The Massive Elephant In The Economic Room [View article]
The article cites the dot com bubble as the appetizer and the housing bubble as the main course. The bursting of the housing bubble was exacerbated by leverage whose immediate effects were mitigated by collectivizing the bad debt and fraudulent Wall Street paper at par onto public balance sheets while rendering Western nations hopelessly insolvent.
Thus it appears sovereign is truly the main course and the real elephant in the room as it rises to the highest possible price while supply surges far beyond any previously known bounds.
The Real Experiment That Is Being Carried Out In Japan [View article]
It seems that the difference between "demand-pull" inflation and "cost-push" inflation is completely lost to economists and monetary authorities today as their policies stimulate higher prices which will only serve to further depress demand as wages, during a time of shrinking labor forces, continue to erode.
Aging demographics, whose arrival now as the article pointed out have been no secret for decades, exacerbate the policies of increasingly squandering the future by vast and increasing borrowing for today that governments in "advanced" economies have used to keep their jobs for too long. Buying votes in this way for multiple generations has led to such epic mainvestment and overfeeding at the public trough in Western economies.
The dynamic of organizing societies as ever-larger entities may well change as the centuries-old formation of ever-larger nations and supra-national bureaucratic structures with endlessly added costs and edicts issued seem to have reached it's peak of funny money creation and financing. As politicians now are clearly losing the ability to buy votes to placate their increasingly unemployed and under-employed masses, bloated and vastly wasteful ponzi-financed governments and bureaucratic entities such as the EU will be forced to retreat and finally shrink over time no matter the upheavals and unrest that will accompany the process.
Wall Street Breakfast: Must-Know News [View article]
Even official sugar-coated unemployment numbers actually increase in the early stages of a normal private sector recovery because more jobseekers emerge to initially overwhelm increasing job offerings at that stage of the business cycle.
So, a declining headline unemployment rate is not necessarily indicative of real recovery at all. Maybe the Washington fixers have outsmarted even themselves with their self-congratulatory numbers this time.
Every critical article about Tesla ends up receiving the same dozens or hundreds of fanboy attacks that critical Apple articles received only a short time ago when that stock was floating skyward.
Only, Apple stands on it's own, but as this article points out, their are many and varied subsidies mandated by the government czars and fixers who run the "global warming science" scam and whose statistics grow more suspect every year as they, for example, destroy vast acreage of farmland while depleting priceless aquifers mandating growing corn for fuel.
Breaking down results into real-world figures brings on great antagonism rather than a simple thankyou from Teslaphytes whose lucky number has won the Wall Street casino roulette wheel spin for now but whose results, both in vehicle performance and investment returns, are unlikely to stand the test of time.
The Federal Reserve: Banks 'Experienced Stronger Demand' For Loans In April [View article]
From Cullen Roche's beloved Fed study: "In addition, about one-half of large domestic banks reported having eased loan covenants for large and middle-market firms in the April survey, up from 30 percent in the January survey."
"Of the domestic respondents that reported having eased either standards or terms on C&I loans over the past three months, all but one cited more-aggressive competition from other banks or nonbank lenders as an important reason for having done so. About 40 percent of respondents that had eased their C&I loan policies cited a more favorable or less uncertain economic outlook as a somewhat important or very important reason."
Back to the borrowing races, which includes GM and it's old, previously spun off subprime financing arm, Ally Financial, adding as many future deadbeat buyers as possible (and investments in China) for it's "recovery" while housing benefits from more of the same lending that spawned the subprime implosion and Wall Street uses it's access to ZIRP to pay cash for a huge chunk of housing in America to securitize them and sell the resultant financial product to investors who hope to turn millions of jobless Americans into profitable renters. While margin debt reaches new heights and many of the same practices prevail that brought us the 2008 Wall Street implosion.
Barnes & Noble's Google Play Puts The Ball In Microsoft's Court [View article]
BKS must have taken a good look at Microsof't's latest victim in a long line of it's asymmetric "partnerships" with Nokia and concluded that dancing with a clumsy elephant like Steve Ballmer was not worth the risk of getting stomped.
Windows 8 may have all kinds of potential as many SA articles have opined, yet the sheer volume of screwups and wrong moves makes for a high probability that Microsoft will manage to snatch defeat or at least a continued slow decline into irrelevance for consumers, from potential victory with their latest offerings.
Arrogance, a dysfunctional corporate culture and a CEO like Steve Ballmer who seems to spend too much time thinking Microsoft can simply hand down buggy products at high prices to eager millions as though we were still in the 1990's, is are tall hurdles for potential partnerships for any company that has alternatives.
It Can Happen Here: The Confiscation Scheme Planned For U.S. And U.K. Depositors [View article]
TVP - I certainly appreciate the politicization of America and that the blame spreads far wider than Wall Street, mainly to our politicians and really, to the voters who will almost always choose the most flagrant sugar daddy to serve up some extra crumbs from the public trough wherever possible.
And of course, the consequences of Bernanke's monetary sugar high wearing off again will likely prove more catastrophic than at any time previously as the largely politicized malinvestment addiction of the US has never required throwing more good fiat after bad to continue things as they are.
Still, this comment stream shows again the architects and advocates of these mountains of bad paper written, securitized, leveraged and "insured" under ludicrous standards who have retained even their performance bonuses has only encouraged a continuation of the same practices while laughing it all off as someone else's doing and playing word games.
It Can Happen Here: The Confiscation Scheme Planned For U.S. And U.K. Depositors [View article]
I believe one point that has been lost in this thread about leveraged fraudulent Wall Street paper, whatever it's called, is that the incentive to make the greatest notional wealth ever devised has been to find as many breathing bodies as possible to write paper on, say, mortgages, securitize and leverage it and get a bailout complete with retained bonuses on the fraud when a taxpayer bailout is required to save the Wall Street institutions involved.
Jim Myrtle is content take shots at any details of comments which deviate from accepted Wall Street-Speak which he is apparently conversant in, without shedding light on the practices that have laid the US and Western economies low beyond the fact that too many of the little people assumed mortgages they were unqualified for. As though the underwriters and financial professionals and engineers throughout the process are merely innocent victims.
Interview With Janet Tavakoli: Any Recovery Will Be Despite Washington Dead Weight [View article]
Thankyou Harlan Levy for once again, being in OUR corner.
At a time when the official and MSM memory holes seem to have swallowed all evidence of the momentous transgressions of their kleptocratic benefactors on Wall Street and in Washington since 2008, this interview with Janet Tavakoli keeps alive the idea and the hope that there are a few expert witnesses remaining who are willing and able to tell the truth with such credibility and clarity.
Wall Street Breakfast: Must-Know News [View article]
"But shouldn't the states, stuck with the need to balance budgets despite recession caused declining revenue, be able to apply an existing sales tax on those who would sell to their citizenry?"
RIQ - There you go again, revealing that "the citizenry" are the property of the state in your mind. When it is the citizenry in the US who are granted the right to bestow limited powers on their government under the Constitution.
Let the states balance their budgets by cutting down on their more-than-ample and ever-increasing waste, fraud and abuse before they even think of coming to us for even more of our hard-earned fiat scrip, for a change.
Wall Street Breakfast: Must-Know News [View article]
Understandable that brick and mortar retail is sorely disadvantaged by sales tax collections that bypass internet retail. So when are businesses which have been savaged by endlessly growing US government with it's blatant waste, fraud, abuse and corruption going to focus on creating an environment where businesses other than multinational, financial engineering and attending to the diktats and edicts of the state can thrive?
There needs to be a long-overdue focus by private domestic US businesspeople on the true enemy of their livelihoods and way of life, the omnipresent state, rather than on spreading the pain more equally, before the US has a hope of re-ascending to the economic primacy it once enjoyed when government was held much closer to Constitutional limits and legitimate functions.
"Raw computing power maybe, computation in the meaningful sense no."
Actually the aim of every major successful business model in the West has long been to evolve previously expensive custom applications into commoditized replication that can be easily performed by low cost labor or dunces. Older high-cost products and services get eaten at the margin until they are nearly irrelevant unless they can change and adapt competitively, which IBM has an unequaled track record of doing....in the past.
The Oracle on Helicopter Ben: Buffett has complete faith in Bernanke's ability to unwind QE but notes that when rates rise "it's likely to be the shot-heard round the world." Both Berkshire and the country as a whole have "benefited significantly from what the Fed has done [but] the unwind [will be] more difficult than [the] buying." In the mean time, Buffett is entertained: "This is like watching a good movie … I don't know how it will end." (NY Times, WSJ) [View news story]
Millions of used-to-haves Americans will not find the unwinding of QE and rising interest rates as entertaining as the 1% who have enjoyed the "movie" as their private losses and Wall Street bonuses were collectivized onto public balance sheets.
Those public balance sheets that have bloated to unprecedented levels to support uneconomic interests and malinvestments cannot withstand rising interest rates once the QE teaser rates expire.
J.C. Penney Resorts To Begging For Business [View article]
The swoon JCP stock took when the "new" old CEO was announced which reversed the brief bounce after the disastrous reign of Ron Johnson was terminated was the right one. How does bringing on the previous failed CEO who was replaced by the last failed CEO solve the mounting problems their policies have only exacerbated already?
Answer: Once again, JCP is stuck in it's declining rut from the past except deeper in debt with fewer customers after a brief, delusional interlude as a wannabe Apple store trying to sell Chinese commodity merchandise at high prices.
The Massive Elephant In The Economic Room [View article]
Thus it appears sovereign is truly the main course and the real elephant in the room as it rises to the highest possible price while supply surges far beyond any previously known bounds.
The Real Experiment That Is Being Carried Out In Japan [View article]
Aging demographics, whose arrival now as the article pointed out have been no secret for decades, exacerbate the policies of increasingly squandering the future by vast and increasing borrowing for today that governments in "advanced" economies have used to keep their jobs for too long. Buying votes in this way for multiple generations has led to such epic mainvestment and overfeeding at the public trough in Western economies.
The dynamic of organizing societies as ever-larger entities may well change as the centuries-old formation of ever-larger nations and supra-national bureaucratic structures with endlessly added costs and edicts issued seem to have reached it's peak of funny money creation and financing. As politicians now are clearly losing the ability to buy votes to placate their increasingly unemployed and under-employed masses, bloated and vastly wasteful ponzi-financed governments and bureaucratic entities such as the EU will be forced to retreat and finally shrink over time no matter the upheavals and unrest that will accompany the process.
Is The Tesla Model S Green? [View article]
Wall Street Breakfast: Must-Know News [View article]
So, a declining headline unemployment rate is not necessarily indicative of real recovery at all. Maybe the Washington fixers have outsmarted even themselves with their self-congratulatory numbers this time.
Is The Tesla Model S Green? [View article]
Only, Apple stands on it's own, but as this article points out, their are many and varied subsidies mandated by the government czars and fixers who run the "global warming science" scam and whose statistics grow more suspect every year as they, for example, destroy vast acreage of farmland while depleting priceless aquifers mandating growing corn for fuel.
Breaking down results into real-world figures brings on great antagonism rather than a simple thankyou from Teslaphytes whose lucky number has won the Wall Street casino roulette wheel spin for now but whose results, both in vehicle performance and investment returns, are unlikely to stand the test of time.
The Federal Reserve: Banks 'Experienced Stronger Demand' For Loans In April [View article]
"Of the domestic respondents that reported having eased either standards or terms on C&I loans over the past three months, all but one cited more-aggressive competition from other banks or nonbank lenders as an important reason for having done so. About 40 percent of respondents that had eased their C&I loan policies cited a more favorable or less uncertain economic outlook as a somewhat important or very important reason."
Back to the borrowing races, which includes GM and it's old, previously spun off subprime financing arm, Ally Financial, adding as many future deadbeat buyers as possible (and investments in China) for it's "recovery" while housing benefits from more of the same lending that spawned the subprime implosion and Wall Street uses it's access to ZIRP to pay cash for a huge chunk of housing in America to securitize them and sell the resultant financial product to investors who hope to turn millions of jobless Americans into profitable renters. While margin debt reaches new heights and many of the same practices prevail that brought us the 2008 Wall Street implosion.
It all "works" until it doesn't.
Barnes & Noble's Google Play Puts The Ball In Microsoft's Court [View article]
Windows 8 may have all kinds of potential as many SA articles have opined, yet the sheer volume of screwups and wrong moves makes for a high probability that Microsoft will manage to snatch defeat or at least a continued slow decline into irrelevance for consumers, from potential victory with their latest offerings.
Arrogance, a dysfunctional corporate culture and a CEO like Steve Ballmer who seems to spend too much time thinking Microsoft can simply hand down buggy products at high prices to eager millions as though we were still in the 1990's, is are tall hurdles for potential partnerships for any company that has alternatives.
It Can Happen Here: The Confiscation Scheme Planned For U.S. And U.K. Depositors [View article]
And of course, the consequences of Bernanke's monetary sugar high wearing off again will likely prove more catastrophic than at any time previously as the largely politicized malinvestment addiction of the US has never required throwing more good fiat after bad to continue things as they are.
Still, this comment stream shows again the architects and advocates of these mountains of bad paper written, securitized, leveraged and "insured" under ludicrous standards who have retained even their performance bonuses has only encouraged a continuation of the same practices while laughing it all off as someone else's doing and playing word games.
It Can Happen Here: The Confiscation Scheme Planned For U.S. And U.K. Depositors [View article]
Jim Myrtle is content take shots at any details of comments which deviate from accepted Wall Street-Speak which he is apparently conversant in, without shedding light on the practices that have laid the US and Western economies low beyond the fact that too many of the little people assumed mortgages they were unqualified for. As though the underwriters and financial professionals and engineers throughout the process are merely innocent victims.
Interview With Janet Tavakoli: Any Recovery Will Be Despite Washington Dead Weight [View article]
At a time when the official and MSM memory holes seem to have swallowed all evidence of the momentous transgressions of their kleptocratic benefactors on Wall Street and in Washington since 2008, this interview with Janet Tavakoli keeps alive the idea and the hope that there are a few expert witnesses remaining who are willing and able to tell the truth with such credibility and clarity.
Wall Street Breakfast: Must-Know News [View article]
RIQ - There you go again, revealing that "the citizenry" are the property of the state in your mind. When it is the citizenry in the US who are granted the right to bestow limited powers on their government under the Constitution.
Let the states balance their budgets by cutting down on their more-than-ample and ever-increasing waste, fraud and abuse before they even think of coming to us for even more of our hard-earned fiat scrip, for a change.
Wall Street Breakfast: Must-Know News [View article]
There needs to be a long-overdue focus by private domestic US businesspeople on the true enemy of their livelihoods and way of life, the omnipresent state, rather than on spreading the pain more equally, before the US has a hope of re-ascending to the economic primacy it once enjoyed when government was held much closer to Constitutional limits and legitimate functions.
IBM: A Disaster In The Making [View article]
Actually the aim of every major successful business model in the West has long been to evolve previously expensive custom applications into commoditized replication that can be easily performed by low cost labor or dunces. Older high-cost products and services get eaten at the margin until they are nearly irrelevant unless they can change and adapt competitively, which IBM has an unequaled track record of doing....in the past.
The Oracle on Helicopter Ben: Buffett has complete faith in Bernanke's ability to unwind QE but notes that when rates rise "it's likely to be the shot-heard round the world." Both Berkshire and the country as a whole have "benefited significantly from what the Fed has done [but] the unwind [will be] more difficult than [the] buying." In the mean time, Buffett is entertained: "This is like watching a good movie … I don't know how it will end." (NY Times, WSJ) [View news story]
Those public balance sheets that have bloated to unprecedented levels to support uneconomic interests and malinvestments cannot withstand rising interest rates once the QE teaser rates expire.
J.C. Penney Resorts To Begging For Business [View article]
Answer: Once again, JCP is stuck in it's declining rut from the past except deeper in debt with fewer customers after a brief, delusional interlude as a wannabe Apple store trying to sell Chinese commodity merchandise at high prices.