Author: admin

Authored by Michael Batnik via TheIrrelevantInvestor.com,

Steven Pinker wrote, “In almost every year from 1992 through 2015, an era in which the rate of violent crime plummeted, a majority of Americans told pollsters that crime was rising. In late 2015, large majorities in eleven developed countries said that “the world is getting worse.”

But crime isn’t rising, and the world is objectively getting better. And while life is improving at the macro level, at the micro level, people aren’t feeling so great. So what gives?

We tend to expect the worst as a way to insulate ourselves from disappointment. Life is not about good or bad, it’s about better or worse, so if things don’t turn out as bad as we imagine, we’re pleasantly surprised.

If you were asked to think about how your life could improve, a few things might come to mind. But imagine how your life could get worse, and a barrage of negative possibilities fills your brain. The risk and reward of every day life is asymmetrical. This is why being a pessimist feels safe and being an optimist feels reckless.

One of the reasons why it seems like the world is getting worse is due to the cacophony of noise coming from the news. Here’s Pinker again:

Whether or not the world is really getting worse, the nature of news will interact with the nature of cognition to make us think that it is. News is about things that happen, nothing things that don’t happen. We never see a journalist saying to the camera, “I’m reporting live from a country where a war has not broken out”- or a city that has not been bombed, or a school that has not been shot up…Bad things can happen quickly, but good things aren’t built in a day, and as they unfold, they will be out of sync with the news cycle. The peace researcher John Galtung pointed out that if a newspaper came out once every fifty years, it would not report half a century gossip and political scandals. It would report momentous global changes such as the increase in life expectancy.

While the news certainly isn’t doing anyone any favors, there are legitimate reasons why people don’t feel like things are getting better. For too many, they aren’t.

The chart below shows the change in real income since 1980. This chart is the root of all the negative things facing our society. People in the top 20% saw their income increase by 60%. People in the bottom 20% saw their income rise by just 5% over the same time. As Leonard Cohen said, “The poor stay poor, the rich get rich. That’s how it goes. Everybody knows.”

Real income increased 38% from 1980-2016, or just 0.87% per year, and 70% of that increase went to people in the top 20%. Things are better, especially around the world, but in our country, way too many people are getting left behind.

Extreme poverty is collapsing, but relative poverty is exploding, and everything in life is relative. If things don’t feel better than they were two hundred years ago, it’s because people compare themselves to their neighbors, not to their ancestors.

via RSS https://ift.tt/2rlwIiV Tyler Durden

Just as President Trump earlier indicated would happen, newly minuted Trump-lawyer Rudy Giuliani has issued a brief statement ” intended to clarify the views I expressed over the past few days.”

These are my views:

First:

There is no campaign violation. The payment was made to resolve a personal and false allegation in order to protect the President’s family. It would have been done in any event, whether he was a candidate or not.

Second:

My references to timing were not describing my understanding of the President’s knowledge, but instead, my understanding of these matters.

Third:

It is undisputed that the President’s dismissal of former Director Comey — an inferior executive officer — was clearly within his  Article II power. Recent revelations about former Director Comey further confirm the wisdom of the President’s decision, Article II power. Recent revelations about former Director Comey further confirm the wisdom of the President’s decision, which was plainly in the best interests of our nation.

It would seem that Giuliani’s “facts” are now “straight” with President Trump’s.

via RSS https://ift.tt/2rlUzz1 Tyler Durden

Authored by MN Gordon via EconomicPrism.com,

There are nooks and corners in every city where talk is cheap and scandal is honorable.  The Alley, in Downtown Los Angeles, is a magical place where shrewd entrepreneurs, shameless salesmen, and downright hucksters coexist in symbiotic disharmony.  Fakes, fugazis, and knock-offs galore, pack the roll-up storefronts with sparkle and shimmer.

Several weeks ago, the LAPD seized $700,000 worth of counterfeit cosmetics from 21 different Alley businesses.  Apparently, some of the bogus makeup products – which were packaged to look like trendy brands MAC, NARS, Kyle Cosmetics, and more – were found to contain human and animal excrement.

“The best price is not always the best deal!” remarked Police Captain Marc Reina via Twitter.  Did you hear that, General Electric shareholders?

Yet the Alley, for all its dubious bustle, offers a useful public service.  It provides an efficient calibration for the greater world at large; a world that’s less upright and truthful than an honest man could ever self-prepare for.  In 30-seconds or less, the Alley will impart several essential lessons:

The price you’re first quoted is the sucker’s price.  To negotiate effectively, you must appear to care far less about buying than the merchant cares about selling.  Don’t trust someone that says, “trust me.”  And, most importantly, don’t believe what you see and read…or what you hear.

Reality Bites

For everything worthwhile, there exists a counterfeit.  This modest insight extends well beyond the boundaries of flea markets and tent bazaars.  It extends outward to news, money, prescription drugs, wars, public schools, Congress, corn ethanol, medical insurance, public pensions – you name it.  There’s plenty of fraud, phony, and fake going on.

For example, in the year 2018, the most reputable news outlets have been reduced to mere purveyors of propaganda.  The stories they spread are stories of fiction.

Investigative reporting is defunct.  Veracity is for bores and troublemakers.  We don’t like it.  We don’t agree with it.  But we can’t change it, nonetheless.

So, we embrace the deception with proper perspective.  We drink from the firehose of deceit with unquenchable thirst.  We smile at false prophets who sell salvation without repentance, benefits without taxes, and new programs and new deals that promise to sprinkle money around and make everyone rich.

According to the government’s statistics, the economy has never been better.  By the official numbers, we’re living in the charmed days of full employment, less than 2 percent price inflation, and the second-longest growth period in the post-World War II era.

Agreeable reports like these are broadcast each month as news, without question.  Yet anyone who stops to ask a question or two can quickly discern that these reports are fabrications.  They’re tales of fiction, which are requisite to these fictitious times.

Ask the wage earner, the mortgage holder, the recent college graduate with six-figures in student loan debt.  They’ll tell you: “Reality bites.  The official economic accounts are a sham.”

Full Faith and Credit in Counterfeit Money

Is it an accident that the debasement of society has followed the debasement of money?  We don’t know, for certain.  But we have a hunch they’re somehow related.

What we do know is that fiction and deception helped usher in the dollar’s transformation to a phony currency.  How else could the dollar have been debased from money coined of gold and silver and issued by Congress, as specified by the Constitution, to paper legal tender notes that are borrowed into existence by the Federal Reserve?

When President Nixon closed the gold window at the U.S. Treasury on August 15, 1971, he told several whoppers.  He said it was to, “defend the dollar against the speculators.”  He also said the action would, “suspend temporarily, the convertibility of the dollar into gold.”  Furthermore, he told Americans that, “your dollar will be worth just as much tomorrow as it is today.”

Nixon’s actions came on the heels of 60-years of gradual steps to remove gold’s backing of the dollar.  In effect, $1 today has the same buying power that $0.16 had when Nixon took these “temporary” actions.  Over this same period, the U.S. national debt has run up from about $398 billion to over $21 trillion, and the economy has been utterly warped.

Today’s reality is the fantasyland of full faith and credit in counterfeit money.  Paper legal tender notes, derived from debt without limits.

What a fictitious world it has wrought.  Do you buy the lie?

via RSS https://ift.tt/2IcZ89j Tyler Durden

While the US trade delegation led by Steven Mnuchin that just spent two days in Beijing to achieve nothing, is currently somewhere over the Pacific on its way back to the States, that did not prevent it from issuing an official statement on the event that, until earlier this morning, was the biggest potential upside catalyst for today’s market: the status of US-China trade talks.

In the statement, the Mnuchin-led group said “U.S. trade officials had candid trade discussions with their Chinese counterparts” and added that President Donald Trump will decide the next steps.

This is what it said.

Statement on the United States Trade Delegation’s Visit to Beijing

At the invitation of Vice Premier Liu He and at the direction of President Donald J. Trump, the United States trade delegation, led by Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin and including Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, Assistant to the President for Economic Policy Larry Kudlow, and Assistant to the President for Trade and Manufacturing Policy Peter Navarro, traveled to Beijing, and was joined there by Ambassador Terry Branstad.

The delegation held frank discussions with Chinese officials on rebalancing the United States-China bilateral economic relationship, improving China’s protection of intellectual property, and identifying policies that unfairly enforce technology transfers. The United States delegation affirmed that fair trade will lead to faster growth for the Chinese, United States, and world economies.

The size and high level of this delegation illustrates the importance that the Trump Administration places on securing fair trade and investment terms for American businesses and workers. There is consensus within the Administration that immediate attention is needed to bring changes to United States-China trade and investment relationship.

The delegation now returns to Washington, D.C., to brief the President and seek his decision on next steps.

The above is a wordy way of stating that the talks achieved nothing, and merely agreed to hold more negotiations in the future. Meanwhile, the Treasury faces a May 21 deadline to report on restrictions on Chinese investment in the US, as part of the response to the recent Section 301 intellectual property investigation

In other words, the clock is ticking. And just to add some more heat, earlier this morning, the US appears to have purposefully leaked the US demands that the US sent to China ahead of their trade talks (this version was leaked on Weibo), and which as the Economist’s Simon Rabinovitch described, revealed “a very aggressive opening position from the US”

Here are the demands that US sent to China ahead of their trade talks (reported by WSJ and Bloomberg; this version leaked on Weibo, now deleted–person involved in talks says it’s authentic). Very aggressive opening position from the US. pic.twitter.com/fe5aSI4Yfm

— Simon Rabinovitch (@S_Rabinovitch) May 4, 2018

For those who missed it, the WSJ summary of the above is as follows:

• The US delegation asked China to cut the bilateral trade deficit by $200BN by 2020, double what Trump demanded back in March.
• The first U.S. request was for China to reduce the bilateral trade deficit by at least $200 billion by the end of 2020. The U.S.-China bilateral deficit in goods was $375 billion last year. President Donald Trump has repeatedly said he wants China to slash the figure by $100 billion a year.
• The U.S. also demanded that China immediately stop providing subsidies and other assistance for advanced technologies outlined in the government’s Made in China 2025 plan. The initiative aims for China to dominate future frontiers of manufacturing and industry, from robotics and aviation to new-energy vehicles.
• The U.S. also asked China to cut tariffs on “all products in non-critical sectors” to levels that are no higher than the levels that the U.S. applies to imports, according to the document.
• In addition, the U.S. also asked China to guarantee that it won’t hit back at the U.S. for any actions taken in the disputes over intellectual property. It also asked that China withdraw its challenges in this area at the World Trade Organization.

In response, and confirming that the upcoming negotiations will be very long, Chinese officials responded that the US proposal was “unfair.”

via RSS https://ift.tt/2HUajAC Tyler Durden

Dr. Jennifer Pena, Vice President Mike Pence’s physician, has resigned following reports that she was among those who detailed claims of professional misconduct against President Trump’s VA Secretary nomination Ronny Jackson to senators considering his nomination.

“The Vice President’s office was informed today by the White House Medical Unit of the resignation.

Physicians assigned to the Vice President report to the White House Medical Unit and thus any resignation would go entirely through the Medical Unit, not the Vice President’s office,” Pence spokeswoman Alyssa Farah said in a statement.

As we noted previously, Sen. Tester even admitted that he reviewed the FBI files and there was no derogatory information in there about Jackson but he still spread malicious rumors,” said a current Administration official.

 “Certainly we would never nominate anybody who had derogatory information. Pena has had a long-standing feud with doctor Jackson…

…she’s very jealous that he’s been consistently promoted. This isn’t about being a whistleblower – there are other procedures for that. She went up to the hill and she spoke with approximately twenty-five Democrats…

…she’s a holdover in the White House and didn’t want Jackson to be nominated.”

As a reminder, Jackson – who served under three Presidents, withdrew himself from consideration for the VA role on Thursday following bombshell allegations of being intoxicated while on the clock and improperly dispensing medication – reportedly passing out Ambien, Provigil and other prescription drugs “like they were candy.” 

President Trump responded to the allegations, telling reporters that Jackson was “one of the finest people that I have ever met.”

While Jackson has denied the claims as “completely false and fabricated,” he said he was withdrawing his name from consideration because he had become a distraction for Trump and his agenda. 

via RSS https://ift.tt/2JSawod Tyler Durden