iftttwall

Authored by Shaun Bradley via TheAntiMedia.org,

Visa recently announced its new Cashless Challenge program, which offers $10,000 to restaurants willing to transition into accepting only digital payments.  As the largest credit card processor in the U.S., it’s no surprise Visa is spearheading this campaign.

Under the guise of increasing transparency and efficiency, they’ve partnered with governments around the world to help convert financial systems into cashless models, but their real incentive is the billions of dollars in extra transaction fees it would generate.

“We are declaring war on cash,” Visa spokesman Andy Gerlt proudly proclaimed after the program was announced.

The food-based small businesses Visa is targeting are among those that benefit most from accepting cash from customers. When transactions are for amounts less than $10, the fees charged cut significantly into profits. Only 28% of food trucks currently accept credit card payments because of the huge losses they incur from them. The bribe from Visa may seem appealing up front but will be mostly paid back to them over the next few years in fees alone.

Liz Garner, Vice President of the Merchant Advisory Group, which represents over 100 of the largest businesses in the U.S., explained some of the hurdles faced when dealing with card networks:

“For many businesses – both large and small – the cost of accepting plastic cards and other forms of electronic payments is one of their highest operating costs. Most business owners have no qualms about paying reasonable fees for business services, and they do so every day for items such as cleaning services, security systems, Wi-Fi, and other basic needs. However, they have the ability to negotiate for those services in a fair and transparent marketplace, which they do not with the two major credit and debit card networks….Credit card and debit card fees are dictated directly by Visa and MasterCard and are imposed on the majority of merchants in a take-it-or-leave-it fashion. Most businesses feel that failing to accept these major card brands is not a competitive option so they continue accepting electronic payments even though the costs are squeezing their business, and the inflexible acceptance rules fly in the face of free market enterprise,”

This ongoing push for a cashless society in Europe, Asia, and the Americas is about much more than just phasing out paper money — it’s about central planners solidifying control over the public’s wealth. This ongoing merger of corporate and government interests is the definition of crony capitalism. Regardless of the blatant collusion, the choices individuals make will still ultimately decide the direction for the future. Buying material goods on credit has become a lifestyle for millions, but the long-term costs of those decisions must be understood if there’s any chance for progress.

Americans have made a huge mistake by running up a staggering $1 trillion dollars in credit card debt with an average interest rate of over 16%. Thanks to the Federal Reserve system, companies like Mastercard, Discover, and American Express can issue bonds paying extremely low-interest rates to the investors while simultaneously lending that money out to credit card holders at sky high rates. Companies will always take advantage of opportunities to increase profits, but the people’s willingness to keep borrowing from them is at the core of the problem.

Access to cheap capital has been extended to the largest corporations for over a decade, but when it comes to small businesses or individuals there is a completely different set of standards. The pressure to consistently increase revenues and stock prices has led to an unnatural parasitic relationship between these companies and their customers. Cash is one of the last options that allows people a way to avoid dealing with this kind of shakedown.

More than 30% of all payments in the U.S. are still conducted in cash, but financial intermediaries that charge processing fees are joining with the State and central banks to ensure the public has no room to innovate. Credit and debit cards have been the most convenient way to make purchases for over a decade, but emerging competition is slowly making them irrelevant.

Bitcoin and smart contract platforms have introduced an entirely new marketplace for businesses and individuals outside the dominion of the old financial vanguard. Dozens of large corporations have founded the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance to build support for other developing alternative blockchain technologies aside from Bitcoin. This ongoing evolution towards peer-to-peer payments will eventually doom companies like Visa to the same fate as Blockbuster. Those in power may champion the benefits of going cashless, but going bankless may be the only way out of this extortion matrix.

The efforts by governments and the financial industry to eliminate cash are only going to intensify. Those who adapt to the new paradigm of peer-to-peer payments will thrive, while those who don’t will have their hard earned money extracted to support a failing system. The illusion of banks being safe should have been shattered after the 2008 crisis, but eventually, the reality of how unstable the current institutions are will become apparent. Educating entrepreneurs and businesses on the benefits of Bitcoin and other decentralized options is the only way to shift this economy away from the control of central planners and towards a free and voluntary market.

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After a quiet few hours contemplating the National Scout Jamboree, President Trump just unleashed ‘hell’ once again at Jeff Bezos, The Washington Post, and Amazon.com.

President Trump took his first shot at what appears to be referencing an article about his decision to end a CIA program that backed Syrian rebels. The Post reported last week that Trump shuttered a CIA program to support Syrian rebels in the fight against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in a major victory for Russia. Russian officials had reportedly seen the program as an attack on the country’s interests…

The Amazon Washington Post fabricated the facts on my ending massive, dangerous, and wasteful payments to Syrian rebels fighting Assad…..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 25, 2017

Which seemed to stir him up even more, taking a shot at CNN and once again reminding his followers of Amazon’s tax position…

So many stories about me in the @washingtonpost are Fake News. They are as bad as ratings challenged @CNN. Lobbyist for Amazon and taxes?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 25, 2017

Which then rapidly escalated to what could – by some – be seen as a threat…

Is Fake News Washington Post being used as a lobbyist weapon against Congress to keep Politicians from looking into Amazon no-tax monopoly?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 25, 2017

It is not the first time that Trump has suggested that Amazon should be paying more than it currently does in taxes. In a speech outlining his 100-day action plan last October in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Trump remarked that “Amazon, which through its ownership controls the Washington Post, should be paying massive taxes but it’s not paying. It’s a very unfair playing field and you see what that’s doing to department stores all over the country.”

It’s unclear exactly what tax issue Trump was referring to in his criticism of Amazon, the e-commerce giant has been collecting sales taxes in all states that have a sales tax since April 1. States are generally barred from requiring remote sellers to collect sales taxes unless they have a physical presence in the state under a 1992 Supreme Court ruling. The issue has split Republicans in Congress, with some supporting legislation that would give states more collection authority and others pushing to codify the Supreme Court ruling.

With Jeff Bezos now a few ticks away from becoming the richest man in the world, one wonders if the only chance a relatively ‘poor’ Donald Trump has is under the guise of government to go after the serial propagandist newspaper.

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When the chief of a country's biggest stock exchange is warning that the central bank is buying too many equities, then you know you have a problem. Japan Exchange Group Inc. Chief Executive Officer Akira Kiyota has become the latest member of Japan’s financial establishment to publicly criticize the BOJ for its longrunning ETF buying program, according to Bloomberg.

To the litany of reasons why the program is bad for markets, the two most obvious biggest being that the bank is artificially inflating valuations while hurting efforts to make public companies more efficient, Kiyota, whose company operates the Tokyo Stock Exchange, the country's biggest, has added one more: That the central bank’s buying artificially suppresses volatility, which makes traders less willing to trade.

“It’s not good in the long run,” Kiyota said in an interview in Tokyo last week. “If you keep buying 6 trillion yen a year, that means constant distortion.”

He later said that “The BOJ buying ETFs during the market’s infancy is welcome." But “ETFs need to be able to grow as a market by themselves, without the BOJ’s help.”

As recently as September, Kiyota said he saw no problem with the ETF buys, believing that the Japanese equity market’s capitalization of around 500 trillion yen would be too large for the central bank’s purchases to distort the market and that, even if they did, the central bank would find a way to handle it. But then he took a closer look at trading volumes on the exchange.

“A gauge tracking volatility on the Nikkei 225 has been hovering near 12-year lows, hitting the least since July 2005 on Friday. Kiyota points to how the value of shares changing hands on the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange fell below 2 trillion yen on some days last quarter, even as he acknowledged the BOJ buying “supports” stock prices.

 

“The stock index levels themselves might be good, but Japan’s cash market isn’t really active,” Kiyota said. “When volatility decreases, trading volume also shrinks.”

As Bloomberg explains, Kiyota’s outburst is notable not just for his criticisms but for the fact that he chose to spoke out. Members of Japan’s financial establishment rarely criticize other parts of the establishment, and it could be a sign that public opinion is turning against BOJ Gov. Haruhiko Kuroa’s QQE efforts. Bloomberg recently reported that some inside the BOJ were said to be concerned about the program’s sustainability.

Through its ETF-buying program, which began in 2010, the BOJ has become the single largest whale operating in the country’s equity market. Last July, the central bank opted to double the size of the program to 6 trillion yen (or $54 billion) from 3 trillion yen. As of the end of June, the BOJ owned about 71 percent of all shares in Japan-listed ETFs at the end of June, according to a Bloomberg analysis of data from the central bank and Japan’s Investment Trusts Association. That’s equivalent to about 2.5 percent of Japanese stock market capitalization. By the end of this year, the central bank will have become the top shareholder in 55 of the companies included in Japan’s main stock index, the Nikkei 225.

Furthermore, the Financial Times recently presented evidence of the BOJ’s willingness to step in and buy the dips – the exact practice that Kiyota is criticizing – by showing that the central bank stepped in on half of the market’s down days between 2013 and 2017. Of the 1,038 business days between April 2013 and March 2017, there were 449 sessions where the market was down: the BOJ bought during more than half of them.

While the BOJ doesn’t buy individual shares directly, it’s the ultimate owner of stakes purchased through ETFs. Estimates of the central bank’s underlying holdings can be gleaned from the BOJ’s public records, regulatory filings by companies and ETF managers, and statistics from the Investment Trusts Association of Japan.

Last week, the BOJ kept monetary policy, including the ETF program, unchanged after the close of its two-day policy meeting, as was widely expected.

Critics complain that the BOJ purchases are giving a free ride to poorly-run firms and crowding out shareholders who would otherwise push for better corporate governance. But a far more substantial question is often ignored: Just how will the BOJ ever unwind its unprecedented holdings of not only bonds, which are now roughly 100% of Japan's GDP, but also of stocks, without crashing both markets?
 

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Content originally published at iBankCoin.com

 

In a brazen attempt at honesty, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D) of Hawaii went on Tucker Carlson tonight and declared the US was addicted to regime change and that we armed and funded Al Qaeda in Syria.

In late 2016, Gabbard introduced the ‘Stop Funding Terrorist Act‘ to Congress — but hardly anyone on the left or on the neocon right listened. Over the course of the past two years, we’ve seen Russia on the right side of history, aiding the only legitimate government in Syria — which has provided the media with endless demonization campaigns depicting both Assad and Putin as monsters, who both gassed innocents and bombed out hospitals, whilst ignoring the horrors and the blind hatred of the people attempting to overthrow Assad.

The stated goal of Putin’s meddling in Syria was to protect Russian’s sole Mediterranean port and aid an ally of Russia who has been loyal to the Kremlin for decades. US policy has been soft on ISIS and hard on Assad, seeking to support so called ‘moderate rebels’ to overthrow him. The most important fallacy about these ‘moderate rebels’ is that they are, in fact, an Al Qaeda spinoff, working in conjunction with ISIS to install the Caliphate in Syria. In other words, we’re now supporting the same people who allegedly attacked us on 9/11.

When Trump ended the brainless CIA project to arm and fund terrorists in Syria, the media painted it as ceding to the demands of Putin. However, what our lawmakers have failed to do is sell America on the idea of extended war in Syria, which would undoubtedly cost inordinate amounts of money and lives. Instead, they simply point towards isolated events to monsterize Assad and draw on the feeble emotional strings of the American normie.

If US policy is to not negotiate with terrorists, then why the heck are we arming them? Let the regional players sort Syria out and leave us the hell out of it.

One of the only sane democrats, Tulsi Gabbard, weighs in.

via http://ift.tt/2uuWylJ The_Real_Fly

Authored by Adam Sabes via CampusReform.org,

The University of California, Berkeley will soon add “laser hair removal” and “fertility preservation” to the list of “transgender student services” covered by its student health insurance plan.

According to The Daily Californian, the two new services will be officially added on August 1, complementing existing services for transgender students that are already covered, including “gender confirmation (reassignment) surgery,” “breast augmentation (MTF top surgery),” “female to male top surgery,” “hormone therapy,” and more.

Bahar Navab, who manages the Student Health Insurance Plan (SHIP) for University Health Services, explained that fertility damage is a common side-effect of the hormones that some transgender individuals take, and that fertility preservation treatments enable those individuals to become pregnant or produce sperm without having to stop taking the hormones.

Navab also pointed out that most health insurance plans do not cover services such as “male-to-female top surgery” and hair removal because they consider them cosmetic procedures, whereas Berkeley’s plan views them as treatments for “gender dysphoria,” though they will also be offered to student with other medical necessities.

“Our Student Health Insurance Advisory Committee (SHIAC) had discussed adding these benefits for transgender patients two years ago,” Kim LaPean, communications manager at University Health Services Tang Center, told Campus Reform.

 

“When we brought the benefit additions back up for discussion with SHIAC this past year, the student representatives expressed their support and requested to expand the benefits to anyone with medical necessity as well (e.g. a patient with ovarian cancer may who may also want fertility preservation).”

LaPean acknowledged that “less than 0.3% of utilizing members currently receive transgender surgery,” a figure that university officials do not expect to increase significantly, but said “it’s important to reiterate that the expanded benefits apply to anyone with medical necessity as well (e.g. a patient with ovarian cancer may who may also want fertility preservation).”

"There are an infinite number of ways that someone can identify in regard to gender,” asserted Laura Alie, chair of the Transgender Care Team at the UHS Tang Center, told Berkeley’s News department.

 

“It’s our goal to make sure trans or gender-nonconforming students feel completely at home in the Tang Center, no matter what department they go to.”

Recently-elected student senator Juniperangelica Cordova, however, told The Daily Cal that while she thinks the university has been doing “a good job” of accommodating transgender students such as herself, she plans to work with the Tang Center to go even further.

“It’s a matter of making sure that everyone who works at Tang is up-to-date in terms of using our names and our pronouns,” she said.

 

“I’m excited to see new procedures and new coverage being added and I’m looking forward to working with Tang this year in making sure trans folks are healthy.”

Navab indicated openness to Cordova’s goals, saying, “Future benefit additions will be considered if they are requested by our clients and SHIAC.”

According to an updated health insurance plan, which was revised in 2016 to incorporate several services for transgender students, students can pay as little as 10 percent of the cost of most transgender services, including “top surgery,” “bottom surgery,” and hormone therapy.

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“Look, Russia!”

 

Source: MichaelPRamirez.com

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Authored by Jeff Thomas via InternationalMan.com,

In my lifetime, I’ve had the misfortune of being present in two major natural disasters and one violent social crisis. Each taught me valuable lessons.

In the aftermath of a natural disaster, there’s the danger of the loss of shelter, services, and food. In most cases, people who experience the loss of shelter and services realise that “things are bad all around” and they tend to do the best they can, accepting that life will be hard for a period of time.

Food is a different matter. People, no matter how civilized, tend to panic if they become uncertain as to when they will next be able to eat. And, not surprisingly, this panic is exacerbated if they have dependents, particularly children who are saying, fearfully, “Daddy, I’m hungry.” As Henry Lewis said in 1906, “There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy.” Quite so.

Intelligent, educated, otherwise peaceful people can be driven to violence and even murder if the likelihood of future meals becomes uncertain. This has been the cause of spontaneous riots throughout history.

But this is not the only cause of riots. In the post-1960 period in the West, a new phenomenon has occurred that has steadily grown: Governments and the halls of higher education have increasingly taught people that they are “entitled.” Governments have been guilty of this for millennia, beginning at least as early as the “bread and circuses” of ancient Rome. It’s a way for governments to get people to be dependent upon them and thereby to do their bidding. But, since the 1960s, it’s become a systemic norm.

And it always ends in the same way. The false economy of “free stuff” eventually devolves into overtaxation and economic collapse. When it does, people are more likely to riot, as the entitlements are “owed” to them. In today’s world, however, this condition has peaked far beyond what the world has ever seen before.

Increasingly, those who are angry that the free stuff they are receiving is not enough to placate them take to the streets. Typically, they throw rocks and Molotov cocktails, burn cars at random, destroy buildings, and loot stores. All of this activity, of course, does not make it more likely that they will receive more free stuff from the authorities who presumably owe it to them. Instead, it victimizes those who have lived lawfully and with less dependence upon the state.

Riots occur for a great variety of reasons.

The trigger can be something as absurd as in the 2011 Vancouver, Canada riot, in which locals became infuriated over the loss of a hockey game. Over 140 people were injured and over 5 million dollars in damage was done in a five-hour period. That last bit of information should be emphasized, as the fans had plenty of time to calm down after their team’s loss, but the rage, once ignited, became self-regenerating. This is one of the important dynamics of a riot that’s often overlooked. The riot, which may begin as a reaction to an event, becomes the event and is continued for its own sake.

In the same year, thousands of people rioted in London. The trigger was more serious this time: the shooting of a local man by a policeman. (Although the man had fired on police prior to being shot himself, this fact failed to deter rioters.) The riots, like most irrational retaliations, only served to cause more deaths and injuries. The riots lasted a full five days over a dozen London boroughs, then ignited further in a dozen other cities. Over £200 million in damages occurred, and over 3,400 crimes were logged.

There’s another dynamic that’s not revealed as it’s seen from the safety of our television screens, and that is the spontaneity of a riot. For anyone who has lived through a riot, as I have, the lesson is an indelible one.

Riots, on occasion, are planned and, once they begin, there are occasions in which individuals capitalize on them (such as the riots in Ferguson, Missouri, where hired rioters were bussed in). But, in most cases, they’re spontaneous. They begin as a reaction to pent-up anger. (In the Vancouver incident, the anger was building even before the hockey game had ended, but many riots, especially socially related riots, are often the result of many years of pent-up anger.)

The riot itself is generally a small spark that’s added to the existing anger and is often related to a specific event, such as the riots in US cities the night Martin Luther King Jr. was shot in 1968.

Once started, riots, for the most part, are entirely unplanned and rely on random acts of violence. Within minutes of the first violent act, entire neighbourhoods spontaneously ignite. As in the London riots, the same incident can spark off multiple riots, miles from each other.

A third often misunderstood dynamic is uncontrollability. Police can race to the centre of a riot and, in some cases, quell the rioters, but, as the riot is not “organized,” the rioters have merely to stop whatever they’re doing and, for the moment, they cease to be participants. If police move on to other riot locations, the rioters who had been temporarily inactive could begin to riot again. Even if police are successful in quelling all violent activity in a neighbourhood, they could receive a radio call directing them to a new riot location, just blocks away.

In my own experience, new locations of violence erupting seemed to be going off all around the city, like popcorn. Before one could be quelled, others would pop up. The incidents were therefore unstoppable by authorities.

Warfare has traditionally been approached from the standpoint that one army faces another and they fight until one surrenders. Guerilla warfare, however, has always proven unwinnable, as long as the guerillas are fighting on their home turf. Rioters have the same advantage as, say, an armed sheepherder in Afghanistan or a rice farmer in Vietnam. The violence only ends when all rioters have decided they’ve had enough.

Of course we’d hope that rioters would learn from their crimes, but this is rarely the case. In the London riots of 2011, rioters burned down the local Sainsbury’s in their own neighbourhood. The next day, the same people were on the streets, in front of the television cameras, angrily stating that their grocery store was now gone and their children needed food. They demanded that the government truck in free food as an emergency measure and, not surprisingly, that’s what they got.

This is exemplary of the fact that, in every case, reason is abandoned and anger rules the day. No lessons are learned by the rioters. In fact, months later, rioters have often been quoted as saying, “We showed ’em.”

So, what can we take away here? First, and most importantly, that riots are by their very nature spontaneous, mindless, and, for the most part, uncontrollable. Second, if an individual lives in or near a location where sociopolitical tension is on the increase, he is living in danger. The spontaneity of a riot means that he cannot prepare for it. If it arrives on his doorstep, or if he’s on the street at the time when it occurs, he may lose everything, including his life.

Since riots are mindless, rioters cannot be reasoned with. There’s no talking your way out of the danger, once it has reached you. Finally, as riots cannot effectively be controlled, the one and only defense against them is to conclude that, if one lives in an area where socioeconomic conditions indicate that the location (whether it be a neighbourhood or even an entire country) is unsafe, it may be time to move.

The key here is that the move occur before violence erupts. Once it has, it’s too late.

*  *  *

For months, we’ve been warning readers about the unprecedented global financial crisis that looms ahead. This inevitable crisis will catch the American masses unprepared… making riots a virtual certainty. Investors should expect chaos all around. New York Times best-selling author Doug Casey and his team can show you how to protect yourself. Click here for the details.

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The staggering inflation rates of college tuition over the past couple of decades has been a frequent topic for us.  As the Wall Street Journal notes today, the cost of educating our snowflakes has soared since the early 90’s and outstripped overall inflation by nearly 4x.  It seems that the liberal indoctrination of an entire generation is very expensive business.

U.S. college tuition is growing at the slowest pace in decades, following a nearly 400% rise over the past three decades that fueled middle class anxieties and a surge in student debt.

 

Tuition at college and graduate school—after scholarships and grants are factored in—rose 1.9% in the year through June, broadly in line with overall inflation, Labor Department figures show. By contrast from 1990 through last year, tuition grew an average 6% a year, more than double the rate of inflation. In that time, the average annual cost for a four-year private college, including living expenses, rose 161% to about $27,500, according to the College Board.

 

Some schools are offering more discounts and cutting prices.

Alas, there may be hope yet as for the first time in nearly 30 years college tuition rates in 2016 only increased at approximately the same rate as overall inflation…shocking.

 

Of course, it’s no surprise how we got here.  The combination of yet another massive debt bubble in student loans, rising government subsidies and soaring demand from a generation of snowflakes programmed to believe their self-worth is directly correlated to how much money their parents drop on their anthropology degree resulted in a predictable supply/demand imbalance and massive prices increases.

 

So, what caused the 2016 slowdown?  Among other things, Congress decided to stop arbitrarily hiking the student loan caps back in 2008.

Another factor: Congress last increased the maximum amount undergraduates could borrow from the government in 2008. Some economists have concluded schools raise prices along with increases in federal financial aid. A clampdown on aid, in turn, could limit the ability of schools to charge more.

Meanwhile, as anyone who has ever invested in commodity markets is undoubtedly aware, supply/demand gaps tend to normalize over the long-term.  And, with college’s extracting massive price increases year after year, it should be little surprise that the number of colleges looking to get in on the action also soared.

Abundant supply is running up against demand constraints. The number of two-year and four-year colleges increased 33% between 1990 and 2012 to 4,726, Education Department data show. But college enrollment is down more than 4% from a peak in 2010, partly because a healthy job market means fewer people are going back to school to learn new skills.

 

Some of these trends may persist. The number of high-school graduates is projected to remain flat through 2023, according to an analysis by the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. White graduates, the most likely among races to attend college, are expected to decline over this period.

 

“The competition is bigger now than it has been, and I think we have more informed consumers,” said Sarah Kottich, chief financial officer at College of Saint Mary in Omaha, Neb.

Of course, it could also be that students and their parents are finally realizing that that silly little piece of paper passed out at graduation ceremonies every year may not be worth as much as it used to be. 

For now, the shakeout is hitting private schools hardest. For-profit trade schools and many private nonprofit colleges are under pressure to justify high prices, particularly because some graduates are failing to land high-paying jobs. The broad decline in undergraduate enrollment since 2010 has been concentrated mostly among small nonprofit colleges, for-profit trade schools and public community colleges, federal data show.

 

Izzi Moraschi, 19 years old, said she chose Rosemont College, a small private college near Philadelphia, after seeing a flier advertising a sharp tuition reduction. She wanted to reduce the burden on her parents.

 

Combined, she and her parents took out $15,800 in federal loans to cover her first year’s tuition. “It was just really important for me that I was able to make it so that my parents wouldn’t have to pay anything out of pocket,” said Ms. Moraschi, now a sophomore, who said she plans to pay back her parents’ portion of the loan.

 

Sharon Hirsh, Rosemont’s president, said her school reduced tuition to ease concerns of middle-income students, who seem more willing to choose public schools to save money.

 

“We are surrounded by private institutions that are openly talking about right-sizing,” Ms. Hirsh said. “Families have gotten to a point where they cannot consider a private institution with a high price.”

And, since we doubt anyone will go through the hassle of actually running the math, we decided to take a quick look at the return on invested capital of a college education.

First, according to Quora.com, attending college these days can cost anywhere from $22,500 per year for a public, in-state university to $75,000 for a private education.  So, lets just assume that, on average, our snowflakes are spending $30,000 per year on a 4-year bachelor, or $120,000.

• Attend a public in-state university for four years, living on campus ($22,500 per year for four years) for $90,000
• Attend a public out-of-state college for four years:  $35,000 per year for four years for a total of $140,000
• Attend a private four year college in an expensive area like Manhattan at $75,000 per year for a total of $300,000

So what do they get for that?  Well, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics, that $120,000 degree in Anthropology will earn you roughly $464 extra dollars per week or ~$24,000 per year.

 

So, doing some quick math, we find that $24,000 tax-effected at a 25% tax rate equals about $18,000 of extra annual earnings for a college grad and implies a 15% return on invested capital. 

Not bad…but, unfortunately, the story doesn’t end there.  You see, by choosing the college route our snowflakes not only incur the cost of college, in the form of massive student loans, but also forgo 4 years of earnings, which equates to roughly $110,000 ($692*52*.75) on a tax-effected basis. 

So lumping in that opportunity cost brings the true average cost of that Anthro degree up closer to $250,000, implying a roughly 7.2% ROIC. 

Of course, that’s assuming that young Tripp Hollingsworth III actually graduates in 4 years and then promptly finds a job shortly thereafter rather than returning to mom’s basement.

So you decide, is a 7.2% return on invested capital sufficient to take on a life time of debt?  

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Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Once the shared memories of these values are lost, the Empire ceases to exist; there is nothing left to reform or renew.

Is renewal / recovery from systemic decline possible? The history of the Roman Empire is a potentially insightful place to start looking for answers. As long-time readers know, I've been studying both the Western and Eastern (Byzantine) Roman Empires over the past few years.

Both Western and Eastern Roman Empires faced existential crises that very nearly dissolved the empires hundreds of years before their terminal declines. The Western Roman Empire, beset by the overlapping crises of invasion, civil war, plague and economic upheaval, nearly collapsed in the third century C.E. (Christian Era, what was previously A.D.) — 235 to 284 C.E., fully two hundred years before its final dissolution in the fifth century (circa 476 C.E.).

Meanwhile, the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantine Empire) faced similar crises in the seventh and eighth centuries, as its capital of Constantinople was besieged by the Persians in 626 C.E. and the Arab caliphate in 674 C.E. and again in 717 C.E. The invasions which preceded the sieges stripped the empire of wealthy territories and the income those lands produced.

In both cases, the Empire not only survived but recovered a substantial measure of its former resilience and stability. Fortune delivered strong leadership at the critical moment: leadership that was able to protect itself from petty, self-aggrandizing domestic rivals, force the reorganization of failed, self-serving bureaucracies, inspire the populace to make the necessary sacrifices for the common good, win decisive military victories that ended the threat of invasion, and generate a moral claim to leadership via personal rectitude and/or participation in a religious revival.

Absent such strong, stable, legitimate leadership, neither empire would have survived their existential crisis.

But strong leadership alone isn't enough. A strong military leader can win battles, and a strong political leader can aggregate power, but these are merely steps to the ultimate goal of strong leadership, which is to reform the Imperial system so it once again serves the needs of the entire Empire rather than just the greed of the few at the top of the wealth-power pyramid.

The system itself must still hold the potential to be reformed. If the systems of communication, trade, control and finance have all eroded beyond the point of no return, then the victories of a strong leader die with that leader.

The army must still have the means to recruit new legions, the Treasury must still have a system to collect tax revenues, the central leadership must have a way to communicate with far-flung commanders and local leaders, and so on.

The collective shared memory of imperial cohesion and competence must still exist in the general populace. Any political group identity, be it tribe, village, nation or empire, is anchored by a shared awareness of membership, i.e. the rights and responsibilities of belonging, and a collective memory of the group / empire as a functioning whole that served the many and not just the few.

Once the shared memory of the Empire as a functioning whole is lost, the entire notion of empire is lost.

The leadership in these existential crises of the third century C.E. in the West and the eighth century in the East could still draw upon a collective memory of a functioning empire. Residents had not yet lost the shared memory of serving in the army, of paying taxes, of stable trade protected by the Empire, of a stable Imperial currency, and so on.

Once the shared memories of these values are lost, the Empire ceases to exist; there is nothing left to reform or renew.

We are far down the road to a system that serves the few at the expense of the many. The collective memory of a system that once served the common good is fading. Strong leadership can still wrest popular political power from the self-serving elites atop the wealth-power pyramid and wield this political power to reform the system so it serves the many instead of just the few, but the window for such reform /renewal is closing fast.

In another decade, a living system that served the common good rather than just the interests of a few will be as distant as the shattered monuments of ancient Rome.

via http://ift.tt/2vCU2tP Tyler Durden

In a comment sure to stir up questions over dollar hegemony (and new world order conspiracy thoughts), IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde admitted during an event today in Washington that The International Monetary Fund could be based in Beijing in a decade.

As Reuters reports, Lagarde said that such a move was "a possibility" because the Fund will need to increase the representation of major emerging markets as their economies grow larger and more influential.

"Which might very well mean, that if we have this conversation in 10 years' time…we might not be sitting in Washington, D.C. We'll do it in our Beijing head office," Lagarde said.

Lagarde's comments build on questions raised in May on The IMF's push for World Money… Yi Gang, the Deputy Governor of the People’s Bank of China disclosed to the IMF panel that,

“China has started reporting our foreign official reserves, balance of payment reports, and the international investment position reports.”

 

“All of these reports, now, in China are published in U.S dollars, SDR and Renminbi rates… I think that has the advantage of reducing the negative impact of negative liquidity on your assets.”

What that means in real terms is that China views the opportunity of being a part of the exclusive world money club as an opportunity to diversify away from the U.S dollar.

The Bank of China official took that message even further saying that he hopes that China could lead in world money operations by integrating it into the private sector.

“If more and more people, companies and the market use SDR as unit of accounts – that would generate more activity in the market with focus on the MSDR. [The hope would be] that they could create more products and market infrastructures that would be available for trade products to be denominated in SDR.”

The People’s Bank of China official referenced how this trend was already underway. Just last year Standard Chartered bank began to maintain accounts in SDR’s. “In terms of the first and secondary markets they will develop fairly well.”

Perhaps the most important segment that the Chinese official signaled was his reference that, “The Official Reserve SDR (OSDR) that allocation from the IMF is very important. [This allows] Central Banks to make the SDR an official asset, and easier for them to convert that asset into the reserve currency they need.”

What that means is that China will become an even greater player in the world money market.

Nomi Prins, an economist and historian stated when analyzing China’s economic positioning, “The expanding SDR basket is as much a political power play as it is about increasing the number of reserve currencies for central banks for financial purposes.”

*  *  *

As a reminder, the IMF's bylaws call for the institution's head office to be located in the largest member economy and since the IMF was launched in 1945, that has always been the United States, which currently has an effective veto over IMF decisions with a 16.5 percent share of its board votes.

But, as Reuters notes, economists estimate that China, with growth rates forecast above 6 percent, will likely overtake U.S. gross domestic product sometime over the next decade to become the world's largest economy in nominal terms.

 

Some, including the IMF, have argued that China already contributes more to global growth on a purchasing power parity basis, which adjusts for differences in prices.

The IMF last revised its quota system, or voting structure in 2010, but is set to launch another review next year.

Nothing lasts forever…

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