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If one listens to the financial media mavens give their detailed analysis of late, you would have thought the The Onion™ decided to try its hand at TV and radio.

Since last Friday as they anticipated the most recent “jobs” report with bated breath to be announced, into this week that just ended. I have been left slack-jawed more times resembling the cartoon characters I grew with up as a kid. However, at least back then the cartoons were trying to be funny. Today, what is being touted as “serious insightful analysis” is so much more comedic – its tragic.

As I awaited this months version of the report. I had playing in the background one of the financial shows that were parsing, and mincing the usual data points. When suddenly I heard a few statements that made me do the double-take of “wait…what?”

As usual the schpiel is basically the same or formulaic on all of these program types. The host plays the sounding board as the guest plays “the seer of all that’s unseen by us mere mortal schlubs.” On this day in particular; replace “mortal” with “idiot” and you are closer to the truth of how you, or I, are looked upon by these masses of the so-called “smart crowd” perusing Wall Street today.

And just to clarify; the word “idiot” is in quotes not in some air quote manner. Rather: that is the exact word used to describe people like myself (and maybe even you) that question their insight. So if you’re reading this – now you know where you may stand within Wall Street’s loving and caring mind. (I know it’s satire) For question their glowing analysis of dog crap? And it’ll be your nose they’ll attempt to rub in it. Elitist insight at its best.

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

How Venture Capitalists Came to Rule the World

June 19, 2015

How Venture Capitalists Came to Rule the World

Jobless Growth and the Lottery Economy

Before the gale-force hurricane of Reaganomics swept through the United States in the 1980s, America very briefly entertained the adoption of a deliberate industrial policy. As in South Korea and certain European nations, the U.S. government would pick economic winners and losers and direct funds accordingly.

This was no utopian idea. After World War II, a number of European governments invested heavily in key sectors — electricity, steel — toclose the technology gap with the United States. Similarly, the South Korean government built up a shipbuilding industry in the 1970s from nothing into the largest and more successful in the world. To a certain extent, the Pentagon accomplished something similar with the Internet (though no American would dare call such a thing “socialism”).

Industrial policy has never really gone away. Many governments, including China and the United States, have focused funds on the clean energy sector (wind turbines, solar cells). But the prevailing economic orthodoxy since the creative destruction unleashed by Reaganomics has been that the invisible hand of the market, not the state, should determine winners and losers.

It turns out, however, that the market’s hand is very often not invisible at all. Actual people, with very visible hands, are picking the winners and losers in the marketplace. Consider the impact of venture capitalists.

Although they’re responsible for only 0.3 percent of U.S. GDP, the influence of these elite investors is disproportionate. Their decisions determine how you communicate, how you shop, how you organize your life. Venture capital has been instrumental in launching companies that today make up over 20 percent of America’s GDP.

Local Production Means Jobs and Prosperity

June 9, 2015

Local Production Means Jobs and Prosperity

With over 93 million unemployed working age adults in America and the economy beginning to go negative again, if you are fortunate enough to have a job it may not last much longer. It is easy to keep a positive attitude about the economy when you get a paycheck every week but life after the paychecks stop will change your outlook a great deal. That is the reality that is about to overtake the working class in the coming months.

The primary mechanism that has tipped the economy onto a downhill trajectory is the route that circulating money has taken in the past few decades. In the past much of the money was kept in circulation in the local economy resulting in the creation of many local jobs. With the new corporate model, most of the profit is siphoned out of the local economy and goes to wall street profiteers. This has resulted in the destruction of many local jobs while the few at the top of the wealth pyramid get richer much faster as time goes on.

The only way a nation can maintain a middle class is to keep money circulating in the local arena. The lack of this local circulation has finally caught up to the middle class and it has begun to shrink at an alarming rate. If the corporate model plays out to the end, it will mean the total destruction of the middle class and the beginnings of a two tiered system where there are a few very wealthy persons lording over a very large poverty stricken majority. That is where we are heading.

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

If Your BS Detector Isn’t Shrieking, It’s Broken

June 9, 2015

If Your BS Detector Isn’t Shrieking, It’s Broken

Wishing it was true doesn’t make it true–it makes you a chump who fell for the con.

Once upon a time in America, no adult could survive without possessing a finely tuned BS detector. Herman Melville masterfully captured America’s fascination with cons and con artists in his 1857 classic The Confidence-Man, which I discussed in The Con in Confidence (October 4, 2006).

An essential component of the American ethos is: don’t be a chump. Don’t fall for the con. And if you do, it’s your own fault. The Wild West wasn’t just thieves shooting people in the back (your classic “gunfight” in the real West)–it was a simmering stew of con artists, flim-flammers and grifters exploiting the naive, the trusting and the credulous.

The employment/unemployment statistics are obviously BS. 93 million people aren’t even counted any more–they’re statistical zombies, no longer among the living workforce. If the unemployment rate were calculated on the number of full-time jobs and the true workforce (everyone ages 18 – 70 that isn’t institutionalized or in prison), the unemployment rate would not be the absurdly delusional 5.6% claimed by the bureaucratic con artists.We now inhabit a world where virtually everything is a con. That “organic” produce from some other country–did anyone test the soil the produce grew in? It could be loaded with heavy metals and be certified “organic” because no pesticides were used during production. But what about last year? And the year before? What’s in the water used to irrigate the crops?

The corrupts-everything-it-touches bribe vacuum known as Hillary Clinton is still disgracing the national stage, 24 years after she first displayed her con-artist colors. Hillary’s most enduring accomplishment is the Clinton Foundation–a glorification of bribery, chicanery, flim-flam and cons so outrageously perfected that it serves up examples of every con known to humanity in one form or another.

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

The Gardens of Plenty

June 2, 2015

The Gardens of Plenty

Editor’s Note: In France, Gardens of Plenty help provide not just vegetables but training and job skills. Yardfarms can be developed not just in backyards but in community spaces around towns and cities, helping to train others to not just make a living but to make their communities more sustainable, more food secure, more resilient.

Jardin Cocagne. Photo (CC): PHOTO CLUB de St Hilarion

In the Jardins de Cocagne gardens the jobless and homeless find self-confidence and support in creating a future.

How can people in difficult circumstances build autonomous lives? The answer might be found in the Jardins de Cocagne: by cultivating vegetables. Initiated in 1991 by Jean-Guy Henckel, the project has now taken root in several French regions. These gardens, whose name translates into the “Gardens of Plenty”, take in men and women in precarious living situations, such as welfare recipients, the long-term unemployed, or the homeless. Hired under a government-supported employment contract, they grow organic produce, which is then sold to subscribers by the basket. For up to two years, the gardeners work 24 hours a week for minimum wage under the guidance of professional vegetable farmers and social workers. “The objective here is not to exploit people out of commercial interest,” Henckel explains. “We are conflict mediators, because we manage to unite three feuding sisters: Society, Business, and Ecology. The Jardins de Cocagne must be economically viable, yet without turning a blind eye to human beings in their existential need, and without harming the planet.”

Networking and expanding

In order to consolidate its activities, the Cocagne network is currently building a donor fund consisting of tax-exempt private as well as corporate and public donations. Following the concept from the earth into the basket, the new Planète Sésame restaurants are now defining the motto as from the basket onto the plate. The restaurants are operated by people in reintegration programs and supplied with produce from the gardens. New projects are being launched, such as the Fleurs de Cocagne gardens that specialize in flower production. The latest Cocagne branch is located in “Europe’s Silicon Valley” on the Saclay plateau, right next to the technological research center Commissariat à l’énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives, the business college École des Hautes Études Commerciales, and the Centrale, AgroParisTech, Polytechnique—an ambitious project featuring a farm, a restaurant, a hostel, and an 18-hectare organic vegetable garden.

Rise of the ‘precariat,’ the global scourge of precarious jobs

June 1, 2015

Rise of the ‘precariat,’ the global scourge of precarious jobs

Barely one in four of the global workforce has a stable job, UN reports

With relatively little notice, the world passed a modern milestone recently, one that makes any yearning for more stable times seem very farfetched — the global jobless total passed 200 million.

To help put that in perspective, that’s 30 million more without work than at the height of the global recession in 2008, according to the UN report that crunched the numbers.

This is a shocker on its own. But even more ominous is the growing precariousness of the job situation for those that have them, according to the UN study, “The changing nature of jobs.”

It warns of “widespread insecurity” spreading as momentum shifts from societies with full-time jobs to shaky short-term employment across much of the globe.

Another scary fact the study unearths is how many people these days have stable work contracts of any kind. That’s barely one in four of the globe’s workforce.

The overwhelming majority of people on the planet struggle with temporary work, informal or illegal jobs, long spells of unemployment and unpaid family work.

In other words, most are caught in a disadvantageous spiral where exploitation is a real risk.

Wave of refugees

Want more perspective on how today’s world works? Much of temporary work simply can’t sustain families anymore and one quarter of the world’s workforce earns around $2 a day.

As the UN report notes, mass unemployment and underemployment puts steady downward pressure on wages — along with increasing child labour, estimated conservatively at 73 million, many working in near slave conditions.

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

Are You Ready for the Coming Debt Revolution?

May 16, 2015

Are You Ready for the Coming Debt Revolution?

Gualfin (“End of the Road”), Argentina

Dear Diary,

There is a specter haunting America… and all the developed nations of the world.

It is the specter of a debt revolution.

We left off yesterday talking about how the economy of the last 30 years – and especially that of the last six years – has favored the old over the young.

“Rise up, ye young’uns,” we as much as said, “you have nothing to lose but your parents’ debts.”

We showed how the value of U.S. corporate equity, mainly held by older people, had multiplied by 28 times since 1981.

That was no honest bull market in stocks; it was a market sent soaring by an explosion of credit.

But what did it do for young people whose only assets are their time and their youthful energy?

Alas, the real economy has increased by only five times over the same period.

A Grim and Menacing Specter

And when you look more closely at work and wages, the specter grows grimmer and more menacing.

Average hourly wages have barely budged in the last 30 years. And average household incomes have fallen – from $57,000 to $52,000 – in the 21st century.

But as our fingers came to rest yesterday, there was one question hanging in the air, like the smoke from an exploded hand grenade: Why?

Was this huge shift – of trillions of dollars of wealth from young working people to old asset holders – an accident?

Was it just the maturing of a market economy in the electronic age?

Was it because China took the capitalist road in 1979?

Or because robots were competing with young people for jobs?

Nope… on all three counts.

First, old people, not young people, control government.

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

A Generational Storm Is Coming

May 14, 2015

A Generational Storm Is Coming

Dear Diary,

Yesterday, we began our high-minded graduation speech to the Class of 2015.

We explained how the young graduates were not only the most heavily indebted in history, but also the least likely to be able to pay their debts.

Median wages have been going down since these graduates were about five years old… So have economic growth rates.

Today, we continue the speech no one wants us to give…

You are heirs to claptrap, nonsense, bogus theories, and trillions of dollars in debt.

The systems, programs, and institutions your parents set up are mostly worthless scams. Worse, they produce outcomes contrary to their stated goals.

Welfare programs do not help people escape poverty; they keep them mired in it.

Health care programs do not make them healthy; they make them dependent on the drug industry.

Defense industry spending doesn’t make us safer; it funds drones, bumbling interventions, and assassinations… and it creates more foreign enemies.

We end up not only poorer, but also less secure.

All of those assertions take more time to explain and prove than we have time for now. But here’s a little example that you will appreciate…

25 Years of Poverty

Under President Johnson, the government set up the Federal Direct Student Loan Program to provide “low-interest loans” (back then, “low” meant 8%) to students.

Private lenders make the loans, but they receive the full backing of the feds.

The idea was to help you afford higher education… and earn larger salaries as a result. And with your increased earnings you were supposed to be able to pay off the loan.

But at over 11% of outstanding debt, the Student Loan Program now has the highest delinquency rate of all forms of household debt (mortgage loans, auto loans, credit cards).

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

A Tale Of Two Graphs——Why Bubble Finance Will Fail

May 13, 2015

A Tale Of Two Graphs——Why Bubble Finance Will Fail

On Friday the BLS reported, among other things, that full-time employment in April had dropped by 252,000 from the prior month and that the weekly earnings of production workers had risen by the grand sum of 67 cents (0.1%) before inflation and taxes. But why should still another confirmation that the main street job market is dead in the water stop the robo-traders from another romp higher?

In fact, this incongruous spectacle of dead wages and soaring financial assets has been going on for several decades now——a transparently obvious trend obfuscated by the unrelenting recency bias of the MSM and the authorized Wall Street/Washington narrative. So let Friday’s incongruous stock market rip serve as a portal into the ugly interior history of how central bank bubble finance has fostered an existential crisis in what remains of American capitalism.

On the main street side, this isn’t a matter of sluggish recovery from a mysterious financial crisis that arrived, apparently, on a comet from deep space in September 2008. Alas, for three decades running now, the constant dollar weekly wages of full-time workers have been flat as a pancake.

And let’s be clear. We are not talking here about after school jobs held by quasi-perpetual students, the meager pay of moonlighting moms or the episodic work gigs of society’s tens of million of loosely attached drifters.

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

The Goldilocks Illusion

May 12, 2015

The Goldilocks Illusion

Why Market Participants Liked the Payrolls Report

Some people have wondered why the stock market reacted with such a big rally to last Friday’s payrolls data. After all, the report wasn’t much to write home about, especially if one ponders the details. In addition, the already weak March payrolls data were revised lower to an even worse figure.

However, the report certainly did one thing: it kept the “Goldilocks illusion” alive. While jobs data are a lagging economic indicator and would likely be completely ignored in an unhampered free market (if anyone even took the trouble to collect them, that is), they are regarded as decisive for Fed policy. Few things illustrate more vividly that the central planners are driving forward with their eyes firmly fixed on the rear-view mirror.

The Fed has little choice though, since its mandate explicitly includes employment as one the things central bank policy is supposed to support (which it does mainly by fostering artificial booms and malinvestment of capital). The market’s focus on the jobs data has increased greatly in recent years as a result of this, which incidentally illustrates how utterly dependent the markets have become on a continuation of easy money policies by central banks.

The “Goldilocks” idea is that it is best for risk assets if economic data are strong enough not to signal recessionary conditions, but weak enough to keep ZIRP and monetary pumping going. Friday’s data point was presumably considered almost perfect in terms of this playbook.

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

Economic Disinformation Keeps Financial Markets Up

May 9, 2015

Economic Disinformation Keeps Financial Markets Up

Today’s payroll jobs report is more of the same. The Bureau of Labor Statistics claims that 223,000 new jobs were created in April. Let’s accept the claim and see where the jobs are.

Specialty trade contractors are credited with 41,000 jobs equally split between residential and nonresidential. I believe these are home and building repairs and remodeling.

The rest of the jobs, 182,000, are in domestic services.

Despite store closings and weak retail sales, 12,000 people were hired in retail trade.

Despite negative first quarter GDP growth, 62,000 people were hired in professional and business services, 67% of which are in administrative and waste services.

Health care and social assistance accounted for 55,600 jobs of which ambulatory health care services, hospitals, and social assistance accounted for 85% of the jobs.

Waitresses and bartenders account for 26,000 jobs, and government employed 10,000 new workers.

There are no jobs in manufacturing.

Mining, timber, oil and gas extraction lost jobs.

Temporary help services (16,100 jobs) offered 3.7 times more jobs than law, accounting architecture, and engineering combined (4,500 jobs).

As I have pointed out for a number of years, according to the payroll jobs reports, the complexion of the US labor force is that of a Third World country. Most of the jobs created are lowly paid domestic services.

The well paying high productivity, high value-added jobs have been offshored and given to foreigners who work for less. This fact, more than the reduction in marginal income tax rates, is the reason for the rising inequality in the distribution of income and wealth.

Offshoring middle class jobs raises corporate profits and, thereby, the incomes of corporate owners (shareholders) and executives. But it reduces the incomes of the majority of the population who are forced into either lowly paid and part time jobs or unemployment.

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

Chinese Company Moves to Replace 90% of its Workforce with Robots

May 7, 2015

Chinese Company Moves to Replace 90% of its Workforce with Robots

I’m not one of those people who thinks robots taking over menial labor from human employees is a bad thing. On the contrary, I think such a displacement could ultimately prove very positive for the species. Nevertheless, the short-term pain and suffering that this could cause for displaced workers and their families likely will have tremendous negative repercussions to the societies that are most affected in the near and intermediate-term.

Since robots entering the workforce is probably one of the most significant economic trends in the decades ahead, we should all start thinking about how to deal with what will be a major adjustment for hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people.

From the South China Morning Post:

Construction work has begun on the first factory in China’s manufacturing hub of Dongguan to use only robots for production, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

A total of 1,000 robots would be introduced at the factory initially, run by Shenzhen Evenwin Precision Technology Co, with the aim of reducing the current workforce of 1,800 by 90 per cent to only about 200, Chen Xingqi, the chairman of the company’s board, was quoted as saying in the report.

Robots are set to take over in many factories in the Pearl River Delta, the area of southern China known as the ‘world’s workshop’ because of the huge export manufacturing industry there, as labour shortages bite and local authorities face the need to spur innovation to counter the economic slowdown.

Since September, a total of 505 factories across Dongguan have invested 4.2 billion yuan in robots, aiming to replace more than 30,000 workers, according to the Dongguan Economy and Information Technology Bureau.

By 2016, up to 1,500 of the city’s industrial enterprises will began replacing humans with robots.

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

A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse – David Graeber on “The Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs”

April 22, 2015

A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse – David Graeber on “The Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs”

Graeber’s argument is similar to one he made in a 2013 article called “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs”, in which he argued that, in 1930, economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that by the end of the century technology would have advanced sufficiently that in countries such as the UK and the US we’d be on 15-hour weeks. “In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshalled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. Huge swaths of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they believe to be unnecessary. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.”

But what happened between the Apollo moon landing and now? Graeber’s theory is that in the late 1960s and early 1970s there was mounting fear about a society of hippie proles with too much time on their hands. “The ruling class had a freak out about robots replacing all the workers. There was a general feeling that ‘My God, if it’s bad now with the hippies, imagine what it’ll be like if the entire working class becomes unemployed.’ You never know how conscious it was but decisions were made about research priorities.” Consider, he suggests, medicine and the life sciences since the late 1960s. “Cancer? No, that’s still here.” Instead, the most dramatic breakthroughs have been with drugs such as Ritalin, Zoloft and Prozac – all of which, Graeber writes, are “tailor-made, one might say, so that these new professional demands don’t drive us completely, dysfunctionally, crazy”

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

Steen Jakobsen: Get Ready For The Biggest Margin Call In History

April 20, 2015

Steen Jakobsen: Get Ready For The Biggest Margin Call In History

A recommendation to move to cash

Economist Steen Jakobsen, Chief Investment Officer of Saxo Bank, believes 2015 will be another “lost year” for the economy. And he predicts the Federal Reserve will indeed start to raise rates later this year, surprising the market and taking the wind of out asset prices.

He recommends building cash and waiting to see how the coming storm — which he calls the “greatest margin call in history” — plays out:

0% interest rates at $0 down has not created the additional momentum to the economy The Fed was hoping for. The trickle down effect, the wealth effect, has instead made for bigger inequality in society. So I think we’re set for a rate hike in either in June or in September. I think this will be the biggest margin call in history on the asset inflation created by the Fed .

That’s where I differ from most Fed watchers. Everyone else is looking at employment, inflation targeting. I don’t think Fed is at all looking at those. They are saying “Listen, the 0% interest rate is getting us absolutely nowhere, we think it’s very, very important for us to move to a more neutral place”. At the same time we will communicate that we are open-minded to additional programs or whatever needs to be done to secure the long term growth of the economy. But that will be on the down side, not on the up side. And as year has progressed, and I’ve said this publicly, I think 2015 is already lost in terms of recovery here. And that will take the market by surprise.

The market will ask in September when the Fed hikes: “Why are you hiking interest rate when growth is below target, inflation below target”? Well, the Fed’s response will be “Because this is the biggest asset inflation we’ve seen in human history and we need to address it”.

…..

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article and/or listen to the podcast…

One Last Look At The Real Economy Before It Implodes – Part 4

April 11, 2015

One Last Look At The Real Economy Before It Implodes – Part 4

In the first three installments of this series, we examined the realities behind supply and demand, unemployment and personal debt, and national debt. As has been proven in each consecutive article with ample evidence, mainstream establishment numbers are, for the most part, utter garbage. They are not legitimate. They are meaningless.

The figures and stats that do have some truth to them are so obscured from the public view and unreported by the media that they may as well be state secrets. The average person has no clue of their existence because his primary sources of information are establishment-dominated. Even MSM talking heads and economic “analysts” are so mesmerized by the false version of the economic world that they have no point of reference when suddenly confronted with singular facts. Some people call this catastrophic behavior a “positive feedback loop.” It is a mainstream echo chamber that has become a financial tomb.

Now that I have covered the lies within our economy that I can prove absolutely, it is time to move on to the lies that are more difficult to pin down. These lies often slip past our investigations because the hard data that could be used to expose them is simply not available to the general public. In fact, much of the data is not even available to government officials. I am, of course, talking about the hard data behind the activities of central banks across the globe — the International Monetary Fund, the Bank for International Settlements and the Federal Reserve in particular. In this installment, we will explore the purpose of these lies; to hide the imminent destruction of our currency — by hook, by crook and by fiat.

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

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