U.S. Dot-Com Bubble Was Nothing Compared to Today’s China Prices http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-07/u-s-dot-com-bubble-was-nothing-compared-to-today-s-china-prices … $FXI $PEK
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The Deep State
The Deep State
I’d like to address some aspects of the Greater Depression in this essay.
I’m here to tell you that the inevitable became reality in 2008. We’ve had an interlude over the last few years financed by trillions of new currency units.
However, the economic clock on the wall is reading the same time as it was in 2007, and the Black Horsemen of your worst financial nightmares are about to again crash through the doors and end the party. And this time, they won’t be riding children’s ponies, but armored Percherons.
To refresh your memory, let me recount what a depression is.
The best general definition is: A period of time when most people’s standard of living drops significantly. By that definition, the Greater Depression started in 2008, although historians may someday say it began in 1971, when real wages started falling.
It’s also a period of time when distortions and misallocations of capital are liquidated, and when the business cycle, which is caused exclusively by currency debasement, also known as inflation, climaxes. That results in high unemployment, business failures, uncompleted construction, bond defaults, stock market crashes, and the like.
Fortunately, for those who benefit from the status quo, and members of something called the Deep State, the trillions of new currency units delayed the liquidation. But they also ensured it will now happen on a much grander scale.
The Deep State is an extremely powerful network that controls nearly everything around you. You won’t read about it in the news because it controls the news. Politicians won’t talk about it publicly. That would be like a mobster discussing murder and robbery on the 6 o’clock news. You could say the Deep State is hidden, but it’s only hidden in plain sight.
The Deep State is the source of every negative thing that’s happening right now. To survive the coming rough times, it’s essential for you to know what it’s all about.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Why This Feels Like a Depression for Most People
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…
The Shocking Reality: This Chart Shows Just How Bad Unemployment Is Today Compared to The Great Depression
The Shocking Reality: This Chart Shows Just How Bad Unemployment Is Today Compared to The Great Depression
(Desperate Americans stand in soup kitchen lines and look for work. Circa 1929)
While the Obama administration and their mainstream surrogates maintain that the economy is growing at a booming pace, the reality of the situation is starkly different.
According to a report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics some 94.6 million Americans (age 16 and over) are either not working or have made no effort to find a job. With a population of 320 million, that means nearly one in three people in the United States are currently out of work.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that a record 94,610,000 people (ages 16 and over) were not in the labor force in September. In other words they were neither employed nor had made specific efforts to find work in the prior four weeks.
The number of individuals out of the work force last month — due to discouragement, retirement or otherwise — represented a substantial 579,000 person increase over the most recent record, hit in August, of 94,031,000 people out of the workforce.
Curiously, the official unemployment rate remained unchanged at 5.1%, suggesting that some 95% of people actually have jobs.
But as we’ve repeatedly pointed out, that number has been completely skewed over the last two decades as it fails to account for people who have stopped looking for work (because there are no actual jobs available).
According to John Williams of Shadow Stats, if we were to calculate unemployment using the same metrics as we did during the 1930’s, or even the 1980’s, we’d already be in Great Depression territory. Williams, who utilizes a reporting methodology that accounts for “long-term discouraged workers who were defined out of official existence in 1994,” notes that the real unemployment rate is rapidly approaching 25%.
Now compare the above chart to similar measurements from the 1930’s and you’ll see just how bad things really are:
(via Casey Research)
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
I Am Mourning For America
I Am Mourning For America
I am mourning for America, because she is dying. I am mourning for a nation that once knew such greatness but that has now fallen to depths that were once unimaginable. I am mourning for the death and destruction that are coming, and I am mourning for a future that our children and our grandchildren will never get to see. I am mourning for a nation that has refused to listen to the warnings and that now stands on the precipice of judgment. I am mourning for games that will never be played, for books that will never be finished, for family vacations that will never get to happen and for memories that will never be made. I am mourning for the economic depression that is coming, for the horror and suffering that friends and family will endure, and for the coming death of the country where I drew my first breath.
To many, these words will seem “over the top” and overly dramatic. After all, despite the thousands of problems facing this nation, things still seem very “normal” at this moment. Well, if you don’t “get” what I am saying right now, just bookmark this page and come back to it later. Eventually it will make sense to you.
Last week, I was invited to be a guest on a major television show that is beamed into the homes of millions of people in the United States and Canada. If you get a chance to view the shows that are being aired this week, you will notice that I wore all black.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Equity markets and credit contraction
Equity markets and credit contraction
There is one class of money that is constantly being created and destroyed, and that is bank credit.
Bank credit is created when a bank lends money to a customer; it becomes money because the customer draws down this credit to deposit in other bank accounts and to pay creditors. It is not money that is created by a central bank; it is money that is created out of thin air by commercial banks to lend. Its contraction comes about when it is repaid, or if a customer defaults.
The recent sharp fall in equity markets is leading to two levels of contraction of bank credit. Brokers’ loans to speculating investors are being unwound from record levels, notably in China and also in the US where in July they hit an all-time record of $487bn. Then there is the secondary effect, likely to kick in if there are further falls in equity prices, when equities held as loan collateral are liquidated. This is when falling stock prices can be so destructive of bank credit, and as the US economist Irving Fisher warned in 1933, a wider cycle of collateral liquidation can ensue leading to economic depression.
Fear of an escalating debt liquidation cycle is always a major concern for central bankers, so ensuring the secondary effect described above does not occur is their ultimate priority. Macroeconomic policy is centred on ensuring that bank credit grows continually, so since the Lehman crisis any tendency for bank credit to contract has been offset by central banks creating money. The bald fact that equity markets have now lost upside momentum and appear to be at risk of a self-feeding collapse will be viewed by central bankers with increasing alarm.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
An economic earthquake is rumbling
An economic earthquake is rumbling
While the people sleep, an economic earthquake rumbles underneath. The day that they begin to feel the quake draws near.
History will record that in this decade more people will lose more money (forget about the trillions of dollars already lost) than at any time in our history, including during the Great Depression.
At the same time, a very small group has made and will make huge sums of money.
During the Y2K scare (a real hoax) many people stored food. Then, after Y2K, many people wanted to dump their cache; and some did.
We advised readers of my Bob Livingston Letter at the time to store food simply because of the crisis world we live in, but to store those foods that you could rotate and consume. Stored food is a hedge against inflation. It’s a hedge against natural disaster. It’s a hedge against economic collapse. It was our advice before, and it has been our advice since.
This advice is still valid. People who don’t have some stored food don’t realize how dependent they are on the system and government. Of course, the system was designed and created to make the people dependent on government. That makes them easier to control.
Many people have been in hard times since 2008, thanks to bursting housing and derivatives bubbles — both fueled by the Federal Reserve’s money printing and both predicted by me in my Letter and by many other writers. For those of us who are not well-connected (those of us who are not in the 1 percent), there has been no relief. While the banksters got bailouts and Wall Street and the banksters benefited from the money printers, the middle class was impoverished. Savings were wiped out.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
China And The New World Disorder
China And The New World Disorder
Nicole Foss: Our consistent theme here at the Automatic Earth since its inception has been that we are facing a very powerful deflationary depression, following on from the bursting of an epic financial bubble. What we have witnessed in our three decades of expansion and inflation is nothing short of a monetary supernova, and that period has been the just culmination of a much larger upward trend going back many decades at least. We have lived through a credit hyper-expansion for the record books, with an unprecedented generation of excess claims to underlying real wealth. In doing so we have created the largest financial departure from reality in human history.
Bubbles are not new – humanity has experienced them periodically going all the way back to antiquity – but the novel aspect of this one, apart from its scale, is its occurrence at a point when we have reached or are reaching so many limits on a global scale. The retrenchment we are about to experience as this bubble bursts is also set to be unprecedented, given that the scale of a bust is predictably proportionate to the scale of the excesses during the boom that precedes it. We have built an incredibly complex economic system, but despite its robust appearance it is over-extended, brittle and fragile after decades of fuelling its continued expansion by feeding on its own substance.
The Automatic Earth, December 2011: The lessons of the past are sadly never learned. Each time the optimism is highly contagious. In the larger episodes, it crescendos into euphoria, leading societies into a period of collective madness where risk is embraced and caution is thrown to the wind. Sky-high valuations are readily rationalized – it’s different here, it’s different this time.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
As Economy Heads to Another Crash, BIS Acknowledges: We’re Failing
As Economy Heads to Another Crash, BIS Acknowledges: We’re Failing
World’s Most Powerful Bank Reverses Course, to Avoid a Global Depression
German Economic News, Translation (and closing Note) by Eric Zuesse | Published: 22:07:15 20:10 clock
The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) acknowledges in its annual report that the policy of cheap money has failed. All the trillions in monetary stimulus have produced no growth in the real economy. Central banks cannot salvage the economy. Governments — fiscal stimulus — must now resolve the economic crisis. Political leadership is required.
In November 2008, the Federal Reserve in the US began to purchase many billions in securities, to stabilize the markets after the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Later, the Fed bought also US Treasuries, and cut interest rates to a record low of zero to 0.25 percent. So, they set off a global devaluation race. As a result, between just January 1st and March 12th of 2015, one-fifth of all central banks lowered their key interest rates. China was last to join this currency war, but when they did, their easing of monetary policy helped spark a credit-driven bull market that now produces the biggest Chinese slump in 20 years.
The Basel-based Bank for International Settlements (BIS) is considered the “central bank of central banks.” It was originally founded in 1930 to handle German reparations after the First World War. Today the BIS networks together central banks around the world, and manages on their behalf nations’ gold reserves. Its 85th Annual report analyzes the global financial system, seven years after the 2008 crisis. An entire chapter is devoted to shortcomings of the international monetary and financial system. It says that instead of promoting sustainable and balanced growth of the global economy, this system actually undermines growth long-term.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Greece Is Now A Full-Blown Humanitarian Crisis – In 9 Charts
Greece Is Now A Full-Blown Humanitarian Crisis – In 9 Charts
The people of Greece are facing further years of economic hardship following a Eurozone agreement over the terms of a third bailout. The deal included more tax rises and spending cuts, despite the Syriza government coming to power promising to end what it described as the “humiliation and pain” of austerity. With the country having already endured years of economic contraction since the global downturn, The BBC asks, just how does Greece’s ordeal compare with other recessions and how have the lives of the country’s people been affected?
The long recession
It is now generally agreed that Greece has experienced an economic crisis on the scale of the US Great Depression of the 1930s.
According to the Greek government’s own figures, the economy first contracted in the final quarter of 2008 and – apart from some weak growth in 2014 – has been shrinking ever since. The recession has cut the size of the Greek economy by around a quarter, the largest contraction of an advanced economy since the 1950s.
Although the Greek recession has not been quite as deep as the Great Depression from peak to trough, it has gone on longer and many observers now believe Greek GDP will drop further in 2015.
Dwindling jobs
Jobs are increasingly difficult to come by in Greece – especially for the young. While a quarter of the population are out of work, youth unemployment is running much higher.
Half of those under 25 are out of work. In some regions of western Greece, the youth unemployment rate is well above 60%.
Systemic Turmoil, Structural Reform
Systemic Turmoil, Structural Reform
“The problem with the post-2007 world is that we are not in a cyclical recovery; we are in a structural depression defined as a sustained period of below-trend growth with no end in sight. The U.S. has caught the Japanese disease. Structural depressions are not amenable to monetary solutions, they require structural solutions.”
–James Rickards
Can anyone stabilize this bitch? At daybreak, anyway, the Federal Reserve governors were all bagging Z’s in their trundle beds. Maybe after a few pumpkin lattes they’ll jump in and tell their trading shills to BTFD. The soma-like perma-trance among those who follow markets and money matters appears to be ending abruptly with the recognition that sometimes robots and humans alike run shrieking to the exit. A pity when they get to the door and discover it opens onto a cliff-edge. Look out below.
All this trouble with money comes from one meta problem: aggregate industrial growth has ended. It has stopped more in some parts of the world than others, while in the USA it has actually been contracting. The cause is simple: the end of cheap energy, oil in particular. At over $70-a-barrel the price kills economies; under $70-a-barrel the price kills oil production. The bottom line is that, in the broadest sense, the world can no longer count on getting more stuff, except waste, garbage, political unrest, and the other various effects of entropy. From now on, there is only less of everything for a global population that has not stopped growing. The folks on-board are still having sex, of course, which has a certain byproduct.
This dynamic was plain to see a decade ago, but the people who run finance and governments thought it would be a good idea to maintain the appearance of growth via the usufruct mechanisms of central banking: ZIRP, QE, market intervention, and universal accounting fraud.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Its 1929 In China—-Here’s The Chapter And Verse
Its 1929 In China—-Here’s The Chapter And Verse
I’ve mentioned the Chinese stock market mania here briefly in recent weeks. I’ve now compiled a fair amount of data along with some interesting anecdotes that show just how crazy it’s gotten so I thought I’d spend this week’s market comment laying it all out for you.
The first thing I like to focus on is valuations. If the dot-com bubble is the gold standard, then China is a bona fide financial bubble. According to Bloomberg:
Valuations in China are now higher than those in the U.S. at the height of the dot-com bubble just about any way you slice them. The average Chinese technology stock has a price-to-earnings ratio 41 percent above that of U.S. peers in 2000, while the median valuation is twice as expensive and the market capitalization-weighted average is 12 percent higher, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Another way to look at it is to compare current valuations around the world:
One of these bars doesn’t belong. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-16/real-cost-of-china-stocks-dwarfs-2007-bubble-as-valuations-jump …
I’ve made the case that US stocks are more overvalued than they appear due to the fact that the median stock is now more highly valued than ever. There’s now a very similar but far more dramatic situation going on in China. Again, from Bloomberg:
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The problem with the Shanghai Composite is that 94 percent of Chinese stocks trade at higher valuations than the index, a consequence of its heavy weighting toward low-priced banks. Use average or median multiples instead and a different picture emerges: Chinese shares are almost twice as expensive as they were when the Shanghai Composite peaked in October 2007 and more than three times pricier than any of the world’s top 10 markets.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Economic Depression In Greece Deepens As Tsipras Prepares To Deliver ‘The Great No’
The Economic Depression In Greece Deepens As Tsipras Prepares To Deliver ‘The Great No’
As Greece plunges even deeper into economic chaos, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras says that his government is prepared to respond to the demands of the EU and the IMF with “the great no” and that his party will accept responsibility for whatever consequences follow. Despite years of intervention from the rest of Europe, Greece is a bigger economic mess today than ever. Greek GDP has shrunk by 26 percent since 2008, the national debt to GDP ratio in Greece is up to a staggering 175 percent, and the unemployment rate is up above 25 percent. Greek stocks are crashing and Greek bond yields are shooting into the stratosphere. Meanwhile, the banking system is essentially on life support at this point. 400 million euros were pulled out of Greek banks on Monday alone. No matter what happens in the coming days, many believe that it is now only a matter of time before capital controls like we saw in Cyprus are imposed.
Over the past several months, there have been endless high level meetings over in Europe regarding this Greek crisis, but none of them have fixed anything. And even Jeroen Dijsselbloem admits that the odds of anything being accomplished during the meeting of eurozone finance ministers on Thursday is “very small”…
Some officials believe Thursday’s meeting of eurozone finance ministers will be perhaps the last chance to stop Greece sliding into default and towards leaving the euro.
However the president of the so-called Eurogroup, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, said the chance of an accord was “very small”.
And it is certainly not just Dijsselbloem that feels this way. At this point pretty much everyone is resigned to the fact that there is not going to be a deal any time soon. The following comes from Reuters…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
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.”
- Watch The National: More Canadians facing part-time jobs, lower wages
- Secure jobs in short supply in Canada’s tough labour market
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…
What We Learned over Dinner from a Swiss Central Banker
What We Learned over Dinner from a Swiss Central Banker
Dear Diary,
Today… what we learned over dinner from a surprisingly smart central banker.
But first, to the markets…
The Dow shot up 121 Dow points yesterday, recovering most of Tuesday’s slide.
In a series of business meetings Tuesday and Wednesday, we explained why nobody but us is rooting for a depression.
Yes, there’s no point in hiding it. We would like to see a depression. Short, swift, and decisive – a quick and sharp end to the biggest credit expansion in all of history.
As secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon said after the 1929 stock market crash:
Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate. It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.
Credit Cannot Increase Forever
“It’s unbelievable,” said colleague Merryn Somerset Webb. Merryn is the editor ofMoneyWeek magazine in London.
“London property prices just keep going up and up. It’s so expensive our writers can’t afford to live here anymore. I’m thinking of moving the business to Edinburgh.”
You can’t build a solid economy on the jelly of unaffordable housing, unpayable debts, and unsustainable asset prices. But that’s what we’ve got.
The only way to get down to something more reliable… more real… and healthier… is to wash away the financial glop and goo that has accumulated during the last 30 years.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Letter to a Plutocrat: Your Pipeline Made Me a Criminal
Letter to a Plutocrat: Your Pipeline Made Me a Criminal
Dear Sir/Madam:
I’m writing to you who control our government now — that is, the big corporations of the world. Let’s not pretend it is otherwise. Thanks to a system in which money buys elections, nearly all of our politicians are in your employ.
Thanks for wrecking everything.
If I were a Millennial, this might not surprise me or even be worthy of mention. They have grown up in the system as it exists now, and many of them are too cynical to fight. But I’m from Generation X, and we still thought we had a chance to make our own destinies. In recent years that’s become increasingly difficult.
The future my kids face will include a deteriorating national infrastructure, underfunded public schools full of stressed students and the traumatized poor, and a world of permanent wars started by my own country, mainly against people much worse off than ourselves. And worst of all, their future is jeopardized by your refusal to see that the Earth cannot take anymore plundering of resources.I’m going to be frank. I’m a member of the intellectual elite. I’m not working class and I’m not poor, but those distinctions aren’t what they used to be. My father worked his way out of Depression-era Oklahoma to become a professor at Harvard. I was given the best education money could buy, because that’s what my parents valued. I never got a D or F in my life, and when I got a few Cs (trigonometry nearly killed me), I heard about it from my mother and father–they thought they knew what it took to get ahead in the world. I have degrees from Smith College and Harvard University.
– See more at: http://transitionvoice.com/2015/05/letter-to-a-plutocrat-your-pipeline-made-me-a-criminal/#sthash.ydUlGRuZ.dpuf
