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While we have beaten the dead horse topic of collapsing global of CapEx (per Citi, net capex is now unchanged since 2000), we now have a clearer understanding why there is no global growth, why trade is plunging, and why world commerce is rapidly grinding to a halt. The answer lies in the following chart which shows the relative proportion of what the world has been investing in for the past two decades.

It shows that while investment in most traditional categories has fallen off a cliff, the money spent for business activities, i.e. services, has soared at the expense of such conventional growth components as trade, manufacturing, petrochemicals, and food and beverage.

But the punchline, and what is by far the scariest, is that rising from 19% to a record 30%, and by far the biggest use of funds, is finance, the one industry that doesn’t actually lead to growth but merely finds ways to mask the lack of growth with pro-forma adjustments and stacks leverage upon leverage on ever declining underlying equity and cash flows, until the entire system crashes as it did in 2001, 2008 and, well, soon.

It also means that forget Too Big To Fail banks: the entire financial industry has now become the monster behemoth whose crash will wipe out the world, and hence why it can never be allowed to crash. One could say that in the past two decades, finance itself succeeded in taking the world hostage and can demand any ransom… or the world gets it. A ransom, which the global central banks are all too happy to pay to let “finance” get its way, in the biggest Mutual Assured Destruction scenario in world history.

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1vyG8Sk Tyler Durden

Having tried (unsuccessfully) to break up the pro-democracy protesters in the heart of Hong Kong using local triad gangs (as opposed to the optics of actual police), it appears the Chinese government is rolling back from its “wait-and-see” approach and becoming more aggressive once again. Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying, as DPA reports, demanded protesters end their blockade of major roads by Monday, or the government will take “all necessary measures to restore social order.” Tensions continue to rise, with clashes breaking out sporadically, as the protesters have broken off talks with the government. As fears of another Tiananmen square debacle loom, former Hong Kong governor Chris Patten noted, “I cannot believe it would be so stupid as to do anything like send in the army.”

At least 37 people were injured yesterday in the violence, taking the number of those hurt throughout the protests to 131, health officials said.

 

Theseare not the images the world has come to think of with regard to Hong Kong…

Following yesterday’s non-police triad-based pro-government gangs attacks…

Hong Kong’s Secretary for Security Lai Tung-kwok Saturday said 19 people were arrested on Friday when clashes broke out between Occupy Central protestors and anti-Occupy people.

 

Clashes happened in Mong Kok and Causeway Bay, two major commercial areas of Hong Kong, from Friday afternoon to early Saturday morning, leaving some citizens and police officers injured.

 

In regard to queries that the police were not capable of handling the clashes in time, Lai explained that as the crowd grew bigger in Mong Kok, fights scattered in different locations, making it more difficult for the police to deal with them.

 

Of the 19 people arrested, eight of them are suspected to have triad backgrounds, according to Lai.

 

“We do not approve any of this violence. Hong Kong is a lawful society. Every citizen in Hong Kong should abide by the law. Nobody wishes to see what has happened yesterday,” he said, adding that the police would faithfully and truthfully enforce the law with patience.

Which led to dialogue with the government to cease…

“The government and police have allowed triads and thugs to use violence to attack peaceful protesters, cutting off the road to any conversation, and should be responsible for any fallout that results,” the Hong Kong Federation of Students said in the posting on its Facebook page titled “Road to Dialogue Must be Shelved.”

It appears the government is firming its position once again… (as DPA reports,)

Hong Kong Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying calls on pro-democracy protesters to end their blockade of major roads by Monday, adding that the government will take “all necessary measures to restore social order.”

 

In a video message, he says access roads to government headquarters must be opened by Monday to allow civil servants to return to work, and that roads on Hong Kong Island must be cleared so that schools can re-open.

*  *  *

 

“I am indeed very concerned about the clashes we have seen in Mong Kok,” Carrie Lam, the city’s second-highest ranking official, told reporters yesterday. “These protests on the streets have great vulnerability to turn into critical violence between the protesters and the anti-protesters.”

 

 

The last British Governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten, has some strong opinions on the way ahead for Hong Kong,

It is not wholly true to say that the eyes of the entire world are on Hong Kong. They would be, of course, if people in mainland China were allowed to know what is happening in their country’s most successful city. But China’s government has tried to block any news about the Hong Kong democracy demonstrations from reaching the rest of the country – not exactly a sign of confidence on the part of China’s rulers in their system of authoritarian government.

 

Before suggesting a way forward for Hong Kong’s ham-fisted authorities, three things need to be made clear. First, it is a slur on the integrity and principles of Hong Kong’s citizens to assert, as the Chinese government’s propaganda machine does, that they are being manipulated by outside forces. What motivates Hong Kong’s tens of thousands of demonstrators is a passionate belief that they should be able to run their affairs as they were promised, choosing those who govern them in free and fair elections.

 

Second, others outside of Hong Kong have a legitimate interest in what happens in the city. Hong Kong is a great international center, whose freedoms and autonomy were guaranteed in a treaty registered at the United Nations. In particular, the United Kingdom, the other party to this Sino-British Joint Declaration, sought and received guarantees that the survival of Hong Kong’s autonomy and liberties would be guaranteed for 50 years.

 

So it is ridiculous to suggest that British ministers and parliamentarians should keep their noses out of Hong Kong’s affairs. In fact, they have a right and a moral obligation to continue to check on whether China is keeping its side of the bargain – as, to be fair, it has mostly done so far.

 

But, third, the biggest problems have arisen because of a dispute about where Hong Kong’s promised path to democracy should take it, and when. No one told Hong Kongers when they were assured of universal suffrage that it would not mean being able to choose for whom they could vote. No one said that Iran was the democratic model that China’s Communist bureaucracy had in mind, with the Chinese government authorized to exercise an effective veto over candidates.

 

In fact, that is not what China had in mind. As early as 1993, China’s chief negotiator on Hong Kong, Lu Ping, told the newspaper People’s Daily, “The [method of universal suffrage] should be reported to [China’s Parliament] for the record, whereas the central government’s agreement is not necessary. How Hong Kong develops its democracy in the future is completely within the sphere of the autonomy of Hong Kong. The central government will not interfere.” The following year, China’s foreign ministry confirmed this.

 

The British Parliament summarized what had been said and promised in a report on Hong Kong in 2000. “The Chinese government has therefore formally accepted that it is for the Hong Kong government to determine the extent and nature of democracy in Hong Kong.”

So, what next?

The peaceful demonstrators in Hong Kong, with their umbrellas and refuse-collection bags, will not themselves be swept off the streets like garbage or bullied into submission by tear gas and pepper spray. Any attempt to do so would present a terrible and damaging picture of Hong Kong and China to the world, and would be an affront to all that China should aspire to be.

 

The Hong Kong authorities have gravely miscalculated the views of their citizens. Like the bad courtiers against whom Confucius warned, they went to Beijing and told the emperor what they thought he wanted to hear, not what the situation really was in the city. They must think again.

 

Under the existing plans, there is supposed to be a second phase of consultations on democratic development to follow what turned out to be a counterfeit start to the process. Hong Kong’s government should now offer its people a proper second round of consultation, one that is open and honest. Dialogue is the only sensible way forward. Hong Kong’s citizens are not irresponsible or unreasonable. A decent compromise that allows for elections that people can recognize as fair, not fixed, is surely available.

 

The demonstrators in Hong Kong, young and old, represent the city’s future. Their hopes are for a peaceful and prosperous life in which they can enjoy the freedoms and rule of law that they were promised. That is not only in the interest of their city; it is in China’s interest, too. Hong Kong’s future is the main issue; but so, too, is China’s honor and its standing in the world.

*  *  *

For some context – this is the scale of the protests…

h/t @WilliamsJon

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/ZH0hwi Tyler Durden

Excerpted from Bridgewater’s recent market letter,

Market movements are driven by how conditions transpire in relation to what is discounted, leading to big moves when conditions are different than what was discounted and small moves when they are similar. Recently, the moves have been small. The following chart shows the absolute value of price changes across the markets that we trade over the past quarter and year, relative to history. As you can see, recent price moves across the markets that we trade have been as small as any in the past forty years.

Looked at another way, the rolling volatility of discounted growth and inflation has fallen to very low levels.

…

Markets have a tendency to extrapolate such periods of low market volatility forward, and continue to assume that moves will be modest. That is what is now priced in. Options markets have shifted over the last few years from pricing in high volatility and fat tails to very low volatility and significantly decreased risk of tail events. Growth and inflation are discounted to remain moderate with little need to tighten monetary policy. Stable conditions, stable discounting of future conditions, low market volatility, and ample liquidity have led to a further movement of money from cash to assets and produced a further compression of risk premiums. This compression of risk premiums has raised asset prices, improving balance sheets, but in the process has further reduced the going-forward expected returns of assets. In essence, markets have pulled forward future returns into prices today, leaving less return for the future.

Stable environments normally sow the seeds of their own demise by drawing traders into more highly leveraged positions as they try to magnify smaller asset returns into the desired level of return on equity. Subsequent shifts then produce magnified reactions. 2006 was the most recent case in point. We see manifestations of this process in the tightening dispersion of the pricing of assets with more widely varying degrees of risk. We see it beginning to happen in the degree of frothiness of the corporate bond market. But we don’t see much excessive leveraging yet. There has been enough money printed that the leverage has been unnecessary. The withdrawal of the flow of money will have to be met by a commensurate rise in credit creation and leverage, otherwise asset prices will fall, which would produce a negative wealth effect on growth. This balancing act gets tougher as spreads get tighter and leverage gets bigger.

…

We continue to believe that economic conditions in the deleveraging developed world are too fragile to withstand much of a rise in interest rates, but the drop in yields over the past few months and the continued improvement in developed economies have moved current pricing closer to equilibrium.

…

Nonetheless, we are still very much dealing with the consequences of being on the backside of the long-term debt cycle, with debt levels still high and borrowers remaining sensitive to increases in rates and debt service costs. At the beginning of this year, bond markets were discounting a rise in rates that we thought was at the high end of the possible range. Now bond markets are discounting what looks closer to the mid-range of our expectations.

…

In contrast, the continued normalization of the US economy, and in particular labor markets, is likely to put downward pressure on record-high US corporate profit margins, and the Fed is pulling back on stimulation. US valuations are unattractive as the movement of money from cash has continued to push prices up faster than sales, margins, and earnings; the long-term expected return of US equities is in the low single digits and roughly equal to the yield on long-term bonds (but with more than twice the expected risk).

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/ZGSvTg Tyler Durden

Whether it is due to the sheer deferred Ebola panic (we warned in June it was only a matter of time before the “world’s worst Ebola epidemic” made it to US shores, which promptly got us branded as fearmongers as usual), or the administration’s bumbled attempt at damage control with a very confused and mostly pointless press conference on Friday afternoon, but three days ago, a petition was launched on the White House website demanding that the “FAA ban all incoming and outgoing flights to Ebola-stricken countries until the Ebola outbreak is contained.” As of this moment, over 4,000 people have already signed it.

And while petitions are usually pointless exercise in public outcry, in this case the CDC already responded. As the Hill reports, a travel ban to the countries facing an Ebola outbreak could paradoxically make the problem worse, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Tom Frieden said during a Saturday press conference.

Paradoxically indeed? Let’s listen to Mr. Frieden’s arguments:

Frieden said the CDC would consider any and all precautions, but warned that a travel ban could make it harder to get medical care and aid workers to regions dealing with the outbreak.

 

He said that had already occurred when African Union aid workers tried to get to Liberia but were stuck in a neighboring country for days because of a travel ban.

“Their ability to get there was delayed by about a week because their flight was canceled and they were stuck in a neighboring country,” he said.

But isn’t it mostly US troops deployed in Africa now, sent on a mission to shoot the Ebola virus on sight, instead of “medical care and aid workers” who are now the primary respondents to the world’s worst Ebola epidemic in history? Guess not.

Frieden also said the CDC has experienced a spike in reported potential cases of Ebola following the first diagnosis of a patient in the U.S. in Dallas earlier this week, saying the rise in concern was a good thing but that he remained the only patient who has been identified as suffering from the disease. Two patients who were initially identified as having potential Ebola symptoms in the Washington, D.C. area were ruled to not have the disease on Saturday. 

 

“We have definitely seen an increase in the number since this patient was diagnosed… that is as it should be,” Frieden said. “We have already gotten well over 100 inquiries for possible patients… this one patient has tested positive,” he said. “We expect we will see more rumors, concerns, possibilities of cases. Until there is a positive test that’s what they are, rumors and concerns.”

So, after ignoring the problem for months, the CDC finally has precisely what it was hoping to achieve: panic? Great job guys.

Frieden also said there were lesons to be learned from the delayed response to the Ebola patient in Dallas. It took two days for those who had been in contact with him to be contacted by medical officials, and Frieden said that should alert medical professionals to pay especially close attention to patients’ travel history if they’re showing signs of fever.

 

“As we anticipated, the arrival of the first Ebola patient in the U.S. has really increased attention to what health workers in this country need to do to be alert and make sure a travel history is taking,” he said.

 

And speaking of inbound cases of fever, moments ago ABC reported that  CDC officials have removed passengers from a plane that landed in Newark Saturday afternoon following a possible Ebola scare.

 

United flight 998 from Brussels landed at Newark Airport and has been met by Centers for Disease Control officials based in Newark after passengers on board, believed to be from Liberia, exhibited possible signs of Ebola. The passenger was displaying flu-like symptoms.

 

The flight was scheduled to land around noon.

 

Officials with the CDC removed two passengers from the plane. A man had been traveling with his daughter and both were removed by a CDC crew in full HAZMAT gear.

 

The airline issued a statement confirming that crew needed to assist an ill customer. “Upon arrival at Newark Airport from Brussels, medical professionals instructed that customers and crew of United flight 988 remain on board until they could assist an ill customer. We are working with authorities and will accommodate our customers as quickly as we can,” said a statement from the airline.” Other passengers remained aboard but were eventually allowed to deplane around 2 p.m.

A scare which promptly concluded when within the hour, CDC officials determined that the people exhibiting flu-like symptoms were, in fact, not contagious.

Passengers being allowed off United flight 998 upon @CDCgov determined person in question not contagious. @ABC7NY #Ebola

— Darla Miles (@DarlaMiles7) October 4, 2014

Finally, as a reminder, Newark is about 20 miles form Manhattan, although those looking for a real dramatic impact should wait until the Ebola scare touches down at JFK. At the current pace of spread, of the Ebola panic if not Ebola itself, it should be a rather short wait. 

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1Ee2COZ Tyler Durden

Remember Greece: the country that in 2010 launched Europe’s sovereign solvency crisis and the ECB’s own helpless attempts at intervention, which later was “saved”, only to default shortly thereafter (but without triggering CDS as that would end the Eurozone’s amusing monetary experiment and collapse the Deutsche Bank $100 trillion house of derivative cards), which later was again “saved” when every single global central bank made sure Greek bonds became the only yield-generating securities in the world? Well, the country which at last count was doing ok, is about to not be ok. Because according to none other than S&P, at some point over the next 15 months, Greek debt is about to be in default when the country is no longer able to cover its financing needs. In other words, back to square one.

As Bloomberg reports, citing Real News, S&P analyst Marie-France Raynaud said Greece can’t cover its own financing needs.

How is that possible? Isn’t Europe so fixed, it no longer has anything to worry about except deflation, pardon, inflation?

Guesst not. According to Bloomberg, S&P estimates Greek financing needs for the next 15 months to be at EU43 billion.

This is a problem because even if Greece sells bonds this year and next, sales won’t be enough to cover net financing needs. So maybe Greece will sell more bonds? Well, the problem with that is that the second the LIFO paradigm of bond investing no longer works, and the last guy in may be stuck holding the bag, nobody will want to buy 1 penny in debt issued by Greece.

So the specifics: S&P estimates Greece will draw EU5 billion from intl bond sales, EU20 billion from internal mkt, EU12 billion from official lenders inluding the IMF in next 15 mos. S&P also forecasts Greece will repay EU3 billion in bonds held by investors who refused to participate in 2012 debt writedown, and if it doesn’t then Greece will following Argentina in being held in “contempt to court” fo cramming down foreign law covenants. Just kidding: that would mean the global legal system actually works instead of serves merely to make the rich richer.

As for Greece, it appears that suddenly the idyllic image of its recovery is about to be torn to shreds and the Syntagma riotcam will have to come out of hibernation.

Or maybe it won’t. In a case of populist pandering that Obama himself would be proud, at the same time as the S&P report hit, the Greek premier Antonis Samaras said in a Kathimerini op-ed that if political stability isn’t threatened, Greece won’t need emergency loans in few months, and will achieve final settlement on public debt. He added that liquidity in Greece will be restored after ECB stress tests on country’s lenders and that in stark contrast to what S&P just said, Greece doesn’t need new bailout agreement, no new loans.

Actually, it will. The backdoor left open by Samaras is that “achievements will be endangered in case of political instability, and if parliament has to elect president” adding tbat the “government will not allow those who want country to commit suicide to have it their way.”

In other words, Greece will default the second the people start protesting the crushing, and very simple math, and they decide they have had enough of the technocrat and appoint another president. Because, you see, it is not that Greece implemented zero reform, and rooted out the pervasive cooruption that saw billions in foreign “aid” end up in offshore bank accounts of the political oligarchy, or the simple math of sources and uses of funds: it is the danger of the Greek people returning to what they did best in those days of 2010 and 2011 when every other day saw a riot in the center of Athens, that will be the straw that finally breaks the camel’s back.

And thus we go back to square one, as we always said we would, when only timing was a matter of debate. Well, we now know the timing: T minus 15 months and counting to yet another Eurozone collapse.

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/10yUbOJ Tyler Durden

 

week ending Sept 30		Commitment of Traders
	(speculative position in 000’s of contracts)
	Net	Prior	Gross Long	Change	Gross Short	Change
Euro	-138.0	-142.0	67.0	6.4	204.6	1.9
Yen	-121.0	-105.0	29.9	1.5	150.8	17.0
Sterling	3.6	-1.1	54.2	0.6	50.7	-4.1
Swiss Franc	-12.6	-13.4	12.0	3.6	24.6	2.8
C$	-4.6	3.1	33.0	5.3	37.6	13.0
A$	-2.0	8.3	43.2	-4.0	45.2	6.4
Mexican Peso	-7.3	10.5	48.9	-9.4	56.2	8.4

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/Zebt2s Marc To Market

When Mario Draghi set off on his latest quest to slay Europe’s deflation monster, after an endless array of failed alphabet soup programs to inject money into stock markets mysteriously failed to fix Europe’s insolvent economy riddled by record unemployment and trillions in non-performing loans, he clearly was guided by this latest Eurobarometer survey of Public Opinion in the European Union, in which virtually everyone across the board admitted that the most important issue facing the common folk in Europe is plunging prices and crushing deflation.

Oh wait… it says rising prices/inflation.

Well, that’s embarrassing. Please ignore everything we just said, because paradoxically to “fix” Europe, Mario Draghi is desperately trying to make Europe’s biggest problem even worse.  Or not: surely this is just a case when the 6 members of the ECB’s executive board “know better” than some 330 million Europeans.

At the end of the day, none of that matters: all Draghi is doing is trying to make the super wealthy holders of capital even richer, and push global stock markets to unprecedented records even if it means crushing Europe’s middle class into extinction, the same way Bernanke “succeeded’ with America’s now defunct middle class.

And for those who care, here is who is most impacted by Mario Draghi’s “phantom deflation.”

Source: Standard Eurobarometer 81, h/t @RudyHavenstein

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/Zebq6R Tyler Durden

 

 

Courtesy of the StealthFlation Blog

I’m certain that the Pompom waving Stock Market fanatics and official Federal Reserve cheer-leading squad will have a hard time accepting this, but fortunately, despite their fantasy football gymnastics, facts remain facts.  As such, I will categorically point out that even with its substantial sell off, Gold remains by far the best performing asset class of the Monetized New Millennium.  That veritable fact is as startling, as it is significant.

Most of the excitable equity equestrians will undoubtedly brush off this striking statement as insignificant, and simply discard it as the typical cherry picking of particular data price points during an exceptional performance period.  Well, ok, but that entirely misses the most critical and crucial point here.  Namely, that the dubiously debt driven bubble economy ushered in by the Monetized New Millennium shows no signs of relenting.

QE or no QE, ZIRP lumbers on.  They can talk about it all they want, but until they actually let interest rates normalize it’s just talk, simply more hot air spewing from the blathering bogus balloon blowers.  The Fed can keep reflating the captured capital markets via zero cost funds to their preferred multinational banking institutions, they can keep encouraging the selling of naked digital shorts to contain the Gold market, and they can massage all the economic data they want.  However, what they are utterly unable to conjure up out of thin air is legitimate, productive and sustainable economic growth at the ground level for the average U. S. citizen.

It really is quite simple.  It’s all a matter of confidence going forward.

As soon as it becomes self evident that this monetized, synthetically engineered, juiced market economy can not reach escape velocity, unable to establish genuine sustainable economic growth for all of America, the confidence in the monetization paradigm which the financial authorities have unwittingly embraced will be shattered.  At that point, even though the Fed will have lost all credibility, as the economy inevitably stalls they will nevertheless double down and once again try to re-monetize.  Let’s face it, that’s all they really know how to do, well, besides looking the other way as Wall Street’s bought off sheriff.

Clearly, the renewed called for further monetary accommodation will invariably fail once more, and simply exacerbate the real structural economic problem we all know we have.  An economy addicted to and utterly dependent upon cheap debt monetization that invariably brings with it diminishing returns is not a viable regimen, but rather, a lethal injection.

Having lost all faith in the monetary authorities, America will lose confidence in its ability to grow, and the dollar will start to slide as it becomes clear for all to see that the most indebted nation on the face of the earth, without real and sustainable growth, will be unable to pay down its debts in stable valued dollars.  At which point, both foreign and domestic creditors will demand higher interest to finance American treasury obligations.

This is the tipping point where gold will simply explode as our misguided monetary authorities finally face the music and pay the piper, forced to further debase the currency in order to pay off the monumental national debt.  This is the crucial and absolute truth the designated financial cheerleaders conveniently ignore and don’t want you to even think about.  Yet, this is precisely why Gold remains the best performing asset class of the Monetized New Millennium.  To paraphrase the infamous words of Al Pacino; “It’s just getting warmed up here”

The country simply can not sustain higher interest rates, it can only appear to grow via this ongoing monetization abomination.  That Jerry-rigged jig is nearly up, and sure signs of its having jeopardized our sustainable future growth are already popping up in many crucial economic data points.

Just the facts Jackson:

• US real median family income has declined to the level of twenty years ago.

• Labor participation rate has dropped to a 36 year low.

• Total U.S. household debt, currently over $10 trillion, nearly tripled during the new millennium.

• U.S. debt to GDP ratio up over 100% since we entered the new millennium.

• Anemic to flat-line average Real GDP growth throughout the new millennium.

• As for the new millennium inflation results, take a peak at the chart below, it will blow your mind.

Inflated nominal equity prices have certainly been a windfall for the minority of Americans that actually own a stock portfolio, but in the end, they do little for the country as a whole, and the shortsighted effort may well have greatly harmed our nation.  In terms of genuine and sustainable economic growth that lifts U.S. boats of all shapes and sizes, the Fed’s fantasy free funds will end up flooding the ship of state.

The financial sector now compromises nearly 30% of our economy.   In my view, as mass counterfeiters, we are simply ignobly living off the vestiges of a world reserve currency which was so honorably achieved by a once monumentally productive America.  Today, the West prints and parties while the rest of the world works and weeps, that is not a sign of exceptionalism, it’s a sign of weakness and an empire in decadent decline.

So when the next eternally eager equity beaver tells you that gold is nothing but a barbarous relic from monetary ages gone by, you can tell them this;  “As the best performing asset class bar none, Gold officially welcomes you to the Monetized New Millennium”.

The bottom line is that we need genuine productive growth to maintain a stable dollar and pay back our monumental national debt.  The Fed’s Monetization abomination evidently has diminishing returns and eventually will blow up a debased fiat currency………………same as it ever was.

You show me sustainable growth without monetization and I’ll take my bat & ball and go home. Until then, you’re blowing hot air up my backside.

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1pRVBsk Bruno de Landevoisin

As the daily propaganda machine prompts the majority of today’s American youth to go to college “to further their earning potential,” despite the actuality that working alongside a non-high-school-graduate flipping burgers is just as likely an outcome, we thought it only fair to discuss the tradeoff between doing something we love and something that pays the bills. As The Washington Post reports, careers in healthcare and engineering ranked high in both meaningfulness and average pay. At the other end of the spectrum, people who had majored in art and design or humanities fields reported low pay, little sense of purpose, and they were relatively unlikely to say that they’d recommend their major to others.

Click image for large interactive version…

 

And the best and worst in each quadrant…

Source: The Washinton Post

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1pRVAVg Tyler Durden