As we’ve reported, the greatest long-term threat to the Japanese economy is a profusion of sexless men – termed “soshoku danshi”, or herbivores, the modern parlance – who are more interested in anime and used panty vending machines than they are in living, breathing women.
But although Japan’s increasingly sexless society has led to the lowest birthrate in the developed world, sending the number of live births below 1 million last year, the lowest level in modern history, it’s the rising number of deaths that are causing the rate at which Japan’s population is shrinking to accelerate.
According to the FT, those born during a pre-WWII baby boom, which was fostered by the Imperial government during the run-up to the war, are rapidly reaching the end of their lives. And the death rate in the country, which last year outstripped the number of births by roughly 430,000, is expected to accelerate through 2030.
“The reason Japan’s population is now falling so fast is not the low birth rate but rather an increase in the number of deaths,” said Akihiko Matsutani, professor emeritus in applied economics at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies.
[…]
Japan had a baby boom before the second world war because of military pressure to increase the birth rate, he added. “Those people are now reaching the age of passing away,” said Prof Matsutani.
Even Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s decision to loosen restrictions on immigration, a controversial subject in Japan, wasn’t enough to offset the number of deaths:Japan recorded a record net inflow of more than 161,000 migrants, but the overall pace of decline still hit a new high of minus 0.21%.
The decelerating pace of population decline has made Japan, once a thriving empire and global economic powerhouse, the country with the highest rate of natural population decline in the world. Some European countries, including Bulgaria and Romania, are seeing their populations decline at a faster rate, but this is mostly driven by immigration. The pace at which Japan’s population is declining has even outpaced Venezuela, even as widespread starvation and societal collapse have driven millions of people out of the country over the past five years.
Since the beginning of the devastating economic crisis currently gripping Venezuela, prosperous Japan, which still boasts the world’s third-largest economy, has lost about as many people.
Not unlike the US, where the migration of people to urban centers has caused the rural population to shrink, Japan’s demographic shifts are hitting rural areas particularly hard.
In some places, like the northern prefectures of Aomori and Akita, the population is declining at a rate of 1% per year, leaving some villages devoid of people under the age of 70. These towns feature “shutter streets” of shops that never open.
Even after 2030, when the rate of population decline is expected to level off as most of the older generation will have already died off, growth will still likely be negative thanks to low birth rates.
And again, these low birth rates are driven by the fact that Japanese culture puts such an intense emphasis on economic success in the workplace, that men who fail to achieve it feel too ashamed to try and court a woman.
By 2050, the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research projects that by the middle of the century, Japan will be losing about 900,000 people a year – roughly the population of Austin, Texas. By 2100, projections suggest Japan’s population will shrink to 50 million – its level from a century ago.
In 2018, there were 944,146 births through October, compared with 1,368,632 deaths. By comparison, in 2011, there were 1,073,663 births and 1,256,387 deaths during the same period.
This has triggered a fraught debate about whether Abe, who has relaxed rules for guest workers, leading Japan’s foreign born population to boom to 2.2 million people in 2018, also a modern record, should start offering a path to permanent residency for foreign workers and – crucially – their families.
That could fill in the economic gaps that might strain Japan’s social services in the coming decades as the country struggles to care for its booming population of senior citizens.
Of course, if coaxing young Japanese men and women to have procreative sex wasn’t Panda-level difficult, then the country wouldn’t have this problem to begin with. Even some Japanese couples are sexless as more men devote themselves to their hobbies, while women are becoming more devoted to work. The last Japanese baby boom was spurred by pressure from the Imperial government. But in the modern era, what can the government do to change a culture that has made it acceptable to be an “herbivore?”
What’s the solution? Ban hentai and tentacle porn? Take away their “Waifu pillows?”
A Japanese man, probably a virgin, carrying a “Waifu” pillow.
Or maybe high levels of soy in their diet combined with the frosty sex relations of the #MeToo era have created a population of ultra-feminized men afraid to make the first move?
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2Dd7s5o Tyler Durden
Russophobia, as psycho-social-political pathology, is diagnosed as a disorder in The West since before the 1000-year-old Roman-Orthodox religious schism and most recently manifested with a vengeance in the course of the 2013-14 with Edward Snowden’s revelations of mass surveillance by the US and its covert activities leading to the Ukraine coup with Russophobia used thereafter as a weapon of mass deception to inflame this latent pathology in the public.
After more than a year since we first heard the BBC “breaking news” about the “Russians Poisoning the Skipals”, all we have are allegations, but there is still no real evidence to present before a judge and jury for a just trial, only media propaganda which has provoked even more fear and hysteria meant to distract people from the government’s bungling and high level of anxiety over Brexit by once again blaming Russia. Never-the-less, it prompted politicians to administer instant sanctions against Russia as punishment. That first day, the “evidence”, presented in the usual clipped, “authoritative” British accents, included interviews with a conservative British MP, then the former US Ambassador to Russia, Alexander Vershbow (2001-05), now with the notoriously hawkish US-based think tank, the Atlantic Council. Thus, the three of them: the BBC “journalist” and the two “experts”, colluded to transform false allegations into “facts”… fueled, as always, by their perpetual prejudice, RUSSOPHOBIA, in the course of their propaganda war to force Russia to surrender to American-led Western Domination or else: have their economy destroyed & their people suffer. Indeed, it is a threat to the whole world played to the discord of rattling nuclear swords with a chorus of vindictive Russian oligarchs, whom Putin expelled for robbing the Russian people. So, now living in London as expats, they would seem to be the more likely culprits. All the while elsewhere in London, thanks to our “special US-UK relationship”, Julian Assange has been excommunicated and imprisoned in a tiny “cell” at the Ecuador embassy for revealing embarrassing American secrets via Wikileaks.
There we have it: the poisoning of our minds by the media and politicians which are owned and controlled by the US-UK-EU 1%, who benefit from Western Hegemony. So, these deluded few are now desperately defending it from the rising powers led by Russia and China with India not far behind demanding a multi-polar, democratic world order.
My search for the roots of this particularly vicious and extremely dangerous hate campaign began in a Dartmouth College Russian Foreign Policy course, which led me to the book, “Russophobia: Anti-Russian Lobby and American Foreign Policy” by San Francisco State University Professor Andrei P. Tsygankov (2009). And there, the detoxification of my mind began as I studied his deft, well-documented deconstruction of the political propaganda disseminated “by various think tanks, congressional testimonials, activities of NGOs and the media” (preface p. XIII)
Then in Italy the following winter, I discovered the work of the Swiss journalist, Guy Mettan, in the Italian geopolitical journal, LiMes: an excerpt from his book, “Creating Russophobia: From the Great Religious Schism to Anti-Putin Hysteria” (2017). There, Mettan informs us that this psycho-social pathology in Western Civilization” goes back more than 1000 years: to the division of Christendom between the Orthodox and Roman churches. Indeed, his research into the depths of history confirms the diagnosis by our renowned American psychiatrist, Robert Jay Lifton, in his 2003 book, “Superpower Syndrome: America’s Apocalyptic Confrontation with the World”. Therein, Lifton states: “More than merely dominate, the American superpower now seeks to control history. Such cosmic ambition is accompanied by an equally vast sense of entitlement, of special dispensation to pursue its aims.” (p.3) And Mettan’s analysis of Russophobia also underscores the work of University of Chicago Professor John J. Mearsheimer, our leading international relations “realist” in his three Henry L. Stimson lectures at Yale University November 2017: “The Roots of Liberal Hegemony”, “The False Promises of Liberal Hegemony” and “The Case for Restraint”: with his book, “The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams, International Realities” published in 2018.
But what about “Russian Aggression” in Ukraine & Crimea?
In the first place, it was the astute Mearsheimer, who, in the Sept-Oct 2014 Foreign Affairs, informed us “Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West’s Fault: The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin” (pp 77-89), but the American foreign policy establishment, together with ambitious politicians and the me-too media, paid no heed and continues to repeat its fabricated “facts”.
Never-the-less, Mearsheimer is backed up by Richard Sakwa, Professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent. In Sakwa’s book, “Russia Against the Rest: The Post-Cold War Crisis of World Order”, 2017, we turn to the section on “Reality Wars and American Power” on p. 217 to read: “It does indeed seem that Russia and Western elites live in totally different worlds, divided by different epistemological understandings of the nature of contemporary reality. The Ukraine crisis crystallized the profound differences between Russian and Atlanticist understandings of the breakdown and its causes.” And he continues on p. 218: “Elite and policy-maker perceptions and attitudes forged in the Cold War years sustain these legacies and frame the discussions of such crucial issues as NATO enlargement, democracy promotion in the post-Soviet area, and strategic arms talks.” Adding that these “are no longer so much legacies as self-regenerating narratives and modes of discourse that preclude a more open-ended understanding of the dynamics and concerns of Russia today.”
Karl Rove: “We’re an empire now; we create our own reality.”
[In 2004, journalist Ron Suskind wrote in The New York Times magazine that a top White House strategist for President George W. Bush—identified later as Karl Rove, Bush’s Deputy White House Chief of Staff—told him, “We’re an empire now, we create our own reality.”]
Thus, we’ve become trapped in a contrived “reality” promulgated by neo-conservative warriors under cover of neo-liberal “democracy-spreading-humanitarian-interventionists” to justify an American Empire promoting itself as the indispensable “Liberal World Order”. However, under that global order, as Sakwa points out on p. 219: “If a foreign power is considered to have violated ‘international order’, then it can be overthrown” as a rationale for American “regime change” anywhere around the world: whether to control the supply of copper in Chile or oil in Iran. And, with its eye on Russia’s vast oil, gas and other natural resources, America claims the right to threaten Russia by ringing it with weapons which we would not abide were the Russians to place missiles in Mexico…as the Soviets did in Cuba to defend it after our “Bay of Pigs” invasion that brought humanity to the brink of nuclear war. Thus, Russia was defending itself in Ukraine against further NATO expansion while Crimean citizens, by majority vote in a democratic referendum, chose to rejoin Russia as they had been one country ever since Catherine the Great…except for an interval in the ’50s when Crimea was” gifted” to Ukraine while they were all members of the Soviet Union.
“Ditching Solzhenitsyn, Defender of Russia”
And not to forget that in 1974, after being expelled from the Soviet Union, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn and his family fled first to Zurich then to Vermont in 1976 and lived on a farm near Cavendish, where he continued to write and publish his work. Meanwhile, Mettan, as a journalist covering events related to Russia, became quite distressed over “the widespread prejudices, cartloads of clichés and systematic anti-Russian biases of most western media.” And he went on to say that “the more I traveled, discussed and read, the wider I perceived, the more the gap of incomprehension and ignorance between Western Europe and Russia became evident.
“That was why, during the 1990s, I was shocked by the way the West treated Solzhenitsyn. For decades, we had published, celebrated, and acclaimed the great writer as bearing the torch of anti-Soviet dissidence. We had praised Solzhenitsyn to the skies as long as he criticized his native country, communist Russia. But as soon as he emigrated, realizing that he preferred to isolate himself in his Vermont retreat to work rather than attending anticommunist conferences, western media and academics began to distance themselves from the great writer.
“The idol no longer matched the image they had built and was becoming a hindrance to their academic and journalistic career plans. And once Solzhenitsyn had left the United States to go back to Russia and defend his humiliated, demoralized motherland that was being sold at auction, raising his voice against the Russian ‘Westernizers’ and pluralist liberals who denied the interests of Russia to better revel in the troughs of capitalism, he became a marked man, an outdated, senile writer, even though he himself had not changed in the least, denouncing with the same vigor the defects of market totalitarianism as those of communist totalitarianism.
“He was booed, despised, his name was dragged through the mud for his choices, often by the very people who had praised his first fights. Despite that, against all odds, against the most powerful powers that were trying to dissuade him, Solzhenitsyn defended his one and only cause, that of Russia. He was not forgiven for having turned his pen against that West that had welcomed him and felt it was owed eternal gratitude. A dissident today, a dissident wherever truth compelled, such was his motto. This deserves to be remembered.” Mettan, pp. 15-16 in “Creating Russophobia”.
Russophobia: akin to Racism
From another perspective: Mettan’s chapter on “German Russophobia” set me thinking that this “Western Supremacy” political-cultural pathology known as Russophobia is like the racism which I knew growing up in totally segregated Oklahoma. Until in high school, I became so perplexed and appalled by the curtain of hate and “justifications” in which we were smothered: the Negro schools on the other side of town? and why were there separate waiting rooms, drinking fountains & restrooms in bus and train stations?…that I began poking holes in the curtain to see what was outside…and found a book in the library: “South of Freedom” by Carl Rowan, an African-American Minneapolis Star Tribune journalist, describing his journey from South to North. So, thanks to what I learned from Rowan, I began to tear the whole damned curtain down…at least in my mind.
Whom the Gods would destroy, they first drive mad?
So, here’s a Swiss journalist punching a hole in this wall of Russophobic Western Supremacy… and through that gaping hole, we are reminded that the Russians are Europe’s neighbors who sacrificed more than 26 million of their own lives to save Europe, America and Russia from the Nazis. These are not poor “niggers” from the Eurasian ghetto we’ve been trying to club into submission as second-class citizens of “The Liberal World Order” dominated by US; they’re nuclear-armed and no longer willing to sit at a separate, inferior table with no vote and no voice over who makes the rules…nor are China, India and Brazil. And last year, while the wave of Russophobic hysteria over alleged “Russian poisoning” was rolling out of the UK and engulfing the Western world in the latest siege of mass madness…with only Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the British Labor party, having the courage to stand up in Parliament on the Ides of March and demand Evidence! only to be pilloried by the mindless politicians and media…led by the once esteemed BBC. And the week following the August 7, 2018 Trump-Putin Helsinki summit, will surely go down in psychiatric circles as another case of mass media-political delusions led by cheer-leader-in-chief, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC.
Meanwhile, not to forget that it was Hearst newspaper propaganda that whipped the American public into a war frenzy to support our first step in empire-building: our 1898 intervention in Cuba’s war for independence from the Spanish Empire which had dominated all of Latin America for 500 years. As the former NYTimes journalist/bureau chief in Istanbul, Berlin & Central America, Stephen Kinzer reminds us in his latest book “The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire”, Twain, Booker T. Washington and even Andrew Carnegie leading a handful of other anti-imperialists…were not able to prevail against Roosevelt with his Rough Riders and the Hearst newspapers’ war propaganda.
Regime Change Comes Home
Never-the-less, after a very long run of American “regime change” abroad leaving a bloody trail of destruction, dictatorships and chaos from Iran in 1953, when we joined with the British to overthrow the democratically-elected President Mohammad Mossadegh to maintain the Brit-US control of its oil…on through Guatemala, Vietnam and Chile…to name a few of our interventions…we were back for a second round with “coalitions of the willing” or not? in the Middle East where our regime-change machine managed to plow its way through Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya…before breaking down in Syria. Until now it’s been brought home again, renovated and renamed “RussiaGate” for another attempt at removing a President for trying to mend US relations with Russia. Though even after more than a year of Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller’s investigations accompanied by such cinematic support as the movie, “Felt”, another “Watergate” re-run. Did anyone else notice the resemblance between “Felt” and Mueller? And despite the media’s commemoration of its 44-year-old “moment of courage” with the movie “The Post” to promote Trump’s ouster, our democratically-elected President, as of this writing, remains in power. However, in this rush to “regime change”, didn’t the our “ruling elite” read Jane Mayer’s “The Danger of President Pence” in the 10/23/17 New Yorker? At least the 70s’ “ruling class” was smart enough to remove an unqualified Vice President Spiro (who?) Agnew…before “regime changing” Nixon and replacing him with the more or less benign Gerald Ford.
A Florentine Epiphany
But back to last January in Florence, Italy, when I was hiking in the hills beyond the Piazzale Michelangelo, with its spectacular view of that Renaissance city and its centerpiece, the Duomo, I came across the Villa Galileo, which had been his last home after his trial as a “heretic”, during which to save himself from torture and execution, he was forced to deny his helio-centric vision and henceforth lived under “villa arrest”, from 1631 until his natural death in 1642. While pondering his fate, I continued walking along the gently rising, ever-narrowing road between ancient stone walls overlooking villas and olive groves until I reached the peak, where I felt as if I were standing on top of the world as I contemplated both the Arno and Ema river valleys far below and where I swear I heard Galileo declare: “The world does not turn on an American axis!”
The 21st Century Inquisition
So how is it that we now have contemporary Inquisitors persecuting so many truth tellers…such as Edward Snowden, our electronic age “Solzhenitsyn?” in Russian exile; Chelsea Manning, imprisoned some 7 years for revealing US brutality in Iraq; Julian Assange confined to his Ecuadorian Embassy exile in London since August 2012; Katharine Gun, a whistleblower attempting to stop the Iraq invasion, who faced 2 years of British imprisonment before her case was dropped; James Risen, former New York Times journalist who was persecuted by our “justice” system for revealing our government’s surveillance of US!
Any Good Sense Left?
So, do we the people have enough good sense & independent thinking left to follow the advice of Henry David Thoreau?
“Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality.”
“Walden” 1854
If not, the Doctor prescribes Shock Therapy:
For a week, a month, or however long it takes to cleanse and open the mind, one must adhere to strict abstinence from Mainstream Media propaganda, junk news, pseudo analysis, fake photos, TV & videos including absolutely NO phony “for, by & of the people” NPR, PBS, BBC or other Government-funded Neo or LibCon Imperial tranquilizer.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2X3ozOy Tyler Durden
Two days after the Thursday arrest of Julian Assange at Ecuador’s London embassy, several government websites were hacked; including Ecuador’s official website, the Central Bank of Ecuador, the Ministry of the Interior and the Ecuadorian Assembly in the UK, according to Gateway Pundit‘s Cassandra Fairbanks, who was in London last week and documented the run-up to Assange’s arrest.
Concurrent with the breach, a hacking group operating under the name “AL1NE3737” released a database containing the full names and passwords for what appear to be 728 Ecuadorian government employees.
I believe I’ve just found another database dropped with the full names and bcrypt hashed passwords for what appear to be 728 Ecuadorian gov employees alongside 5 admin credentials, one password of which is MD5 hashed (lol). Not sure exactly where these were sourced from yet.
As noted by Fairbanks, “The cyber attack was reminiscent of 2010’s “Operation Avenge Assange” which was launched by the broader “Operation Payback” effort. The movement lead to hacktivists hitting companies such as PayPal, PostFinance, Mastercard, Visa, and others who had blocked services to WikiLeaks with a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack. This is when a website is flooded with fake traffic until it crashes and goes offline.”
Following Assange’s Thursday arrest, more than 70 MPs and peers signed a letter urging the UK home secretary to ensure that the WikiLeaks founder is extradited to Sweden if Swedish authorities request it.
Sweden is considering whether to open a previously-dropped investigation into allegations of rape and sexual assault against Assange.
The United States, meanwhile, wants to try Assange for the largest-ever leak of government secrets in 2010. On Thursday, the Justice Department hit him with an indictment that claims the WikiLeaks founder helped former US Army intelligence analyst crack DoD password using Linux.
“The indictment alleges that in March 2010, Assange engaged in a conspiracy with Chelsea Manning, a former intelligence analyst in the U.S. Army, to assist Manning in cracking a password stored on U.S. Department of Defense computers connected to the Secret Internet Protocol Network (SIPRNet), a U.S. government network used for classified documents and communications,” reads a DOJ press release.
Materials Manning released included videos of various US airstrikes in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the “Iraq War Logs” and “Afghan War Diary.”
Assange faces five years in prison if convicted in the Manning case.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2GjQDHH Tyler Durden
There are three principal phases of a bull market: the first is represented by reviving confidence in the future of business; the second is the response of stock prices to the known improvement in corporate earnings, and the third is the period when speculation is rampant – a period when stocks are advanced on hopes and expectations.
There are three principal phases of a bear market: the first represents the abandonment of the hopes upon which stocks were purchased at inflated prices; the second reflects selling due to decreased business and earnings, and the third is caused by distress selling of sound securities, regardless of their value, by those who must find a cash market for at least a portion of their assets. – Robert Rhea, The Dow Theory, 1932
Charles Dow once wrote, “To know values is to know the meaning of the market.” That quote may surprise trend-followers and adherents of technical analysis, because Dow’s work is often squeezed into a caricature focusing on nothing more than confirmation and divergence across the Dow Jones Industrial and Transportation averages. But Dow’s actual views, best elaborated by writers like Robert Rhea and William Peter Hamilton, were actually about something much more fundamental: identifying the position of the market in its complete bull-bear cycle. That’s a concept that investors have forgotten, encouraged by the illusion that the Federal Reserve’s buying of Treasury bonds is capable of saving the world from any form of discomfort. That illusion is likely to prove costly.
The recent bull market clocked in as the longest in history. Even if the September 20, 2018 peak in the S&P 500 was the final high, the preceding advance outlived the 1990-2000 bull market by nearly 8 weeks. Likewise, the current economic expansion is just 3 months shy of the record 10-year expansion that ended in early 2001, the unemployment rate is down to just 3.8%, the entire post-crisis gap between actual real GDP and the CBO estimate of potential real GDP has been eliminated, and the expansion has already outlived the previous runner-up, which ran from 1961 to the end of 1969.
Meanwhile, based on the valuation measures we find best-correlated with actual subsequent market returns across history, the current market extreme already matches or exceeds those of the 1929 and 2000 peaks. There’s little question that the market is long into what Rhea described as the final phase of the bull market; “the period when speculation is rampant – a period when stocks are advanced on hopes and expectations.”
As I’ll detail below, the economic expansion we’ve observed since the 2009 economic low has been a rather standard mean-reverting recovery, with a trajectory no different than could have been projected on the basis of wholly non-monetary variables. The primary effect of extraordinary monetary policy wasn’t to drive real economic gains, but instead to amplify speculation and contribute to wealth and income disparities. Wages and salaries as a share of GDP are clawing higher from the historic low set in 2011, but have only begun to erode the elevated profit margins on which Wall Street is basing its permanent hopes and expectations.
Aside from historic extremes in the valuation measures best correlated with actual subsequent market returns, one measure of these hopes and expectations is that in 2018, according to the Financial Times, 81% of U.S. companies that went public reported losses in the 12 months before their initial public offerings, matching the high-water mark set at the height of the dotcom bubble (h/t Hadi Taheri). It’s the same kind of spectacle that Rhea described nearly a century ago, when he wrote:
“Worthless equities were being sky-rocketed without regard for intrinsic worth or earning power. The whole country appeared insane on the subject of stock speculation. Veteran traders look back at those months and wonder how they could have become so inoculated with the ‘new era’ views as to have been caught in the inevitable crash. Bankers whose good sense might have saved the situation, had speculators listened to them, were shouted down as deconstructionists, while other bankers, whose names will go down in history as ‘racketeers,’ were praised as supermen.”
Still, while it was important to Dow, Rhea, and Hamilton to understand valuations, and to recognize the position of the market in the cycle, they were also carefully focused on the behavior of prices, particularly the uniformity of behavior between their primary indices of interest – the Dow Industrials and Transports. While our own measures of market internals focus on the uniformity of a much broader set of securities, it’s enormously instructive to consider several critical features of market behavior that they understood even a century ago.
First, market fluctuations exhibit cycles that move between periods of extreme optimism and periods of profound despair.
Second, the extremes of each cycle are characterized by unusually elevated or depressed valuations, and these valuations comprise the true “meaning” of the market for investors.
Third, the speculative pressure toward higher prices, and the downward pressure toward lower prices, can be largely gauged by the “uniformity” of behavior across various groups of securities.
Fourth, it is enough to identify prevailing conditions and respond to them as they change, without any need to predict the extent or duration of a subsequent market movement.
Consider the situation in mid-1929, when, as the market pushed to obscenely rich valuations, Hamilton acknowledged the uniform behavior of the Dow averages, while also carefully placing the advance in a full-cycle context. That uniformity suggested that investors had taken the speculative bit in their teeth, despite the fact that the bull market, in hindsight, would reach its peak only a few weeks later.
“It goes without saying that the stock market, which has advanced with merely secondary reactions for five years and eight months, is almost necessarily in the third or last stage of such a movement, where stocks do not carry themselves on the dividend return, for the most part, and where sanguine expectations of the future exercise a greater influence than immediate results. All that the averages say when they give such a bull point as that of June 29 [when the Dow averages breached their previous May highs] is that stocks are due for a further advance. They do not predict the extent of that advance.”
The 1929 peak occurred on September 3rd of that year, followed immediately by a steep, waterfall decline. Hamilton’s confirmation of a “turn in the tide” was published the next month, on October 25, 1929, the Friday before Black Monday. By then, the Dow was already 20% off its high (that’s what safety nets and tail-risk hedges are for). The Dow would lose an additional 86% before setting its final low in 1932.
We presently have a financially disfigured economic expansion that’s three months shy of the longest in history, where the unemployment rate is down to 3.8%, and the most reliable measures of stock market valuation again rival the hypervalued extremes of 1929 and 2000. In this context, to call for an immediate 50 basis point rate cut and a resumption of quantitative easing from the Fed seems a frantic strategy to keep a hypervalued market and two-tiered economic “prosperity” in suspended animation.
In a hypervalued market, we do not need to embrace market risk as a result of speculative pressures, but we have to defer an overtly bearish investment outlook on immediate market direction. All of this effort to jam the speculative bit back into the horse’s teeth requires us to adopt a rather neutral outlook here, until we observe fresh deterioration in market internals. Given the late-stage condition of the financial markets and the economy, my sense is that, as in 1929, they may just run this poor horse straight up and over the cliff.
We’ll respond to shifts in valuations and market action as they emerge, so forecasts aren’t actually necessary. Still, full-cycle risks have a way of emerging in ways that investors wholly rule out at market peaks. Glorious half-cycle market advances leave investors vulnerable to catastrophe, because investors hold contempt for anyone who suggests there may be a cliff on the other side of the mountain.
Still, recall that I openly anticipated the 2000-2002 collapse (which wiped out the entire total return of the S&P 500 – over and above T-bill returns – all the way back to May 1996), estimated an -83% loss in tech stocks at their March 2000 peak (which rather improbably matched the actual loss of the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100), and, after a constructive shift in early 2003, projected the 2007-2009 collapse (which wiped out the entire total return of both preceding bubbles – over and above T-bill returns – all the way back to June 1995). The distressing thing is that, from a historical perspective, all of those losses were rather run-of-the-mill cycle completions.
Understanding potential downside risk at a market extreme has a way of concentrating the mind. If I were to offer a guess, I’d suggest that regardless of whether the S&P 500 registers fresh near-term highs, investors should allow for the S&P 500 to be perhaps -30% lower by the end of 2019, on the way to losing an additional -50% of its remaining value over the rest of the down-cycle. That, after all, is how a market loses -65% of its paper value. That’s not so much a forecast as a base case. A -65% loss, unfortunately, would presently represent a run-of-the-mill cycle completion from current valuation extremes. As I observed at the 2000 peak, “If you understand valuations and market history, you know we’re not joking.”
… the investors at greatest risk in the coming years will likely be those who take solace from Fed easing in environments where valuations are extreme yet investors are inclined toward risk-aversion. It will be necessary to refrain from too negative an outlook when overvaluation is joined by speculative psychology, and also to refrain from too aggressive an outlook when reasonable valuations are still joined by extreme risk-aversion. In any event, I expect that responding systematically to valuations and market action, particularly the condition of market internals, will be sufficient to navigate whatever policy makers throw at the markets.
It might be a sign of the apocalypse, but a panel of judges in the Ninth Circuit has temporarily blocked a California judge’s order to halt a Trump administration policy to allow the return of some asylum seekers to Mexico while they await their court dates – handing the administration a rare victory in the courts.
Seeborg justified the injunction by arguing that the policy failed to take into account the dangers that migrants might face in Mexico.
The three-judge panel set a Tuesday deadline for civil liberties groups to submit arguments for why the policy should be discontinued while the issue winds its way through the courts. The panel set a Wednesday deadline for the White House to argue why the policy should remain in effect.
The government asked the panel to reconsider the injunction, arguing that Seeborg’s argument was made in error, and that keeping the migrants in the US, where federal facilities are overflowing, forcing the government to release more asylum seekers amid an unprecedented surge in border-crossings. More than 100,000 migrants crossed into the US via the southern border in March – a 12-year high.
The circuit court managed to block the injunction before it took effect, meaning there was no interruption to the Trump administration’s plans to start returning some migrants to Mexico, according to the AP.
Though the decision doesn’t mean the policy will be upheld indefinitely – it could still ultimately be ruled unconstitutional – but it does underscore how San Francisco judges have been a persistent thorn in the administration’s side when it comes to immigration policy, contributing to the White House’s six percent win rate on legal challenges surrounding its policies.
At a time when appropriations authorized by Trump’s national emergency declaration appear to be moving forward in spite of a flurry of legal challenges, one can’t help but wonder if this marks a turning point in the administration’s struggle to implement its immigration agenda, as the crisis at the border – which Democrats declared “fake” as recently as February – has now been widely acknowledged, as municipal officials from border cities like McAllen, Texas, which have strained under the influx of migrants requiring shelter, medical care and other services, have warned of a “system-wide collapse.”
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2UytsCl Tyler Durden
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov declared today that the Western, liberal model of society is dying, and a new world order is taking its place.
Lavrov made the comments at his annual meeting with students and professors at the Foreign Ministry’s Diplomatic Academy, reported Russian state news agency TASS.
“The Western liberal model of development, which particularly stipulates a partial loss of national sovereignty – this is what our Western colleagues aimed at when they invented what they called globalization – is losing its attractiveness and is no more viewed as a perfect model for all. Moreover, many people in the very western countries are skeptical about it,” Lavrov said.
According to him, global development is guided “by processes aimed at boosting multipolarity and what we call a polycentric world order.”
“Clearly, multipolarity and the emergence of new centers of power in every way requires efforts to maintain global stability and search for a balance of interests and compromises, so diplomacy should play a leading role here,” Lavrov went on to say.
“Particularly because there are a lot of issues that require generally acceptable solutions.”
These include regional conflicts, international terrorism, food security and environmental protection. This is why we believe that only diplomacy can help make agreements and reach sustainable decisions that will be accepted by all.
“The US and its allies are trying to impose their approaches on others,” Lavrov noted.
“They are guided by a clear desire to preserve their centuries-long dominance in global affairs although from the economic and financial standpoint, the US – alone or with its allies – can no longer resolve all global economic and political issues,” he said.
“In order to preserve their dominance and recover their indisputable authority, they use blackmail and pressure. They don’t hesitate to blatantly interfere in the affairs of sovereign states.”
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2GbAOSd Tyler Durden
Tens of thousands of Facebook Oculus virtual reality (VR) controllers contain bizarre ‘hidden’ inscriptions warning that “Big Brother is Watching” and “The Masons Were Here” among other things ominous messages, according to Business Insider.
According to Nate Mitchell, cofounder of Facebook-owned VR organization Oculus, the messages were “easter eggs” which were only meant for prototypes.
The messages on final production hardware say “This Space For Rent” & “👁The Masons Were Here.👁” A few dev kits shipped with “👁Big Brother is Watching👁” and “Hi iFixit! We See You!👁” but those were limited to non-consumer units. [2/3] pic.twitter.com/po1qyQ10Um
Mitchell added “While I appreciate easter eggs, these were inappropriate and should have been removed.”
And while the affected units haven’t shipped yet, Facebook spokeswoman Joanna Peace told Business Insider that they will ultimately go out to consumers with the hidden messages inside.
Oculus Touch controllers
“To be clear, no devices have been sold with these messages yet, since Quest and Rift S have not yet shipped. That said, as mentioned in Nate’s tweet, the messages will be inside tens of thousands of controller pairs that will ship to consumers when Quest and Rift S ship,” wrote Facebook in an email – which kind of makes this look like a giant advertising stunt.
“We think it’s important to be transparent with our community and take responsibility when there’s an error,” added the company.
While most users of the Touch controller will never see the hidden messages, it’s an awkward misstep for Facebook, which has faced sustained criticism on privacy issues for more than a decade.
It comes as Facebook attempts to push virtual reality into the mainstream, and the company is also gearing up to launch its long-awaited Oculus Quest, an all-in-one virtual reality headset, in the coming months. –Business Insider
Misstep or marketing campaign?
The inscriptions are sure to draw comparisons to Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘illuminati’ hoodie, which he revealed during a 2020 interview with Recode editor-at-large Kara Swisher.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2VIsGzh Tyler Durden
Isn’t it interesting how an Ecuadorian “asylum conditions” technicality, a UK bail technicality, and a US whistleblowing technicality all just so happened to converge in a way that just so happens to look exactly the same as imprisoning a journalist for telling the truth?
Following the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, top UK officials all began simultaneously piping the following exact phrase into public consciousness: “No one is above the law.”
“This goes to show that in the United Kingdom, no one is above the law,” Prime Minister Theresa May told parliament after Assange’s arrest.
“Julian Assange is no hero and no one is above the law,” tweeted Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt.
“Nearly 7 years after entering the Ecuadorean Embassy, I can confirm Julian Assange is now in police custody and rightly facing justice in the UK. I would like to thank Ecuador for its cooperation and @metpoliceuk for its professionalism. No one is above the law,”tweeted Home Secretary Sajid Javid.
Over and over again that phrase showed up to be unquestioningly re-bleated by the human livestock known as the British press in all their reporting on the Assange case: No one is above the law. No one is above the law. No one is above the law. Something tells me they really want people to know that, with regard to Julian Assange, no one is above the law.
But what is “the law” in this particular case? What they are constantly referring to as “the law” with regard to Assange is in fact nothing more than a combination of ridiculous bureaucratic technicalities which can be (and have been) interpreted very differently, but are now instead being interpreted in a way which just so happens to lead to a truth-telling journalist being locked in a cage, awaiting extradition to the same government which tortured Chelsea Manning.
Now, the US is a Free Democracy™. When you are a Free Democracy™, you can’t just go around imprisoning journalists willy nilly simply for telling the truth about your government. That’s something other countries do, bad countries, the kind of country the US routinely invades in order to help spread Freedom and Democracy™. The US would never do that. But it would diddle a bunch of narratives in such a way that just so happens to achieve exactly the same result.
Ecuador: We need to surrender a journalist for telling the truth… I mean asylum conditions violation.
UK: We need to arrest a journalist for telling the truth… I mean bail violation.
US: We need to extradite a journalist for telling the truth… I mean cyber crime conspiracy.
As we discussed yesterday, the Trump administration’s extradition request is accompanied by criminal charges which are based on the same information which the Obama administration declined to charge Assange for, a point which has been discussed in more detail in a new article by The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald and Micah Lee. The Obama administration looked at the evidence and concluded that there was no way to charge Assange with anything without endangering press freedoms, then the Trump administration looked at literally the exact same evidence and said screw press freedoms, we’re going after him. They wanted to punish Assange and show the world what happens to a journalist who exposes US war crimes, so they changed the narrative to make it happen.
But they couldn’t extradite Assange from the UK if the British government didn’t legally have Assange in custody.
To get around this problem, the UK, which is functionally just a province within the US-centralized empire, used a bail technicality to justify his arrest. After the Swedish government decided to drop its sexual assault investigation without issuing any charges, Assange’s legal team attempted last year to get a British arrest warrant dropped for a bail violation which went into effect when the WikiLeaks founder took political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy. The judge in that case, Emma Arbuthnot, just happens to be married to former Tory junior Defence Minister and government whip James Arbuthnot, who served as director of Security Intelligence Consultancy SC Strategy Ltd with a former head of MI6. Lady Arbuthnot denied Assange’s request with extreme vitriol, despite his argument that British law does have provisions which allow for the time he’d already served under functional house arrest to count toward far more time than would be served for violating bail. The British government kept police stationed outside the embassy at taxpayers’ expense with orders to arrest Assange on sight.
But they couldn’t arrest Assange as long as he had legal political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy.
To get around that problem, Ecuador’s new president Lenin Moreno found himself being courted by the US government, meeting with Vice President Mike Pence and reportedly discussing Assange after US Democratic senators petitioned Pence to push for Moreno to revoke political asylum. The New York Timesreported last year that in 2017 Paul Manafort met with Moreno and offered to broker a deal where Ecuador could receive debt relief aid in exchange for handing Assange over, and just last month Ecuador ended up receiving a 4.2 billion dollar loan from the Washington-based IMF. And then, lo and behold, we just so happen to see Ecuador justifying the revocation of political asylum under the absurd claim that Assange had violated conditions that were only recently invented, using narratives that were based on wild distortions and outright lies.
— Defend Assange Campaign (@DefendAssange) April 7, 2019
In this way a kind of narrative funnel was created, funneling Assange from the embassy to British police on the imaginary narrative that Assange had violated asylum conditions and that he needs to serve time for a bail violation, which in turn allows for Assange to be funneled from the UK into the US on the imaginary narrative that he broke some kind of law by trying to help Chelsea Manning cover her tracks and avoid detection, which is all made possible by the fact that the government of Australia (another province in the US-centralized empire) has refused to provide any protection for its citizen. And the end result just so happens to look the same as what you see when a journalist tries to expose malfeasance in an overtly totalitarian government.
This is called Nice Guy Fascism. With a little narrative manipulation you get to act just like a brutal totalitarian regime and then say it’s not because you’re a brutal totalitarian regime, it’s because you’re deeply deeply concerned about the adherence to a specific interpretation of the bureaucratic technicalities of bail protocol. No one is above the law. No one is above the law. No one is above the law.
They keep saying “No one is above the law,” but what they really mean is “No one is safe from the law.” Our rulers are using Assange to show that they can get anyone who tells the truth about them, even if there are laws and policies in place which ostensibly prohibit that.
Manipulators love the rule of law, because they are able to twist it toward their infernal ends. It’s always possible to squint at laws in such a way that it allows them to be interpreted to the benefit of the powerful, which is why lawyers are often horrible human beings. All the most horrific things that have been done throughout the history of civilization have been carried out not by criminals but by law-abiding citizens, because they were perfectly legal under the ruling governments of that time. Genocide, slavery, torture, the use of the atomic bomb: all perfectly legal and state-sanctioned in their time.
They want you looking at “the rule of law”. They want you fixated on it. But really “the rule of law” is nothing other than a series of mental narratives which are treated as reality by existing power structures. Assange is a prisoner by narrative, because he punched holes in the authorized narratives of the powerful. Whoever controls the narrative controls the world.
* * *
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A group of around 350 Central American migrants broke the locks on a gate at the Guatemala-Mexico border, forcing their way into Mexico to join a larger caravan of 2,000 or so migrants headed towards the United States, AP reports.
According to the National Immigration Institute, the migrants were acting in a “hostile” and ” aggressive” manner – and said that they were attacking local police in the Mexican village of Metapa near the city of Tapachula.
The incident echoed a similar confrontation on the same border bridge between Mexico and Guatemala last year.
Migrants breach Guatemala-Mexico border in October, 2018
Several groups of migrants in the southern border state of Chipas have expressed frustration at Mexico’s cold attitude towards them, as they have been slowed or stopped during their northbound journey, according to AP.
A group of several hundred Cuban, African and Central American migrants have been waiting at the immigration offices in Tapachula for documents that would allow them to travel to the U.S. border, where most plan to request asylum.
Some members of that group have scuffled with immigration authorities and broken windows at the offices in recent days, accusing officials of making them wait too long for papers. –AP
One group of Central American and Cuban migrants estimated at 2,500 strong have been stuck for at least a week in the Chipas town of Mapastepec, north-west of Tapachula.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2UhHmUq Tyler Durden
It’s been more than 10 years since the last economic recession. Since the U.S. economy generally operates in cycles, it looks like the time is drawing near for another.
In fact, late last year the Dow Jones took a dive, but that was likely just an appetizer for the course to come…
A recent piece from Bloomberg reported the risk of a recession has “more than doubled this year as leading economic indicators deteriorate, the yield curve inverts and monetary policy tightens,” referencing a note by Guggenheim Partners.
And, according to CIO Scott Minerd, it appears the next recession could last longer than the previous one (emphasis ours):
The next recession will not be as severe as the last one, but it could be more prolonged than usual because policymakers at home and abroad have limited tools to fight the downturn…
Guggenheim oversees $200 billion as an investment banking firm. They issued this dire warning along with major concerns about corporate debt, a severe stock market drop, and uncertainty about the Fed.
Debt, Yield Curve Inversion & QE Signaling Recession Risk
We’ve previously reported that U.S. National, corporate, and consumer debt are at all-time highs. This dangerous “debt trifecta” has even gotten the attention of several billionaires.
Rising national debt currently tops $22 trillion. Corporate debt topped $6 trillion at the end of 2018. And the “ATM” of consumer debt has hit $4 trillion. Americans are tapped out. Combined together, this signal alone should sound recession alarms.
But this is just one of multiple major warning signs…
The yield curve is dangerously close to inverting at only 16 basis points between 2- and 10-year treasuries. What’s even more troubling is yield curve inversion has preceded every major recession over the last 50 years.
The third big warning sign comes from the Federal Reserve. They used Quantitative Easing (QE) to help bring the economy out of the depths of the last recession. But right now that process is going in reverse. In other words, they are sucking hundreds of billions of dollars out of the banking system in a process called Quantitative Tightening.
The Fed said they would stop unwinding QE in September. But for now, Wolf Richter reports this unwinding process is still on “autopilot” at $535 billion and counting.
So let’s review our recession risk:
Historic levels of debt — check
Major recession signal proven reliable for 50 years — check
Massive amounts of money being sucked out of the financial system — check
It’s pretty clear why Guggenheim is so worried. In fact, would not surprise us if their warnings are confirmed in the very near future.
Diversify Your Risk So It Doesn’t “Double”
These economic indicators will continue to develop, and it’s safe to assume it will result in plenty of uncertainty in the markets.
You don’t have to let a volatile market hit your retirement the way it did to so many people in our last recession. You can start taking action now to protect your savings.
Having a diversified portfolio with assets known for their protection during uncertain times is a strategic way to protect your retirement. Holding assets such as physical gold and silver could prevent your retirement savings from suffering the consequences of being overexposed to the risk of the markets.
via ZeroHedge News http://bit.ly/2VF1bGB Tyler Durden
