Home » Posts tagged 'adam taggart' (Page 10)
Tag Archives: adam taggart
David Collum: We’ve Got A Recession Coming
David Collum: We’ve Got A Recession Coming
Whether or not you’ve had time yet to plow your way through David Collum’s excellent 2016 Year in Review, our annual podcast with Dave always brings additional color to light — and this year’s is no exception.
Any model based on an assumed 7.5% return is doomed. As you get low returns, our pensions get in trouble. And whenever the returns shoot above the norm they say “Well, this is excess.” And they scoop it up. So every time they are above water they scoop it up. How? They stop contributing. They start using the money for other stuff. Think of a sine wave oscillating about the mean — even if you guessed the mean correctly, if every time it is on the high side you skim it you’ll never get the mean; and that’s what the pension managers have done. And companies just stop contributing to pension plans and started calling the retained funds “profits”, which causes equities to go up and makes the thing get out of whack.
We’ve got a recession coming, one of the full-blown kind. And I don’t know what will happen. My prediction is that it is going to be a bad one. But what a lot of people don’t realize is that is when things start unwinding, counter party risk kicks in and faulty business models start showing up as bad and they start collapsing. All the accounting problems that built up behind the scenes so that the people cook the books to get their bonuses up and they made these crazy assumptions — under the protective cloak of a recession, CEOs can get away with announcing anything because they say Hey, don’t look at me. It’s a recession.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Wolf Richter: The Economy Is Cracking Under Too Much Debt
Wolf Richter: The Economy Is Cracking Under Too Much Debt
Wolf Richter joins the podcast this week to discuss the deterioration of the global macro situation, and how he is seeing growing signs of recession breaking out across the economy:
I think that was one of the biggest mistakes the central banks made during the financial crisis: They stopped the debt from blowing up. So we never had a cleansing.
In a recession, normally companies de-leverage. They go through bankruptcy, they shed their debts, and you have this big wave of debt restructuring. This is painful for bondholders and banks, but it clears out the crap that is clogging up the pipeline. And so these companies reemerge or get bought out and the debt just disappears. The same with consumers: they unload their debts through various methods, and so when the recovery starts, you are not suffocating under this huge load of debt.
That has not happened in the United States, particularly, but in other countries, too. That debt never got fully blown out. And then the recovery started with 0% interest rates and monetary stimulus, which only encouraged companies and individuals and governments to take on even more debt. So now we’re burdened with such an enormous amount of debt that I think it is very hard to even breathe for the economy. A lot of people out there are worried about this, which is why you hear now voices saying we need a serious reflation. They need to come up with a lot of inflation to wipe out that debt. And of course, that will be a fiasco for our economy because if you have any uptick inflation without an equivalent uptick in wages — which we have not been getting — then you will destroy the consumer. And so this is not a great solution either.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Dmitry Orlov: The US Is Sleepwalking Towards A Nuclear Confrontation
Dmitry Orlov: The US Is Sleepwalking Towards A Nuclear Confrontation
Following his cautionary analysis on the increasing tension between the US/NATO and Russia, Chris interview Dmitry Orlov this week about the potential likelihood for actual direct conflict to break out between the world powers.
Orlov was born and raised in Leningrad in the former Soviet Union and immigrated to the United States in the mid 70s, He has spent the past several decades traveling back and forth between the two countries, writing about the collapse of the Soviet Union and the many similarities he sees between that and the secular decline happening in the West. Orlov recently co-authored a stark warning with a number of other experts on Russia, concerned that the US is recklessly provoking a military confrontation it cannot win:
The United States is sleepwalking towards a nuclear confrontation with Russia. It is astounding in its stupidity this approach. What’s going on is an effort by the US military and by NATO officials to extract as much money as possible out of Eastern Europe, to continue financing weapons and generally extract military spending out of Europe.
The neocons have a very stiff ideology of world domination. Basically they took over the US government because it’s the largest and most vulnerable democracy in order to realize their insane dreams of world domination.
It hasn’t gone that well. But there’s no convincing them. There isn’t a feedback loop from experience to what they do next. One defeat causes them to organize for the next defeat without realizing it. So they don’t realize that what they have done in the Middle East has been completely counter-productive.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Grasshopper Nation: Planning For Those Who Aren’t Prepared
wikimedia
Grasshopper Nation: Planning For Those Who Aren’t Prepared
Take a moment to reflect on all the people you care about who aren’t reading this article. Or sites like this, which wrestle with the implications of limits to growth and the concerning unsustainability of the economic and natural systems our society depends upon.
How many of your family members, good friends, and neighbors simply choose to ignore the messages from those of us alarmists on the “doomer” side, and live life trusting that tomorrow will always look and feel pretty much like today? Most of them? All of them?
Look, it’s understandable. Humans aren’t wired well to respond to future risk that isn’t visible as an immediate threat. And temperamentally, we prefer good news over bad, so we seek to overweight the former and discount the latter. Who wants to stress out about what “might” happen tomorrow, anyways — can’t we just enjoy life today?
The rift between the preparedness-minded and those not is age-old, as fables like Aesop’s The Ant & The Grasshopper date at least as far back as the 5th century BCE.
We spend our focus on this website engaging the “ants”, the empirically-minded folks who look at the data and concur that there is sufficient possibility of one or several crises (economic, energy-related, environmental — or a combination of such) occurring in the next several years. And that taking advance action is prudent.
But the ants are the minority.
Forget about planning for the more esoteric risks posed by faulty monetary policy or energy economics — 72% of Americans don’t even have a basic emergency response kit in place should an ordinary kind of disaster strike (power outage, hurricane, tornado, earthquake, etc).
The simple reality is that, if you’re investing your energies towards building resilience against potential hardship, most of those around you likely aren’t.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
.
Brad Friedman: Why To Be Suspicious Of Every Election
Brad Friedman: Why To Be Suspicious Of Every Election
Long an ‘exporter of democracy’ to the rest of the world, there is ample evidence that the United States lacks even the most rudimentary, basic protections necessary to preserve voting integrity within its own borders.
Some of the evidence is circumstantial, some is statistical, and some is pretty direct and clear-cut. Taken together, a pattern that emerges strongly suggesting that ever since voting machines, electronic voting machines were introduced in the United States, we’ve had a string of suspect election results that frankly are not consistent with a free and fair voting outcome.
Trust is different than ‘verifiable’. Trust, frankly, has no place in elections. There is no reason to ever trust anybody. We need to be able to verify all of this.
There are basically two different types of electronic voting systems that are currently used today.
One is the touchscreen system that people know about. They’ve seen those votes flipping and so forth. Those machines are, in fact, 100 percent unverifiable — period. I’ve asked the companies that make the systems many times, if they have any evidence whatsoever that any vote ever cast on one of those machines during an election, for any candidate or initiative on the ballot, if any of those votes have ever been recorded as per the voter’s intent, any evidence whatsoever. They have none — they are 100 percent unverifiable. Thankfully, many states are getting rid of those and they’re moving to paper ballots.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Dave Janda: Bad Medicine
Dave Janda: Bad Medicine
In our ongoing discussion of how our Health Care system (or more aptly-named “Sick Care” system) has been hijacked by those who profit most from it, we interview Dr. Dave Janda this week, who recently and very publicly announced he was walking away from his clinical practice in protest of how poorly the quality-to-cost ratio has dropped in his profession.
Dr. Janda’s perspective is informed not just from his years as a practicing surgeon and researcher, but also through his involvement with health initiatives for the Reagan and Bush I administrations, as well as the National Institute of Health. His overall conclusion is that the health system now exists to serves its corporate and administrative owners, to the detriment of patients and practitioners:
I decided I needed to retire from medicine the clinical practice of medicine because I truly felt that I could no longer take care of people the way I was trained to take care of people in a high quality manner. Now I have been involved 27 years in the clinical practice of medicine. I have battled insurance companies every day of my professional career since I got done with my residency program 27 years ago. The formula that insurance companies use and government uses to cut healthcare costs is the most inhumane and unethical means of cutting costs; and that’s the rationing and denying of care. It’s what I have fought against my entire career. My approach is, if you are really sincere about cutting healthcare costs, quit trying to deny the availability and access to care — which is what insurance companies try to do. If you’re really sincere about cutting healthcare costs prevent healthcare needs. It’s the single greatest bang for the buck.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Automating Ourselves To Unemployment
Tatiana Shepeleva/Shutterstock
Automating Ourselves To Unemployment
With this article, I’d like to introduce a related term: malincentive. While not part of the official economic lexicon, I consider a ‘malincentive’ a useful word to describe any promise of short-term gain whose long-term costs outweigh any immediate benefits enjoyed. The temptation to urinate in one’s pants on a cold winter day to get warm is a (perhaps unnecessarily) graphic example of malincentive. Yes, a momentary relief from the cold can be achieved; but moments later, you’ll have a much larger problem than you did at the outset.
Malincetives and malinvestment go hand-in-hand. In my opinion, the former causes the latter. As humans, we respond remarkably well to incentives. And dumb incentives encourage us to make dumb investments.
In this current era of central planning, malincentives abound. We raced to frack as fast as we could for the quick money, while leaving behind a wake of environmental destruction and creating a supply glut that has killed the economics of shale oil. Our stock exchanges sell unfairly-fast price feeds for great sums to elite Wall Street high-frequency-trading firms, and as a result have destroyed investor trust in our financial markets. The Federal Reserve keeps interest rates historically low to encourage banks to lend money out, yet instead the banks simply lever up to buy Treasurys thereby pocketing vast amounts of riskless free profit. The list goes on and on.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Eric Hunsader: The Financial System is ‘Absolutely, Positively Rigged’
Eric Hunsader: The Financial System is ‘Absolutely, Positively Rigged’
Eric Hunsader, founder of Nanex, has been at the vanguard of warning about the dangers and the rampant fraud that the rise of high-frequency trading (HFT) algorithims have let loose in today’s financial markets.
While he usually feels like a lone voice in a world happy to deceive itself, he was shocked to receive a $750,000 whistleblower award from the SEC for his efforts. He’s been sadly less shocked to see that since the award was publicly announced, the abuses he reported have only become more extreme and frequent.
Of the situation that led to his award, he says:
The folks at the NYSE were selling their direct feed for north of $30,000 a month versus the SIP which is under a thousand dollars a month. Their customers are not buying it because it has that much more rich data. The thing that makes it worth $29,000 more is that it is faster, but that is illegal. Up until this point they deny that that is the case. And somehow it works. So the exchanges make all their money from their highest paying customers which are the high frequency traders. And the high frequency traders pay the exchanges exorbitant amounts of money to have a slight advantage.
That’s how the whole system works. It is absolutely, positively rigged. There is no question about it. It is rigged on many different levels in many different ways — for example, no retail order ever gets to see the light of day of the stock exchange. That’s one of the many eye openers. People who aren’t pros in the market don’t realize that it’s all a rigged game.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Adam Trexler: A New Way to Hold Gold (2016 Update)
Adam Trexler: A New Way to Hold Gold (2016 Update)
What if you could carry and exchange gold in the exact same manner as you do with the dollar bills in your wallet?
Two years ago, we introduced the precious metals community to a company called Valaurum, which has developed a technology that’s making this possible.
From that write-up:
Democratizing Gold
In short, a fractional gram’s worth of gold is affixed to layers of polyester, creating a note – called an “Aurum” – similar in dimension and thickness to a U.S. dollar bill. This gold (usually 1/10th or 1/20th of a gram) is commercially recoverable. So an Aurum offers similar potential as a coin or bar, in terms of providing a vehicle for storing and exchanging known, dependable increments of precious metals – just in much smaller (and more affordable) amounts than commercially available to date.
The big idea here? In a world where a 1oz coin of gold costs over $1,200, an Aurum will let you hold a few dollars’ worth of gold in a single note. If you’ve got pocket change, you can be a precious metals owner.
And you don’t have to change your behavior. You can store and transport an Aurum in your billfold along with your dollars.
Understanding the Aurum
As the saying goes, a picture’s worth a thousand words. Here’s a picture of an Aurum designed for Peak Prosperity that the Valaurum team produced for us:
You’ll see that with even just 1/20th of a gram of gold involved, it’s enough to make the Aurum appear to be “made of” gold. The characteristic luster, color, and shine of the 24-karat gold used is immediately apparent.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Jim Rickards: The New Case For Gold
Jim Rickards: The New Case For Gold
Monetary expert Jim Rickards returns this week to share the insights from his latest work The New Case For Gold, a detailed and highly-researched study of the fundamentals likely to drive the price of gold bullion in the years to come.
Rickards is quite confident that the price is going higher — much higher in fact — as the current world fiat currency regimes falter, to be replaced by ones backed (at least in part) by bullion.
On the way to that outcome, expect the price to be subjugated to the interests and aims of the largest players on the geopolitical chessboard:
Is there gold price manipulation going on? Absolutely; there’s no question about it. That’s not just an opinion.
I spoke to a PhD statistician who works for one of the biggest hedge funds in the world. I can’t mention the name but it’s a household name, you would know the fund. This guy is a PhD statistician. He looked at COMEX opening prices and COMEX closing prices for a 10-year period and he was dumbfounded. He said…This is the most blatant case of manipulation I’ve ever seen. He said if you went into the aftermarket, bought after the close and sold before the opening every day, you would make risk-free profits. He said statistically that’s impossible unless there’s manipulation going on.
I spoke to Professor Rosa Abrantes-Metz at the New York University Stern School of Business. She is the leading expert on globe price manipulation. She actually testifies in some of these gold manipulation cases that are going on. She wrote a report reaching the same conclusions. It’s not just an opinion, it’s not just a deep, dark conspiracy theory. Here’s a PhD statistician and a prominent market expert lawyer, expert witness in litigation qualified by the courts, who independently reached the same conclusion.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Ed Butowsky: Calculating The True Cost of Living
Ed Butowsky: Calculating The True Cost of Living
Over the past decade, we’ve been told that inflation has been tame — actually below the target the Federal Reserve would like to see. But if that’s true, then why does the average household find it harder and harder to get by?
The ugly reality is that the true annual cost of living is far outpacing the government’s reported inflation rate. By nearly 10x in many parts of the country.
This week, we welcome Ed Butowsky, developer of the Chapwood Index, to the program. His index is a ‘real world’ measure of how prices are increasing much faster than the wages of the 99% can afford:
In my business, I wanted to make sure that I was building portfolios that weren’t just efficient but got people the rate of return that they needed. I thought: My goodness, what I need to do is give people a list of everything they spend money on and have them track quarter by quarter exactly their increases, so I can do a better job as a financial advisor in determining what return I need to target.
I got a hold of a list of 50 major metropolitan areas and found people in every city and I gave them a job: I asked everybody to send me what items they spend their after-tax dollars on. I got about 4,000 different items. Then I took the 500 that most frequently appeared on the list and we’ve been tracking specifically these same items in every city since that period of time. I weight this list based on what percentage of a normal income people spend on each item.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Joel Salatin: The Promise Of Regenerative Farming
Joel Salatin: The Promise Of Regenerative Farming
Front man for the sustainable/regenerative farming movement, Joel Salatin, returns to the podcast this week.
Next month on April 23rd, he’ll be joining Adam, the folks from Singing Frogs Farm, permaculturalist Toby Hemenway, and Robb Wolf at a speaking event in northern California. He’ll be speaking on the power that’s in our hands to make much smarter choices regarding the food systems we depend on:
Joel Salatin: Farmers get beat up for a number of things: producing what they produce, the way they treat animals, they way they treat the land . I want to point out that the power is not in the farmers. From a voting standpoint, prisoners/inmates are a lot more powerful of a constituency block in the culture than farmers are. So let’s put this in perspective: the power is in the customer. And so if you want things to change on the landscape, if you want things to change regarding chemicals, pesticides, GMO – name your issue — if you want change, well, you’ve got to make a change.
I think that too often consumers take the convenient way out and say ‘Well, if farmers would just do things differently, everything would be better.’ The truth is that farmers have always followed the market. If people refuse to buy genetically modified organism food, farmers won’t produce it. It’s really that simple. It doesn’t take a government agent, a bureaucracy, a police state, a new law. I mean, all of this could be changed just by consumers taking a more active and aggressive role at financing what they say they believe in from the outset.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
John Perkins: The Shadow World Of The Economic Hitman
John Perkins: The Shadow World Of The Economic Hitman
If you’re hoping to have a ‘feel good’ day today, we’re about to owe you an apology.
John Perkins, author of The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, is someone we’ve been trying to get on the program for some time. He tells a dark story of an elite cabal working in the shadows to subjugate governments as it pursues ever-greater control of the planet’s resources.
What’s most frightening about this story is how credible it is. Anybody paying attention to world developments will have a hard time dismissing Perkins’ claims out-of-hand; and a harder time not being sickened at how on the mark his claims may likely prove to be:
Economic hitmen – I’m a former one, actually – created the world’s first truly global empire. It’s really a corporate empire, not an American empire although the U.S. government certainly supports it.
We work many different ways, but perhaps the most common is that we will identify a country that has resources that corporations want, like oil. We arrange huge loans of that country from the World Bank or one of its sisters. Yet, the money never actually goes to the country. It is primarily there to make the our companies — that build the infrastructure projects like the power plants, and the industrial parks, highways, and ports — very rich.
In addition, a few wealthy families make a lot of money off of these programs. They own the industries and commercial centers.
But the majority of the people do not benefit at all. They do not have enough money to buy much electricity. They cannot get jobs in industrial parks because the industrial parks do not hire many people.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Steen Jakobsen: The End Of The Debt Cycle
Steen Jakobsen: The End Of The Debt Cycle
As we’ve been watching closely, something is wrong with the big banks. Their shares have lost 25-33% of their market value since the beginning of the year. What’s going on?
The turmoil seems greatest in Europe, where bank shares have fallen the hardest, and negative interest rates have appeared with increasingly frequency across member countries.
To make sense of it all, we’ve invited Steen Jakobsen back on, Chief Investment Officer of Saxo Bank, who can provide an eyes-on-the-ground perspective on the European banking system from his location in Copenhagen:
Clearly what we’ve seen over the course of the first quarter this year is that the ability of central banks to do their magic in terms of talking to the market with the rhetoric of “low for longer” and the likes is running on empty now.
If we look back in chronological order of what happened this year, first we had, of course, the Fed with Yellen and Fischer backing down slightly from the three to four hikes they promised in December. That was followed very quickly by, of course, Draghi promising to do ‘Whatever it takes!’ yet again in March this year. Then the BOJ went negative on interest rates and a number of European central banks followed suit. So much so that actually right now if you look at the G7 governments, about 50 percent of all G7 government is now trading at a negative yield, which seems to be the new solution from central banks.
I think the market is seeing right through that because, of course, at the center of all of this at all times will be the banking system, a banking system that is getting penalized for the negative interest rate.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
