Home » Posts tagged 'the burning platform' (Page 5)

Tag Archives: the burning platform

Olduvai
Click on image to purchase

Olduvai III: Catacylsm
Click on image to purchase

Post categories

Post Archives by Category

Worst Case Scenario = 73% Down From Here

March 31, 2016

WORST CASE SCENARIO = 73% DOWN FROM HERE

As the stock market gyrates higher and lower in a fairly narrow range, the spokesmodels and talking heads on CNBC breathlessly regurgitate the standard bullish mantra designed to keep the muppets in the market. They are employees of a massive corporation whose bottom line and stock price depend upon advertising revenues reaped from Wall Street and K Street. They aren’t journalists. They are propagandists disguised as journalists. Their job is to keep you confused, misinformed, and ignorant of the true facts.

Based on the never ending happy talk and buy now gibberish spouted by the pundit lackeys, you would think we are experiencing a bull market of epic proportions and anyone who hasn’t been in the market has missed out on tremendous gains. There’s one little problem with that bit of propaganda. It’s completely false. The Fed turned off the QE spigot at the end of October 2014 and the market has gone nowhere ever since.

QE1 began in September 2008, taking the Fed balance sheet from $900 billion to $2.3 trillion by June 2010. This helped halt the stock market crash and drove the S&P 500 up by 50% from its March 2009 lows. QE2 was implemented in November 2010 and increased the Fed balance sheet to $2.9 trillion by the end of 2011. This resulted in an unacceptable 10% increase in the S&P 500, so the Fed cranked up their printing presses to hyper-speed and launched the mother of all quantitative easings, with QE3 pushing their balance sheet to $4.5 trillion by October 2014, when they ceased their “Save a Wall Street Banker” campaign.

As Main Street dies, Wall Street has been paved in gold. The S&P 500 soared to all-time highs, with 40% gains from the September 2012 QE3 launch until its cessation in October 2014. Like a heroine addict, Wall Street has experienced withdrawal symptoms ever since, and begs for more monetary easing injections.

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

The Odds Are Never In Your Favour

December 28, 2015

The Odds Are Never In Your Favour

The irony of the phrase “may the odds be ever in your favor” is not lost on the readers of the Hunger Games trilogy of novels or the film adaption. Despite the grimness of the story, over 65 million copies of the books have been sold. The total box office take so far has exceeded $1.4 billion for the four movies. The dystopian series tackles real issues like severe poverty, starvation, torture, oppression, betrayal and the brutality of war. It doesn’t fit into the standard film making success recipe of feel good fluff, politically correct storylines and happy endings. Each film in the series gets progressively darker, with the final episode permeating doom and gloom. The books and the movies capture the deepening crisis mood engulfing the world today. And they realistically portray the world as a place where there are no good guys in positions of power. The ruling class, in all cases, is driven by a voracious appetite for supremacy, wealth, and control.

An Ambiguous, Confusing, Dangerous World

The world is a morally ambiguous place where those in power and those seeking power utilize the influence of media propaganda and PR campaigns built around “heroes” and “icons” to psychologically control the masses, while enriching themselves and their crony capitalist sponsors. Endless war against the latest “bad guys” further enriches the arms dealers and their political lackeys who joyfully use faux patriotism and nationalistic fervor to insist upon more boots on the ground, drones in the air, bombs dropped, and missiles launched.

War is good for business and keeps the masses distracted, while the Wall Street financiers harvest the wealth of the citizens.

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

The Most Devious Liars in the Room

November 5, 2015

The Most Devious Liars in the Room

There were a few different stories coming out over the last few days that reveal the true nature of government and the apparatchiks who use disinformation, devious machinations, fraudulent accounting, and taxpayer money to cover up their criminality, lies, and the true state of the American economy. The use of government accounting tricks to obscure the truth about our dire financial straits is designed to keep the masses sedated and confused.

A few weeks ago, to great fanfare from the fawning faux journalists who never question any Washington D.C. propaganda, they announced the lowest annual deficit of Obama’s reign of error.

For the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30 the shortfall was $439 billion, a decrease of 9%, or $44 billion, from last year. The deficit is the smallest of Barack Obama’s presidency and the lowest since 2007 in both dollar terms and as a percentage of gross domestic product.

Jack Lew, the Treasury Secretary, and Obama were ecstatic as they boasted about this tremendous accomplishment. I find it disgusting that our leaders hail a $439 billion deficit as a feather in their cap, when until the mid-2000’s the country had never had an annual deficit above $300 billion. After 183 years as a country, the entire national debt was only $427 billion in 1972. Now our beloved leaders cheer annual deficits above that figure. What a warped, deformed, dysfunctional nation we’ve become.

When the government reported this tremendous accomplishment, there was no way to verify the number against the national debt figures, as the government stopped reporting the daily national debt figure because of the debt ceiling impasse with Congress. The farce of these Kabuki Theater exercises in government incompetence is almost beyond comprehension.

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

The Worse Things Get For You, The Better They Get For Wall Street

October 27, 2015

The Worse Things Get For You, The Better They Get For Wall Street

On October 2 the BLS reported absolutely atrocious employment data, with virtually no job growth other than the phantom jobs added by the fantastically wrong Birth/Death adjustment for all those new businesses springing up around the country. The MSM couldn’t even spin it in a positive manner, as the previous two months of lies were adjusted significantly downward. What a shocker. At the beginning of that day the Dow stood at 16,250 and had been in a downward trend for a couple months as the global economy has been clearly weakening. The immediate rational reaction to the horrible news was a 250 point plunge down to the 16,000 level. But by the end of the day the market had finished up over 200 points, as this terrible news was immediately interpreted as good news for the market, because the Federal Reserve will never ever increase interest rates again.

Over the next three weeks, the economic data has continued to deteriorate, corporate earnings have been crashing, and both Europe and China are experiencing continuing and deepening economic declines. The big swinging dicks on Wall Street have programmed their HFT computers to buy, buy, buy. The worse the data, the bigger the gains. The market has soared by 1,600 points since the low on October 2. A 10% surge based upon lousy economic info, as the economy is either in recession or headed into recession, is irrational, ridiculous, and warped, just like our financial system. This is what happens when crony capitalism takes root like a foul weed and is bankrolled by a central bank that cares only for Wall Street, while throwing Main Street under the bus.

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

Ignore the Media Bullsh*t–Retail Implosion Proves We Are In Recession

October 15, 2015

Ignore the Media Bullsh*t–Retail Implosion Proves We Are In Recession

Here we go again. The dying legacy media will continue to support the status quo, who provide their dwindling advertising revenue, by papering over the truth with platitudes, lies, and misinformation. I have been detailing the long slow death of retail in America for the last few years. The data and facts are unequivocal. Therefore, the establishment and their media mouthpieces need to suppress the truth.

They spin every terrible report in the most positive way possible. They blame lousy retail results on the weather. They blame them on calendar effects. They blame them on gasoline sales plunging. That one is funny, because we heard for months that retail spending would surge because people had more money in their pockets from the huge decline in gasoline prices.

September retail sales were grudgingly reported by the Census Bureau this morning and they were absolutely dreadful. This followed an atrocious August report. The MSM couldn’t blame it on snow, cold, flooding, drought, or even swarms of locusts. So they just buried the story in their small print headlines. The propaganda media machine had nothing. They continue to spew the drivel about a 5.1% unemployment rate as a reflection of a booming jobs market. If we really have a booming jobs market, we would have a booming retail sector. The stagnant retail market reveals the jobs data to be fraudulent. The 94 million people supposedly not in the job market can’t buy shit with their good looks.

Despite the storyline about consumer austerity being the reason for sluggish spending, the facts prove otherwise. Consumer spending accounted for 68% of GDP in 2008 at the peak. Seven years later it still represents 68% of GDP. The difference is the spending has shifted dramatically towards services since the Wall Street created financial crisis. Spending on services has grown by 31% versus 20% for goods since 2008. Guess what has caused that surge?

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

Why This Feels Like a Depression for Most People

October 9, 2015

Why This Feels Like a Depression for Most People

“And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.” – John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

Everyone has seen the pictures of the unemployed waiting in soup lines during the Great Depression. When you try to tell a propaganda believing, willfully ignorant, mainstream media watching, math challenged consumer we are in the midst of a Greater Depression, they act as if you’ve lost your mind. They will immediately bluster about the 5.1% unemployment rate, record corporate profits, and stock market near all-time highs. The cognitive dissonance of these people is only exceeded by their inability to understand basic mathematical concepts.

The reason you don’t see huge lines of people waiting in soup lines during this Greater Depression is because the government has figured out how to disguise suffering through modern technology. During the height of the Great Depression in 1933, there were 12.8 million Americans unemployed. These were the men pictured in the soup lines. Today, there are 46 million Americans in an electronic soup kitchen line, as their food is distributed through EBT cards (with that angel of mercy JP Morgan reaping billions in profits by processing the transactions).

These 46 million people represent 14% of the U.S. population. There are 23 million households on food stamps in a nation of 123 million households. Therefore, 19% of all households in the U.S. are so poor, they require food assistance to survive. In 1933 there were approximately 126 million Americans living in 30 million households. The government didn’t keep official unemployment records until 1940, but the Department of Labor estimated 12.8 million people were unemployed during the worst year of the Great Depression or 24.9% of the labor force. By 1937 it had fallen to 14.3% or approximately 8 million people.

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

Take The Opportunity To Bail Before Its Too Late

August 31, 2015

Take The Opportunity To Bail Before Its Too Late

Last week ended with the cackling hens on CNBC and the spokesmodels on Bloomberg bloviating about the temporary pothole on the road to riches. They assured their few thousand remaining viewers the 11% plunge in the stock market was caused by China and the communist government’s direct intervention in their stock market, arrest of a brokerage CEO, and threat to prosecute sellers surely cured what ails their market. The Fed and their Plunge Protection Team co-conspirators reversed the free fall, manipulating derivatives and creating a short seller covering rally back to previous week levels. The moneyed interests are desperate to retain the appearance of normality and stability, as their debt saturated system teeters on the verge of collapse.

John Hussman’s weekly letter provides sound advice for anyone looking to avoid a 50% loss in the next 18 months. The market has been overvalued for the last three years and now sits at overvaluation levels on par with 1929 and 2000. The difference is that fear has been overtaking greed in the psyches of traders. The average Joe isn’t in the market. Only the Ivy League MBA High frequency trading computer gurus are playing in this rigged market. The 1,100 point crash last Monday is what happens when arrogant young traders, fear and computer algorithms combine in a perfect storm of mindless selling. Suddenly the pompous risk takers became frightened risk averse lemmings.

The single most important thing for investors to understand here is how current market conditions differ from those that existed through the majority of the market advance of recent years. The difference isn’t valuations. On measures that are best correlated with actual subsequent 10-year S&P 500 total returns, the market has advanced from strenuous, to extreme, to obscene overvaluation, largely without consequence. The difference is that investor risk-preferences have shifted from risk-seeking to risk-aversion.

 

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

FED LUNACY IS TO BLAME FOR THE COMING CRASH

August 5, 2015

FED LUNACY IS TO BLAME FOR THE COMING CRASH

This week John Hussman’s pondering about the state of our markets is as clear and concise as it’s ever been. He starts off by describing the difference between an economy operating at a low level versus a high level. He’s essentially describing a 2% GDP economy versus a 4% GDP economy. We have been stuck in a low level economy since 2008. And there is one primary culprit for the suffering of millions – The Federal Reserve and their Wall Street Bank owners. They are the reason incomes are stagnant, the labor participation rate is at 40 year lows, savers can only earn .25% on their savings, and consumers have been forced further into debt to make ends meet. Meanwhile, corporate America and the Wall Street banks are siphoning off record profits, paying obscene pay packages to their executives, buying off the politicians in Washington to pass legislation (TPP) designed to enrich them further, and arrogantly telling the peasants to work harder.

In economics, we often describe “equilibrium” as a condition where demand is equal to supply. Textbooks usually depict this as a single point where a demand curve and a supply curve intersect, and all is right with the world.

In reality, we know that economies often face a whole range of possible equilibria. One can imagine “low level” equilibria where producers are idle, jobs are scarce, incomes stagnate, consumers struggle or go into debt to make ends meet, and the economy sits in a state of depression – which is often the case in developing countries. One can also imagine “high level” equilibria where producers generate desirable goods and services, jobs are plentiful, and household income is sufficient to demand all of that output.

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

 

 

Something Smells Fishy

May 30, 2015

SOMETHING SMELLS FISHY

It’s always interesting to see a long term chart that reflects your real life experiences. I bought my first home in 1990. It was a small townhouse and I paid $100k, put 10% down, and obtained a 9.875% mortgage. I was thrilled to get under 10%. Those were different times, when you bought a home as a place to live. We had our first kid in 1993 and started looking for a single family home. We stopped because our townhouse had declined in value to $85k, so I couldn’t afford to sell. In 1995 I convinced my employer to rent my townhouse, as they were already renting multiple townhouses for all the foreigners doing short term assignments in the U.S. We bought a single family home in 1995 with the sole purpose of having a decent place to raise a family that was within 20 minutes of my job.

Considering home prices on an inflation adjusted basis were lower than they were in 1980, I was certainly not looking at it as some sort of investment vehicle. But, as you can see from the chart, nationally prices soared by about 55% between 1995 and 2005. My home supposedly doubled in value over 10 years. I was ecstatic when I was eventually able to sell my townhouse in 2004 for $134k. I felt so smart, until I saw a notice in the paper one year later showing my old townhouse had been sold again for $176k. Who knew there were so many greater fools.

This was utterly ridiculous, as home prices over the last 100 years have gone up at the rate of inflation. Robert Shiller and a few other rational thinking people called it a bubble. They were scorned and ridiculed by the whores at the NAR and the bimbo cheerleaders on CNBC. Something smelled rotten in the state of housing.

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

 

 

 

Post navigation

Newer posts →

Olduvai IV: Courage
Click on image to read excerpts

Olduvai II: Exodus
Click on image to purchase

Click on image to purchase @ FriesenPress