{"id":15504,"date":"2015-12-21T12:01:00","date_gmt":"2015-12-21T17:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=15504"},"modified":"2015-12-21T12:01:00","modified_gmt":"2015-12-21T17:01:00","slug":"christmas-present","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=15504","title":{"rendered":"Christmas Present"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Christmas Present<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
Theory du jour: the new\u00a0Star Wars<\/em>\u00a0movie is sucking in whatever meager disposable lucre remains among the economically-flayed mid-to-lower orders of America. In fact, I propose a new index showing an inverse relationship between\u00a0Star Wars<\/em>\u00a0box office receipts and soundness of the financial commonweal. In other words,\u00a0Star Wars<\/em>\u00a0is all that remains of the US economy outside of the obscure workings of Wall Street \u2014 and that heretofore magical realm is not looking too rosy either in this season of the Great Rate Hike after puking up 623 points of the DJIA last Thursday and Friday.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Here I confess: for thirty years I have hated those stupid space movies, as much for their badly-written scripts (all mumbo-jumbo exposition of nonsensical story-lines between explosions) as for the degenerate techno-narcissism they promote in a society literally dying from the diminishing returns and unintended consequences of technology.<\/p>\n

It adds up to an ominous Yuletide. Turns out that the vehicle the Federal Reserve\u2019s Open Market Committee was driving in its game of \u201cchicken\u201d with oncoming reality was a hearse. The occupants are ghosts, but don\u2019t know it. A lot of commentators around the web think that the Fed \u201cpulled the trigger\u201d on interest rates to save its credibility. Uh, wrong. They had already lost their credibility. What remains is for these ghosts to helplessly watch over the awesome workout, which has obviously been underway for quite a while in the crash of commodity prices (and whole national economies \u2014 e.g. Brazil, Canada, Australia), the janky regions of the bond markets, the related death of the shale oil industry, and the imploding hedge fund scene.<\/p>\n

As it were, all credit these days looks shopworn and threadbare, as if the capital markets had by stealth turned into a swap meet of previously-owned optimism. Who believes in anything these days besides the allure of fraud?<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n

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Christmas Present Theory du jour: the new\u00a0Star Wars\u00a0movie is sucking in whatever meager disposable lucre remains among the economically-flayed mid-to-lower orders of America. In fact, I propose a new index showing an inverse relationship between\u00a0Star Wars\u00a0box office receipts and soundness of the financial commonweal. In other words,\u00a0Star Wars\u00a0is all that remains of the US economy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[151,1851,9257,303,8364,305,4512,449,11165,2443],"class_list":["post-15504","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-commodities","tag-commodity-price-collapse","tag-djia","tag-fed","tag-federal-open-market-committee","tag-federal-reserve","tag-fomc","tag-james-howard-kunstler","tag-star-wars","tag-stock-markets"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15504","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15504"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15504\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15505,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15504\/revisions\/15505"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}