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Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,

Many people do not realize that America is not only entering a new year, but within the next month we will also be entering a new economic era. In early February, Janet Yellen is set to leave the Federal Reserve and be replaced by the new Fed chair nominee, Jerome Powell. Now, to be clear, the Fed chair along with the bank governors do not set central bank policy. Policy for most central banks around the world is dictated in Switzerland by the Bank for International Settlements. Fed chairmen like Janet Yellen are mere mascots implementing policy initiatives as ordered.  This is why we are now seeing supposedly separate central banking institutions around the world acting in unison, first with stimulus, then with fiscal tightening.

 

However, it is important to note that each new Fed chair does tend to signal a new shift in action for the central bank. For example, Alan Greenspan oversaw the low interest rate easy money phase of the Fed, which created the conditions for the derivatives and credit bubble and subsequent crash in 2008. Ben Bernanke oversaw the stimulus and bailout phase, flooding the markets with massive amounts of fiat and engineering an even larger bubble in stocks, bonds and just about every other asset except perhaps some select commodities. Janet Yellen managed the tapering phase, in which stimulus has been carefully and systematically diminished while still maintaining delusional stock market euphoria.

Now comes the era of Jerome Powell, who will oversee the last stages of fiscal tightening, the reduction of the Fed balance sheet, faster rate increases and the final implosion of the ‘everything’ bubble.

As I warned before Trump won the election in 2016, a Trump presidency would inevitably be followed by economic crisis, and this would be facilitated by the Federal Reserve pulling the plug on fiat life support measures which kept the illusion of recovery going for the past several years. It is important to note that the mainstream media is consistently referring to Jerome Powell as “Trump’s candidate” for the Fed, or “Trump’s pick” (as if the president really has much of a choice in the roster of candidates for the Fed chair). The public is being subtly conditioned to view Powell as if he is an extension of the Trump administration.

This could not be further from the truth. Powell and the Fed are autonomous from government.

As Alan Greenspan openly admitted years ago, the Fed does not answer to the government and can act independently without oversight.

So, why is the media insisting on misrepresenting Powell as some kind of Trump agent? Because Trump, and by extension all the conservatives that support him, are meant to take the blame when the ‘everything’ bubble vaporizes our financial structure. Jerome Powell is “Trump’s guy” at the Fed; so any actions Powell takes to crush the recovery narrative will also be blamed on the Trump administration.

 

But, is it a certainty that Powell will put the final nail in the coffin of “economic recovery?” Yes. Last Friday the Fed finally released the transcripts of its monetary policy meetings in 2012, and in those transcripts are some interesting admissions from Powell himself. After reading these transcripts I am fully convinced that Powell is the man who will stand as the figurehead of the central bank during the final phase of U.S. decline.

Here are some of the most astonishing quotes by Powell from those transcripts along with my commentary. These quotes are yet another piece of evidence that vindicates my position on the Fed as an economic saboteur and my position on the historic market bubble the bank has created:

Powell: “I have concerns about more purchases. As others have pointed out, the dealer community is now assuming close to a $4 trillion balance sheet and purchases through the first quarter of 2014. I admit that is a much stronger reaction than I anticipated, and I am uncomfortable with it for a couple of reasons.

First, the question, why stop at $4 trillion? The market in most cases will cheer us for doing more. It will never be enough for the market. Our models will always tell us that we are helping the economy, and I will probably always feel that those benefits are overestimated. And we will be able to tell ourselves that market function is not impaired and that inflation expectations are under control. What is to stop us, other than much faster economic growth, which it is probably not in our power to produce?”

Assessment: By all indications the Fed did do more, MUCH more. Including QE3, various stimulus packages and incessantly low interest rates for years, the Fed has essentially stepped in every time stock markets in particular were about to crash back to their natural state of decline. Powell is being rather honest in his estimation here that these stopgaps are in fact temporary and that the Fed cannot produce true economic growth to support the market optimism they have created through their interventions. He is stating openly that markets will only remain optimistic so long as they are assured that the Fed will continue to intervene.

This is probably why it took almost six years before these transcripts were released.

Powell: “When it is time for us to sell, or even to stop buying, the response could be quite strong; there is every reason to expect a strong response. So there are a couple of ways to look at it. It is about $1.2 trillion in sales; you take 60 months, you get about $20 billion a month. That is a very doable thing, it sounds like, in a market where the norm by the middle of next year is $80 billion a month. Another way to look at it, though, is that it’s not so much the sale, the duration; it’s also unloading our short volatility position.”

Assessment: And here we have Powell’s shocking admission, clarifying his previous point — the “strong response” that Powell is referring to is a market reversal, or bubble implosion. He even admits the existence of the Fed’s “short position on volatility.” This explains the strange behavior of the VIX index, which has plunged to record lows as “someone” continually shorts VIX stocks in order to interfere with any decline in markets.

This interference in the VIX has conjured an aberration, a market calm and investor confidence that is artificial. Such overconfidence, when optimism turns into mania, has happened before. In fact, the end of the Greenspan era was awash in such exuberance. And this delusion always ends the same way — with crisis.

I would also like to mention here that I have seen some disinformation being planted on Powell’s statements in 2012, asserting that he was “not talking about stock markets” specifically. Obviously he is, as you will see in other parts of his statement, but to reinforce the point, here is a quote from another Fed member who spilled the beans, Richard Fisher:

“What the Fed did — and I was part of that group — is we front-loaded a tremendous market rally, starting in 2009.

It’s sort of what I call the “reverse Whimpy factor” — give me two hamburgers today for one tomorrow.”

Fisher went on to hint at his very reserved view of the impending danger:

“I was warning my colleagues, Don’t go wobbly if we have a 10 to 20 percent correction at some point… Everybody you talk to… has been warning that these markets are heavily priced.” [In reference to interest rate hikes]

So, what happens when the Fed stops shorting volatility and ends the easy money being pumped into markets? Well, again, I think Powell and Fisher have just told you what will happen, but let’s continue.

Powell: “My third concern — and others have touched on it as well — is the problems of exiting from a near $4 trillion balance sheet. We’ve got a set of principles from June 2011 and have done some work since then, but it just seems to me that we seem to be way too confident that exit can be managed smoothly. Markets can be much more dynamic than we appear to think.

When you turn and say to the market, “I’ve got $1.2 trillion of these things,” it’s not just $20 billion a month — it’s the sight of the whole thing coming. And I think there is a pretty good chance that you could have quite a dynamic response in the market.”

Assessment: The Fed balance sheet is being reduced NOW, and Powell as chairman will only continue the process if not expedite it. Some people may argue that Powell is displaying an attitude that would suggest he is not on board with tightening policies. I disagree. I believe Powell will make the argument that the band-aid must be ripped off and that stock markets need some “tough love”.

In fact, Fed members including Yellen and former member Alan Greenspan (is there such a thing as a “former” member of the Fed?) have already been fielding the notion that stock markets are suffering from “irrational exuberance” and that something must be done to “temper inflation.”

Powell is also acknowledging the mass-psychological aspect of investors, now trained like Pavlovian dogs to salivate over stock tickers instead of thinking critically on the implications of equities that “can’t lose”.  When they finally begin to realize that equities can indeed lose, and that the Fed is going to let them lose, what will the result be, I wonder?

Powell: “I think we are actually at a point of encouraging risk-taking, and that should give us pause. Investors really do understand now that we will be there to prevent serious losses. It is not that it is easy for them to make money but that they have every incentive to take more risk, and they are doing so. Meanwhile, we look like we are blowing a fixed-income duration bubble right across the credit spectrum that will result in big losses when rates come up down the road. You can almost say that that is our strategy.”

Assessment: Wow! And there you have it. The new Fed chair’s own prognostications. He even used the dreaded “B” word — bubble. Yes, as I have been arguing for quite some time, the Fed will continue to raise rates and cut off the low cost money supply to banks and corporations that has helped boost stock markets as well as numerous other asset classes.  And now we discover after six years a Fed official, soon to be the Fed chairman, telling you EXACTLY what is about to happen within American markets, reinforcing my long held position.

Powell even mentions that “this is their strategy.” Now, that could be interpreted a few ways, but I continue to hold that the Fed plans to deliberately crash markets and that this will be a controlled demolition of the U.S. economy.

Trump may actually clash with Powell over these measures in the near future, considering Trump has thoroughly taken credit for the insane stock market rally that has dominated since his election. But, this will only add to the fake drama. Imagine, the very man Trump “picked” as the new head of the Federal Reserve undermining the market bubble which Trump boasts about on his Twitter account. The Kabuki theater will be phenomenal.

All the while, the true culprits behind the bubble and the crash, the international financiers and banks, will escape almost all scrutiny as the public mindlessly follows the political soap opera played out in the mainstream media.

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Less than 24 hours after headlines rang around the world proclaiming China would “slow purchases” of US Treasuries, China’s State Administration of Foreign Exchange, SAFE, pushes back on the report, saying it is “fake news.”

As Blooomberg reports, SAFE says its investment in Treasuries is based on market conditions and its needs, and adds that it always diversifies investment of FX reverses.

Additionally, SAFE says the earlier report may have quoted a wrong source.

US 10Y Yields immediately tumbled 2bps, well below the pre-China-headlines levels from this morning…

 

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So, what do you do when your pension funds are hopelessly underfunded and haven’t a chance of ever reaching breakeven again?  Well, you just change national laws to allow them to swing for the fences by loading up on risky investments and hope for the best.  Who cares…the losses are backstopped by taxpayers anyway, right?

According to Pensions & Investments, that is precisely what legislators in Canada have decided to do and it has sparked an asset rotation wave toward risky “alternative investments.”

Canadian pension plan executives are starting 2018 expecting to invest more in alternative investments, specifically infrastructure and real estate, as the easing of funding rules in Ontario gives plans more opportunity to take on risk, sources said.

“This funding rule change is a game-changer,” said Manuel Monteiro, partner and head of the financial strategy group at Mercer (Canada), Toronto. “It could change plan design, change investment strategies and should impact funding strategies.”

Martin Leclair of Phillips, Hager & North has even coined a new term to describe the asset rotation among Canadian pension funds: “rerisking“….presumably because ‘investing in the highest beta garbage possible at the highest valuation multiples of all time’ was just too honest for marketing presentations.

The change will make higher-yielding investments like alternatives more popular among Canadian institutional investors as more money will be freed up for riskier investments with the potential for higher return, sources said.

“Any alternatives, infrastructure particularly,” said Ian Struthers, partner and practice lead, Aon Hewitt Investment Consulting, Toronto. “We expect growth in those asset classes to continue, particularly among the large pension plans. It’s easy for plans the size of Canada Pension Plan to do; they have long time horizons and huge asset inflows. But for small to midsize plans, they can take on more exposure to alternatives through diversified investments with external managers. But there’s a lot of money looking for infrastructure and for real estate. There will be more interest in less vanilla kind of investments to add value, like brownfield projects.”

Martin Leclair, portfolio manager at Phillips, Hager & North ​ Investment Management, Toronto, said the move to those strategies already is happening. “What we’re seeing from the solvency rule changes is a lot of rerisking. That’s already happening. It’s more about yield than about risk. So fundamentally, yes, there will be a lot of rerisking.”

Leclair continues by saying that traditional bond and equity strategies just have no place in the portfolio of a modern 2018 investor and suggests that you’ll have to be “creative” this year to “find alpha…”

“2018 will not be the year of one strategy, it will be the year of being creative,” Mr. Leclair said. “Traditional bond and equity strategies will not get you there. You have to find alpha. These strategies are out there … I think you’ll see departures from traditional benchmark-oriented strategies, away from being a ‘closet indexer.'” PH&N Investment Management has C$90 billion in institutional assets under management, according to its website.

Which presumably means that the retirements of 1,000s of Canadians are about to be invested in Ripple?

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Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled: it will not hear the case of Young v. Borders.

Despite the fact that a 26-year-old man was gunned down by police who banged on the wrong door at 1:30 am, failed to identify themselves as police, and then repeatedly shot and killed the innocent homeowner who answered the door while holding a gun in self-defense, the justices of the high court refused to intervene to address police misconduct.

Although 26-year-old Andrew Scott committed no crime and never fired a single bullet or lifted his firearm against police, only to be gunned down by police who were investigating a speeding incident by engaging in a middle-of-the-night “knock and talk” in Scott’s apartment complex, the Supreme Court refused to balance the scales between justice and injustice.

Despite the fact that police shot and killed nearly 1,000 people nationwide for the third year in a row (many of whom were unarmed, mentally ill, minors or were shot merely because militarized police who were armed to the hilt “feared” for their safety), the Supreme Court will not act to right the wrongs being meted out by the American police state.

Although “knock-and-talk” policing has become a thinly veiled, warrantless—lethal—exercise by which citizens are coerced and intimidated into “talking” with heavily armed police who “knock” on their doors in the middle of the night, the Supreme Court will not make the government play by the rules of the Constitution.

The lesson to be learned: the U.S. Supreme Court will not save us.

No one is coming to save us: not the courts, not the legislatures, and not the president.

According to journalist Michael Harriot:

More people died from police violence in 2017 than the total number of U.S. soldiers killed in action around the globe (21). More people died at the hands of police in 2017 than the number of black people who were lynched in the worst year of Jim Crow (161 in 1892). Cops killed more Americans in 2017 than terrorists did (four). They killed more citizens than airplanes (13 deaths worldwide), mass shooters (428 deaths) and Chicago’s “top gang thugs” (675 Chicago homicides).

Americans are dying at the hands of the police, and the U.S. government doesn’t care.

Worse, the U.S. government is actively doing everything in its power to ensure that the killing spree continues.

Take Jeff Sessions, for example.

While the president’s conveniently-timed tweets distract the public and dominate the headlines, his attorney general continues to bulldoze over the Constitution, knocking down what scant protections remain between the citizenry and the hydra-headed police state.

Within his first year as attorney general, Jeff Sessions has made a concerted effort to expand the police state’s power to search, strip, seize, raid, steal from, arrest and jail Americans for any infraction, no matter how insignificant.

What this means is more militarized police, more asset forfeiture, more private prisons, more SWAT team raids, more police shootings of unarmed citizens, and more wars waged by the government against the American people.

And while the crime rate may be falling, the death toll—casualties of the government’s war on the American people—is growing.

Even so, it’s not just the police shootings that are cause for concern.

We are inching ever closer to a constitutional crisis the likes of which we have never seen before, and “we the people” are woefully unprepared and ill-equipped to deal with a government that is corrupt, topsy turvy, unjust, immoral, illegal, brutal, violent, war-hungry, greedy, biased, imbalanced, unaccountable, non-transparent, fascist and as illegitimate as they come.

Where do we go from here?

We’ve been through troubled times before.

In fact, it was 50 years ago this year, in 1968, when the country was buffeted by assassinations, riots and protests: “The assassinations of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. The riots that shook Washington, Chicago, Baltimore and other U.S. cities. Campus protests. Civil rights protests. Vietnam War protests. The Tet Offensive. The My Lai massacre. The rise of Richard Nixon and the retreat of Lyndon Johnson.”

Fifty years later, we’re no better off.

The nation is still being buffeted by economic instability, racial inequality, injustice, police brutality, government misconduct and a rising discontent on the part of the populace.

I can’t help but wonder what Martin Luther King Jr. would have to say to about his dream of a world without racism, militarism and materialism: America has become a ticking time bomb of racial unrest and injustice, police militarization, surveillance, government corruption and ineptitude, the blowback from a battlefield mindset and endless wars abroad, and a growing economic inequality between the haves and have nots.

We cannot afford to wait until it is too late to act.

This is no time to stand silently on the sidelines. It’s a time for anger and reform. Most importantly, it’s a time for making ourselves heard. And there is no better time to act than the present.

As Robert F. Kennedy reminded his listeners in a speech delivered at the University of Cape Town in 1966, “Hand in hand with freedom of speech goes the power to be heard, to share in the decisions of government which shape men’s lives. Everything that makes man’s life worthwhile—family, work, education, a place to rear one’s children and a place to rest one’s head—all this depends on decisions of government; all can be swept away by a government which does not heed the demands of its people.”

What can ordinary citizens do?

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, instead of sitting around and waiting for someone else to change things, take charge. Never discount the part that everyday citizens play in our nation’s future. You can change things, but there can be no action without education. Get educated about your rights and exercise them. Start by reading the Bill of Rights. You can do so online at www.rutherford.org. Or, if you want a copy to keep with you, email me at staff@rutherford.org and I’ll send you a free one.

Most important of all, just get out there and do your part to make sure that your government officials hear you. The best way to ensure that happens is by never giving up, never backing down, and never remaining silent. What matters is that you do your part.

It’s midnight in America right now. But the real question is, will there be a dawn?

That’s up to you and me. The future is in our hands.

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While the earlier report  from Bloomberg that South Korea is preparing a Crypto-exchange shutdown bill has yet to be confirmed, moments ago Reuters reported that in the latest crackdown against thr frothy sector, South Korea’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, including Bithumb and Coinone, were raided by police and tax agencies this week for alleged tax evasion.

An official at Coinone, one of the country’s largest crypto exchanges, told Reuters that “a few officials from the National Tax Service raided our office this week.” He added that “local police also have been investigating our company since last year, they think what we do is gambling,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. He said Coinone was cooperating with the investigation.

On Wednesday tax authorities also raided, Bithumb, the second largest virtual currency operator in South Korea.

“We were asked by the tax officials to disclose paperwork and things yesterday,” an official at Bithumb said, requesting anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue.

To be sure, this is not the first time the South Korean government has cracked down on potential money-laundering and tax evasion. Authorities previously said they are inspecting six local banks that offer virtual currency accounts to institutions, amid concerns the increasing use of such assets could lead to a surge in crime.

The crackdown on Seoul-based operators of some of the world’s busiest virtual currency exchanges comes as the government attempts to calm frenzied demand for cryptocurrency trading in Asia’s fourth largest economy.

Two weeks ago, the entire sector plunged following news that South Korea would require cryptocurrency transactions to name participants and ban banks from offering virtual accounts, and that the government may also direct law enforcement officials to close some exchanges.

Separately, Bloomberg reports that officials at South Korea’s Justice Ministry are looking at various steps to regulate cryptocurrencies due to their “seriousness and riskiness,” a spokesman says by phone. SBS TV earlier reported the ministry will begin discussions with other ministries as early as this week after preparing a bill that would shut down cryptocurrency exchanges

As a result of Bitcoin’s record surge last year, demand for cryptocurrency in South Korea has exploded, drawing college students to housewives and sparking concerns about a gambling addiction. We profiled the plight of the nation’s bitcoin trading addicts in “A Stunning Look Inside The World Of South Korea’s “Bitcoin Zombies”.

For now, the double whammy of news out of South Korea has had a modest impact on cryptocurrency prices, but nowhere near the 40% plunge observed two weeks ago.

 

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What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever done while intoxicated?

That’s nothing compared with this.

A Russian man rammed an armored personnel carrier into a shop window before climbing through to steal a bottle of wine on Wednesday morning, according to local media and video posted on social media. The incident occurred in Apatity, a small town just south of the Arctic circle.

The man had swiped the vehicle from a privately-run motorsport training ground nearby, driven it through a forest. But as he struggled to turn around in a narrow street, the man – whom witnesses described as being drunk – proceeded to slam the tank into the window of the “Family” convenience store.

He also crushed a Daewoo car parked nearby. Footage shared on social media showed the man exiting the tank, briefly inspecting the damage, then entering the shop through the broken window and snatching a bottle of wine.

He was later arrested while in possession of the same stolen bottle of wine, local media reported. The shop was not licensed to sell alcohol that early in the morning, the agency added.

Despite the fact that a drunk man was in full control of a tank, witnesses visible in the footage did not seemed particularly disturbed.

“Basically some guy stole an armored vehicle… and went into a shop to top up his stocks in the morning,” one social media user said while filming the scene.

The man, in his late twenties, did not resist arrest, RIA news agency reported. His identity was not released.

 

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Authored by John Rappaport via John Rappaport’s blog,

“Well, boys, we’ve got this strange thing called THE INDIVIDUAL. Could somebody tell me what he is? He’s not conforming to our algorithms. He’s all over the place. And while we’re at it, what the hell is this IMAGINATION? It keeps slipping out of our grasp, it doesn’t fit the plan…”

PART ONE

Technocrats say they want to wipe out poverty, war, and inequality. But in order to achieve these lofty goals (or pretend to), they need to re-program humans

 

Technocracy is the basic agenda and plan for ruling global society from above, so we need to understand it from several angles.

Consider a group of enthusiastic forward-looking engineers in the early 20th century. They work for a company that has a contract to manufacture a locomotive.

This is a highly complex piece of equipment.

On one level, workers are required to make the components to spec. Then they must put them all together. These tasks are formidable.

On another level, various departments of the company must coordinate their efforts. This is also viewed as a technological job. Organizing is considered a technology.

When the locomotive is finished and delivered, and when it runs on its tracks and pulls a train, a great and inspiring victory is won.

And then…the engineers begin to think about the implications. Suppose the locomotive was society itself? Suppose society was the finished product? Couldn’t society be put together in a coordinated fashion? And couldn’t the “technology of organizing things” be utilized for the job?

Why bother with endlessly arguing and lying politicians? Why should they be in charge? Isn’t that an obvious losing proposition? Of course it is.

Engineers could lay out and build a future society that would benefit all people. Disease and poverty could be wiped out. Eliminating them would be part of the blueprint.

This “insight” hit engineers and technicians like a ton of bricks. Of course! All societies had been failures for the same reason: the wrong people were in charge.

Armed with this new understanding, engineers of every stripe began to see what was needed. A revolution in thinking about societal organization. Science was the new king. And science would rule.

Of course, for an engineered world to work, certain decisions would have to be made about the role of the individual. Every individual. You couldn’t have an air-tight plan if every human were free to pursue his own objectives. Too many variables. Too much confusion. Too much conflict. Well, that problem could be solved. The individual’s actions would be tailored to fit the coordinated operations of the planned society.

The individual would be “one of the components of the locomotive.” His life would be connected to other lives to produce an exemplary shape.

Yes, this could imply a few problems, but those problems could be worked out. They would have to be worked out, because the overriding goal was the forming of a world organization. What would you do if one bolt (an individual human) in one wheel of a locomotive was the wrong size? You would go back and correct the error. You would re-make the bolt.

Other people entered the game. High-echelon Globalists saw technocracy as a system they could use to control the population.

Essentially, an already-misguided vision of a future technocratic utopia was hijacked. Something bad was made much worse.

In a nutshell, this is the history of technocracy.

A locomotive is a society? No. That was the first fatally flawed idea. Everything that followed was increasingly bizarre.

Unfortunately, many people in our world believe in Globalism, if you could call a partial vague view a legitimate belief. They dreamily float on all the propaganda cover stories—greatest good for the greatest number of people; no more poverty; equality of sharing; reducing the carbon footprint; a green economy; “sustainable development”; international cooperation; allotting production and consumption of goods and services for the betterment of everyone; and all of this delivered from a central platform of altruistic guidance.

If you track down the specifics that sit under these cover stories, you discover a warped system of planning that expresses control over the global population.

The collective utopia turns out to be a sham.

Waking up is hard to do? Breaking up is hard to do? They must be done.

A workable technological fix is a very nice achievement when the project is a machine. But transferring that glow of victory to the whole of society is an illusion. Anything that calls itself education would tackle the illusion as the first order of business.

Engineering society requires engineering humans.

That is the fatal flaw.

It’s called mind control.

PART TWO

Any genuine artist, any builder of communities, any sane activist, any honorable visionary stands outside technocracy, and is not part of this program.

Instead, his thrust is toward more individual freedom and a more open society with greater decentralization of power.

Decentralization is the key.

The use of technology does not imply living inside its control. The use of technology does not imply that society should be laid out like a giant machine with fitted parts.

Those futurists who have offered “overall plans” for the disposition of society generally ignore or sidestep the issue of who is going to administer the plan. To say this is an error is a vast understatement.

Where is one far-reaching center of power in our world that would run society?

All such centers of power are, first and foremost, dedicated to their own survival. And after that, they are dedicated to control of the territory they believe they own. THE INDIVIDUAL is a messy thing that needs to be sidelined or dealt with as a disruptive element.

I speak to those people who understand that the idea of the free, independent, powerful, and creative individual is being sidelined, shelved, and sent down the memory hole. This is no accident. This isn’t just a devolutionary trend. Technocrats see this as a necessary action, in order to “clean up” their equation for the civilization they’re building. The individual is a slippery variable that throws a monkey wrench into formulas.

PART THREE

Imagination never dies.

It belongs to the individual. It isn’t property of the group.

It enables solutions that eradicate problems and get out ahead of problems before they raise their heads.

Time and time again, the individual, as he wends his way through life, encounters persons and organizations that consider imagination a negative. In the clearly defined shapes of society, imagination must take a back seat to planning.

Is the individual resistant to such manipulations, or does he give in?

This is the key question.

Does the individual view society as an operation that can potentially lift up individuals and empower them? Or does he give in to the idea that society should create more and more dependent people?

The individual can be a source of spreading freedom, or he can defend the notion that there are an endless number of “entitlements” that must be honored.

Technocracy promotes entitlements as a doorway into the future. Its ultimate entitlement goes this way: you have the right to be re-programmed to believe you have a slot in the future world; we will make this slot as attractive as possible; you will serve the overall good as we engineer it.

That is the fundamental justification for the Welfare State. It’s the justification for a future technocratic policy which will assign citizens energy quotas. A citizen would be permitted to consume a set amount of energy in a given time period. (So-called smart meters are a step in that direction. The meters enable more specific measurements of energy consumption.)

This is how technocracy views the future…your future.

The ultimate technocratic vision? Your brain is a processor, and your brain is your mind. That’s all your mind is. Therefore, connecting your brain to a super-computer, or to the Cloud, will magically expand your mind and make it “more than human.”

You will become trans-human. A hybrid of human and machine.

This is the fairy tale to end all fairy tales.

It’s wishful fantasy dressed up as science.

The idea is: you will become More. You will overcome the limits and problems associated with being an individual.

Every individual will receive the same information and the same answers and the same solutions from the Cloud. AUTOMATICALLY.

This is the programmer’s wet dream.

Technocrats will thus be able to build a global society and control its every facet.

That’s the revolution.

The counter-revolution is YOU.

The free individual.

Never forget it.

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“…but who would want to live there?”

 

 

Source: Michael P Ramirez

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Authored by 720Global’s Michael Lebowitz via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

The New England Patriots are the winningest professional football team of the new millennia. While we could post a long list of reasons for their success, there is one that stands above the rest. In a recent interview, Patriots quarterback Tom Brady stated that they start each year with one goal; win the Super Bowl. Unlike many other teams, the Patriots do not settle for a better record than last year or improved statistics. Their single-minded goal is absolute and crystal clear to everyone on the team. It provides a framework and benchmark to help them coach, manage and play for success.

Interestingly, when most individuals, and many institutions for that matter, think about their investment goals, they have hopes of achieving Super Bowl like returns. Despite their well-intentioned ambitions, they manage their portfolios based on benchmarks that are not relevant to their goals. In this paper, we introduce a simple investment benchmark that simplifies the tracking process toward goals which if achieved, provide certitude that one’s long-term objectives will be met.

The S&P 500

Almost all investors benchmark their returns, manage their assets and ultimately measure their success based on the value of a stock, bond or blended index(s). The most common investor benchmark is the S&P 500, a measure of the return of 500 large-cap domestic stocks.

Our belief is that the performance of the S&P 500 and your retirement goals are unrelated. The typical counter-argument claims that the S&P 500 tends to be well correlated with economic growth and is a valid benchmark for individual portfolio performance and wealth. While that theory can be easily challenged over the past decade the question remains: Is economic growth a more valid benchmark than achieving a desired retirement goal?  Additionally, there are long periods like today where the divergence between stock prices and underlying economic fundamentals are grossly askew. These variances result in long periods when stock market performance can vary greatly from economic activity.

Even if we have a very long investment time frame and are willing to ignore the large variances between price and valuation, there is a much bigger problem to examine. Consider the following question: If you are promised a consistent annualized return of 10% from today until your retirement, will that allow you to meet your retirement goals?

Inflation and Purchasing Power

Regardless of your answer, we are willing to bet that most people perform a similar analysis. Compound current wealth by 10% annually to arrive at a future portfolio value and then determine if that is enough for the retirement need in mind. Simple enough, but this calculus fails to consider an issue of vital importance. What if inflation were to run at an 11% annual rate from today until your retirement date?  Your portfolio value will have increased nicely by retirement, but your wealth in real terms, measured by your purchasing power, will be less than it is today. Now, suppose you were offered annual returns equal to the annual rate of inflation (the consumer price index or CPI) plus 3%.

Based on 2017 CPI of approximately 2% for a total return of approximately 5% compared to almost 20% for the S&P 500, we venture to say that many readers would be reluctant to accept such an “unsexy” proposition. Whether a premium of 3% is the right number for you is up for debate, but what is not debatable is that a return based on inflation, regardless of the performance of popular indexes, is a much more effective determinant of future wealth and purchasing power.

To show why this concept is so important, consider the situation of an investor with plans to retire in 25 years. Our investor has $600,000 to invest and believes that he will need $1,500,000 based on today’s purchasing power, to allow him to live comfortably for the remainder of his life. To achieve this goal, he must seek an annualized return of at least 4.50%. As a point of reference, the total return of the S&P 500 is 6.60% over the past 100 years. At first blush our investor, given his relatively long time frame until retirement, might think the odds are good that the S&P 500 will allow him to achieve his retirement goal. However, his failure to factor in inflation causes his calculations to be incorrect. Since 1917, inflation has averaged 3.09%. The S&P 500 total return since 1917 including the effect of inflation is only 3.51%. The odds are not in his favor, and his oversight may ultimately leave him in a difficult situation.

The graph below shows the resulting 25 year total returns based on each monthly starting point since 1917. The red line shows our investor’s goal of 4.50%. Keep in mind that since the graph requires 25 years of data, the last data point on the graph is December 1992.

Over the time frame illustrated, the investor was subjected to anxiety-inducing random high and lows relative to his target return. His portfolio performance is a flag in the wind at the mercy of the volatility of the equity markets.

Instead of rolling the dice like an investor managing and benchmarking towards the S&P 500, why not manage your portfolio based on an index that will properly target a dollar amount of purchasing power in the future? In our prior example, achieving a benchmark of the annual rate of CPI plus 4.50% would allow our investor to retire with at least $1,500,000 in today’s purchasing power.

Inflation based indexing

Unlike benchmarking to a popularly traded equity or bond index using ETFs and mutual funds, managing to an inflation-linked benchmark is more difficult. It requires an outcome-oriented approach that considers fundamentals and technical analysis across a wide range of asset classes. At times, alternative strategies might be necessary or prudent. Further, and maybe most importantly, one must check one’s ego at the door, as returns can vary widely from those of one’s neighbors. The challenge of this approach explains why most individuals and investment professionals do not subscribe to it. It is far easier to succeed or fail with the crowd than to take an unconventional path that demands rigor.

The reward for using the proper index and successfully matching or exceeding it is certitude. The CPI-plus benchmark approach described here is far more honest and durable in its ability to compound wealth and show definitive progress. It is deliberate and does not hand over control of the outcome to the whim of the market. It also requires an investor to avoid the hype and distractions that continually surround the day-to-day movements of the stock market.

Summary 

We understand the difficulty in achieving one’s financial goals, especially in today’s unique environment of low-interest rates and high stock market valuations. Why compound the difficulty by managing your wealth to the random volatility of an index or benchmark that is different from your goals? Matching the performance of the S&P 500 is cheap and easy for a reason. It is also irrelevant to compounding wealth as it ignores important aspects of the wealth management process such as avoiding large and wealth-debilitating drawdowns.

Meeting your goals requires a logical and deliberate strategy guided by a set of rules that few investors understand. There is a reason many investors and retirees are failing to meet their goals. Using a reliable but different approach will help ensure that you don’t end up as one of them.

via RSS http://ift.tt/2miwzdx Tyler Durden

Video published online shows disgraced film mogul Harvey Weinstein being physically and verbally assaulted while walking out of an Arizona restaurant on Tuesday night. Though it’s not known if there was more to the altercation than what is shown in the video, a reportedly drunk restaurant patron slapped Weinstein twice in the face while angrily yelling, “You’re a piece of shit for fucking with those women, get the fuck out of here!” 

According to initial reports, the lead up to the incident involved the attacker being turned down for a photo as Weinstein was dining with his sobriety coach. However, the video content suggests the attacker may have been out for his own version of drunken vigilante justice as the man references Weinstein’s now widely known past predatory attacks against women.  

The episode was summarized as follows:

Weinstein was dining Tuesday night at Elements restaurant in Scottsdale when a guy named Steve approached him and asked for a photo. Steve tells TMZ Weinstein was belligerent and said no, while a restaurant manager says Weinstein was “sweet” and politely declined.

Steve and Weinstein shook hands and sat down, but this video shows what happened when they were both leaving the restaurant around 9 PM. Although the restaurant manager says Steve’s hands never landed on Weinstein’s face, you clearly see and hear Steve make contact twice, as he calls Weinstein “a piece of s***.”

Steve told us he’d had “quite a bit to drink,” and instructed his friend to record video as he walked up to Weinstein. As we reported, Weinstein declined to call police and left the restaurant.

Though Weinstein might have been dazed by the assault – as a witness reported  “Weinstein stumble backward and almost fell” – he appears to awkwardly saunter out of the restaurant and into a hallway while his sober coach stays behind attempting to block the cell phone shot. Though TMZ indicates that police were not called to the scene, it is unclear if any later report was made.

Since the New York Times first published explosive allegations of sexual assault based on interviews with multiple of his celebrity female victims, more than 60 women have accused the 65-year old movie mogul of sexual misconduct. Since then Weinstein has been dropped by his own studio which he co-founded and is now facing ongoing criminal investigations in multiple US jurisdictions as well as in London.

And beyond the potential for an impending arrest and future prosecution, which has long been speculated upon but has yet to materialize, Weinstein is at the very least now a national pariah who as this latest video attests will have trouble showing his face in public for a very long time to come. 

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