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POPSInflation warming up? Nadeem Walayat has an amazing track record at predicting the market's fluctuations. My money is on inflation.
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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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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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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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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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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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POPSAmerican Casino: A Documentary About the Home-Mortgage Crisis more @ clip source the Cockburns meet one guy in "American Casino" who understands the whole mess better than most, a California real estate investor named Jeff Greene who smelled the end of the housing bubble around 2006 and bet $1 billion against the mid-decade exuberance of Wall Street. Sitting in his walled and gated beach compound in Malibu, Greene calmly tells the camera that the opportunity for his successful hedge bet (which has yielded $500 million so far) involved massive pain for millions of homeowners.
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POPSIt's About Spain Today, Tomorrow....the US? Banks in Spain are manipulating the housing market by artificially shoring up excess demand. Are we to believe that buying 110,000 homes was an investment made for returns? I hope I don't hear a echo of this thinking in the U.S. Sadly, hopes do not dictate reality.
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POPS"World Trade Has Collapsed... Shipping Lines Have Become Graveyard Archipelagos" Yet all of this is beyond the land, and thus far from sight. Of course, who needs trade when you have a speculative market trading in its own bubble, hitting yearly highs day after day, thanks only and exclusively to the Chairman's printing press. It is a pity these ships can not sail in the sea of hundred dollar bills that is being created each and every day at the Federal Reserve, whose only use these days it seems is to buy junker stocks and to feed the algos that lift whatever offers are stupid enough to float in the equity market." Thousands Of Rusting Ship Hulls Are A Fitting Tribute To The Speculative Market Bubble To view enlarged images please visit website (green indicates operating ship, red denotes a ship out of spot/charter and currently unused) http://www.zerohedge.com/article/thousands-rusting-ship-hulls-are-fitting-tribute-speculative-market-bubble
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POPSGoldman Profits. Do We Lose? From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression - and they're about to do it again. In a brilliant article that appears in the current issue of Rolling Stone magazine, "The Great American Bubble Machine" by Matt Taibbi, we can see in all its gory and horrendous detail what is so wrong with "the invisible hand of the marketplace." From the article: “any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain — an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.”
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POPSChina bubble A Chinese bubble has been deflated. Too bad it’s the wrong one. The main Shanghai stock market index has fallen 23% from its peak at the beginning of August, reversing half of the run-up that started early in 2009. That’s a welcome correction, but it doesn’t mean a return to normality, or address the bigger bubble round the corner.
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POPSEconomic bubble This article is worth reviewing given the past year. (Bonus: The "tulip bubble" still seems to be an entertaining example, probably because of its "historical" context.)
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POPSAmerican Dream or American Nightmare? Home-ownership is just a part of the american dream, and it's a part which has been unduly subsidized and distorted by the government, to the pont that it threatens the whole dream.
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POPSGoldman Sachs Pumping and Dumping Our Economy An excellent article and video by Matt Taibbi, from Rolling Stone Magazine, about how Goldman Sachs has been systematically, repeatedly, "pumping and dumping" the American economy, creating bubbles, then positioning themselves to profit from the popped bubbles, then being in good position to help "fix" the inevitable recession.
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POPSThe destruction of the black middle class More: Yet in the depths of this African American depression, some commentators, black as well as white, are still obsessing about the supposed cultural deficiencies of the black community. In a December op-ed in the Washington Post, Kay Hymowitz blamed black economic woes on the fact that 70 percent of black children are born to single mothers, not noticing that the white two-parent family has actually declined at a faster rate than the black two-parent family. The share of black children living in a single parent home increased by 155 percent between 1960 to 2006, while the share of white children living in single parent homes increased by a staggering 229 percent. Just last month on NPR, commentator Juan Williams dismissed the NAACP…The fact that there is an ongoing recession disproportionately affecting the African American middle class – and brought on by Wall Street greed rather than "ghetto" values – seems to have eluded him.
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POPSGoldman Sachs When you hear people complaining about what union employees earn, why is it that we can accept such unequal compensation for the likes of Goldman Sachs employees. There's little free market here, let alone fair market.
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POPSGoldman Sachs - Scams & Bubbles
John McCain insisted that ending the moratorium on offshore drilling would be "very helpful in the short term," while Barack Obama in typical liberal-arts yuppie style argued that federal investment in hybrid cars was the way out. But it was all a lie. While the global supply of oil will eventually dry up, the shortterm flow has actually been increasing. In the six months before prices spiked, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the world oil supply rose from 85.24 million barrels a day to 85.72 million. Over the same period, world oil demand dropped from 86.82 million barrels a day to 86.07 million. Not only was the shortterm supply of oil rising, the demand for it was falling — which, in classic economic terms, should have brought prices at the pump down. So what caused the huge spike in oil prices? but the root cause had almost everything to do with the behavior of a few powerful actors determined to turn the once solid market into a speculative casino.
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POPSThe Great American Bubble Machine a suspiciously self-serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton's former Treasury secretary, spent 26 years at Goldman before becoming chairman of Citigroup " which in turn got a $300 billion taxpayer bailout from Paulson. There's John Thain, the asshole chief of Merrill Lynch who bought an $87,000 area rug for his office as his company was imploding; a former Goldman banker, Thain enjoyed a multibilliondollar handout from Paulson, who used billions in taxpayer funds to help Bank of America rescue Thain's sorry company. And Robert Steel, the former Goldmanite head of Wachovia, scored himself and his fellow executives $225 million in golden parachute payments as his bank was selfdestructing. There's Joshua Bolten, Bush's chief of staff during the bailout, and Mark Patterson, the current Treasury chief of staff, who was a Goldman lobbyist just a year ago, and Ed Liddy, the former Goldman director . . .
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POPSGoldman Sachs The Next Bubble But it was only in 2000 and 2001 that the foundation gave money to the Climate Exchange -- funds deemed by the exchange itself to be fundamental to its successful launch, and in fact to its early survival. Having survived, thanks to the million-dollar bailout from Obama and the Joyce Foundation, the Chicago Climate Exchange went on to merge with Climate Exchange Ltd in 2006. Goldman Sachs took a 10% stake in the firm at the time and later increased its holdings to at least 19%. CCX is also 10% owned by Generation Investment Management, a firm founded and chaired by Al Gore and co-founded by the above-mentioned former Goldman CEO, Hank Paulson. According to EnergyRisk.com, "Goldman Sachs is a major trader of European Union allowances and is set to be a key player in the US emissions markets that are planned to start up at the end of the decade."
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POPSGoldman Sachs The Wizard of Oz and primed to spearhead an assault on the mortgage banks, bringing suits against any suspected of practicing unlawful discrimination, whether on the basis of race, gender or disability." Goldman Sachs played a major hand in these Clinton-era financial policies through Robert Rubin, former Co-Chairman of the firm, who actually announced them on December 8, 1993. Taibbi wrote in Rolling Stone: During his (Robert Rubin's) tenure at Treasury, the Clinton White House made a series of moves that would have drastic consequences for the global economy - beginning with Rubin's complete and total failure to regulate his old firm during its first mad dash for obscene short-term profits. Taibbi adds that other Goldman graduates played a major hand when the market crashed, including another Goldman-ex turned Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson: Paulson elected to let Lehman Brothers -- one of Goldman's last real competitors -- collapse without intervention...
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POPSThe Great American Bubble Machine The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.
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