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North Dakota’s Economy Has Been “Completely Devastated” By Oil’s Collapse

February 5, 2016

North Dakota’s Economy Has Been “Completely Devastated” By Oil’s Collapse

Yesterday, on the way to documenting the malaise China’s hard landing has inflicted on Minnesota’s mining country, we discussed the dramatic impact falling crude prices have had on the American and Canadian oil patches.

Take Texas, for instance, where a year of crude carnage has wreaked havoc upon what, until last year anyway, was the engine driving the “robust” US labor market.  As we showed in November, layoffs in Lone Star land far outrun job losses in any other state. In Houston (which was already staring down a worsening pension crisis), vacant office space is “piling up.” As WSJ wrote last week, “the amount of sublease space on the market in the Houston area hit 7.6 million square feet, or the size of more than two Empire State Buildings.”

“The unemployment rate in Texas rose sharply to 9.2% in 1986, an all-time high for the state,” Goldman wrote recently, recalling a previous period of low oil prices in a note entitled “How Bad Can Texas Get?”

“Real house prices fell 30% peak to trough, and the number of bankruptcy filings (including both business and non-business filings) more than doubled from 1984 to 1986,” the bank added.

North of the border, things are even worse. As regular readers are no doubt aware, Alberta is a veritable nightmare as suicide rates rise, the number of jobless multiplies, food bank usage soars, and property crime in Calgary spikes.

“Lower for longer” has been a disaster for many state and local governments in the US, as revenue projections devised before oil’s historic plunge prove increasingly optimistic.

Take Louisiana for example, where Lt. Gov. Jay Dardenne recently announced that the state is facing a $750 million deficit.

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

S&P Downgrades Japan From AA- To A+ On Doubts Abenomics Will Work – Full Text

September 16, 2015

S&P Downgrades Japan From AA- To A+ On Doubts Abenomics Will Work – Full Text

Who would have thought that decades of ZIRP, an aborted attempt to hike rates over a decade ago, and the annual monetization of well over 10% of sovereign debt would lead to a toxic debt spiral, regardless of how many “Abenomics” arrows one throws at it? Apparently Standard and Poors just had its a-ha subprime flashbulb moment and moments ago, a little over 4 years after it downgraded the US from its legendary AAA-rating which led to angry phone calls from Tim Geithner and a painful US government lawsuit, downgraded Japan from AA- to A+.  The reason: rising doubt Abenomics is working.

Apparently S&P has never heard of the Magic Money Tree theory concocted by economists who have never traded an asset in their lives, in which “countries that print their own currency” have nothing to fear about a 250% debt/GDP ratio. In fact, the only fear is that it is not big enough.

Expect the market’s reaction to be that since Abenomics has not worked yet, some nearly three years after it was launched then Japan will be forced to do even more of it, simply because it has no choice – it is now all in, the problem of course being that the BOJ is simply running out of stuff to monetize as even the IMF warned two weeks ago…

Here is the S&P’s full downgrade.

Japan Ratings Lowered To ‘A+/A-1’; Outlook Is Stable

OVERVIEW

  • Economic support for Japan’s sovereign creditworthiness has continued to  weaken in the past three to four years. Despite showing initial promise,  the government’s strategy to revive economic growth and end deflation appears unlikely to reverse this deterioration in the next two to three  years.
  • We are lowering our sovereign credit ratings on Japan to ‘A+/A-1’ from  ‘AA-/A-1+’.
  • The outlook on the long-term rating is stable.

 

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

Japan projects to spend 43% of tax revenue just to pay interest on the debt

March 5, 2015

Japan projects to spend 43% of tax revenue just to pay interest on the debt

It’s entirely possible that we may see interstellar space travel in our lifetime. And what a dream that would be.

But in the meantime, for anyone that’s losing patience with space technology, I would recommend you visit Japan. Because for anybody that has been here, this place is as close as it gets to being on another planet.

Japan is a land of irony and dichotomy. It is one of the most conservative cultures in the world, while simultaneously being one of the most perverted.

Business culture here is yet another thing that seems totally alien. Creativity and innovation are constrained by process and procedure. The individual is never celebrated, and dutiful compliance is everything.

In Japanese corporate culture, business meetings follow a strict agenda. New ideas, no matter how valuable, are simply not welcome.

They actually have a term here called nemawashi, which is a meeting before a meeting. The idea being that if you have an idea to present at a meeting, you need to discuss it first so that nobody’s caught off guard or embarrassed by not having a prepared response.

 

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

Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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