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After President Trump’s modest de-escalation in the North Korea situation during the US day session, South Korea has decided to reignite the smoldering fires tonight.
Scaremongering of “expectations of a Sept 9th missile launch,” which was widely known since it is a public holiday in North Korea, South Korea’s Premier Lee warned ominously that there’s “not much time left until North Korea is fully nuclear-armed.”
His words sent JPY and Gold higher…
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Sometimes the bond market gets it wrong too.
Earlier today, when Trump “flipped” on the GOP and aligned with congressional Democrats at a White House meeting to fund the government and raise the debt ceiling through Dec. 15. despite objections from virtually all Republicans, the threat of a late September/early October debt ceiling crisis disappeared. The bond market realized this first by sending the yield on the October 5 BIll tumbling from 1.20% to 1.00%, as repayment on this maturity was no longer in jeopardy.
However, at the same time as the October T-Bill yield was tumbling, bond traders sent the December 21 T-Bill yield surging, since after all all Trump had achieved was kick the can by three months…
… which in turn inverted the Oct 12-Dec 21 curve.
There’s one problem with this kneejerk reaction: it was only half right, because while bond traders were right to buy the October bills, they made a mistake in dumping the December Cusip.
Why? The answer lies in the cash flow calendar.
Recall that the reason why early October Bills were being sold is not because the “debt ceiling” would be breached – that happened in March of 2017, with a last minute agreement in May kicking the can through September, which in turn has now been pushed through December) – but because early October is when the Treasury’s “X-Date” would finally be hit: that’s the date when the Treasury would run out of cash and emergency measures.
The problem is that the upcoming three month extension to December 15 is not also an extension of the X-Date: there will be a buffer of at least a few months between December 15 and when the next X-Date hits.
As Jefferies’ Ward McCarthy explains, Congress’s standard operating procedure for addressing the debt ceiling over the past few years has been to suspend it for a defined period of time. Assuming that this agreement centers on a suspension of the debt ceiling through December 15th, the following will happen once President Trump signs the bill:
So if December 15th is not the next “X-date”, what happens then, and in the weeks after.
In other words, instead of the $32 billion in effective cash and equivalents as of today, the Treasury will have over $300 billion in dry powder, more than enough to buy the Treasury 2-3 of more months, and to take the government well into 2018 before a debt ceiling crisis reappears on the horizon.
Lastly, when will this issue come to a head again? Here’s Jefferies’ estimate:
The answer to that question is highly dependent on estimating borrowing needs for Q1, which is always a dangerous exercise since Treasury pays out the lion’s share of tax refunds in January and February. If tax refund outlays are relatively high and Treasury needs to issue a lot of debt in order to fund them, the new “drop-dead” date could come as soon as late-February. However, if Treasury is able to get through Refund Season and make it to the April 15th income tax receipts, then the “drop-dead date” would be a few more months out, potentially the end of Q2, beginning of Q3.
Putting it all together, it is still too early to tell the specifics, “especially because there is a non-zero chance that this “agreement” reached by Trump and Congress falls apart.” After all, as Jefferies snydely notes, only a few hours ago Paul Ryan was on television describing a 3-month extension as “unworkable” and characterized the action of tying debt limit legislation to an aid bill as “disgraceful”. Shortly after, the President endorsed it.
In a worst case scenario, the early-October bills would come right back into the cross-hairs although for right now, the crisis appears averted, if only temporarily. One thing, however is certain: there is no reason at all why the December 21 Bills should have been sold off. While it is much too early to determine what is the correct “Fulcrum” Treasury Bill should today’s extension pass – it could be an issue maturing in Q1, Q2 or Q3 2018 – it is effectively “free money” that any purchases of the December Bills that were sold today at the closing price, will be a profitable investment.
So yes, sometimes even the bond market gets it wrong.
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From the 10 years of military dictatorship between 1948-1958 to the impeachment of Carlos Andrés Pérez for corruption in 1993, The Money Project's Jeff Desjardins notes that Venezuelan politics have often been both rocky and eventful.
But despite these challenges throughout its history, no one has ever denied Venezuela’s economic potential. After the discovery of oil in the early 20th century, the nation quickly built its economy on back of black gold – and even today, Venezuela leads the world in proven oil reserves with 300 billion barrels.
Early on, Venezuela’s oil was a game-changer.
By 1950, as the rest of the world was struggling to recover from World War II, Venezuela had the fourth-richest GDP per capita on Earth. The country was 2x richer than Chile, 4x richer than Japan, and 12x richer than China!
Unfortunately for Venezuela, this wealth wouldn’t last – and an over-reliance on oil would soon decimate the economy in unexpected ways.
From 1950 to the early 1980s, the Venezuelan economy experienced steady growth.
By 1982, Venezuela was still the richest major economy in Latin America. The country used its vast oil wealth to pay for social programs, including health care, education, transport, and food subsidies. Workers in Venezuela were among the highest paid in the region.
However, as you’ll see in the following animation, from there things went quickly downhill. In the mid-1980s, an oil glut and a free-falling oil price ended up decimating the Venezuelan economy, which was unable to diversify away from energy.
Today, Venezuela has one of the poorest major economies in Latin America – and as the current crisis rides itself out, the IMF foresees it getting far worse. By 2022, the organization predicts Venezuela’s GDP per capita (PPP) will be just $12,210, which would be a massive economic setback – the Venezuelan economy would be even poorer than it was many years before the Chávez era started.
Although oil revenues are tempting to rely on to maintain social order, they come with a degree of unpredictability. According to OPEC, Venezuela still relies on oil for 95% of its exports, which means that any fluctuations in oil price can be the difference between immense wealth and near-poverty.
The above graphic shows Venezuela’s oil revenues (in 2000 dollars) against the rate of inflation – and it symbolizes the story of Venezuela’s recent economic history as succinctly as possible.
After the oil glut in the 1980s, Venezuela’s oil revenues dropped significantly. It was then that Venezuela had its first bout with inflation, where rates peaked in 1989 (84.5% inflation) and later in 1996 (99.9% inflation). Without sufficient money coming in, the country had to rely on its printing presses in an attempt to maintain living standards.
In 1998, Hugo Chávez was elected with the promise that Venezuela could reduce poverty and step up living standards by leaning even more heavily on its energy wealth. The recovery of oil prices helped this come true in the 2000s, and Chávez later passed away in office in 2013.
Nicolás Maduro, who took over after the death of his predecessor, saw oil prices crash almost immediately, and it was clear that Venezuela’s intense battle with inflation was only just beginning. The national currency, the Venezuelan bolívar, would soon be almost worthless.
The details of today’s crisis and intense hyperinflation are widely shared.
The country has massive shortages of food, electricity, and other essential goods, and violence is escalating in Caracas. More recently, the government is attempting to tighten its grip around power, and mismanagement of the economy has led to people starving on the streets. People are calling the situation a humanitarian crisis, which is extremely disheartening to see in what was once one of the richest countries on the planet.
And while the current condition of Venezuela is a tragedy in itself, the country’s inability to live up to its true economic potential is nearly just as devastating.
* * *
The Money Project is an ongoing collaboration between Visual Capitalist and Texas Precious Metals that seeks to use intuitive visualizations to explore the origins, nature, and use of money.
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Hillary Clinton’s book of excuses for her 2016 electoral defeat hits the shelves next week, but already several media organizations, including NBC, CNN and now Axios, too, has received an advance copy of the book that will allow the Clintons to transform Hillary’s miscalculations into a hefty pay day.
In a summary of the highlights (the book is more than 500 pages long) Axios publishes excerpts from what it believes to be the book’s most important passages. Yesterday, we noted how Clinton – as was widely expected – appeared to blame her loss on Bernie Sanders, comparing his campaign to a famous scene from the 90s comedy “There’s Something About Mary.”
That report included the following gem about how Clinton wishes she “fought back” harder against her upstart rival (apparently, colluding to rig the Democratic primary in her favor didn’t go far enough).
"Throughout the primaries, every time I wanted to hit back against Bernie's attacks, I was told to restrain myself. Noting that his plans didn't add up, that they would inevitably mean raising taxes on middle-class families, or that they were little more than a pipe dream – all of this could be used to reinforce his argument that I wasn't a true progressive. My team kept reminding me that we didn't want to alienate Bernie's supporters. President Obama urged me to grit my teeth and lay off Bernie as much as I could. I felt like I was in a straightjacket."
She takes a similar tack in the Axios excerpts. In one passage where Clinton addresses her unpopularity, she says being a “lightning rod” stems partly from the fact that she’s a woman…and not the laundry list of scandals that have plagued the Clintons over the years.
“On her likability, or lack thereof: "What makes me such a lightning rod for fury? I'm really asking. I'm at a loss… I think it's partly because I'm a woman."
Despite her promise to use the book as sort of a public apology for failing to defeat Trump, she blamed Russian interference, and specifically Russian President Vladimir Putin, claiming he held a “personal vendetta” against her and that the election interference was tantamount to a “massive covert attack,” contrary to what prosecutorial leaks have suggested.
“On Russia's interference in the election: "There's nothing I was looking forward to more than showing Putin that his efforts to influence our election and install a friendly puppet had failed. I know he must be enjoying everything that's happened instead. But he hasn't had the last laugh yet."
On Vladimir Putin: Clinton claims he carried a "personal vendetta" toward her, and held a ‘deep resentment’ against the U.S. ‘I never imagined that he would have the audacity to launch a massive covert attack against our own democracy, right under our noses – and that he'd get away with it.’”
She also criticized her former opponent for running a “reality TV show” campaign and for stoking the “anger and resentment” of millions of Americans.
Her campaign strategy vs. Trump's: "I think it's fair to say that I didn't realize how quickly the ground was shifting under all our feet. I was running a traditional presidential campaign with carefully thought-out policies and painstakingly built coalitions, while Trump was running a reality TV show that expertly and relentlessly stoked Americans' anger and resentment."
However, Clinton comes shockingly close to a mea culpa, at one point, admitting that she must bear ultimate responsibility because she was the candidate…not because she herself made numerous mistakes and errors of judgment.
“On losing the election: ‘I go back over my own shortcomings and the mistakes we made. I take responsibility for all of them. You can blame the data, blame the message, blame anything you want — but I was the candidate. It was my campaign. Those were my decisions.’”
And about her marriage to Bill…
“On her marriage to Bill Clinton: ‘There were times that I was deeply unsure about whether our marriage could or should survive. But on those days, I asked myself the questions that mattered to me: Do I still love him? And can I still be in this marriage without becoming unrecognizable to myself – twisted by anger, resentment, or remoteness? The answers were always yes.’”
She even blames former FBI Director James Comey for her loss even though a recent leak revealed that Comey had started drafting a statement announcing Clinton’s exoneration in the investigation before he had interviewed several key figures, including Clinton herself.
“The undoing of her image: It went from a picture of steady leader to one tainted by scandal, and ‘[James] Comey's letter turned that picture upside down.’”
And, of course, she blames Obama for not doing enough to fight back against the Russians using covert operations. Specifically, she blames Obama for withholding certain information about Russian interference from the public, which he claimed to have done because he worried it’d validate Donald Trump’s claims that the election was “rigged.”
“On Obama's failure to address Russia's cyber attack: ‘I do wonder sometimes about what would have happened if President Obama had made a televised address to the nation in the fall of 2016 warning that our democracy was under attack. Maybe more Americans would have woken up to the threat in time. We'll never know.’”
She goes on to describe the last 24 hours of her campaign, and the surreal feeling of losing to Trump.
“The last 24 hours of her campaign: Clinton describes how Obama hugged her and whispered, ‘You've got this. I'm so proud of you.’”
She said her congratulatory call to Trump was bizarre and “mercifully brief.”
"Her call congratulating Trump: "[It was] without a doubt one of the strangest moments of my life… I congratulated Trump and offered to do anything I could to make sure the transition was smooth. It was all perfectly nice and weirdly ordinary, like calling a neighbor to say you can't make it to his barbecue. It was mercifully brief… I was numb. It was all so shocking."
Meanwhile, she found time to blast fellow Democrats for their post-election criticism, another way in which Clinton resists all criticism or any semblance of accepting blame.
“Critiques from party members: ‘Joe Biden said the Democratic Party in 2016 'did not talk about what it always stood for – and that was how to maintain a burgeoning middle class.' I find this fairly remarkable, considering that Joe himself campaigned for me all over the Midwest and talked plenty about the middle class.’”
Finally, she says she plans to remain in the public sphere in spite of the haters who're hoping she disappears.
"On her plan to remain in the public sphere: "There were plenty of people hoping that I, too, would just disappear. But here I am."
Her book is out Sept. 12. In the meantime, we await even more revealing leaks that speak to Clinton’s pathological inability to accept responsibility for her actions.
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Authored by Dale Steinreich viaThe Mises Institute,
As the floodwaters brought by Hurricane Harvey last week recede and new hurricane Irma moves slowly toward the Eastern U.S., it might be edifying to review how millions of Americans, despite federal anti-flood efforts, came to live and work in hazardous to dangerous flood-prone areas.
The foundation of the current disaster traces back at least to the late 1920s under Republican interventionist Herbert Hoover. In 1927, a very destructive flood occurred along the Mississippi River. Secretary of Commerce Hoover’s relief campaign greatly increased the power of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to implement supposed flood protection.
No doubt, the Flood Control Act of 1928 helped construct what was considered one of the most impressive systems of levees in the world along the Mississippi River. However, the one thing it did not do was control flooding. While the new levee system prevented flooding in some areas, it quickened the natural current of the river which helped produce flooding in other areas. Other unforeseen consequences were the reductions in natural soil deposits and natural flow of water into the river's flood plains.
Less than a decade later, another damaging flood in New England helped drive the passage of the National Flood Control Act of 1936. This Act was a real turning point in terms of centralization. Besides doubling the size of the federal flood-control program, it signaled that Congress would no longer merely provide occasional flood relief and regard floods as principally a local matter. It effectively enlisted the federal government and Army Corps of Engineers in the battle against floods.
For the rest of the 1930s and 1940s, private insurance markets were undermined because the Army Corps of Engineers built hundred-year flood walls which reduced risk just enough for homeowners to make private flood insurance too costly. On the other hand, private insurers saw these walls as insufficient protection which did not reduce risk enough. Regardless, an impasse was created for private markets that was both figuratively and literally cemented in place by the Army Corps.
Enter the New Deal central planners of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in 1953. TVA began monitoring flood-prone areas in and around one hundred and fifty towns and cities in its jurisdiction. At first, TVA used a worst-case standard from the Army Corps, regardless of whether such a flood had ever actually occurred.
This stringent standard was quickly abandoned when it was realized that it would eliminate huge areas of potential development that not only local private and public planners wanted, but TVA as well since part of its conflicted mission was spurring development. Thus TVA adopted a new standard skewed in favor of development that was based on past floods that occurred inside a 60- or 100-mile zone from proposed development.
Outside TVA’s jurisdiction, the U.S. Geological Survey and Army Corps of Engineers mapped flood plains with roughly the same backward-looking standard. By the end of the 1960s, all three agencies had laid the groundwork for a national map of floodplains. A very bad standard had been created.
Of course no tapestry of disastrous policies would be complete without a contribution by Lyndon Baines Johnson, thus the Southeast Hurricane Disaster Relief Act of 1965. This Act authorized $500 million in spending to assist in repairing damage created by Hurricane Betsy.
Next came the National Flood Insurance Act of 1968, which created the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), which covered up to $250,000 in damage to single-family houses and buildings in cities and towns meeting the flawed federal flood-plain criteria.
The absolute death knell for any semblance of economic and actuarial soundness in the NFIP came in 1973, when Congress allowed coverage to be extended to property owners who should have enrolled in the program and paid for insurance but did not.
While none of this is to say that had more rigorous private standards prevailed and the Army Corps and TVA never been created, that no one's residence or workplace would ever have flooded.
However, there's no doubt that the federal government's perverse subsidization of residential and commercial development in flood-prone areas as well as artificially cheap flood insurance completely detached from risk assessment have contributed to not only the untold loss of billions of dollars of property, but lives as well.
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Earlier today, we reported that Deutsche Bank CEO John Cryan called for an end to Europe’s cheap-money policies and asked that the European Central Bank not use the strengthening euro as an excuse to keep printing money…
According to Bloomberg, Cryan said that the bank is “seeing signs of bubbles” across capital markets while low interest pummel European banks’ earnings.
“We are now seeing signs of bubbles in more and more parts of the capital market where we wouldn’t have expected them," Cryan said, adding that the interest-rate policy has been partly responsible for the decline in earnings at European banks.
“I welcome the recent announcement by the Federal Reserve and now also from the ECB that they intend to gradually bring their loose monetary policy to an end.”
Now, barely a day later, Goldman Sachs CEO and Chairman Lloyd Blankfein has joined his fellow bulge bracket bank CEO in expressing his uneasiness with contemporary valuations and the central-bank money printing that has helped pump up asset prices around the world.
Blankfein said that “things have been going up for too long” and that “when yields on corporate bonds are lower than dividends on stocks, that unnerves me.”
Here’s more from the Wall Street Journal:
“Goldman Sachs Group Chairman Lloyd Blankfein on Wednesday sounded a warning about the markets, saying that some of what he sees “unnerves” him.
Mr. Blankfein said the current market environment “doesn’t feel like tulip-bulb-mania,” a reference to the famous speculative bubble in the Netherlands in 1637, but was nonetheless concerning.
‘Things have been going up for too long,’ he told attendees at a Handelsblatt business conference in Frankfurt.
‘When yields on corporate bonds are lower than dividends on stocks? That unnerves me.’”
Here’s a breakdown of Blankfein’s other remarks, courtesy of WSJ. The CEO was speaking via a video link from Goldman’s headquarters in New York:
…On speculation that Goldman alum Gary Cohn could become the next chairman of the Federal Reserve, Blankfein said Cohn would do a “different job but a great job.”
“I think Gary is very very capable. He would be a different kind of person. Not an academic. I don’t know that he reads a lot of policy papers, let alone writes then, but there’s nobody who understands markets better?.”
Relative to current chair Janet Yellen, Mr. Cohn is ‘much less theoretical.’”
‘Who’s to say what’s better or not??’ he said, noting that past Fed chairs have had more of a markets bent. ‘I’d be willing to give that a try. I think he would do a different job, but a great job.’”
…On Trump:
“Things could have gone better but I’m not without hope. A lot of what [President Trump's] trying to accomplish I’m friendly to. There are a lot of layers of protectionism and regulation that have been built up that impede progress. I think his good intentions are to take a lot of that away.? ?I have some disappointment but also some hope.?”?
…Asked about the bank’s “Government Sachs” moniker, Blankfein said the bank happens to have a lot of employees who are “civically minded.”
“We have a lot of people who are civically minded…I’m proud of it. Their qualities are recognized. ?T?hey make a sacrifice and we feel the cost of that sacrifice, because they’re very capable people.”
…On the Volcker rule:
“'You have people sitting on desks who are paralyzed out of fear… It has had chilling effect in people’s willingness' to make markets."
…On declining revenue at the bank’s trading division:
“’We have always had periods of time where we haven’t done well. I’m not terribly aggrieved by it. It’s a level playing field for everyone. I think we can do well in this environment, and we can do well if they relax the rules.’
‘We’re running in a horse race against our competitors. If it rains, it rains for everyone and we’ll run in the mud. If it’s sunny, we’ll all run in the sunshine.’”
Could Blankfein’s and Cryan’s remarks portend a selloff in the coming months? Certainly, their publicly voiced concerns about asset bubbles probably represent the most bearish comments made by the leaders of systemically important banks since July, when J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon warned investors that the Federal Reserve’s unwinding of its balance sheet wouldn’t be like watching paint dry, but instead that it could be “a little more disruptive than people think.”
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Content originally published at iBankCoin.com
I will not pretend to be a scientist in this blog, or even claim to know the very first thing about global warming or lack thereof. I am more interested in human narratives, how they are woven, and the basis from which they were formed. Just like in stocks, when listening to an analyst, I like to know the historical performance of his/her previous picks.
Now that we have a vert active hurricane season again, all of the self-made climatologists are out shilling for their global agendas. It’s all very convenient, reminiscent of sudden calls for gun control following a mass murder.
Doing a cursory search of the NY Times archives, I found several articles warning Americans of the perils of global warming, several dating back to the early 1930s.
In the article below, dated May 15th, 1932, the NY Times cites scientific research that said the center of Greenland was ~9,000 ft thick and the edges ~4,000.
Today, according to a report out by experts…
…1,000m or 3,200 ft around the edges and 2,500m at the center or 8,200ft, roughly a 10% reduction from 75 years ago. Bear in mind, the instruments used to measure the thickness of the ice was rudimentary at best, back in 1932, so there must be some margin for error. Having said that, given the frantic panic, this is hardly a rate of change worthy of panic.
Here are some other articles from yesteryear.
Circa 1933, NY Times
Lastly, back in 1984, there were some skeptics — those who called out the global warming panickers of the 1960s and instead claimed that that ice sheets were instead getting ticker.
EXPERTS QUESTION SEA-RISE THEORY
Specialists in polar ice caps have expressed doubts about a rise in sea level that has been predicted as a consequence of the expected warming of world climates.
Some experts, in fact, now suspect that the sea level may fall.
Two reports on probable climate change were issued last October, one by the National Academy of Sciences and the other by the Environmental Protection Agency. Both suggested there would be substantial rises in worldwide sea levels if, as suspected, there was a rise of several degrees in global temperatures.
Such a rise would be caused by the effects of carbon dioxide delivered to the atmosphere by steadily increasing combustion of fuels. That gas absorbs infrared heat radiation from the earth instead of allowing it to escape into space, acting somewhat like the glass in a greenhouse.
Scientists at the environmental agency suggested that heating of polar latitudes would melt enough ice to raise sea levels four to seven feet by the year 2100. The academy report said a less radical rise of two feet was ”likely” in the next century, but added, ”More rapid rates could occur subsequently if the West Antarctic ice sheet should begin to disintegrate.” Forecasts Are Challenged
These predictions were challenged last week at the latest in a series of seminars on global habitability being held at Columbia University. It brought together Government and academic specialists to discuss the future of the Antarctic ice sheet.
In the past there have been far more ominous predictions regarding that ice sheet than those suggested in last October’s reports. In 1964 it was proposed that virtually the entire ice cap at the bottom of the world sometimes slips into the sea, raising global sea levels more than 200 feet, enough to flood many coastal lands and cities.
Such dramatic predictions fell out of fashion, and attention focused on the ice covering West Antarctica, that part of the continent south of the Americas. As pointed out at the Columbia seminar by Dr. George H. Denton of the University of Maine, an authority on the ice of West Antarctica, much of it rests on land thousands of feet below sea level.
Because such ice readily breaks off into icebergs it is thought to be more vulnerable to discharge than continental ice. Since it is a mile or more thick, its entry into the oceans would raise sea levels several feet.
It has been widely assumed that, between the last two ice ages, some 125,000 years ago, the climate was hotter than it is now and sea levels were 10 or 20 feet higher. Coral reefs formed in that period on some oceanic islands suggest such a high stand of the sea. These two lines of evidence were taken to mean that the West Antarctic ice dispersed into the oceans in that period. Past Assumptions Are Questioned
New evidence, however, questions both arguments, Dr. Denton said. While sea floor sediment in the North Atlantic suggests it was unusually warm there, it is beginning to appear the climate of the Southern Hemisphere was much like that of today. The coral reefs may be high, he added, not because the oceans were high but because the islands have risen.
Likewise the response to greater warmth is difficult to predict, Dr. Denton said. More moisture may be carried to the Antarctic hinterland, increasing snowfall there and the Antarctic ice ”may even expand,” he said.
The Antarctica’s interior is so high and cold there is virtually no melting and some scientists believe there would not be much, even if the climate warms. The critical area is along the coasts, where ice discharges as icebergs.
As pointed out by Dr. Arnold Gordon of Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory, the behavior of the ocean along the coast may be a controlling influence. A change in oceanic circulation in response to warming of the atmosphere could, for example, alter the extent to which deep water wells upward along the rim of Antarctica and beneath its coastal ice shelves.
The two shelves through which most West Antarctic ice reaches the sea are considered keys to the fate of that region’s ice cover. They are the Ross Ice Shelf on the Pacific side and the Filchner and Ronne ice shelves facing the Weddell Sea on the Atlantic side. Each shelf is fed by broad ice streams flowing from the hinterland.
The shelves are thought to hold back the flow of ice and there has therefore been concern that they might be unstable. As stated by Dr. Robert H. Thomas, manager of the polar oceans program of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the conclusion seems ”unambiguous” that, if the shelves go to sea, the ice of West Antarctica ”will collapse.”
The seaward edge of the shelves breaks off into icebergs. Should this process accelerate, specialists believe it could drain much of the ice from West Antarctica in a matter of centuries. Hence, in the last few years, there have been extensive studies of the ice cover.
Dr. Ian M. Whillans of the Institute of Polar Studies at Ohio State University said these studies had revealed no ”dramatic” changes either in West Antarctica or on the Ross Ice Shelf. He cited various ”catastrophic hypothesis” regarding that ice and added, ”Perhaps we should also consider the possibility that it is stable.”
There appeared to be a consensus that too little was known about the factors controlling growth and shrinkage of the ice sheet to predict its response to warming. ”The more ingredients you put into a cake,” said Dr. Thomas, ”the more ambiguous it gets.”
I wonder what experts will be writing about 75 years hence.
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Authored by James Rickards via Daily Reckoning blog,
Interest in Bitcoin is red hot at the moment. It’s impossible to open a website, listen to a podcast, or watch a video in the financial space without hearing about the meteoric rise in the price of Bitcoin.
Maybe you know a “Bitcoin millionaire” who bought five hundred Bitcoins a few years back for $50,000 and is now sitting on a Bitcoin fortune worth over $2,000,000. It’s true, those people actually do exist.
Yet the crypto-hysteria is distracting you from a scary truth no one is talking about.
There is every indication that governments, regulators, tax authorities, and the global elite are moving in for the crypto-kill.
The future of Bitcoin may be a dystopia in which Big Brother controls what’s called “the blockchain” and decides when and how you can buy or sell anything and everything.
Furthermore, cryptocurrency technology could be the very mechanism used by global elites to replace the dollar based financial system.
In 1958, Mao Zedong, the leader of the Communist Party of China and China’s dictatorial leader was confronted with demoralized intellectuals and artists who were alienated by Communist rule. As a policy response, he declared a new policy of intellectual freedom.
Mao declared, “The policy of letting a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend is designed to promote the flourishing of the arts and the progress of science.”
This declaration is referred to as the “Hundred Flowers Campaign” (often misquoted as the “thousand flowers campaign”). The response to Mao’s invitation was an enthusiastic outpouring of creative thought and artistic expression.
What came next was no surprise to those familiar with the operation of state power. Once the intellectuals and artists emerged, it was easy for Mao’s secret police to round them up, kill and torture some, and send others to “reeducation camps” where they learned ideological conformity.
The Hundred Flowers Movement was a trap for those who placed their trust in the state.
It was also a taste of things to come in the form of the much more violent and comprehensive Cultural Revolution of 1964–1974 in which all traces of Chinese bourgeoisie culture and much of China’s historical legacy were eradicated.
Something similar is going on with Bitcoin and the Distributed ledger technology (DLT) today. Governments have been patiently watching blockchain technology develop and grow outside their control for the past eight years.
Libertarian supporters of blockchain celebrate this lack of government control. Yet, their celebration is premature, and their belief in the sustainability of powerful systems outside government control is naïve.
Governments don’t like competition especially when it comes to money. Governments know they cannot stop blockchain, in fact they don’t want to. What they want is to control it using powers of regulation, taxation, and investigation and ultimately more coercive powers including arrest and imprisonment of individuals who refuse to obey government mandates with regard to blockchain.
Blockchain does not exist in the ether (despite the name of one cryptocurrency) and it does not reside on Mars. Blockchain depends on critical infrastructure including servers, telecommunications networks, the banking system, and the power grid, all of which are subject to government control.
A group of major companies, all regulated by government, have announced a joint effort to develop an open-source blockchain as a uniform standard for all blockchain applications. The group includes JPMorgan, Wells Fargo, State Street, SWIFT, Cisco, Accenture, the London Stock Exchange and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial. That’s not exactly five guys in hoodies working in a garage. That’s a sign of the corporate-state consortium taking over.
An elite U.S. legal institution called the Uniform Law Commission, that proposes model laws intended for adoption in all fifty states, has released its latest proposal called the “Uniform Regulation of Virtual Currency Businesses Act.”
This new law will not only provide a regulatory scheme for state regulators, but will also be a platform for litigation by private plaintiffs and class action lawyers seeking recourse against real or imagined abuses by digital coin exchanges and facilities. Once litigation begins, anonymity is the first casualty.
Consider the following additional developments:
On August 1, 2017, the SEC announced “Guidance on Regulation of Initial Coin Offerings,” the first step toward requiring fundraising through blockchain-based tokens to register with the government.
On August 1, 2017, the World Economic Forum, host body to the Davos conference of global super-elites, published a paper entitled “Four reasons to question the hype around blockchain.”
On August 7, 2017, China announced they will begin using blockchain to collect taxes and issue “electronic invoices” to citizens there.
Perhaps most portentously, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has weighed in. In a special report dated June 2017, the IMF had this to say about blockchain:
“Distributed ledger technology (DLT), in particular, could spur change in the financial sector. …. DLT can be categorized as “permissionless” or “permissioned” depending on who can participate in the consensus-driven validation process. Permissionless DLTs allow anyone to read, transact on, and participate in the validation process. These open schemes (that underlie Bitcoin, for instance) could be very disruptive if successfully implemented. By contrast, in permissioned DLTs, the validation process is controlled by a pre-selected group of participants (“consortium”) or managed by one organization (“fully-private”), and thus serve more as a common communications platform.” (emphasis added).
IMF releases require expert translation because they are never written in plain English, and the real meaning is always hidden between the lines. But, the thrust of this report language is clear. The IMF favors “permissioned” systems over “open schemes.” The IMF also favors control by a “pre-selected group of participants” or “one organization,” rather than allowing “anyone” to participate.
This paper should be viewed as the first step in the IMF’s plan to migrate its existing form of world money, the special drawing right or SDR, onto a DLT platform controlled by the IMF. In time, all other forms of money would be banned.
These and other developments all point toward an elite group including the IMF, JPMorgan, the Davos crowd, the IRS, SEC, and other agencies converging to shut down the existing free-wheeling blockchain ecosphere, and replace it with a “permissioned” system under “consortium” control.
Big Brother is coming to the blockchain.
via http://ift.tt/2gHP2NZ Tyler Durden
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development suggests that you spend no more than 30% of your annual budget on housing costs as it could put you and your family at greater risk of being unable to afford other necessities. That said, Americans are overachievers.
Per the following chart from howmuch.net, the average American family spends roughly $57,000 per year and have thrown caution to the wind with housing costs eating up nearly 33% of annual budgets. In all, some 40 million houses (or about 1/3) are occupied by people who can’t afford them.
Of course, this is hardly surprising in light of the following chart which reveals that the average working class family can’t afford to live in the majority of metropolitan cities around the country due to ballooning housing costs.
Meanwhile, the following data from Harvard found that over 18 million households are currently stuck spending more than 50% of their annual income on housing, which is up 35% compared to 2001 levels. Per Harvard Study:
The future course of homeownership will also be shaped by how affordable local home prices are for typical renters. On average, 45 percent of renters across the nation’s metropolitan areas can afford the payments on a median-priced home in their market area, but the shares range from less than one in ten in the high-cost markets concentrated on the Pacific Coast as well as in Florida and the Northeast, to two-thirds or more in low-cost metros in the Midwest and rural South. In areas where homebuying is well out of reach for a large majority of renters, there is much less potential for increases in homeownership.
With such large shares of households exceeding the traditional affordability standard, policymakers have increasingly focused their attention on the severely burdened (paying more than 50 percent of their incomes for housing). Although the total number of households with severe burdens also fell somewhat from 19.3 million in 2014 to 18.8 million in 2015, the improvement was again on the owner side (Figure 5). Indeed, 11.1 million renter households were severely cost burdened in 2015, a 3.7 million increase from 2001. By comparison, 7.6 million owners were severely burdened in 2015, up 1.1 million from 2001.
The share of renters with severe burdens varies widely across the nation’s 100 largest metros, ranging from a high of 35.4 percent in Miami to a low of 18.4 percent in El Paso. While most common in high-cost markets, renter cost burdens are also widespread in areas with moderate rents but relatively low incomes. Augusta is a case in point, where the severely cost-burdened share of renters was at 30.3 percent in 2015.
Of course, with the housing bubble re-inflating at breakneck speed and incomes stagnant, this crisis is only likely to worsen over time.
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Adrian Crook, the dad behind the blog 5Kids1Condo, taught his four oldest kids—ages 7, 8, 9, and 11—how to ride the city bus to and from school for the past two years in Vancouver.
The result? Fantastic. The kids love it, and became friends with the bus drivers. Once Adrian even received an email from a random bus passenger saying what a pleasure his well-behaved kids were.
But (you knew there had to be a but) recently someone reported these “unsupervised” kids to the Ministry of Children and Family Development—the Canadian equivalent of Child Protective Services—and the agency opened an inquiry. They came to Adrian’s house and interviewed each child separately. Aware of the stakes, Adrian tried to be cordial. He provided character references. And, adds Crook:
I even suggested the Ministry shadow the kids on a bus ride, but they declined.
While the Ministry conducted their weeks-long investigation, they had me sign a “Safety Plan” stating that the kids wouldn’t take the bus alone until the investigation was completed. I returned to spending several hours a day transiting the kids back and forth from school, a reduction in freedom the kids didn’t understand.
Then decision day finally came.
Can you guess what happened? My guess is that you can:
It started off in a favourable way, with the supervisor insisting that I’d gone “above and beyond” what any parent should have to do to train their kids to be responsible and conscious transit riders….
Ultimately, however, For the Ministry had checked with their lawyers “across the country” and the Attorney General, and determined that children under 10 years old could not be unsupervised in or outside the home, for any amount of time. That included not just the bus, but even trips across the street to our corner store, a route I can survey in its entirety from my living room window.
That bizarre and benighted decision was based on a British Columbia case we’ve discussed here, in which a judge ruled that no child under 10 can stay home alone. As terrible as that decision was, it was irrelevant to Crook’s situation. That was about one 8-year-old, home alone, not four kids together, on the bus.
So what? Crook continues:
The Ministry also said that in other provinces, the legal age to be unsupervised is much higher. In fact, only three provinces have legislated minimum ages at which kids can be left home alone (and BC isn’t one of them): Ontario (16), New Brunswick (12) and Manitoba (12). Only Quebec has a statutory minimum age for being left alone in a vehicle, and that’s 7 years old.
Does anyone really think there are no children under 16 being left unsupervised in Ontario?
Of course not. But does anyone really think common sense is what we’re talking about here? The social workers gave every made-up reason for grounding the kids:
[They] stated that the comparatively wide-ranging freedoms we enjoyed in our childhood were, “before we knew better” – despite widely available crime statistics that demonstrate our kids live in a safer world today than the one we grew up in. ….
Anyone who knows me can tell you I’m a firm believer in evidence-based policy-making, so this fear-driven assertion rung hollow for me.
What’s more, the kids already had been taking the bus for two years—safely! So clearly this investigation “safety” plan was only in reaction to the busybody’s call, for that is all it takes:
It’s a “Cover Your Ass” culture, where even if a trivial issue is reported the Ministry cannot condone it, lest they be responsible for future issues. The Ministry has no incentive or ability to dismiss a report or allow a situation to continue – regardless of how many steps a parent has taken to ensure the safety and well-being of their children.
Our family’s freedom of mobility has been dramatically restricted for little reason beyond the complaint of an anonymous person.
The dad is running a GoFundMe page to pay for the legal case he hopes to make against the government. In the meantime, he reminds us all that when the state insists that the only acceptable parenting is helicopter parenting, it is committing a serious crime of its own: robbery. It “robs our children of agency, independence, and responsibility.”
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