly desperate to get rid of property. The opportunity is now.
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POPSInterest rates are going up With short term rates at or near zero, they can't o lower. The only way way rates can go is up. The questions remain; how high and how fast. This article does a much better job than I can about explaining what the bond market is facing. maybe the move up in rates won't be as dramatic as the article suggests, but we all should prepare ourselves for it.
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POPSBank can't prove it owns the mortgage, Judge writes off $460k debt This is why Rep. Kaptur was telling people facing eviction to squat in their own homes , refuse to be evicted, and make the bank demonstrate in court that the debt is legitimate . Possession is 9/10 of the law. I predict that this is the first tremble of a massive shock-wave about to move through our economy.
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POPSTown Hall protesters are nativists, not racists More: Just consider how utterly stupid and idiotic conservatives seem to serious Democrats when they smugly tell each other that progressives and Democrats are all really “fascists” because they support a variety of mild social-democratic polices. Within their closed ideological bubble the conservatives feel quite certain that they have achieved a deep psychological insight by recognizing that latent Adolph Hitlers lie just beneath the surface of everyone from Teddy Kennedy to Robert Redford and Jane Goodall. They actually sit around and pat themselves on the back for their penetrating aptitude at psychological analysis. This is exactly how stupid progressives and Democrats appear to culturally conservative Americans when they label as “racism” beliefs that these Americans know are in reality vastly different and more complex.
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POPSOn Complexity, Chaos & Collapse The size of the financial sector must be reduced. It's original purposes have been perverted. Its very size is a measure of it dysfunction. They have confused their self-serving maps of the territory for the territory itself.
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POPSGenius: Mortgage Program Will Spend $3,000,000 per Loan Repair Three million mortgages are believed to be eligible for HAMP with 500,000 in a trial phase. The trial was supposed to last three months, but it has since been stretched to five months . The Doctor believes that many of these "repaired" loans will simply re-default. Why? For one reason, the underwriting (courtesy of TurboTax Tim) for the program uses "stated income", not verified income. These are the very same "liar's loans" that helped trigger the mortgage meltdown! Examining the chart, of the 50,130 trial modifications entered into in May, only 1,711 (or only 3%) resulted in a permanent modification! As The Huffington Post reported a few days ago, the low number of permanent modifications is still appallingly low ("HAMP will come nowhere close to keeping up with foreclosures"). Among the reasons for the low conversion rate: failure to make timely payments (doh!), failure to assemble necessary documentation (like income verification), and other . . .
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POPSCaptured in Morning Dew “I to the world am like a drop of water That in the ocean seeks another drop, Who, falling there to find his fellow forth, Unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself.” – William Shakespeare
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POPSDeath As Timeless Reality Death is ultimately just another transformation, from one configuration of matter and energy into another. But unless you can stand outside the arena of change, death represents an end point, an extinction. To escape death ultimately means escaping the worldview that gives death its terrible sense of closure and finality. Adapted from Ageless Body, Timeless Mind, by Deepak Chopra (Three Rivers Press, 1998).
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POPSAt 10% Unemployment America Still Doesn't Have Enough Workers But of course, it's really not much a paradox at all. After years and years of a housing bubble, we have millions of Americans trained in some capacity relating to housing, and those skills are no longer needed. Concepts like this should shred anyone's notion of an output gap. Sure, American hands are underutilized, but if those hands don't have anything to do that's productive, can they really be considered unused "capacity." No, they can't. And this is the problem with big, macro-thinking. You can point to two GDP trendlines and say "Look, undercapacity..." but that totally ignores the ground level where real employees have to find jobs that they're suited for, and no amount of expansionary practice can change that problem.
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POPSSo you think the economy is on the mend. Hate to burst anyone's bubble, but if you have 20 min. then follow the link and learn from Nomi Prins that nothing has changed. If anything the structure that caused the economy to fall has gotten worse.
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POPSMultiplying by Fractions: Gov't Stimulus trying to raise the GDP Prof. Barro of Harvard has written an article in the WSJ on the multiplier effect, or lack there of. Bottom line is that government stimulating spending will likely raise the GDP by less than the increase in government spending. Even without a multiplier larger than 1, government spending could be the least costly way of arresting the economic fall. I have issues with how this stimulus seems to be re-inflating the bubble that got us here in the first place.
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POPS(NOT)Federal (NO)Reserve - Bank After watching this video This video here that i have clipped is a must see. It is the Beginning of the criminal control of these global Banking Families. http://clipmarks.com/clipmark/8D34CDB8-B4BA-475A-A016-BA569688751A/
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