Author: admin

By: Chris Tell at http://capitalistexploits.at/

I first met Joe in Mongolia last year. He is one of the most fascinating men I’ve had the pleasure of meeting. A spook from the cold war with stories that would not be out of place in any spy novel. Truth truly is stranger than fiction.

This is not the first time I’ve written about our favourite curmudgeon. Joe was previously introduced in a post discussing elderly care here. He was Formerly COO and CFO, Executive Vice President and Member of the Board of the Atlantic Council of the United States in Washington, DC. He was also the U.S. Representative of the Atlantic Institute for International Affairs in Paris, France.

He has written professionally on economic development and international security affairs. On the lighter side, he is co-author of GAMBIT with Antoinette Falquier, a novel of international intrigue, nuclear hijinks and improbable espionage. I have read the book and have to say that it should be made into a movie. It has all the ingredients that are required for a fantastic, action packed screenplay, but I digress.

Joe recently sent me his projections for 2014. Given his incredibly diverse background and involvement in geopolitics, combined with the very real fact that he’s already doubled my time on this ball of dirt and amassed more insights and experience than I can hope to acquire in my lifetime, I always find his views interesting. He kindly agreed to share them with our readers.

11/20/13

The Early Line on 2014

by: Joseph Harned

It is said that making predictions is often a risky business, particularly when they’re about the future. The “early line” is what book makers call the very first predictions by odd makers about a given outcome. Early lines are the riskiest predictions of all. Sheer folly. Pure chutzpah. All hat, no cattle. With that in mind, and tongue firmly in cheek, here are my early lines for 2014 – in no particular order of importance.

• Mid-term U.S. election results will see the Democrats retaining control of the Senate and re-taking control of the House despite the lowest voter turn-out in decades. Pundits decide this resulted from the Tea Party overplaying its hand, the “sane Right’s” inability to provide an attractive alternative to the “insane Right”, and the traditional ability of the left to organize reluctant voters to vote early and often.

• In Europe, the French government’s steadfast determination to refuse to f*#k its poor with austerity programs just to appease its right wing and German overseers actually begins to pay off, as the French economy rebounds while the German economy falters and its oh-so-determined society faces self-doubt. Some Euro-meisters are heard to mutter that “a little inflation may even be a good thing”.

• The price of gold breaks below $1100 per ounce, as even the most fervent gold bugs are forced to admit that 1) the gold market price is manipulated, and 2) not by me. [We spend a fortune to find and mine the stuff, only to hoard and bury it again. At least with oil, between finding and “mining” it, and eventually sequestering by burying the CO2 it produces, we at least get some working productivity out of it.]

• For the first time, India is beginning to realize its extraordinary potential by making progress in taming the high inflation that has crushed economic growth until now. The rising economic tide has muted fractious internecine political struggles, secular battles and religious antipathies enough to permit the population to see light down the tunnel together. Possibilities unlimited.

• Energy-dependent Mideast governments are rapidly losing their leverage as the U.S. becomes the largest oil producer in the world, and fracking enables old and marginal fields to become productive.

• As a corollary to an increasingly marginal Middle East, the Shi’a versus Wahhabi, Iran versus Saudi proxy struggles become rapidly marginal. Now it’s just sand they are fighting over. So be it. Let them at it.

• Which leaves Israel. For the first time since 1920, the U.S. Has the leverage to arrange a two-state sit-down-and-shut-up peace accord with Israel, and between Israel and Palestine and Jordan. And no one, no one, wants it more than American Jews, who are sick and tired of being arm-twisted and guilt-driven by Israel into indefensible positions of backing colonialist Israeli policies.

• China succeeds on two fronts simultaneously: first, in shifting with alacrity from a developing-nation exporting economy to a newly industrializing nation consumer-spending economy; and second; from highly pollution per-capita developing nation to a moderate pollution per-capita more responsible nation. The ability to accomplish both steps in tandem provides China with increased political and even moral leverage in Africa as well as Asia.

• Japan, on the other hand, weakens its short term 2013 growth spurt by enacting consumption taxes meant to pay for the increasing costs of caring for an inverted pyramid of aging population cohort depending upon decreasing working population cohort. [The Japanese should, of course, adopt the Israeli system of training the mobile aged to care for immobile aged.]

• Africa truly begins to come into its own, led by Botswana, which proves to foster better political leadership and less corruption than its southern neighbor. As China and now India do well, resource-rich, newly capitalized and trained Africa will prosper.

• Mexico, undergoing real structural and political reform, will take advantage of a recovering U.S. economy, and begin a decade of unprecedented growth.

• Downside risks include the knowns, the unknowns, the imponderables (that which we don’t know we don’t know), and a new category that has cost us more lives and dollars already than anyone predicted: climate change. As a layman, reading voraciously, with a lifetime of contacts and access, the best I can make of it all at this date is: By 2030 – in 16 years or so – we will have serious crop failures in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia which will result in massive starvation and political upheaval. If you have a five-year-old today, his or her likely military or alternative healthcare service will be connected to this crisis. By 2050 the U.S. will have lost 15% of its habitable near-shore cityscapes and housing, and crop failures will be affecting the U.S. Heartland. If you have a child – any age – this will be its future.

• Our old friend and cricket Naresh correctly pointed out that I failed to mention the increasing danger of a conflict between China and Japan. So, Here’s a PS for Naresh:Ever since Chiang Kai -Shek escaped across the Straits, whenever the Communist regime has needed a unifying cry to attempt to (ever so briefly) unify the 56 diverse ethnic groups speaking 292 different languages of China, they have called for reuniting Taiwan with the Mainland. No issue historically has had the same emotional, patriotic, political fervor, though the population being so disparate that fervor is always short-lived and cannot be counted on often.With the e
  conomic integration of Taiwan and the mainland, the cross-fertilization of investments and integration of technology, that arrow is no longer in the political quiver. It is being replaced by a handful of less effective arrows regarding contested islands in the Pacific. Each island has a 200-mile exclusive economic zone extending from its coastline, encompassing vast undersea areas of potential oil, gas and mineral resources. This fight over contested islands’ historical jurisdictions is being picked in particular with Japan, as the Chinese have long memories of Japan’s tortuous occupation in World War 2, which can be exploited politically by China’s Communist leadership. Look for Sino-Japan relations to heat up in 2014.To give you some perspective on the importance of the economic issue, while it is said that the U.S. doubled it’s size and potentially its wealth with the Louisiana Purchase under President Thomas Jefferson in 1803 at a cost of 50 million FFrs, in fact the U.S. more than doubled its size and potentially its wealth under Ronald Reagan in 1983 with his creation of the Exclusive Economic Zones extending from 3 miles to 200 miles from our shores — all our shores, the mainland, Alaska, Hawaii, all islands, protectorates — some 3.4 million square nautical miles of ocean — under the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. And for a Reagan’esque no money down!

Some very interesting and hopefully contentious food for thought!

– Chris

“American exceptionalism is a reaction to the inability of people to understand global complexity or important issues like American energy dependency. Therefore, they search for simplistic sources of comfort and clarity. And the people that they are now selecting to be, so to speak, the spokespersons of their anxieties are, in most cases, stunningly ignorant.” ? Zbigniew Brzezinski

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/vXW2P-rqpX4/story01.htm Capitalist Exploits

 

 

HANK’S RESTAURANT

(Arlo Guthrie–Alice’s Restaurant)

Adapted by WilliamBanzai7

 

This song is called Hank’s Restaurant,

and it’s about Hank,

and the restaurant,

but Hank’s Restaurant is not the name of the restaurant,

that’s just the name of the song,

and that’s why I called the song Hank’s Restaurant.

You can take anything you want from Hank’s Bailout Restaurant

You can take anything you want from Hank’s Bailout Restaurant

Walk right in it’s around the back

Just a half a mile from the Federal Reserve Bank

You can take anything you want from Hank’s Bailout Restaurant

Now it all started Hanksgiving Day 2008

when my friend Fabulous Fab and I went up to visit Hank at the restaurant,

but Hank doesn’t like sittin in there,

he likes sittin near a fella named Blankfein in Goldman Sachs’ Wall Street office,

in a big glass tower.

And being in a tower like that,

they got a lot of room downstairs.

Havin’ all that room,

they decided that they didn’t have to take out their subprime garbage for a long time.

We got up there,

we found all the toxic subprime garbage in there,

and we decided it’d be a friendly gesture for us to take the garbage down to the Federal Reserve shitty deal dump, Maiden Lane.

So my friend and I took the $700 billion tons of subprime garbage,

put it in the back of a red Humvee stretch limo, including CDSs and CDOs and other implements of financial

mass destruction and headed on toward the Maiden Lane shitty deal dump.

Well we got there and there was a big sign and a chain across across the dump saying,

“By order of Emperor Benron–No Dumping on Hanksgiving.”

And we had never heard of a shitty deal dump closed on Hanksgiving before,

and with tears in our eyes we drove off into the sunset looking for another place to put the toxic asset garbage.

We didn’t find one.

Until we came to a side road,

and off the side of the side road there was another financial black hole hole and at the bottom of the hole there was

a big pile of Wall Street garbage, offering circulars, stress tests, analyst reports, mortgage notes and such.

And we decided that one big pile is better than two little piles,

and rather than bring that one up we decided to throw our’s down.

That’s what we did, and drove back to the restaurant,

had a Thanksgiving dinner that couldn’t be beat,

went to sleep and didn’t get up until the next morning,

when we got a phone call from Porn Commissioner Cox.

He said, “Kid, we found your name on an Abacus offering circular at the bottom of a half a ton of shitty deals,

and just wanted to know if you had any information about it.”

And I said, “Yes, sir, Mr. Porn Commissioner,

I cannot tell a lie, I put that Abacus offering circular under that garbage.”

After speaking to Porn Commissioner Cox for about fourty-five minutes on the telephone we finally arrived at

the truth of the matter and said that we had to go down and pick up the subprime garbage,

and also had to go down and speak to him at the Porn Commission’s NY Regional office.

So we got in the red Humvee Limo with the CDOs and CDSs and implements of financial mass destruction and

headed on toward the Porn office upstairs at Score’s.

Now friends, there was only one or two things that the Commissioner coulda done at the Porn office,

and the first was he could have shown us some hot porn tubes of Mary Schapiro doin the deed,

which wasn’t very likely, and we didn’t expect it,

and the other thing was he could have bawled us out and told us never to be seen driving toxic asset backed

garbage around the vicinity of Wall Street again,

which is what we expected,

but when we got to the Porn Commission’s office there was a third possibility that we hadn’t even counted upon,

and we was both immediately arrested.

Handcuffed.

And I said Mr. Porn Commissioner sir, I don’t think I can pick up the toxic garbage with these handcuffs on.

He said, “Shut up, kid. Get in the back of the car.”

And that’s what we did, sat in the back of the c
ar and drove to the quote Scene of the Crime unquote.

I want tell you about Wall Street, where this happened here, they got three Federal regulators, the SEC, the

CFTC and the FBI, but when we got to the Scene of the Crime there was all kinds of Black Ops people running

around,

this being the biggest financial crime of the last five consecutive Wall Street trading days,

and everybody wanted to get in the newspaper story about it.

And the TSA, they was using up all kinds of equipment that they had hanging around the anti-traveler unit.

They was taking plaster tire tracks, finger prints, dog smelling prints, and they took twenty seven eight-by-ten

glossy back scatter scans with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each

one was to be used as evidence against us.

Took scans of the approach, the getaway, the northwest corner the southwest corner and that’s not to

mention the aerial drone photography.

After the ordeal, we went back to the jail.

Porn Commissioner Cox said he was going to put us in the cell. Said,

“Kid, I’m going to put you in the cell, I want your wallet and your belt.”

And I said, “I can understand you wanting my wallet so I don’t have any money to spend in the cell,

but what do you want my belt for?”

And he said, “Kid, we don’t want any hangings.”

I said, “did you really think I was going to hang myself for financial intermediation?”

Porn commissioner Cox said he was making sure,

and friends the Porn Commissioner was,

cause he took out the toilet seat so I couldn’t hit myself over the head and drown,

and he took out the toilet paper so I couldn’t bend the bars roll out the – roll the toilet paper out the window,

slide down the roll and have an escape.

The PornCommissioner was making sure,

and it was about four or five hours later that Hank (remember Hank? It’s a song about Hank),

came by and with a few nasty words to Porn Commissioner Cox on the side,

Bailed us out using Federal taxpayer money,

and we went back to the restaurant,

had a another Hanksgiving dinner that couldn’t be beat!!

You can take anything you want, from Hank’s Bailout Restaurant

You can take anything you want, from Hank’s Bailout Restaurant

Walk right in it’s around the back

Just a half a mile from the Federal Reserve Bank

You can take anything you want, from Hank’s Bailout Restaurant

 

WB7: This is my favorite Thanksgiving song. It is also the only one I know.

Arlo Authrie, if you don’t know him, is the son of Woody Guthrie, a famous folk singer who was no friend of Wall Street.

I originally did this version of Alice’s Restaurant in September 2008. This is my updated version, which is really an excuse for me to play this song for you and to once again say…

HAPPY HANKSGIVING ALL!!

WB7

 

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/gR6IidDKzRg/story01.htm williambanzai7

 

 

HANK’S RESTAURANT

(Arlo Guthrie–Alice’s Restaurant)

Adapted by WilliamBanzai7

 

This song is called Hank’s Restaurant,

and it’s about Hank,

and the restaurant,

but Hank’s Restaurant is not the name of the restaurant,

that’s just the name of the song,

and that’s why I called the song Hank’s Restaurant.

You can take anything you want from Hank’s Bailout Restaurant

You can take anything you want from Hank’s Bailout Restaurant

Walk right in it’s around the back

Just a half a mile from the Federal Reserve Bank

You can take anything you want from Hank’s Bailout Restaurant

Now it all started Hanksgiving Day 2008

when my friend Fabulous Fab and I went up to visit Hank at the restaurant,

but Hank doesn’t like sittin in there,

he likes sittin near a fella named Blankfein in Goldman Sachs’ Wall Street office,

in a big glass tower.

And being in a tower like that,

they got a lot of room downstairs.

Havin’ all that room,

they decided that they didn’t have to take out their subprime garbage for a long time.

We got up there,

we found all the toxic subprime garbage in there,

and we decided it’d be a friendly gesture for us to take the garbage down to the Federal Reserve shitty deal dump, Maiden Lane.

So my friend and I took the $700 billion tons of subprime garbage,

put it in the back of a red Humvee stretch limo, including CDSs and CDOs and other implements of financial

mass destruction and headed on toward the Maiden Lane shitty deal dump.

Well we got there and there was a big sign and a chain across across the dump saying,

“By order of Emperor Benron–No Dumping on Hanksgiving.”

And we had never heard of a shitty deal dump closed on Hanksgiving before,

and with tears in our eyes we drove off into the sunset looking for another place to put the toxic asset garbage.

We didn’t find one.

Until we came to a side road,

and off the side of the side road there was another financial black hole hole and at the bottom of the hole there was

a big pile of Wall Street garbage, offering circulars, stress tests, analyst reports, mortgage notes and such.

And we decided that one big pile is better than two little piles,

and rather than bring that one up we decided to throw our’s down.

That’s what we did, and drove back to the restaurant,

had a Thanksgiving dinner that couldn’t be beat,

went to sleep and didn’t get up until the next morning,

when we got a phone call from Porn Commissioner Cox.

He said, “Kid, we found your name on an Abacus offering circular at the bottom of a half a ton of shitty deals,

and just wanted to know if you had any information about it.”

And I said, “Yes, sir, Mr. Porn Commissioner,

I cannot tell a lie, I put that Abacus offering circular under that garbage.”

After speaking to Porn Commissioner Cox for about fourty-five minutes on the telephone we finally arrived at

the truth of the matter and said that we had to go down and pick up the subprime garbage,

and also had to go down and speak to him at the Porn Commission’s NY Regional office.

So we got in the red Humvee Limo with the CDOs and CDSs and implements of financial mass destruction and

headed on toward the Porn office upstairs at Score’s.

Now friends, there was only one or two things that the Commissioner coulda done at the Porn office,

and the first was he could have shown us some hot porn tubes of Mary Schapiro doin the deed,

which wasn’t very likely, and we didn’t expect it,

and the other thing was he could have bawled us out and told us never to be seen driving toxic asset backed

garbage around the vicinity of Wall Street again,

which is what we expected,

but when we got to the Porn Commission’s office there was a third possibility that we hadn’t even counted upon,

and we was both immediately arrested.

Handcuffed.

And I said Mr. Porn Commissioner sir, I don’t think I can pick up the toxic garbage with these handcuffs on.

He said, “Shut up, kid. Get in the back of the car.”

And that’s what we did, sat in the back of the car and drove to the quote Scene of the Crime unquote.

I want tell you about Wall Street, where this happened here, they got three Federal regulators, the SEC, the

CFTC and the FBI, but when we got to the Scene of the Crime there was all kinds of Black Ops people running

around,

this being the biggest financial crime of the last five consecutive Wall Street trading days,

and everybody wanted to get in the newspaper story about it.

And the TSA, they was using up all kinds of equipment that they had hanging around the anti-traveler unit.

They was taking plaster tire tracks, finger prints, dog smelling prints, and they took twenty seven eight-by-ten

glossy back scatter scans with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each

one was to be used as evidence against us.

Took scans of the approach, the getaway, the northwest corner the southwest corner and that’s not to

mention the aerial drone photography.

After the ordeal, we went back to the jail.

Porn Commissioner Cox said he was going to put us in the cell. Said,

“Kid, I’m going to put you in the cell, I want your wallet and your belt.”

And I said, “I can understand you wanting my wallet so I don’t have any money to spend in the cell,

but what do you want my belt for?”

And he said, “Kid, we don’t want any hangings.”

I said, “did you really think I was going to hang myself for financial intermediation?”

Porn commissioner Cox said he was making sure,

and friends the Porn Commissioner was,

cause he took out the toilet seat so I couldn’t hit myself over the head and drown,

and he took out the toilet paper so I couldn’t bend the bars roll out the – roll the toilet paper out the window,

slide down the roll and have an escape.

The PornCommissioner was making sure,

and it was about four or five hours later that Hank (remember Hank? It’s a song about Hank),

came by and with a few nasty words to Porn Commissioner Cox on the side,

Bailed us out using Federal taxpayer money,

and we went back to the restaurant,

had a another Hanksgiving dinner that couldn’t be beat!!

You can take anything you want, from Hank’s Bailout Restaurant

You can take anything you want, from Hank’s Bailout Restaurant

Walk right in it’s around the back

Just a half a mile from the Federal Reserve Bank

You can take anything you want, from Hank’s Bailout Restaurant

 

WB7: This is my favorite Thanksgiving song. It is also the only one I know.

Arlo Authrie, if you don’t know him, is the son of Woody Guthrie, a famous folk singer who was no friend of Wall Street.

I originally did this version of Alice’s Restaurant in September 2008. This is my updated version, which is really an excuse for me to play this song for you and to once again say…

HAPPY HANKSGIVING ALL!!

WB7

 

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/gR6IidDKzRg/story01.htm williambanzai7

Submitted by Lance Roberts of STA Wealth Management,

With the "inmates in charge of the asylum" during this holiday shortened trading week it seemed to be an apropriate opportunity to share a virtual cornucopia of topics to consider while enjoying the delicious delicacies, and subsequent tryptophan induced comas, of a traditional Thanksgiving.

As I discussed earlier this week in "30% Up Years: The Case For Cashing In:"

"If the markets rise to 1850 by the end of 2013, which I believe is entirely possible as managers chase performance, it will mark the 11th time in history the markets have attained that goal.  I have also notated that each 30% return year was also the beginning of a period of both declining rates of annualized returns and typically sideways markets.  It is also important to notice that some of the biggest negative annual returns eventually followed 30% up years."

1) Margin Debt Soars To New Record via Zerohedge

"The correlation between stock prices and margin debt continues to rise (to new records of exuberant "Fed's got our backs" hope) as NYSE member margin balances surge to new record highs. Relative to the NYSE Composite, this is the most "leveraged' investors have been since the absolute peak in Feb 2000. What is more worrisome, or perhaps not, is the ongoing collapse in investor net worth – defined as total free credit in margin accounts less total margin debt – which has hit what appears to be all-time lows (i.e. there's less left than ever before) which as we noted previously raised a "red flag" with Deutsche Bank. Relative to the 'economy' margin debt has only been higher at the very peak in 2000 and 2007 and was never sustained at this level for more than 2 months."

 

2) Thanking The Fed For Investors' Bounty via Bloomberg Businessweek

"Thanks to outgoing Fed Chairmen Ben Bernanke and the nominee to replace him, Janet Yellen, and their colleagues taking down interest rates to near-zero five years ago and keeping them there—on top of the Fed's nearly $4 trillion of creative asset purchases—investors have enjoyed the restoration of more than $13 trillion in U.S. equity market value. That's called the multiplier effect. And it's also called remorse, if you were one of the record numbers who bolted stocks altogether and are scrambling to get back in now, after indexes have more than doubled. It's also called financial repression if you're a saver having to eat negative real rates on your hard-earned cash.

 

Any wonder why capital markets threw a summer temper tantrum merely on signaling (arguably) from the Fed that it could soon reduce the size of its asset purchases (not end them, mind you—much less hike interest rates). Either way, the lame-duck Bernanke Fed opted to hold off."

 

"If it shows what it appears to show," says University of Texas economics and government professor James Galbraith, "then it's not difficult to grasp why the Fed's tapering has acquired the habit of ever-receding into the future."

 

3) Need To Laugh, Read "Getting Back To Full Employment" via Forbes

"They say that laughter is the best medicine. If so, "Getting Back to Full Employment", a revised and updated book by economists Dean Baker and Jared Bernstein, might just be able to save Obamacare. Read it, and see if it doesn't make you laugh out loud.

 

Of course, Bernstein, at least, has experience in economics comedy writing. Along with Christina Romer, he wrote "The Job Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan," which was the blueprint for President Obama's 2009 "stimulus" program.

 

In their "Recovery" study, Romer and Bernstein confidently predicted that shoveling $862 billion of borrowed money into the gaping maws of various Democratic interest groups would prevent the unemployment rate from going above 8%, and would push joblessness down to 5% by, well, now.

 

As they say in text message land, ROTFLMAO! Adjusted to the labor force participation rate that Bernstein and Romer assumed in their study (that of December 2008), the unemployment rate peaked at 11.5% in mid-2011, and it was still at 11.4% last month.

Baker and Bernstein begin by waxing nostalgic over the year 2000, when America reached effective full employment. The official "U-3" unemployment rate bottomed out at 3.84% during April of that year, while a record-high 64.74% of working-age Americans had jobs.

 

If that was full employment, we are 15.8 million jobs distant from it now. On a full-time equivalent (FTE)
jobs basis, the shortfall is even worse: 16.6 million FTE jobs.

 

Unemployment and underemployment are not laughing matters. The humor is contained in Baker and Bernstein's bizarre ideas for getting America back to full employment. After extolling the glories of Bill Clinton's second term, they go on to recommend policies that are the exact opposites of the ones that worked so well during that period."

4) Goldman's Global Leading Indicator Collapses Into Slowdown via Advisor Analyst

"The best silver lining Goldman Sachs found when faced with the total and utter collapse in their global leading indicator swirlogram was – (probably) stabilizing. The only improving factor across all their global economic components was the US initial jobless claims (and that has been a farce wrapped in a debacle for 2 months of 'glitches'). Having led global industrial production for a few months, it seems the indicator is crashing back to reality as the summer's hopefulness is exsanguinated from hard and soft data around the world."

 

5) In Fed Policy, Exits May Be Harder To Hear via New York Times

"Is it time for the Federal Reserve to start its exit from the extraordinary set of policies it has pursued over the past few years? That crucial question is on the minds of the nation's central bankers, as well as the stock and bond traders who follow the Fed's every move.    

 

 

In her recent testimony before the Senate Banking Committee, Janet L. Yellen, the eminently qualified nominee to lead the Fed, made clear she didn't think the time for an exit had come. With inflation running below the Fed target of 2 percent and continued weakness in the labor market, she argued, the economy needs all the help the central bank can provide. 

 

Many of the numbers back up that diagnosis. The unemployment rate is about three percentage points higher than it was seven years ago, before we got the first whiffs of the economy's financial problems. The employment-to-population ratio is about five percentage points lower, and it has not recovered much at all since the trough of the recession.

 

But that is only a small part of the story. A relevant measure is the employment-to-population ratio for those in the prime working age group —25 to 54. This statistic also shows the recession's lingering effects: the ratio declined to about 75 percent from 80 percent over the course of the recession, and has recovered to only about 76 percent today. So we have recovered only about a fifth of what we lost during the downturn.

 

These numbers indicate that there is still much slack, or unused potential, in the economy. In turn, this suggests that inflation is unlikely to become a problem anytime soon, so the Fed can delay its exit. But the labor market data are hard to interpret, because this recession has been so different from those before it.

 

How these conflicting signals are resolved will eventually determine the course of monetary policy. Because Ms. Yellen says the economy has a lot of slack, she isn't especially worried about inflation and isn't eager for the Fed to quit its stimulative policies. Many measures confirm her judgment, but this recession has been extraordinary, making historical norms hard to apply, and other statistics point to a different conclusion. Ms. Yellen may well turn out to be right, but as new data arrive, she had also better be prepared to change her mind."

Have a great Thanksgiving holiday, be safe and enjoy your family.

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/Evie4_je9P4/story01.htm Tyler Durden

One of the more painfully clueless observations made by pundits in recent weeks is that just because everyone is talking about a bubble, there can not possibly be a bubble.

Naturally, if one is tuned to only filter any bubble mentions, one will naturally have a cognitive bias of interpreting the world only through the eyes of “bubble watchers.” The flipside of course is that not everyone is a mindless member of the herd, rushing headlong into whatever precipice awaits lemmings just around the corner, and can still do simple math and recall what fundamentals looked like (as a reminder, forward multiples in 2007 looked very cheap too…before EPS for the S&P in 2008 plunged by over 50% which in retrospect would have made those forward multiples 100% higher).

But simple logic failure aside, what empirical evidence shows is that while there has been indeed a pick up in internet mentions of “stock bubble” according to Google Trends, it is still well below its prior high… hit in May 2007 and October 2007, just before and at the very peak of the last stock bubble.

We can only assume that the same pundits that somehow are getting airtime now, were the same ones who said in the summer of 2007 when the S&P had hit its prior, non-QE assisted all time high, that just because everyone is talking about a bubble there can’t possibly be a bubble…

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/a8j8mbf6GgI/story01.htm Tyler Durden

A few days ago, in the latest escalation over the its territorial dispute with Japan regarding several islands in the East China Sea, China unveiled a so-called “Air Defense Identification” zone, shown on the map below, which includes not only the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands in question, but stretches from South Korea all the way to Taiwan, and which requires that any overflights submit their plans to Beijing in advance.

The response by Japan and the US was immediate, with Japan blasting China’s retaliation to its own annexation of the Senkakus a year earlier and demonstratively neither Japan Airlines nor ANA complying with China’s demands, while the US, demonstrating its allegiance to Japan, flew B-52 bombers above the Air Defense Zone.

China promptly responded to what it perceived was Western hypocrisy:

China’s announcement to establish an Air Defense Identification Zone in East China Sea has drawn criticism from the United States and Japan, yet their blame is wrong.

 

Their logic is simple: they can do it while China can not, which could be described with a Chinese saying, “the magistrates are free to burn down houses while the common people are forbidden even to light lamps.”

 

It is known to all that the United States is among the first to set up an air defense zone in 1950, and later more than 20 countries have followed suit, which Washington has taken for granted.

 

However, as soon as China started to do it, Washington immediately voiced various “concerns.” U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Saturday voiced concerns over the zone, fearing it might “constitute an attempt to change the status quo in the East China Sea,” and a White House spokesman on Monday called the Chinese announcement over the weekend “unnecessarily inflammatory.”

 

…

 

Japan set up such a zone in the 1960s and it even one-sidedly allowed the zone to cover China’s Diaoyu Islands. But when China set up the zone covering the Diaoyu Islands, Tokyo immediately announced it “unacceptable” and Abe even called China’s move “dangerous.” It is totally absurd and unreasonable.

 

In one word, both Washington and Tokyo are pursuing double standards.

The latter should not come as a surprise to China, and the reason why such double standards are allowed to exist in a US superpower legacy world is because neither Japan nor the US believe China would actually dare to re-escalate further. However, in a world in which the US is no longer an undisputed superpower (especially in the aftermath of the Syrian debacle in which Putin schooled the Obama administration) that is changing.

The first clear indication that China would not just sit there and do nothing, came overnight when China’s first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, passed through the Taiwan Strait on Thursday morning on its way to a training mission in the South China Sea.

Naturally, the training mission is just the pretext. China’s long-running if dormant feud with Taiwan, officially the Republic of China, is perhaps the best proxy of US interests in the region, where thanks to the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, the US sells arms and provides military training to the Taiwanese armed forces. China considers US involvement disruptive to the stability of the region, and made that quite clear in 2010 when Obama announced the decision to sell $6.4 billion in military hardware to the island leading to threats of economic sanctions from the mainland.

Which is why China crossing the Straits of Taiwan for the first time with its brand new aircraft carrier is nothing short of a message to Obama. From Xinhua:

It took about 10 hours for the carrier and its four escort ships to get through the strait separating the Chinese mainland and Taiwan.

 

The Liaoning entered the Taiwan Strait on Wednesday afternoon after it left its home port in Qingdao of east China’s Shandong Province on Tuesday for the South China Sea on a scientific and training mission.

 

It was escorted by two missile destroyers, the Shenyang and Shijiazhuang, and two missile frigates, the Yantai and Weifang.

 

The narrative gets scarier:

“During the voyage, the carrier has kept a high degree of vigilance against approaches from foreign warships and aircraft, according to Liaoning Captain Zhang Zheng. This is the first time the carrier has conducted a cross-sea training voyage and passed through the Taiwan Strait since it was commissioned into the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy in September last year, according to Zhang.”

But where it gets worst is that as BBC reported minutes ago, China has not only sent a symbolic message to the US, but a very literal one to Japan and everyone else who thought China would just sit there and do nothing, when it dispatched its own warplanes over the air defense zone.

China has sent warplanes to its newly declared air defence zone in the East China Sea, state media reports.

 

The vast zone, announced last week, covers territory claimed by China, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea.

 

China has said all planes transiting the zone must file flight plans and identify themselves, or face “defensive emergency measures”. But Japan, South Korea and the US have all since flown military aircraft through the area.

 

China’s state news agency Xinhua quoted an air force colonel as saying the the warplanes had carried out routine patrols. The zone includes islands known as Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China, which are claimed by Japan, China and Taiwan.

What happens next: will Japan once again prod the not so sleeping dragon, and continue flying commercial (and military) airplanes over China’s expanded zone of control, without preclearance with Beijing, and will the US send some more strategic bombers just to prove that Obama didn’t win the Nobel peace prize for nothing?

And will then China once again re-escalate, perhaps through an “accidental” engagement with what it “vigilantly” thought was an
offensive act by “foreign warships and aircraft?” resulting in a major diplomatic scandal or worse. Or will it simply, and more effectively, launch a salvo of a few hundred billion US Treasurys into the electronic ether, sending the 10 Year yield over 3% and the Fed scrambling to preserve its centrally-planned house of cards?

So, the ball is now in the court of Japan, which lately has been engaging in increasingly more desperate and irrational actions to preserve a sense of control over its imploding economy and the whole “Fukushima thing”, and which means that much more entertainment is imminent.

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/qG6dMTcOJ9g/story01.htm Tyler Durden

Submitted by Chris Martenson via The Ludwig von Mises Institute,

The Fed is busy doing everything in its considerable power to get credit (that is, debt) growing again so that we can get back to what it considers to be “normal.”

But the problem is that the recent past was not normal. You may have already seen this next chart. It shows total debt in the U.S. as a percent of GDP:

 

(Source)

Somewhere right around 1980, things really changed, and debt began climbing far faster than GDP. And that, right there, is the long and the short of why any attempt to continue the behavior that got us to this point is certain to fail.

It is simply not possible to grow your debts faster than your income forever. However, that’s been the practice since 1980, and current politicians and Federal Reserve officials developed their opinions about “how the world works” during the 33-year period between 1980 and 2013.

Put bluntly, they want to get us back on that same track, and as soon as possible. The reason? Because every major power center, be that in D.C. or on Wall Street, tuned their thinking, systems, and sense of entitlement, during that period. And, frankly, a huge number of financial firms and political careers will melt away if and when that credit expansion finally stops. And stop it will; that’s just a mathematical certainty.

Total Credit Market Debt (TCMD) is a measure of all the various forms of debt in the U.S. That includes corporate, state, federal, and household borrowing. So student loans are in there, as are auto loans, mortgages, and municipal and federal debt. It’s pretty much everything debt-related. What it does not include, though, are any unfunded obligations, entitlements, or other types of liabilities. So the Social Security shortfalls are not in there, nor are the underfunded pensions at the state or corporate levels. TCMD is just debt, plain and simple.

As you can see in this next chart, since 1970, TCMD has been growing almost exponentially.

 

That tiny little wiggle happened in 2008-2009, and it apparently nearly brought down the entire global financial system. That little deviation was practically too much all on its own for the markets to handle.

Now debts are climbing again at a quite nice pace. That’s mainly due to the Fed monetizing U.S. federal debt just to keep things patched together. As an aside, based on this chart, we’d expect the Fed to not end their QE efforts until and unless households and corporations once more engage in robust borrowing. The system apparently needs borrowing to keep growing exponentially, or it risks collapse.

One could ask why credit can’t just keep growing. But there are many reasons to believe that the future will not resemble the past. Let’s start in 1980, when credit growth really took off. This period also happens to be the happy time that the Fed is trying (desperately) to recreate. Between 1980 and 2013, total credit grew by an astonishing 8 percent per year, compounded. I say “astonishing” because anything growing by 8 percent per year will fully double every 9 years. So let’s run the math experiment and ask what will happen if the Fed is successful and total credit grows for the next 30 years at exactly the same rate it did over the prior 30. That’s all. This is nothing fancy, and it is simply the same rate of growth that everybody got accustomed to while they were figuring out “how the world works.”

What happens to the current $57 trillion in TCMD as it advances by 8 percent per year for 30 years? It mushrooms into a silly number: $573 trillion. That is, an 8 percent growth paradigm gives us a 10-fold increase in total credit in just 30 years:

 

For perspective, the GDP of the entire globe was just $85 trillion in 2012. Even if we advance global GDP by some hefty number, like 4 percent per year for the next 30 years, under an 8 percent growth regime, U.S. credit would be twice as large as global GDP in 2043.

If that comparison didn’t do it for you, then just ask yourself: Why, exactly, would U.S. corporations, households, and government borrow more than $500 trillion over the next 30 years?

The total mortgage market is currently $10 trillion, so might the plan include developing an additional 50 more U.S. residential real estate markets?

So perhaps the situation moderates a bit, and instead of growing at 8 percent, credit market debt grows at just half that rate. So what happens if credit just grows by 4 percent per year? That gets us to $185 trillion, or another $128 trillion higher than today — a more than 3x increase. Again: for what will we borrow (only) $128 trillion for, over the next 30 years?

When I run these numbers, I am entirely confident that the rate of growth in debt between 1980 and 2013 will not be recreated between 2013 and 2043. But, I’ve been assuming that dollars remain valuable. If dollars were to lose 90 percent or more of their value (say, perhaps due to our central bank creating too many of them), then it’s entirely possible to achieve any sorts of fantastical numbers one wishes to see.

For the Fed to achieve anything even close to the historical rate of credit growth, the dollar will have to lose a lot of value. This may in fact be the Fed’s grand plan, and it’s entirely about keeping the financial system primed with sufficient new credit to prevent it from imploding.

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/WjYOY09pikA/story01.htm Tyler Durden