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Deranged Central Bankers Blowing Up the World

DERANGED CENTRAL BANKERS BLOWING UP THE WORLD

It is now self-evident to any sentient being (excludes CNBC shills, Wall Street shyster economists, and Keynesian loving politicians) the mountainous level of unpayable global debt is about to crash down like an avalanche upon hundreds of millions of willfully ignorant citizens who trusted their politician leaders and the central bankers who created the debt out of thin air. McKinsey produced a report last year showing the world had added $57 trillion of debt between 2008 and the 2nd quarter of 2014, with global debt to GDP reaching 286%.

The global economy has only deteriorated since mid-2014, with politicians and central bankers accelerating the issuance of debt. These deranged psychopaths have added in excess of $70 trillion of debt in the last eight years, a 50% increase. With $142 trillion of global debt enough to collapse the global economy in 2008, only a lunatic would implement a “solution” that increased global debt to $212 trillion over the next seven years thinking that would solve a problem created by too much debt.

The truth is, these central bankers and captured politicians knew this massive issuance of more unpayable debt wouldn’t solve anything. Their goal was to keep the global economy afloat so their banker owners and corporate masters would not have to accept the consequences of their criminal actions and could keep their pillaging of global wealth going unabated.

The issuance of debt and easy money policies of the Fed and their foreign central banker co-conspirators functioned to drive equity prices to all-time highs in 2015, but the debt issuance and money printing needs to increase exponentially in order keep stock markets rising. Once the QE spigot was shut off markets have flattened and are now falling hard. You can sense the desperation among the financial elite. The desperation is borne out by the frantic reckless measures taken by central bankers and politicians since 2008.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Consumer Drowning Sorrows at the Bar

CONSUMER DROWNING SORROWS AT THE BAR

Month after month I watch as the MSM mouthpieces try to spin declining consumer spending in a positive light. They are practically out of excuses. They are befuddled, because month after month they report “awesome” job gains and can’t understand why all these gainfully employed Americans aren’t buying shit they don’t need like they used to. These faux journalists, spouting propaganda for their ruling class bosses, are willfully ignorant of the fact the job gains are in low paying part-time jobs and the fact that Obamacare and record high rents are sapping any discretionary income households would use to buy stuff.

Despite the propaganda from the media and happy talk from the Liar-in-Chief, the country is currently in a recession and the Fed has no ammo to fake another recovery. We are going down and going down hard. When 70% of your economy is based on Americans buying shit they don’t need from China on credit cards, a dramatic slowdown in consumer spending equals recession. When sales actually fall from November to December during the holiday season, you are in recession. We’ve arrived.

The December report was a disaster and portends horrible retailer results coming down the road. More ghost malls coming to your neighborhood. The annual results were pitiful, with the more recent months even more dreadful. So after adding 10 million jobs, according to Obama, spending declines? They must be great jobs.

I think the results are even worse than portrayed in the results presented by the Census Bureau. Retail sales grew by only 2.2% in 2015 versus 2014. That is significantly less than the real inflation being experienced by real people, so on an inflation adjusted basis they fell. Even the 2.2% increase is artificially pumped up by the Fed induced auto debt fueled boom in car sales (or long-term rentals in reality).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Big Short–A Review

THE BIG SHORT – A REVIEW

“The truth is like poetry, and most people fucking hate poetry.”

The Big Short opens nationwide today. But it happened to have one showing last night at a theater near me. My youngest son and I hopped in the car and went to see it. I loved the book by Michael Lewis. The cast assembled for the movie was top notch, but having the director of Anchorman and Talledaga Nights handle a subject matter like high finance seemed odd.

The choice of Adam McKay as director turned out to be brilliant. The question was how do you make a movie about the housing market, mortgage backed securities, collateralized debt obligations, collateralized debt swaps, and synthetic CDOs interesting for the average person. He succeeded beyond all expectations.

Interweaving pop culture icons, music, symbols of materialism, and unforgettable characters, McKay has created a masterpiece about the greed, stupidity, hubris, and arrogance of Wall Street bankers gone wild. He captures the idiocy and complete capture of the rating agencies (S&P, Moodys). He reveals the ineptitude and dysfunction of the SEC, where the goal of these regulators was to get a high paying job with banks they were supposed to regulate. He skewers the faux financial journalists at the Wall Street Journal who didn’t want to rock the boat with the truth about the greatest fraud ever committed.

What makes the movie great are the characters, their motivations, their frustrations, their anger at a warped demented system, and ultimately their hollow victory when the entire edifice of fraud came crashing down on the heads of honest hard working Americans. The movie does not glorify the men that ended up making billions from the demise of the housing bubble. But it clearly defines the real bad guys.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

On Conspiracy Theories

On Conspiracy Theories

“In many nations, rational people end up believing crazy things, including (false) conspiracy theories. Those crazy thoughts can lead to violence, including terrorism. Many terrorist acts have been fueled by false conspiracy theories, and there is a good argument that some such acts would not have occurred in the absence of such theories. The key point—and, in a way, the most puzzling and disturbing one—is that the crazy thoughts are often held by people who are not crazy at all.”

Cass Sunstein- White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs

If you don’t know who Cass Sunstein is, or what he does now would be a good time to do some research. Not only because of his position with the White House and the power that entails, but because he understands quite clearly what problems are posed by people who, in his own words are, “…neither ignorant, not ill-educated. On the contrary they can be spectacularly well informed…”

Conspiracy theories are, in short, the belief that others conspire in secret to commit criminal acts. They do, no secret there. In fact the majority of prisoners in Federal Penitentiaries are serving time not for a specific crime, but for conspiracy to commit a felony, more simply discussing their intentions with another person in secret. It must be difficult indeed to simultaneously prosecute large numbers of people for the very activity that you are assigned to debunk and then somehow explain to people that it’s dangerous to believe in them. Yes, yes, you can imagine them saying, other people do engage in conspiracies, but we never would and you’d have to be crazy to even consider it.

Point taken, Mr. Sunstein.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Deja Vu All Over Again

Deja Vu All Over Again

Janet Yellen will increase interest rates for the first time in nine years on Wednesday. She isn’t raising them because the economy is strengthening. The economy just happens to be weakening rapidly, as global recession takes hold. The stock market is 3% lower than it was in December 2014, and has basically done nothing since the end of QE3. Wall Street is throwing a hissy fit to try and stop Janet from boosting rates by an inconsequential .25%. Janet would prefer not to raise rates, but the credibility and reputation of her bubble blowing machine is at stake. The Fed has enriched their Wall Street benefactors over the last six years, while destroying the real economy and the middle class.

The quarter point increase will be reversed in short order as soon as we experience market collapse part two. It will be followed with negative interest rates and QE4, as these academics have only one play in their playbook – print money. They created the last financial crisis and have set the stage for the next – even bigger collapse. John Hussman explains how their zero interest rate policy has driven speculators into junk bonds as the only place to get any yield.

Over the past several years, yield-seeking investors, starved for any “pickup” in yield over Treasury securities, have piled into the junk debt and leveraged loan markets. Just as equity valuations have been driven to the second most extreme point in history (and the single most extreme point in history for the median stock, where valuations are well-beyond 2000 levels), risk premiums on speculative debt were compressed to razor-thin levels. By 2014, the spread between junk bond yields and Treasury yields had fallen to less than 2.4%. Since then, years of expected “risk-premiums” have been erased by capital losses, and defaults haven’t even spiked yet (they do so with a lag).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Living a Lie

Living a Lie

“Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

The lies we tell ourselves are only exceeded by the lies perpetrated by those controlling the levers of our society. We’ve lost respect for ourselves and others, transforming from citizens with obligations to consumers with desires. The love of mammon has left our country a hollowed out, debt ridden shell of what it once was.  When I see the data from surveys about the amount of debt being carried by people in this country and match it up with the totals reported by the Federal Reserve, I’m honestly flabbergasted that so many people choose to live a lie. By falling for the false materialistic narrative of having it all today, millions of Americans have enslaved themselves in trillions of debt. The totals are breathtaking to behold:

Total mortgage debt – $13.6 trillion ($9.9 trillion residential)

Total credit card debt – $924 billion

Total auto loan debt – $1.0 trillion

Total student loan debt – $1.3 trillion

Other consumer debt – $300 billion

With 118 million occupied households in the U.S., that comes to $145,000 per household. But, when you consider only 74 million of the households are owner occupied and approximately 26 million of those are free and clear of mortgage debt, that leaves millions of people with in excess of $200,000 in mortgage debt. Keeping up with the Joneses has taken on a new meaning as buying a 6,000 sq ft McMansion with 3% down became the standard operating procedure for a vast swath of image conscious Americans. When you are up to your eyeballs in debt, you don’t own anything. You are living a lie.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Fed Induced Farce

The Fed Induced Farce

The minutes from the last Fed meeting were released on Wednesday afternoon. The minutes, along with a squadron of jabbering Fed heads lying about the economy doing great, pretty much locked in the most talked about .25% interest rate increase in world history.  Evidently the Wall Street titans of greed have convinced the muppets higher interest rates are great for stocks, as the market soared by 250 points. As institutional money exits the market on these rigged up days, the dumb money retail investor buys into the market with dreams of riches just like they did with Pets.com in 2000, McMansions in 2005, and Bear Stearns in 2007.

The Fed has lost any credibility they ever thought they deserved by delaying this meaningless insignificant interest rate increase for the last three years, so they will make this token increase in December come hell or high water. They want to give themselves some leeway for easing again when this debt saturated global economy implodes in the near future. The Fed is trapped by their own cowardice and capture by the Wall Street cabal. If they raise rates the USD will strengthen even more than it has already. The USD is already at 11 year highs. It has appreciated by 25% in the last year versus the basket of world currencies. The babbling boobs on the entertainment news channels authoritatively expound with a straight face about the rise in the dollar being due to our strong economic performance. It’s beyond laughable, as the economy has been sucking wind since the day the Fed turned off the QE spigot in October 2014.


Chart of the Day

Anyone with a working brain and an IQ over 100 (eliminates the bimbos and boobs on CNBC) can see the USD isn’t strengthening of its own accord.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

Somebody Will Do Something Stupid

Somebody Will Do Something Stupid

Is it just me, or does it seem like we are moving inexorably towards a global confrontation? China claims some islands in the South China Sea and we attempt to provoke a military response by sending a US warship within 12 miles of the disputed islands. We accuse both China and Russia of cyber terrorism on a regular basis, even though we released the Stuxnet virus into the Iranian nuclear facilities and have used mass surveillance against people around the world, including allied leaders. We created ISIS as part of our grand strategy that included turning Iraq and Libya into lawless countries racked by civil war strife and religious zealotry. We created the Syrian refugee crisis by funding militants against Assad because Saudi Arabia and Qatar want to build a natural gas pipeline through Syria to Europe.

We led the overthrow of a democratically elected, Russian friendly, government in the Ukraine, and have continuously provoked Russia in their own backyard. We have covered up the true culprit in shooting down of the Malaysian airliner over the Ukraine. We have colluded with Saudi Arabia to drive the price of oil down in an attempt to destroy the economies of Iran, Argentina and Russia. Putin has now called our bluff and entered Syria in full force, bombing the shit out of ISIS and proving the US had no intention of defeating these terrorists, because our military industrial complex depends upon having an enemy to fight. Now Obama is placing US troops in the line of fire between Russia, Syria, Turkey, Iran, and ISIS.

Europe was already bankrupt, issues trillions in new debt to pay off the unpayable debt they already had. Now they are being overrun by Muslim hordes who will cause their societies to splinter and cause chaos, violence, and war.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

5 Ways You Can Fix The World

5 Ways You Can Fix The World

With the exception of the very young, those who live in caves and people in comas it would be hard to miss the accelerated trajectory of America’s decline in the past few years. Regardless of which side you may find yourself on in the culture war, your party affiliation or self-proclaimed gender assignment, the one thing we all share in common, is a pronounced sense of dissatisfaction and unease. The camps are divided into a panoply of discordant sects, each jockeying for an ever decreasing slice of American Pie; Vegans vs Paleos, He&She vs Xe&Xer, the SJW’s, and the Bitter Clingers, the 1% or the 99%, Red vs Blue, Progressive vs Conservative, insiders and outsiders, MRA’s and Third Wave Feminazis- no one is exempt from the agita of the age.

The use of anxiety medications is at an all time high, politics has become polarized to a degree that hasn’t been seen since 1860, and human beings are so deeply disturbed with their condition that extreme body modification has led a portion of the population to cut off healthy limbs, install horns, drill holes, ink their flesh until their own mother wouldn’t recognize them. America leads the world in obesity while at the same time less than 1% of the population lives on a family farm, highlighting a disconnect from something as basic as the food we eat. At a time when technology has made communications devices ubiquitous, we have never been further apart.

This divide has been blamed on religion, on politics, on ideology and even on something as immutable as the genetics that make us what we are. The one thing that escapes all responsibility and the only aspect of our decline that we control is our own actions and attitudes. Americans aren’t the Captains of their Fate, they are victims of the patriarchy. They haven’t got personal responsibility for their path through life when they feel the world owes them something just for being born.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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