Jade Queen

Chance of a Depression Now 5 Percent

There is a sewage treatment plant in Oregon that has begun mining phosphorus from effluent. It makes a struvite fertilizer that looks like perlite, but it is actually differently-sized time-release fertilizer that is 10% Mg. Because there is pretty broad awareness that we have a peak-phosphorus issue, this plant is used to conducting tours. The Chinese, for example, have visited.

Development of the machinery was a science experiment between the wastewater treatment plant and a Canadian company that makes the equipment. The Oregon facility is buying the equipment, but it allows the Canadian company to market the resulting fertilizer pellets, which are in high demand by golf courses. The company is still private, or I would try to say how to invest in it.

Innovation like this does not stop when the mess on the Atlantic coast becomes worse. Somehow those who want to make improvements in functioning will figure out how to cooperate across assorted boundaries of country, religion, etc.

What is impossible to predict for a lay person is exactly which companies are too affected by corruption to be resilient in an environment that will change rapidly when a tipping point hits.

There is a Slow Money movement afoot in which people are trying to figure out how to invest in local companies so they can be involved more closely and have eyes on the street, so to speak.
This depends on having a somewhat clean state government apparatus. Good luck on that one.

I think the present Chinese government has watched successive empires exhaust resources in Afghanistan. The present world environment has many players who have watched this and who now have savvy U.S. joint venturers who have helped to disable some of the debt/extraction mechanisms that have had such a run.

Obama strong-armed money for the IMF and appointed big-ag executives to food-safety posts These were clues that substantive change wasn't happening, no matter the cute organic garden on White House grounds.

I like Brazil and a few solar companies, one U.S. and one Chinese. I don't understand India or Russia well enough to choose anything there.

Why the Stock Market Should Crash

War is a thing empires have tried to get them out of these kinds of messes. It does not work, and the U.S. in Afghanistan is about as over-extended as an empire could get. Afghanistan eats arrogant imperial behavior. Offense is greatly more expensive than defense, and occupation devours resources. One could say we are in this mess because they took this old-world choice rather than competing with energy efficiency and bio-mimicry to solve technical problems surrounding heating, cooling, and other utility issues. U.S. people will be now working on these things. When the government's poor choices make it irrelevant, then they will catch up with what the people are doing. At least we have enough freedom left for this process to work eventually. The large institutions have become less trustworthy, and the value of good neighbors is having a resurgence, in my town anyway. The way this relates to investing is that the private economy creates value, sometimes out of close to nothing, then the government figures out how to tax the value that got created. It thwarts government plans when huge parts of the private economy go underground. But that is where it has to go when government mismanages and shuts people out of the formal economy. It happened in the Depression as well when local governments issued scrip to pay teachers. Landlords could pay taxes back with scrip, though utilities refused to take it. All of this makes investing in the formal economy very difficult. Anybody else notice that vast infusions of printed money lead to run-ups in stock values at the end of the day? Chris Martenson is writing about this. Where else was this money going to go?

Too Big to Fail Banks: A Simple Solution

As I understand it, the feds are taking money from credit unions operating well to fund the obligations of failed credit unions. This could affect the competitiveness of local credit unions against banks. But local banks are suffering, with money not getting to Main Street.

Expecting big banks to share with depositors isn't logical, so there will not be competitive pressure, and both depositors and borrowers will get stung, more punishment of the less advantaged to pay bonuses to people CEO's like to call talent (if you think of it in relationship to Hollywood and fantasyland, that is kind of how it works).

Liquidating Freddie and Fannie could send some paper back to local solvent banks and credit unions in return for the payments to cover the failures. Maybe this would help to keep solvent ones from going out because they can't predict budgets, what with being held up for unpredictable amounts by the Feds or even by local robbers.

As for the big banks, as long as the CEO's maintain enough slush to support the protection racket (Congress and the Executive Branch), then it seems to be pretty much a closed loop, except that some of the big banks have investments in cities and companies that could bust if the little guys can't or won't buy stuff the companies and cities are counting on them to buy.

The timing of the shake-outs is what is hard to predict.

In the meantime, the foot soldiers of Empire are checking out, one way or another, so that loop is in some doubt as well. This is the saddest loop of all. Surely this would give the bonus brothers pause if they had eyes to see and hearts to feel with.

And then there are the drones, and I hear the latest weapons are called killer bees, to fuel war forever, unless the protection loop breaks and some perps do some walking.

7 Steps Towards Real Free Market Capitalism

I would rather have heard an alarm before a fire than not.

Dean Baker, on truthout, just had a piece about the folly of empire by force.

Ron Paul was the Paul Revere about this every time he could sound the alarm. It was a major reason for so much of his spontaneous support. It resonated across assorted social boundaries.

His offshore military supporters had expressly mentioned this when they sent in donations, as they explained what was going on with the corruption they were observing.

Is it OK when Dean Baker says it, but not when Ron Paul said it?

I am as unimpressed by Ron Paul's arguments about a Gold Standard as it is possible to be.

I have argued for bean or solar-cell standards personally.

Nonetheless, Ron Paul is an honest and straightforward human in Washington, D.C.

Even if he has odd leanings, he is an exceptional bit of non-fiction among Love Boat, Fantasy Island, and the Sopranos.

It remains to be seen whether Ron Paul's efforts to let us know where the booty went will be eviscerated.

Even if they won't make Fed dealings transparent, we could be in for some interesting municipal bond failures that may unearth some of the spoils garnered by international conglomerates favored by the usual suspects and precipitated by unfunded mandates.

I am nervous about municipal bonds. I just noticed all the second liens floating about with an unemployed populace expected to cough up the money that didn't make it to Main Street. I do hope Birmingham, Alabama, is not the start of a waterfall, or should I say a sewer fall, of bond failures.

What a mess that would be. They might have to clear some of the poor folks out of jails to make room for some cultural diversity. We seem to get token limousine perp-walks when there are deluges of fires and bubble-busts.

Global Markets in Review: Reversal in Financial Markets

It would be interesting to do a map with the United States parceled out and colored by state. North Dakota is apparently doing better than many other states, and the guess as to why I have seen mentioned is that it has its own state bank through which it runs taxes and state business.

From what I have read, Its state bank does not compete with its private banks, but cooperates on vetting and funding projects within the state, which would keep focus and interest in how the collateral is doing fairly close.

I also think that some U.S. states are better at respecting the property of modest-income people than others. Jane Jacobs documented some sad stories of government-enforced takings in The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

We have takings going on now with unfunded federal mandates that end up enriching the usual suspects.

People get elected to local office promising to represent local people. Once elected, they cave when the feds threaten to incarcerate them.

When too-big-to-fails offer to indebt citizens to keep the politicians out of jail, guess who wins. The high-paying local jobs themselves give the politicians too much to lose. They cannot resist this temptation, and they rationalize however they need to get these deals done. If they have to fire whistle-blowers on citizen committees, they just do it.

I think there are some jurisdictions where people are sophisticated enough to figure out how to not get taken by this pattern.

Perhaps that is the secret of North Dakota.

If your people are not paying exhorbitant debt loads (to out-of-state entities) on water, sewer, and other utility bills, it would certainly help to get mortgages paid.

On the other hand, high bills for necessary expenses can clear land of less-advantaged people for the plans of more-advantaged. Raising taxes is another gadget in this tool box.

Healthcare Profits: Assessing Company Sensitivity to Obamacare

The FDA just sent a threatening letter to Dr. Weil for advocating use of an herbal preparation that many use and have reported benefit from.

While Dr. Weil likely won't want them to point their guns at him and take his business, the news of this will pump the herb, which I take myself, prescribed by a Chinese herbalist.

Underground and offshore, ordinary people are using plant analogs for substances now made generally with leftovers from industrial processes.

Attempts to bully particular practitioners with much to lose will work to restrain the businesses of celebrities, but it won't stop word of mouth about what works.

In addition to this phenomenon, Equador has just broken patents, with the acquiescence of some pharmaceutical companies, to manufacture and provide medications it wants for its people at costs they can afford. This is another area where old ways of doing things are breaking down.

Substantial change is evolving rapidly in this area. I didn't even mention side-effect lawsuits, which tend to have gags attached, but putting a gag on a long-term user of psych meds seems maybe as if it might not work perfectly.

Caution seems indeed in order. Thanks for bringing this up.

The Problem with Being Wealthy

I really appreciate this discussion. Thank you very much for replying to my question about origins.

So iShares Emerging Markets could handle the volume you might need for a wealthy client. Since professionals might be deciding to use it for that reason, I am assuming then you would turn your analytical skills on to what's in the ETF and who the manager is, yes?

So might that mean that as as a small investor, I could hope to sort of cruise in the wake of the big guys?

I am tempted to visit Brazil to look at some of the allegedly transparent new companies down there, but it probably isn't going to happen, so I am considering ways I might benefit from the abilities of those who can make the trips involved.

Thanks again.

Solar Stocks Break Down Yet Again

The German team won the solar house competition on the mall in D.C. with SunPower on the roof. At least one of the other teams used SunPower as well. It was interesting to see whose products were on these houses. I looked at the information on Renewable Energy World, where you can go to watch some of the videos and look at some of the results.

I appreciate the analysis.

Here's Why Asia Must Eventually Ditch the Dollar

It isn't true that the U.S. doesn't make anything any more.

Some of the components in Apple products are made here and assembled elsewhere.

The question is whether the U.S. can invent enough new stuff in a crunch that our people can do fairly well in spite of the fancy government the people tolerate.

U.S. people have bailed out government before. This time the people will probably need to restrain the government as well, but it can be argued that has happened before as well.

When the book Natural Capitalism came out, the author and others he works with got a call from an ideologist from China who completely understood what they were talking about and invited them to speak there.

Attempts to pigeon-hole China seem off the mark to me. It seems possible there are micro-cultures in China, as there are here, where things are being done well.

There is an appetite for sharing information now on how to do things better in specific climates. The Germans won the recent contest on the mall in D.C. on renewable-energy efficient homes, but most world people probably would not choose to live in the black box they designed, even though it produced far more energy than it consumed.

Obama went to MIT to tell them he wants the U.S. to get its edge back. It remains to be seen whether the drain from hinterlands to federal government is bad enough to stifle the innovation that comes from the restless energy and mixing of cultures at MIT and in garages, basements, and workplaces of the U.S.

It would be easier to count the U.S. out if we were counting only government activity. An enormous amount of work and invention goes on outside of government still, however, and counting that out seems a bit inaccurate to me.

The U.S. is not a hegemony.

Fantastic value-improvement activities go on unsung because only small segments of interest groups care about the details of the work they are doing. It can't be made into a 30-second sound bite. That doesn't mean that people from all over the world don't come to visit projects that hold promise for solving major world-wide problems like cleaning pollution and dealing with sewage, for example.

In small U.S. jurisdictions, cooperative cultures and exploration can still produce major breakthroughs that will fuel new ways of doing things around the world. The key is creating value.

The Problem with Being Wealthy

It's easier to know what is in ETF's, for an investor wanting to learn about and track sectors or who does not want to put money into certain things. I read this with great interest.

Is this the history of ETF's, that wealthy people needed diversity, liquidity, and the ability to put buy-points and stop-points in? Or was it more about knowing what's there?

I'm curious about the origins of ETF's. How fast do you think they will grow in market share relative to mutual funds?

The Greatest Depression Is Coming

As mind-boggling as the level of corruption is in the U.S., the entire world is far more sophisticated about us and about their own corruption than it used to be.

MIT will have a branch in Abu Dhabi. They want it, and they will be rewarded for it, with incredible piles of money used to build "infrastructure," as we now seem to call fancy buildings with fancy stuff in them and fancy roads to get to them.

If Homeland Security won't let MIT import the best brains in the world in through a time-consuming and expensive filter beyond their own filters, then they will just make a branch offshore, closer to some of the brains that they want anyway. Thinking local may mean less transportation subsidies for transporting the young brains.

The old brains tend to like to travel.

I hear they have been finding some really good brains from Africa and Russia, not to mention China and India. You can read and watch YouTubes about these kids who invent pumps and other amazing things out of old bike parts. They figure out how to do it by spending time in libraries.

MIT likes initiative and could apparently care less about who your parents are. I know because I'm nobody, and I have a kid there.

Who came up with the blowing-skirts-up machines at U.S. airports, by the way? To me, this is sort of emblematic of how the U.S. government spends money.

Level heads roll eyes at the skirt machine, but at least the people who get jobs observing the blown skirts have some money with which to buy houses in some parts of the country.

The sophisticated street knows which country's ordinary people dominated the on-line shoe-throwing contest. They understand perfectly well that ordinary U.S. people are paying protection money that often doesn't work as promised for ordinary people.

I have noticed the Pakistani spokespeople with those lovely lilts throwing it gently back at our elite newspeople when asked about corruption.

They also know that U.S. people sulk in their garages and basements inventing utterly off-the-wall playthings when unemployed, whether they have told their employer to take the job and shove it, or whether the employer has gently told them that the retention-bonus has expired and the severance-payment and counseling lines are over there.

They also know some of our own people blow our own stuff up. Possibly they remember Oklahoma City, Waco, and Ruby Ridge. They know about our current Prohibition and about our incarceration rates. Some of our offshore prison guards worked onshore before going off.

Regarding U.S. unions, there are likely some clean ones. The ones who use coercion and corruption are doing the equivalent of wired-in attempts at subsidies that multi-nationals do. It works in a short-term, but backfires in a longer term.

If a pork-retention specialist loses an election or goes to jail, the bonus-over-value can evaporate for corporations or unions who play this way.

I'm all for workers owning businesses in a transparent way. Without transparency, thuggery engenders blowback.

Over time, transparent operations will win because they are entertaining and enlightening in addition to producing things that people want.

It's hard to see this in the middle of a transition time, but the re-cap of the 70's above helped me to get this in more perspective.

Carefully watching patterns and anticipating them seems to be something that gets lost in top-down, yes-person environments.

As for what to do, I have some investments in renewable energy and some in a Brazilian ETF. Brazil has some transparent companies. Also, some cities there have done well with class mobility and making inclusive social structures.

Brazil has done a relatively good job of getting advantage with the best of the "left" and the best of the "right," whatever specifically those antiquated terms mean.

I haven't done it for a while, but you can search Curitiba for an example of an interesting city down there. Curitiba has been much admired by researchers like Bill McKibben.

For taxable savings, so far I have been ok with local double tax-free municipals in a mutual fund.

I bank with a local credit union where I am on a first-name basis with my favorite teller and where I have found them to be responsive to my sometimes impertinent questions. I check them out periodically on BankRate.com.

Employee turnover has been a sign of impending doom at some banks I have used in the past, so I like that the same people stick around. They also do constant customer-service research which I find to be a sign of conscientiousness.

I am aware that rating agencies can make mistakes. I do not know if BankRate.com has a competitor that I could check as well, but for now that is the best I know to do.

Fannie and Freddie: Not Worthless Yet

Who could be trusted to do a proper auditing of Fannie and Freddie? That's the essential problem with them.

They are too big to be properly managed, and the paper they carry is far away from the ground that secures it.

It isn't that anyone forced them to take bad paper at face value, I would guess, because they wanted to show that excess value. What they tell themselves they can spend is based on it. If they are in D.C., what do they know or care about a house in Alaska? Isn't its value what the local guys say?

Showing excess value to pump up turf appearance is not just a federal government problem. In large cities, it's hard to catch these shenanigans and get a large voting public to understand it well enough to bust it.

In some small towns, they catch a graft-recipient's fancy car purchase straight off. They don't need the IRS to tell them about it.

It takes a sophisticated public and a competitive and conscientious press to take on the nitty-gritty bean-counting of getting honesty in leadership.

Many jurisdictions are profoundly challenged in this regard. It is the reason I don't want stocks relating to water. The water issue affects housing, affordability, and health. Large projects are heavily vulnerable to political corruption.

The liabilities associated with doing water badly are sobering, more rife with pitfalls than energy.

The local stuff affects Freddie and Fannie value. If loads of people from the Southwest move because there is no more water, it will increase the value of property in the places where they go and decrease it where they came from.

I don't know how small pooled resources should be, but one or two corruption leverage points in D.C. is clearly a disaster. If it got busted out in groups of three neighboring states, maybe there could be a degree of bickering/cooperation to keep it more honest.

Dow Breaks 10,000 for 26th Time While Gold Shines

In a rare incident of bi-partisanship, Alan Grayson and Ron Paul are asking for more disclosure before Bernanke can be re-upped. What if there are cracks in the facades, and some light can get in? What effect might this have on the inflation/deflation discussion? What would happen if there were a change in behavior of the feds?

I know this is a long shot, but it would be a dramatic manipulation, and it appears there is a big appetite for knowing drama ahead of the effects.

Central Banks Shift Reserves Away from U.S. Dollar

In the U.S., when a government passes a crazy confiscation plan, the 20% move across a border, either a state border, or out of the country altogether.

Upscale supermarkets are now testing independently the products they buy to protect themselves from poisoning issues.

The government agencies paid to do this don't do it, either because it's impractical or because they are corrupt, hard to tell.

When I went recently to a deliberately up-and-downscale eatery, I asked the waiter where the oysters came from. When he asked in the kitchen and found they came from a bay I know to be tainted, I passed on a dish containing them.

My friend, whose gumbo addiction was not to be deterred, ordered gumbo anyway.

Oysters disappear when they are poisoned, though it takes a while. The poisoning hurts the young more than the mature.

Some mini-ecosystem will figure this pattern out and will prevail until or unless the poisoned place gets it and cleans up.

The things we buy with dollars have not disappeared all the way.

When aristocracy cannot buy oysters with dollars because dollars are so obviously blood money, we will get change.

Optimist that I am, I still believe there is a possibility change could be incremental.

It is happening in some countries and mini-environments where there is adoption of deliberate and careful transparency.

If the major media decides to discover this, it will be as if it is something new, amazing, and dramatic.

Some of the oligarchs will get busted under a new culture, and some will morph to go along with new conditions.

California's New Budget Already $1B in the Hole

I agree with Glen that we can make distinctions among the rich.

The wired-in rich are the ones who may come to understand the error of their ways in some locales.

An example may be Portland, where M. Paulson, son of an infamous Paulson, wants to own a soccer team, using "his" money.

An tricky issue is that he also wants to own a baseball team.

The baseball team needed to be unhoused to revamp the former baseball stadium to the specifications of world-class soccer.

He and some city-council members tried to take a veterans memorial for baseball, but an interesting alliance of veterans and architects shut them down.

They tried to take a Little League venue in a working class neighborhood, thinking they would be received as liberators.

Boy, did that not work, and I wish there were video--maybe there is.

There are locales where top-down wants are met by ferocious bottom-up expressions of Little People needs.

Paulson and the 20% will get soccer.

I am not sure where baseball will go, possibly across the river to Washington, where an interesting percentage of former Oregon 20%'ers have gone to escape punitive income taxes.

The former 20%'er Oregonians escape Washington sales taxes by shopping in Portland or growing their own whatever.

Crunchers on the right and left leave out the furious ability of U.S. people to go around elite inadvertent (perhaps) manipulations, in locales that can put together voluntary issue-communities in a heartbeat.

Some locations gain population when the New York Times talks them up (e.g., Portland, where there is good free beer on street-fair days).

The 20% can go wherever they want, on a whim, and they finagle the tax angle with internet- and boots-on-the-ground research.

This is why property values continue to go up in certain places.

Looking only at the macro for a state does not explain an entire picture.

A watched pot does not boil in the short-term, but as heat builds up under the surface, the surface will change.

It is sad to me that the major media does not make trend information widely available, especially in health research, for example.

Nonetheless, places highly infiltrated with small voluntary groups tend to get statistics that would lead you to believe they look far different from how they actually look if you go to eyeball them.