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Top Shale Fracking Executive: We Won’t Frack the Rich

April 24, 2016

Top Shale Fracking Executive: We Won’t Frack the Rich

“’We heard Range Resources say it sites its shale gas wells away from large homes where wealthy people live and who might have the money to fight such drilling and fracking operations,’ said Patrick Grenter, an attorney and Center for Coalfield Justice executive director, who attended the lawyers’ forum,” the Post-Gazette reported. “A handful of attorneys in the audience confirmed that account,” and added that the Range Resources official had prefaced his remarks by saying “To be frank”.

The comments were made by Terry Bossert, Range Resources’s vice president for legislative and regulatory affairs, during a presentation at the Pennsylvania Bar Institute’s Environmental Law Forum on April 7. In 2004, Range Resources was the first company to drill in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus shale – but it has racked up a string of environmental violations so severe that state regulators slapped it with a record-breaking $4.15 million fine in 2014, followed the next year by an $8.9 million fine over a different incident.

The company has also repeatedly been sued by landowners – and not just in Pennsylvania, but also in their home state of Texas. It made international headlines when a gag order – part of a $750,000 settlement agreement between the company and a family over a contaminated 10-acre farm in Mount Pleasant, PA – barred two children from speaking about fracking for life (a ban that the company later repudiated, after the settlement terms were unsealed and made public).

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

Let Me Tell You About the Very Rich

April 7, 2016

Let Me Tell You About the Very Rich

The Panama Papers highlight, with painstaking clarity, that austerity is not a shared sacrifice.

Let Me Tell You About the Very Rich

It’s not like we didn’t know what was going on. But the “Panama Papers,” the largest-ever document leak and one that implicates political leaders and business executives around the world, confirms it — cementing a widespread distrust of public and private institutions in the global economy.

It remains to be seen whether the scale of the revelations, whose full scope is only slowly starting to emerge, will be a catalyst for positive change or just more fodder for curmudgeonly conspiracy theorists. But one thing is clear: The debate over global economic policy is going to be deeply affected for a while to come.

The epic document dump, which includes 11.5 million files from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, implicates a string of world leaders, their families, and close associates in an intricate web of shell companies constructed for the sole purpose of hiding money from tax authorities.

Following the Great Recession and world financial meltdown, policymakers have fallen broadly into two camps: those who see a significant role for official intervention through fiscal and monetary stimulus policies, and those who see government as the problem and push for structural changes to push it out of the way.

Both Europe and the United States imposed considerable austerity on government finances despite prevailing modern economic thinking suggesting governments should spend more, not less, in times of economic weakness.

This budget-cutting approach to exiting the economic crisis, predicated on the dubious notion that fiscal prudence will boost confidence and hence growth, was sold to the public as a shared sacrifice across society. But as the Panama Papers appear to show, the very wealthy play by an entirely different set of rules than the average person when it comes to paying taxes.

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

The Liquidity Crisis Intensifies: ‘Prepare For A Bear Market In Bonds’

June 25, 2015

The Liquidity Crisis Intensifies: ‘Prepare For A Bear Market In Bonds’

Bear Market - Public DomainAre we about to witness trillions of dollars of “paper wealth” vaporize into thin air?  During the next financial crisis, a lot of “wealthy” investors are going to be in for a very rude awakening.  The truth is that securities are only worth what someone else is willing to pay for them, and that is why liquidity is so important.  Back on April 17th, I published an article entitled “The Global Liquidity Squeeze Has Begun“, but it didn’t get nearly as much attention as many of my other articles do.  But now that the liquidity crisis is intensifying, hopefully people will start to grasp the implications of what is happening.  The 76 trillion dollar global bond bubble is threatening to implode, and if it does, the amount of “paper wealth” that could potentially be lost during the months ahead is almost unimaginable.

For those that do not consider the emerging liquidity crisis to be important, I would suggest that they check out what the financial experts are saying.  For instance, the following comes from a recent Bloomberg report…

There are three things that matter in the bond market these days: liquidity, liquidity and liquidity.

How — or whether — investors can trade without having prices move against them has become a major worry as bonds globally tanked in the past few months. As a result, liquidity, or the lack of it, is skewing markets in new and surprising ways.

Things have already gotten so bad that Zero Hedge says that some fund managers “are starting to panic” about the lack of liquidity in the marketplace…

Fund managers who together control trillions in assets are starting to panic in the face of an acute bond market liquidity shortage.

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

We’re In Uncharted Economic Territory

May 30, 2015

We’re In Uncharted Economic Territory

We’re in uncharted territory …

For example, this is the first time in history that most central banks worldwide have printed money during the same time period.

And one of America’s leading economists (Nobel-prize winner Robert Shiller) just said that – unlike 1929 –  this time, stocks, bonds and housing are ALL overvalued:

This time around, bonds and, increasingly, real estate also look overvalued. This is different from other over-valuation periods such as 1929, when the stock market was very overvalued, but the bond and housing markets for the most part weren’t. It’s an interesting phenomenon.

There’s a connection between the two unprecedented events …

Money printing sucks money out of the real economy, and throws it at the wealthy … who use it to speculate on stocks, bonds and housing.

Indeed, the central banks have consciously been focusing all of their efforts on blowing asset bubbles …

But the bigger they come, the harder they fall.

 

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