Category Archive: 6b.) Debt and the Fallacies of Paper Money

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Wealth Management Products: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

2016-06-10

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2016-06-10

Wealh Management Products issuance equaled $1.1 trillion in 2015, a nearly 75% jump on the prior year and equaling 40% of the total growth in credit. Almost one-third of the WMP were bought by credit institutions for inclusion in other WMP – WMP Squared!

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The Trump Risk: Will President Trump Trigger a Recession?

2016-06-10

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2016-06-10

“The economic consequences of a Trump win would be severe,” claims Mr. Summers in the headline. But he has no way of knowing what the consequences would be, let alone if they would be severe. Would they be worse than if Ms. Clinton were elected? No one knows.

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Free Speech Under Attack

2016-06-08

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2016-06-08

  Offending People Left and Right Bill Bonner, whose Diaries we republish here, is well-known for being an equal opportunity offender  – meaning that political affiliation, gender, age, or any other defining characteristics won’t save worthy targets ...

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Janet Yellen – Backtracking Again

2016-06-08

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2016-06-08

  Muhammad Ali Could Take a Punch BALTIMORE – You had to admit. Muhammad Ali could take a punch. Unlike Donald Trump, Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton, he was a real war hero. He stood up and faced his enemies on the draft board, rather ...

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The Real Reason We Have a Welfare State

2016-06-07

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2016-06-07

  From Subject to Citizen BALTIMORE – June 5th, the Swiss cast their votes and registered their opinions: “No,” they said. We left off yesterday wondering why something for nothing never works. Not as monetary policy. Not as welfare or foreign aid. N...

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Moving Closer to BREXIT

2016-06-07

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2016-06-07

  Polls Show Growing Support for a Break with the EU In the UK as elsewhere, the political elites may have underestimated the strength of the trend change in social mood across Europe. The most recent “You-Gov” and ICM pools show a widening lead in f...

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Free Money Leaves Everyone Poorer

2016-06-07

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2016-06-07

  Destroying Lives BALTIMORE – A dear reader reminded us of the comment, supposedly made by Groucho Marx: “A free lunch? You can’t afford a free lunch.”   Groucho dispensing valuable advice Photo via imdb.com   He was responding to last week’s Diary ...

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Is it Time to Buy Real Estate? Yes and No

2016-06-07

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2016-06-07

  Is it Time to Buy Income-Producing Real Estate?  No, No, No. Much to the dismay of my real estate buddies, who are complaining about how high prices while watching the cash flow of their portfolios bursting at the seams from a few good years of ren...

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8 Lessons That We Can Learn From The Economic Meltdown In Venezuela

2016-06-05

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2016-06-05

Submitted by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog, We are watching an entire nation collapse right in front of our eyes.  As you read this article, there are severe shortages of just about anything you can imagine in Venezuela.&nb...

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Swiss Referendum: The new World of Bread and Circuses

2016-06-04

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2016-06-04

Swiss Referendum Minimum Income
9 out of 10 workers could be permanently replaced by robots. The working classes of Rome were put out of work by “robots,” too – slaves captured in Rome’s many successful conquests. Given the Swiss initiative for the minimum income, welcome to the world of bread and circuses!

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Twitter’s Other Growing Problem – A Surging Share Count

2016-06-04

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2016-06-04

It seems like almost everybody has an opinion about Twitter. As for the company it seems that their “window of opportunity” to massively succeed has essentially closed as user growth and revenue have both slowed, quite dramatically, over the past 18 months. Oddly, the strategy at Twitter seems to be not to thrive, but just to survive.

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Turning Stones Into Bread – The Japanese Miracle

2016-06-03

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2016-06-03

  Stuffing the Futon Our friend Ramsey Su just asked what Haruhiko Kuroda and Shinzo Abe are going to do now in light of the strong yen (aside from perhaps doing the honorable thing). Isn’t it time to just “wipe out some debt with the stroke of a pen...

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Guided By Nonsense

2016-06-03

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2016-06-03

  Seven Year Achievement   “Read the directions and directly you will be directed in the right direction.” — Lewis Carroll   See? It’s easy Janet! Just read the directions! Illustration credit: Walt Disney   U.S. consumers are at it again.  After a s...

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Grasping Parasites and Bernie the Underdog

2016-06-03

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2016-06-03

The system changed in 1971, when President Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard. Since then, the powers that be no longer depended on Congress… or savers…or voters… to raise the funds they needed. What about Bernie Sanders?

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Arrant Star Trek Socialism

2016-05-31

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2016-05-31

  Robotic Utopia In spite of the fact that Marx expressed nothing but disdain for his Utopian socialist predecessors such as Henri Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte, variants of Utopian socialism evidently live on. The latest iteration of the socialist d...

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On the Road to Panicville

2016-05-31

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2016-05-31

  An Alert for the Global Posse of Liquidity Junkies In the summer of 2015 and again in December-February this year, global stock markets were rattled by weakness in the yuan’s exchange rate vs. the US dollar. Yuan weakness is widely held to exacerba...

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Economy “Improves”, Americans Get Poorer

2016-05-31

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2016-05-31

  No Surprises BALTIMORE – We were not surprised by the big news last week. We saw it coming. Figures from the Conference Board research group revealed productivity sinking for the first time in three decades. We promised to explain why it was such a...

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The Stunning Idiocy of Steel Tariffs

2016-05-30

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2016-05-30

  Victims of the Boom-Bust Cycle The world is drowning in steel – there is huge overcapacity in steel production worldwide. This is a direct result of the massive global credit expansion that has taken place over the past 15 years. Much of this capac...

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A Thank You to the Jackasses Running the Economy

2016-05-30

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2016-05-30

  Rolling Back 200 Years of Growth BALTIMORE, Maryland – The press reported mixed financial news on Thursday. House sales, oil, unemployment figures… up, down… the news left investors puzzled.   Two of many symptoms of the much-bewailed “populist bac...

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Venezuela’s Gold Reserves Plunge To Lowest Ever As Maduro Repays Debt With Gold

2016-05-29

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2016-05-29

Several months ago, as Venezuela's hyperinflating, imploding economy was spinning in freefall, leading to the dramatic episodes of total social collapse such as those profiled in "Scenes From The Venezuela Apocalypse: "Countless Wounded" After 5,000 ...

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