Home » Posts tagged 'adam taggart' (Page 9)
Tag Archives: adam taggart
Connor Stedman: Carbon Farming
Connor Stedman: Carbon Farming
Climate change remains a hotly debated topic. But a scientific fact not up for dispute is the pronounced spike in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere over the past two centuries.
There’s a building urgency to find solutions that can manage/reverse that spike — a process known as carbon sequestration. But how to do that on a planetary scale? It’s a massive predicament. And most of the ‘solutions’ being proposed are technologically unproven, prohibitively costly and/or completely impractical.
Enter carbon farming. It uses nature-based farming practices to park gigatons of carbon in the soil, rebuild soil health and complexity, and revitalize the nutrient density of the foods that we eat. It is quite likely the only practical — and best — way to sequester carbon at massive scale, as well as reap a multitude of by-product benefits.
In this week’s podcast, field ecologist and agriforestry specialist Connor Stedman explains the science behind the carbon farming process:
For the last few million years of the Earth’s history, when there’s been this cycle of glaciers advancing and receding in the northern hemisphere, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has gone between about 180 parts per million and 280 parts per million. That is the band in which all of human history has happened, up until the last 200 or 300 years.
Now the concentration of carbon dioxide is about 407 parts per million, almost 50% higher than the upper end of that historical normal. Carbon dioxide is one of a number of greenhouse gases that hold heat in the Earth’s atmosphere, rather than it being fully reflected back out into space
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Waiting Is The Hardest Part
Man, what an awful stretch of events.
When I penned last week’s article on tragedy, little did I expect something as horrible as the Las Vegas massacre would immediately follow. And nearly lost in the headlines was the untimely passing of rock legend, Tom Petty, one of my all-time favorite musicians. Sure can’t wait for this week to be over…
In memory of Tom, I’ve been listening to a lot of his and the Heartbreakers’ best hits. The lyrics to one song in particular, The Waiting, well-captures an important message today’s investors should take to heart:
The waiting is the hardest partDon’t let it kill you baby, don’t let it get to you
Those waiting for the financial markets to experience some sort (any sort!) of pullback have been waiting a long, looong time. How long?
- It has been over 100 months (more than 8.5 years) since the current bull market began in April of 2009
- It has been 15 months since the last (and very brief) drop of 5% in the S&P 500
- This past September saw record low volatility, including a stretch now claimed to be “the most peaceful days in the history of the markets”
- Since last year’s presidential election, at which point the markets were already considered dangerously overvalued, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is up over 20%
- As of this article’s publishing, the Dow, the S&P and the NASDAQ are all trading at record highs
Or, to put it visually:
The stock market is now 70% higher than it was at the previous bubble peak immediately preceding the 2008 Great Financial Crisis.
Reflect for a moment how painful the crash from Oct 2008-March 2009 was. How much more painful will a crash from today’s much dizzier heights be?
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Michael Basta: The Science Of Conflict Resolution
As our podcast with Pulitzer prize-winning author Sebastian Junger explored, humans are evolutionarily hard-wired to co-exist in community with others. Deriving self-worth from our relationships is simply a fundamental feature of the human species.
But relationships are messy. No two people are exactly alike and disagreements are inevitable. So when conflict arises, how can we navigate through them in ways that strengthen our relationships rather than tear them asunder?
A classic case in point: here at PeakProsperity.com, a very common form of relationship conflict our readers experience is what we refer to as “reluctant partner syndrome“. One partner learns about The Three Es and develops a strongly-felt sense of urgency to prepare for coming crisis. The other partner doesn’t understand this transformation and simply wants life to continue along as it always has been — who needs all the doom and gloom anyways? And the conflicts quickly ensue…
Anyone for whom that situation resonates will enjoy hearing from this week’s podcast guest, Michael Basta. Mike has worked in mental health for 30 years and is a certified Master Gottman Therapist. (Those who read Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink may remember the chapter on John Gottman, whose decades of research studying couples enables him to determine with 94% accuracy after just a few minutes of observation whether a couple will stick together or not.)
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
What Really Matters
What Really Matters
Here at PeakProsperity.com, we devote a lot of focus to building wealth and other forms of “capital“. This website has hosted thousands of discussions over the years on how to preserve and increase wealth.
But what’s it all for?
Every so often, it’s useful to pull waay back to look at the big picture. To re-examine the Why? underlying our plans and aspirations.
Most of us don’t do this very often. We usually only do so after life throws us a curve ball — often some form of tragedy or crisis — that suddenly forces us to re-evaluate everything we may have taken for granted beforehand.
I’ve certainly been guilty of some of this complacency. I think Chris would admit to a little, as well. But sadly, we’ve both recently experienced traumatic events that have forced a renewed appreciation of what truly matters in life.
For me, my (very personal and highly subjective) conclusion is that it pretty much boils down to just two things:
- living with meaning, and
- valued relationships
Everything else — money, knowledge, possessions, skills, experiences…even our beliefs and actions — are means to achieve those two goals.
Living with meaning is a huge topic. One we’ve addressed in parts occasionally here at PP.com and which I expect we’ll tackle more ambitiously in the future. But for now, I just want to point out that it’s rooted within the individual. Each of us has to identify what “meaning” is for ourselves, and then determine how best to pursue it in our lives. (Much easier said than done, of course).
Valued relationships, on the other hand, are by definition interpersonal. As our podcast with Pulitzer prize-winning author Sebastian Junger explored, humans are evolutionarily hard-wired to co-exist in community with others. Deriving self-worth from our relationships is simply a fundamental feature of the human species. And the theme of the remainder of this article.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Chaz Peling: Backup Power Solutions
Chaz Peling: Backup Power Solutions
Over the past month, the Americas have sustained extensive damage from 3 major Atlantic hurricanes and 2 major earthquakes in Mexico. In terms of destroyed houses and businesses, ruined cars, and lost lives, it has been an extremely costly couple of weeks.
One common factor present in the aftermath of each of these disasters has been the loss of electrical power. Harvey knocked out power for 250,000 people. Irma topped 4 million. Maria has deprived 3.5 million people of electricity in Puerto Rico alone. The earthquakes in Mexico City and Oaxaca resulted in blackouts for well over 5 million.
Without electricity, our capability to conduct our modern way of life becomes immediately and severely curtailed. Communication instantly stops. Food quickly spoils. Sundown puts an end to all activity. Air conditioning and water well pumps no longer function.
And as prolonged blackouts often go hand-in-hand with gas shortages, disaster victims are often truly forced into a “dark ages” lifestyle.
This week, Chaz Peling, founder of Sol Solutions, joins the podcast to share his expertise on residential backup power options. The good news is that recent technology advancements offer more robust and affordable solutions than ever before. The bad news is, you have to invest the effort to procure an install them in advance ofthe next crisis for them to be of use.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Cardinal Sin Of Investing: Permanent Impairment Of Capital
Victor Moussa/Shutterstock
The Cardinal Sin Of Investing: Permanent Impairment Of Capital
The key message was: When smart analysts independently find the same patterns in the data, it’s time to take notice.
Well, many of you did, by participating in this week’s Dangerous Markets webinar, which featured Grant and Lance.
In it, both went much deeper into the structural fragility of today’s financial markets and the many reasons why economic growth will remain constrained for years to come.
The excessive build-up of debt in the system — and the absolute dependence on its continued expansion to keep the economy from imploding — is, of course, seen as the prime risk to future growth.
As Lance demonstrates here with several of his excellent charts, so much leverage has been taken on that its servicing is increasingly stealing capital that would otherwise go to savings, consumption and productive investment. Going forward, the demands of the debt service will simply result in less and less capital available left over to grow the economy:
As financial assets are (supposed to be) valued on future growth prospects, lower forecasted growth demands lower valuations. Grant calculates that, should the US see another decade of 2% average annual GDP growth (and it has averaged less than that over the past decade), stock prices should be roughly half of what they are today to be considered fairly valued:
And Lance builds further on this, explaining how this moribund growth, coupled with America’s aging demographic trend, will simply savage the nation’s (already troublesomely underfunded) pension and entitlement systems:
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Van Halen, M&Ms, And The Next Market Downturn
Van Halen, M&Ms, And The Next Market Downturn
The planet-sized egos of rock & roll performers are legendary.
Few things symbolize this better than the outrageous requests they often make when on tour.
These requests are referred to as “riders”, and appear in the contract a tour venue receives in advance of the artist’s arrival. These contract riders specify the physical conditions that the singer/band requires to be in place before arriving to perform. Stage lighting settings, sound equipment, furnishings, etc — that kind of stuff.
And these rider requests can get pretty funky – often extremely so — when it comes to backstage perks the performers want.
For example: A wooden pond filled with koi carp (Eminem). A driver who will not speak or make eye contact (Katy Perry). 20 white kittens and 100 doves (Mariah Carey). Seven dwarves (Iggy Pop). 50,000 bees (Slayer). A sub-machine gun (Mötley Crüe). And, yes, even a great white shark (Hank III).
The practice of making these kind of outrageous demands stems from a rider Van Halen inserted into the contract for its 1982 world tour, which insisted on a bowl of M&Ms to be provided backstage, but with all of the brown M&Ms removed.
As this image below of the actual rider shows, the band was very explicit in its seriousness about this:
Once the media got whiff of this, it had a field day roasting the band’s narcissistic chutzpah. A new high-water mark of diva capriciousness had been established, which quickly became legend. A feat of prima donna pampering that subsequent performers have been trying to top ever since.
But as crazy as it sounds, Van Halen’s “no brown M&Ms” rider had nothing to do with caprice. There was a solid rationale behind it.
In fact, it was quite brilliant.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Scott Cahill: Collapse Risk At The Oroville Dam Is Still Unacceptably High
Remember the crisis earlier this year at the Oroville Dam?
The overflow from California’s winter of heavy rain threatened to overpower our country’s tallest dam. A cascading failure of the dam’s main gates, its primarily spillway AND its emergency spillway had the world watching hour by hour to see if a catastrophic breach was going to occur.
Fortunately, the rains stopped long enough for the situation to be brought under control. The dam remains in place and repair crews have been working all spring and summer.
But should we breathe easy at this point? Not at all, says dam safety expert Scott Cahill. Our readers will remember Scott from the excellent technical assessment he provided in the thick of the crisis earlier this year. In our earlier podcast with him, he explained how the real tragedy at Oroville was that for many years, small and affordable maintenance projects that easily could have prevented the crisis were diverted (in his estimation, the cost of making the needed repairs was quite small — around $6 million. But for short-sighted reasons, the repairs were not funded; and now the bill to fix the resultant damage will likely be on the order of magnitude of over $200 million. Which does not factor in the environmental carnage caused by flooding downstream ecosystems with high-sediment water or the costs involved with evacuating the 200,000 residents living nearby the dam).
And the pattern appears to be continuing. In this week’s podcast, Scott details a number of concerning structural risks visible at Oroville that are again being de-prioritized, or ignored all-together. And as before, straightforward and inexpensive projects that have high potential to prevent a catastrophic failure of the dam are not being pursued:
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Better A Year Early Than A Day Too Late
livelifehappy.com
Better A Year Early Than A Day Too Late
He who hesitates is lost.
~proverb
Change, especially a collapse scenario, often happens quite fast. So fast that there’s little to no time to react in the short frenzy between “before” and “after”.
This is true throughout nature. Glaciers that took millennia to form calve off into the sea in a matter of moments. Old-growth forests filled with thousand-year-old trees can be decimated by a single wildfire. The bubonic plague “Black Death” pandemic of the Middle Ages killed one-third of the Earth’s human population within just four short years.
Fast change is also a hallmark of human society. Movements and ideas — oftentimes simmering for years, decades or longer — suddenly reach a critical state in which the populace is swept up into history-making action. The outbreak of World War I. The Civil Rights movement. The dissolution of the USSR. The Digital Age.
When it comes, change happens swiftly. And life after — for better or worse — is forever different.
I’ve witnessed this time and time again since co-founding PeakProsperity.com. And in pretty much every instance, I notice that the vast majority of people — including even many of the the watchful and preparation-minded folks who read this site — are caught by surprise.
Fukushima
A good example of this was the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in March of 2011. Of course, no one could have foretold the timing and scale of the tsunami, and virtually nobody expected that it could overwhelm the facility as spectacularly as it did. So in the immediate aftermath of the plant’s failure, the world looked on in sympathy, not fear.
But on March 12th, that changed as the first of several hydrogen explosions was observed among the reactors. And then my phone rang.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Brad Birkenfeld: Lucifer’s Banker
Brad Birkenfeld: Lucifer’s Banker
Just how bad is the ongoing fraud in the banking system? Get ready for a mind-bowing expose by a former insider at UBS.
Brad Birkenfield, author of Lucifer’s Banker: The Untold Story of How I Destroyed Swiss Bank Secrecy, recounts the efforts he uncovered by his employer to help its clients cheat the US government out of tens of $billions in taxes.
But despite his working with the government closely to expose the gigantic conspiracy between US-based tax cheats and the giant Swiss bank, UBS, the so-called Justice Department went after Mr. Birkenfeld for abetting tax evasion by one of his clients. After spending thirty months in Federal prison, he was released and three weeks later, received a whistle-blower check for $104 million, the largest such check ever from the IRS Whistle-blower Office.
Once again, 300,000,000 Americans-plus got screwed by the corrupt Department of Justice. They’re not about justice, they’re about protecting themselves, trying to take credit, and making everyone else listen to what they say the story is.
We remember the financial crisis of 2008. It was devastating and so many people lost their jobs, lost their homes and so forth. In the entire financial crisis, there was not one banker to go to jail. The only banker to go to jail was the UBS whistleblower who exposed the largest and longest running tax fraud in the world.
Here’s the problem with the system. When you fine UBS you must realize UBS is a Swiss bank, so that means they write off the fine on their taxes. So then, that means the Swiss taxpayers carry the burden. That’s the first thing.
The second thing is go look at the millions and millions of dollars in legal fees spent to defend their conduct. The UBS shareholders pick up that tab.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Banks Are Evil
Barandash Karandashich/Shutterstock
Banks Are Evil
I don’t talk to my classmates from business school anymore, many of whom went to work in the financial industry.
Why?
Because, through the lens we use here at PeakProsperity.com to look at the world, I’ve increasingly come to see the financial industry — with the big banks at its core — as the root cause of injustice in today’s society. I can no longer separate any personal affections I might have for my fellow alumni from the evil that their companies perpetrate.
And I’m choosing that word deliberately: Evil.
In my opinion, it’s long past time we be brutally honest about the banks. Their influence and reach has metastasized to the point where we now live under a captive system. From our retirement accounts, to our homes, to the laws we live under — the banks control it all. And they run the system for their benefit, not ours.
While the banks spent much of the past century consolidating their power, the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Actin 1999 emboldened them to accelerate their efforts. Since then, the key trends in the financial industry have been to dismantle regulation and defang those responsible for enforcing it, to manipulate market prices (an ambition tremendously helped by the rise of high-frequency trading algorithms), and to push downside risk onto “muppets” and taxpayers.
Oh, and of course, this hasn’t hurt either: having the ability to print up trillions in thin-air money and then get first-at-the-trough access to it. Don’t forget, the Federal Reserve is made up of and run by — drum roll, please — the banks.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Nafeez Ahmed: Our Systems Are Failing
Nafeez Ahmed: Our Systems Are Failing
Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is an award winning 15 year investigative journalist, noted international security scholar, best-selling author and film-maker. He authored The Guardian’s Earth Insight blog and has twice won the prestigious Project Censored Award for outstanding investigative journalism.
In his new book Failing States, Collapsing Systems, Nafeez points out, as we often do here at PeakProsperity.com, that everything in our modern society is connected to energy, and that our pursuit of ever more, ever higher growth is finally colliding with planetary limits. Scarcity and strife will be the dominant trends from here, unless we, as a species, start looking for different ways of living better-suited for a finite world:
The most fascinating thing for me is how so much of what we take for granted becomes questionable as a result of the breakdown we’re seeing. When we begin questioning the exponential growth model then we begin questioning the value system driving our material production/consumption. It’s not that it hasn’t produced amazing knowledge of our environment and our place in the universe. It’s not that there haven’t been a huge amount of amazing technological developments, like the internet which has enabled people to be interconnected in ways that they never were able to before. In a way has paved the way for us to be able to think globally in a way that centuries ago would have never happened.
It’s not that everything about this paradigm is bad. It’s just that it has very clearly outlasted its usefulness and is now fundamentally responsible for escalating the biophysical rupture that we see happening and manifesting in so many different ways. What that tells me is that we have to grow up as a species. It’s an evolutionary moment.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
A Murderous Complacency
murder: a flock of crows
~ Miriam-Webster dictionary
Many view the appearance of crows as an omen of death because ravens and crows are scavengers and are generally associated with dead bodies, battlefields, and cemeteries, and they’re thought to circle in large numbers above sites where animals or people are expected to soon die.
~ “Nature”, PBS.org
Running PeakProsperity.com requires me to read and process a lot of data on a daily basis. As it’s hard to digest it all in real-time, I keep a running list of charts, tables and articles that catch my attention, to return to when I have the time to give them my full focus.
Lately, that list has been getting quite long. And it’s largely full of indicators that concern me; signals that the long era of “extend and pretend” in today’s markets may finally be at its terminus.
Like crows circling overhead, every day brings with it new worrisome statistics that portend an ill change ahead. Indeed, these omens are increasing so quickly now that it’s hard not to feel like Tippi Hedren in Hitchcock’s suspense classic The Birds:
So what are the data that make me think these crows will soon be feasting on the carcass of the great bull market that has powered stock, bonds, real estate and most other asset classes to record highs since 2009?
Rogue’s Gallery
Complacent Investors
Investors have enjoyed remarkably gentle treatment by the stock markets over the past half-decade. Retracements have occurred much less frequently than historical norms, and have been shallow and short-lived when they happened.
Tom Lee, head of research at Fundstrat and often referred to as “Wall Street’s biggest bull” notes that 2016 was the mildest year on record for the S&P 500, with only 7 days in which the index traded at less than 3% of its 52-week high.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Harry Dent: Stocks Will Fall 70-90% Within 3 Years
Harry Dent: Stocks Will Fall 70-90% Within 3 Years
Economist and cycle trend forecaster Harry Dent sees crushing deflation ahead for nearly every financial asset class. We are at the nexus of a concurrent series of downtrends in the four most important predictive trends he tracks.
Laying out the thesis of his new book The Sale Of A Lifetime, Dent sees punishing losses ahead for investors who do not position themselves for safety beforehand. On the positive side, he predicts those that do will have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to buy assets at incredible bargain prices once the carnage ends (and yes, for those of you wondering, he also addresses his outlook for gold):
All four of the cycles I track point down now. One after the next has peaked in the last several years. All four point down into early 2020 or so. That’s only happened in the early to mid-’70s when we had the worst stock crashes back then, the OPEC embargo, etc — the worst set of crises since the 1930s.
Of course, in the early ’30s we had this same configuration of all four of these fundamental cycles, cycles that have taken me 30 years to hone and say “these are the four that matter”.
The next three years are likely to be the worst we see in our lifetimes. It will be more like the early 1930s when stocks hit a debt bubble and financial asset bubbles crashed, which they only do once in a lifetime such as the early 1930s. Stocks will be down 70, 80, 90% — that’s to be as expected in this stage of the cycle after such a bubble.
I went from being the most bullish economist in the ’80s and ’90s to now being of the most bearish because what goes up goes down. That’s what cycles do. At heart, I’m a cycle guy.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
James Howard Kunstler: The World’s Greatest Misallocation Of Resources
James Howard Kunstler: The World’s Greatest Misallocation Of Resources
Kunstler adds fresh critique to his now decades-old warning that we are sleepwalking our way deep into the Long Emergency. The longer we delude ourselves and waste our energies in pursuit of reviving the failed “endless growth” model, the farther our journey back to a sustainable way of living will be when our current system collapses:
I don’t think there is any sense that they really know where we’re headed, what our destination is, and what the imperatives are and what the future is actually telling us that we need to do. Don’t forget that the so-called psychology of previous investment is a very powerful force in American life and it’s prompting us to do everything we can to maintain the investments we’ve already made. Those investments are the ones I have already mentioned: the freeways, the suburban housing developments, the strip malls.
A lot of the hope pinned on Trump is based on the idea that he’s assembling this team of mega-competent capitalist movers and shakers who know how to make deals — the Wilbur Rosses and Rex Tillersons of the world — and that they are going to conjure up a tremendous surge of economic activity that will be majorly fruitful going forward in the future and produce a tremendous amount of new wealth. Of course the stock market has been pricing that in.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
