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What Comes Next?

April 8, 2020

What Comes Next?

Predicting life after coronavirus


If covid-19 is indeed hastening the permanent disruption of the status quo, what will life in a post-coronavirus world look like?

In a prognosticating session building on last week’s Economic Shockwaves roundtable, John Rubino, Charles Hugh Smith and I — also joined by Chris Martenson this time — discuss the myriad ways in the future may be permanently altered by the disruptions happening right now.

How will the economy, fiat currencies, jobs & the nature of work, as well as our general lifestyle, be forced to evolve? What new solutions will be required and what shape with they take?

All this and more is addressed in this video (1-hour runtime):

These roundtables are always a good time as John, Charles, Chris and I not only enjoy each other’s company, but we find helpful value in tapping each other’s thinking. The process always creates even more questions that we want to ask one another.

After shooting this video, the group agreed that fertile future territory includes the housing market, retirement/pensions, which big cartels are most vulnerable to today’s disruption (e.g., education, health care, pharma, finance) and what benefits would emerge from breaking their industry strangleholds.

So, if you’d like to see this brain trust convene again to push deeper into this material, let us know in the Comments section below, along with any other specific topics you’d like for us to kick around.

Oh, and if you’d like to inspire your own discussions on resilience with those in your community, pick up your own RESILIENCE shirt here and join Chris and me in wearing it proudly 🙂

As The Perfect Storm Approaches, Most Americans Are Partying Instead Of Preparing

February 26, 2019

As The Perfect Storm Approaches, Most Americans Are Partying Instead Of Preparing

I can’t think of a time when Americans were more apathetic about getting prepared, and yet this is exactly the time when the urgency to get prepared should be at the highest.  Earlier today, my wife Meranda and I were discussing the fact that every single element of “the perfect storm” is coming together just as we had anticipated.  One by one, the pieces are all falling into place, and I share the most recent things that my research has uncovered with all of you on a daily basis.  Unfortunately, most Americans are absolutely convinced that there is no reason to get prepared for hard times because everything is going to be just great.  In America today, most people either believe that the future is going to be totally wonderful or that the future will be totally wonderful once we get rid of Trump.  Because so many of us have adopted one of these false narratives, most Americans are partying instead of preparing, and that is going to mean big trouble when things really start going haywire.

Are you familiar with “the rule of three”?  I just looked it up on Google, and this is how it is defined…

“You can survive for 3 Minutes without air (oxygen) or in icy water. You can survive for 3 Hours without shelter in a harsh environment (unless in icy water) You can survive for 3 Days without water (if sheltered from a harsh environment) You can survive for 3 Weeks without food (if you have water and shelter)”

Of course these numbers are not exact.  For example, many have gone without food for more than 3 weeks without serious problems.  But in general, this is a pretty good guideline for survival.

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

Uniting for a Green New Deal

January 17, 2019

Uniting for a Green New Deal

Support is growing in the United States for a Green New Deal. Though there are competing visions for what that looks like, essentially, a Green New Deal includes a rapid transition to a clean energy economy, a jobs program and a stronger social safety net.

We need a Green New Deal for many reasons, most obviously the climate crisis and growing economic insecurity. Each new climate report describes the severe consequences of climate change with increasing alarm and the window of opportunity for action is closing. At the same time, wealth inequality is also growing. Paul Bucheit writes that more than half of the population in the United States is suffering from poverty.

The Green New Deal provides an opportunity for transformational changes, not just reform, but changes that fundamentally solve the crises we face. This is the time to be pushing for a Green New Deal at all levels, in our towns and cities, states and nationally.

Growing support for the Green New Deal

The idea of a Green New Deal seems to have arisen in early 2007 when the Green New Deal Group started meeting to discuss it, specifically as a plan for the United Kingdom. They published their report in July 2008. In April 2009, the United Nations Environmental Program also issued a plan for a global Green New Deal.

In the United States, Barack Obama included a Green New Deal in his 2008 presidential campaign and conservative Thomas Friedman started talking about it in 2007. Howie Hawkins, a Green Party gubernatorial candidate in New York, campaigned on a Green New Deal starting in 2010. Listen to our interview with Hawkins about how we win the Green New Deal on Clearing the FOG. Jill Stein campaigned on it during her presidential runs in 2012 and 2016, as have many Green Party candidates.

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

The Real Economic Numbers: 21.5 Percent Unemployment, 10 Percent Inflation And Negative Economic Growth

June 14, 2018

The Real Economic Numbers: 21.5 Percent Unemployment, 10 Percent Inflation And Negative Economic Growth

Every time the mainstream media touts some “wonderful new economic numbers” I just want to cringe.  Yes, it is true that the economic numbers have gotten slightly better since Donald Trump entered the White House, but the rosy economic picture that the mainstream media is constantly painting for all of us is completely absurd.  As you are about to see, if honest numbers were being used all of our major economic numbers would be absolutely terrible.  Of course we can hope for a major economic turnaround for America under Donald Trump, but we certainly are not there yet.  Economist John Williams of shadowstats.com has been tracking what our key economic numbers would look like if honest numbers were being used for many years, and he has gained a sterling reputation for being accurate.  And according to him, it looks like the U.S. economy has been in a recession and/or depression for a very long time.

Let’s start by talking about unemployment.  We are being told that the unemployment rate in the United States is currently “3.8 percent”, which would be the lowest that it has been “in nearly 50 years”.

To support this claim, the mainstream media endlessly runs articles declaring how wonderful everything is.  For example, the following is from a recent New York Times article entitled “We Ran Out of Words to Describe How Good the Jobs Numbers Are”…

The real question in analyzing the May jobs numbers released Friday is whether there are enough synonyms for “good” in an online thesaurus to describe them adequately.

So, for example, “splendid” and “excellent” fit the bill. Those are the kinds of terms that are appropriate when the United States economy adds 223,000 jobs in a month, despite being nine years into an expansion, and when the unemployment rate falls to 3.8 percent, a new 18-year low.

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

Why do we need jobs if we can have slaves working for us?

November 27, 2017

Why do we need jobs if we can have slaves working for us?

We normally assume that anything that creates jobs is a good thing, but is it, really? Is our current prosperity related to having “jobs”? Isn’t it, rather, the result of the large number of “energy slaves” working for us in the form of fossil fuels? Today, everyone of us has probably more slaves in terms of available energy output than even the richest in the ancient world could have. But, in the ancient world, the rich Roman patricians knew the source of their wealth and practiced “otium” (a term untranslatable in English) intended as the search of pleasure and knowledge free from the needs of everyday survival – with their human slaves taking care of that. In our times, instead, we tend to neglect, or even actively deny, the role of our fossil slaves. We state, and maybe even believe, that our antics (“jobs”) are what makes us live and we engage with gusto in the equivalent of digging holes in the ground and filling them up again as a good way to make us rich by increasing the numerical value of that curious deity we call “dʒiːdiːˈpiː” (or “GDP”). Maybe it is because, deep down, we know that, sooner or later, our fossil slaves are going to evaporate into thin air and leave us. 

This is a post by Nate Hagens and DJ White. Rich in ideas and concepts, it is longer than the average post on Cassandra’s Legacy but well worth the effort of reading, savoring each sentence in it.  Working drafts copyright ©2010-2017 – Not to be reproduced in any form without the explicit permission of the authors

by NJ Hagens & DJ White, EarthTrust

First, some review of relevant points:
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Automating Ourselves To Unemployment

April 28, 2016

Tatiana Shepeleva/Shutterstock

Automating Ourselves To Unemployment

How shortsighted policies are creating a long-term crisis
Students of Austrian business cycle theory are familiar with the term malinvestment. A malinvestment is any poor use of resources or capital, commonly made in response to bad policy (usually artificially low interest rates and/or unsustainable increases in the monetary supply). The dot-com bubble that popped in 2001? The housing bubble that similarly burst in 2008? Those were classic examples of malinvestment.

With this article, I’d like to introduce a related term: malincentive. While not part of the official economic lexicon, I consider a ‘malincentive’ a useful word to describe any promise of short-term gain whose long-term costs outweigh any immediate benefits enjoyed. The temptation to urinate in one’s pants on a cold winter day to get warm is a (perhaps unnecessarily) graphic example of malincentive. Yes, a momentary relief from the cold can be achieved; but moments later, you’ll have a much larger problem than you did at the outset.

Malincetives and malinvestment go hand-in-hand. In my opinion, the former causes the latter. As humans, we respond remarkably well to incentives. And dumb incentives encourage us to make dumb investments.

In this current era of central planning, malincentives abound. We raced to frack as fast as we could for the quick money, while leaving behind a wake of environmental destruction and creating a supply glut that has killed the economics of shale oil. Our stock exchanges sell unfairly-fast price feeds for great sums to elite Wall Street high-frequency-trading firms, and as a result have destroyed investor trust in our financial markets.  The Federal Reserve keeps interest rates historically low to encourage banks to lend money out, yet instead the banks simply lever up to buy Treasurys thereby pocketing vast amounts of riskless free profit. The list goes on and on.

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

Why we have a wage inequality problem

March 30, 2016

Why we have a wage inequality problem

Wage inequality is a topic in elections around the world. What can be done to provide more income for those without jobs, and those with low wages?

Wage inequality is really a sign of a deeper problem; basically it reflects an economic system that is not growing rapidly enough to satisfy everyone. In a finite world, it is easy for an economy to grow rapidly at first. In the early days, there are enough resources, such as land, fresh water, and metals, for each person to get a reasonable-sized amount. Each would-be farmer can obtain as much land as he thinks he can work with; fresh water is readily available virtually for free; and goods made with metals, such as cars, are not expensive. There are many jobs available, and wages for most people are fairly similar.

As population grows, and as resources degrade, the situation changes. It is still possible to grow enough food, but it takes large farms, with expensive equipment (but very few actual workers) to produce that food. It is possible to produce enough water, but it takes high-tech equipment and a handful of workers who know how to use the high-tech equipment. Metals suddenly need to be lighter and stronger and have other characteristics for the high tech industry, thus requiring more advanced products. International trade becomes more important to be able to get the correct mix of materials for the advanced products needed to operate the high-tech economy.

With these changes, the economic system that previously provided many jobs for those with limited training (often providing on-the-job training, if necessary) gradually became a system that provides a relatively small number of high-paying jobs, together with many low-paying jobs. In the United States, the change started happening in 1981, and has gotten worse recently.

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

Ed Butowsky: Calculating The True Cost of Living

March 21, 2016

Ed Butowsky: Calculating The True Cost of Living

Why it’s much higher than we’re told/sold 

Over the past decade, we’ve been told that inflation has been tame — actually below the target the Federal Reserve would like to see. But if that’s true, then why does the average household find it harder and harder to get by?

The ugly reality is that the true annual cost of living is far outpacing the government’s reported inflation rate. By nearly 10x in many parts of the country.

This week, we welcome Ed Butowsky, developer of the Chapwood Index, to the program. His index is a ‘real world’ measure of how prices are increasing much faster than the wages of the 99% can afford:

In my business, I wanted to make sure that I was building portfolios that weren’t just efficient but got people the rate of return that they needed. I thought: My goodness, what I need to do is give people a list of everything they spend money on and have them track quarter by quarter exactly their increases, so I can do a better job as a financial advisor in determining what return I need to target. 

I got a hold of a list of 50 major metropolitan areas and found people in every city and I gave them a job: I asked everybody to send me what items they spend their after-tax dollars on. I got about 4,000 different items. Then I took the 500 that most frequently appeared on the list and we’ve been tracking specifically these same items in every city since that period of time. I weight this list based on what percentage of a normal income people spend on each item.

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

Mass Layoffs To Return With A Vengeance

February 3, 2016

Eric Von Seggern/Shutterstock

Mass Layoffs To Return With A Vengeance

How safe is your job?

Remember the mass layoffs of 2008-2009? The US economy shed millions of jobs quickly and relentlessly, as companies died and the rest fought for survival.

Then the Fed and the US government flooded the banks and the corporate sector with bailouts and handouts. With those giga-tons of liquidity sloshing around, as well as taking on massive amounts of new cheap debt, companies were able to finance their working capital needs, hire workers back, and even buy-back their shares en mass to make themselves look deceptively profitable. The nightmare of 2008 soon became a golden era of ‘recovery’.

Well, 2016 is showing us that that era is over. And as stock prices cease to rise, and in fact fall within many industries, layoffs are beginning to make a return as companies jettison costs in attempt to reduce losses.

Since January 1st, here is a but of subset of the headlines we’ve seen:

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

The Fed Induced Farce

November 19, 2015

The Fed Induced Farce

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

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


Chart of the Day

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

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

 

Spin cycle: Can 1.3-million new jobs be created in 5 years?

September 23, 2015

Spin cycle: Can 1.3-million new jobs be created in 5 years?

This election has a theme common to almost all others before it: everyone is promising more jobs

The promise of jobs, jobs, and more jobs has long been a staple of election campaigns.

NDP Leader Tom Mulcair has promised a basket of goodies to help manufacturing and other sectors create jobs, as well as help for young people and veterans to connect with the new jobs.

The Liberals, meanwhile, decided to go big or go home by promising $125-billion in infrastructure spending — even if it means short-term deficits.

Now it seems the Conservatives, not wanting to be outdone, are making a bold promise of their own.

Perhaps channeling Babe Ruth, Conservative leader Stephen Harper figuratively pointed to the faraway bleachers on Tuesday and promised “1.3-million net new jobs.”

The spin

“I would say that there is no reason why we can’t have a similar record on that we have now,” Harper told reporters on Tuesday.

Harper points out that the economy created 1.3-million new jobs since the “depths of the global recession.”

Of course, those jobs were created in large part by the unprecedented stimulus spending the government launched — including the largest deficit in Canadian history.

This time around is quite different. Harper’s plan to duplicate the results involves maintaining a balanced budget, reducing employment insurance premiums two years from now, and re-introducing the home renovation tax credit.

The counter spin

“I find that number, to put it mildly, wildly optimistic,” Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau said.

Trudeau is dismissing this as just another empty campaign promise.

No one is going to campaign against creating more jobs. In fact, as mentioned, everyone in this campaign is promising that.

The critique, and indeed the test, of Harper’s promise is whether or not it is a realistic goal and, if so, are the measures in place to achieve it.

Economics and demographics

To borrow an old adage, if you asked 12 economists if tax cuts lead to job creation — you are likely to get 13 different opinions.

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

Will The Fed Pick A Winning Combination?

September 16, 2015

Will The Fed Pick A Winning Combination?

It’s highly amusing to read all the ‘expert’ theories on a Federal Reserve hike or no hike tomorrow, but it’s also obvious that nobody really has a clue, and still feel they should be heard. Don’t know if that’s so smart, but I guess in that world being consistently wrong is not that big a deal.

Thing is, US economic numbers are so ‘massaged’ and unreliable, the Fed can pick whichever way the wind blows to argue whatever decision it makes. As long as jobs numbers get presented for instance without counting the 90-odd million Americans who are not in the labor force, and a majority of new jobs are waiters, just about anything goes in that area. Numbers on wages are just as silly.

And people can make inflation a big issue, but hardly anyone even knows what inflation is. Wonder if the Fed does. It had better, because if you don’t look at spending, prices don’t tell you a thing. They surely must look at velocity of money charts from time to time?!

The biggest thing for the Fed might, and perhaps must, be the confidence factor. It’s been talking about rate hikes for so long now that if it decides to leave rates alone, it will only create more uncertainty down the road. Uncertainty about the economy (no hike would suggest a weak economy), and also about its own capabilities.

If all you have is talk, people tend to take you a lot less serious. Moreover, the abject -and grossly expensive- failure of the Chinese central bank to quiet down its domestic stock markets has raised questions about the omnipotence of all central banks.

This morning’s spectacle of a 5% rise in Shanghai in under an hour near the close no longer serves to restore confidence, it further undermines it. Beijing doesn’t seem to get that yet. But the Fed might.

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

Cincinnati’s experiment with an economy that works for everyone

August 10, 2015

Community members gathered for an owners meeting at Apple Street Market in February. (Facebook / Apple Street Market)

With the 2016 presidential campaigns underway, economic populism has taken center stage. Bernie Sanders, calling for a $1 trillion investment in a sustainable infrastructure jobs program along with publically funded health care and college education, has forced Hillary Clinton to offer vague support for similar measures, while even some Republican candidates, like Marco Rubio, have asserted the need to stop the “fall of the [American] worker.” Not content to wait for national politicians to follow through on non-binding proposals, 1worker1vote — a joint venture launched in 2009 by the United Steelworkers, or USW, and Mondragon USA — has been pursing a grassroots agenda to move populist discontent beyond protest and toward the building of new institutions.

The 1worker1vote network has developed and is beginning to implement a “union co-op” model, which calls for a business structure that combines worker, and sometimes community, ownership with union representation. With the model, 1worker1vote hopes to demonstrate the viability of a democratic economy, both in terms of ownership and management, capable of eventually replacing the corporate-managed economy that generates astounding wealth for those at the top while leaving nearly a quarter of the country living in poverty and half the population stuck in a debt trap with zero net assets.

“Profit should be for people, not for profit’s sake, and capital, while important, is subordinate to labor,” explained Ellen Vera, a founding member of both 1worker1vote and one of its member coops, the Cincinnati Union Cooperative Initiative, or CUCI.

The claim conjures images of the clashes between labor and capital of a bygone era, and, more recently, growing grassroots protest for a democratic global economy that began in 1994 with the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico and have continued during the first years of the new millennium with the global justice and Occupy movements.

 

 

Don’t Believe The Headlines: Canada’s Latest Job Numbers Don’t Look Good

February 7, 2015

Don’t Believe The Headlines: Canada’s Latest Job Numbers Don’t Look Good

After two months of shrinking job numbers, it looked like Canada had broken the streak with this morning’s StasCan report showing an increase of 35,400 jobs, and a decrease in the jobless rate to 6.6 per cent, from 6.7 per cent.

But that is just about the sunniest number there is in this jobs report. Dig a little beneath the surface, and what you find is a struggling job market.

First and most importantly, all of the net increase in jobs was accounted for by an increase in “self-employed” individuals, of 41,000.

 

Many economists are suspicious of this category, because “self-employed” does not equal “making money.” It could be that more than 40,000 Canadians found their entrepreneurial spirit last month and launched their own startups, but it’s just as likely many are putting a brave face on their unemployment.

The number of salaried jobs actually fell by 5,400 from a month earlier, and the number of full-time jobs of any kind fell by 11,800. That was offset by an increase of part-time jobs of 47,000.

 

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

The Grand Manipulation

February 7, 2015

The Grand Manipulation

Gerald Celente, editor of the Trends Journal, a subscription-based publication for which I write, has permitted King World News to republish my most recent article from the Trends Journal. This makes the article available to you from a free site. In place of me writing yet another expose of the non-existent jobs reported today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, read my article, The Grand Manipulation:

http://kingworldnews.com/paul-craig-roberts-terrifying-look-life-inside-matrix-government-lies-manipulation-murder/

The government’s economic reporting has no credibility. In the face of depressed Christmas sales and the closure of retail chains such as Radio Shack, do you think retailers rushed out in January to hire 45,900 new retail employees?

In the face of declining restaurant traffic, do you think 34,600 new waitresses and bartenders were hired in January?

Read my sometime coauthor Dave Kranzler’s take on today’s payroll jobs report:
http://investmentresearchdynamics.com/todays-employment-report-is-the-biggest-lie-theyve-told-to-date/

If the government will not even tell us the truth about jobs and inflation, how can we believe the government when it tells us, without supplying any evidence, that Russian tank columns have entered Ukraine? Americans need to come to terms with the fact that they live in The Matrix, a world composed of fake information designed to control thought and behavior.

 

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