iftttwall – Page 26701

President Obama Discusses The Manufacturing Renaissance In America – Live Feed

As long as we ignore that data last week, the jobless recovery is mediocre at best… let’s see how great it really is as President Obama explains how exceptional America still is…

As a gentle reminder… last year was not so hot…

The Fed spent over $1 trillion in 2013 (to push the stock market to all time highs) and all we got was… less jobs created than in 2012?

Establishment survey 2012 vs 2013 job change:

And Household survey 2012 vs 2013 job change:

JOIN THE LIVE CHAT

VISIT WHITEHOUSE.GOV

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1gLJ6Mz Tyler Durden

San Francisco Home Sales Plunge To 6-Year Lows

Among the epicenters of the echo-bubble in the US housing ‘recovery’ is the San Francisco (and Bay Area) region. Between the weather, the frenzied IPOs of non-profitable tech firms, and free-money-funded hedge fund speculation, prices have surged – as DataQuick reports up 23.9% YoY in December! However, it seems perhaps the laws of economics may just have some relevance; as this price spike has had the following impact:

*SAN FRANCISCO AREA HOME SALES FELL 12.7% IN DEC VS YR AGO
*DATAQUICK: SAN FRANCISCO AREA DEC HOME SALES DROP TO 6-YR LOW

We are sure this is nothing to worry about. All we need is one marginal home to sell for more than the median $548,500 that San Francisco homes went for and we all feel the wealth effect…right?

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

Cathy Young on Russia's Riot Girls, All Grown Up

Pussy Riot, the Russian punk feminist group that
gained international fame in the summer of 2012 when three of its
members were prosecuted for a protest in Moscow’s main cathedral,
is back in the news. Moving away from their controversial name and
tactics, they announced the creation of a new human rights
organization to advocate for and aid prisoners. Cathy Young says
that with their cleaned-up image and their activism for the
rights of prisoners and defendants, the former Pussy Rioters stand
to gain far more sympathy.

View this article.

from Hit & Run http://reason.com/blog/2014/01/15/cathy-young-on-russias-riot-girls-all-gr
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Cathy Young on Russia’s Riot Girls, All Grown Up

View this article.

from Hit & Run http://reason.com/blog/2014/01/15/cathy-young-on-russias-riot-girls-all-gr
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How a 17-year old made a fortune in Chile

January 15, 2014
Santiago, Chile

In 1892, 17 year old Pascual Baburizza stepped off the boat in what looked like an unwelcoming, arid landscape in the north of Chile.

Baburizza had just spent several weeks on a boat travelling from his home island of Koločep, Croatia, which was then part of the dying Austro-Hungarian empire.

Austria-Hungary was once one of the most powerful empires in the world… replete with grandiose palaces, monuments, and a huge army. It no longer exists.

And by the late 19th century, an unpromising future back in his homeland had forced Baburizza to leave and seek better prospects on the other side of the planet.

He quickly found a business opportunity as the region was going through a potassium nitrate boom. Rather than get into potassium nitrate, though, he sold fish and meat to prospectors in the desert… something like selling shovels to gold miners.

The business went so well that he soon began acquiring property and other companies, and eventually expanded into agriculture.

In 1929, at the age of 54, he retired to live in his palatial Italianate villa in Valparaíso on Chile’s beautiful Pacific coast.

Baburizza’s story wouldn’t be much different today, especially in Chile.

There are legions of enterprising, talented, and ambitious young people out there who have realized that they cannot fulfill their dreams back home in Europe or North America.

They’re looking elsewhere, and Chile is receiving a number of them.

Down here, it’s possible for foreigners to obtain a job, start a business, or invest, all with relative ease. And the immigration laws make it easy for any productive foreigner to move here.

The government’s funding program, Start Up Chile, has been a huge success in attracting talented people and innovative businesses here. And with more talent, innovation, and crosspollination the opportunities are expanding.

Just as in Baburizza’s time, this place is still brimming with business and investment opportunities. I come across them every day.

For example, there are enormous problems to be solved (and money to be made) by catering to the needs of Argentine nationals across the Andes, who are once again getting hosed by their government.

That’s why Bitcoin-related services are taking off here.

Satisfying the appetites of the growingly affluent Chileans is another substantial opportunity. Large parts of Santiago provide a pleasant, first world standard of living.

And yet, the offerings here in the consumer, retail, service, culture, and hospitality businesses still lag behind other places in the world with a similar standard of living.

The high-end service space is waiting to be exploited—anything from fine dining restaurants, private schools, boutique hotels, sophisticated bars, etc.

Across the board, the level of service is something that can be greatly improved upon by anyone coming from a more service-oriented environment.

Every week I meet new foreigners who have arrived and are overwhelmed at the business opportunities here. Back home, the competition (and regulation) would be suffocating.

But here, the startup costs are lower, the competition is almost nonexistent, and the opportunities to excel in a thriving economy are abundant.

Pascual Baburizza didn’t wait for things to get better. In his case, they got worse… until the Austro-Hungarian Empire disappeared altogether.

Today, the leap of faith to be made by changing your geography is much smaller than it was in his time. It’s possible for anyone to do who has the courage and the vision to try.

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Trial begins in 'shaken baby' murder

Defense attorneys say injuries don’t match and father did not shake his son

Defense attorneys for a man accused of shaking his baby to death told a jury yesterday that his infant son’s injuries do not match those from any typical “shaken baby” death.

Attorneys for Jamal Rashad Thomas, 21, said Tuesday that the evidence will show a lack of several specific injuries common to “shaken baby” deaths and the location of the infant’s actual injuries does not correlate with a shaken baby diagnosis.

via The Citizen http://ift.tt/1aGHbsm

Trial begins in ‘shaken baby’ murder

Defense attorneys say injuries don’t match and father did not shake his son

Defense attorneys for a man accused of shaking his baby to death told a jury yesterday that his infant son’s injuries do not match those from any typical “shaken baby” death.

via The Citizen http://ift.tt/1aGHbsm

The Level Of Economic Freedom In The United States Is At An All-Time Low

World economic freedom averaged a record 60.3 out of 100 in 2014, with the U.S. dropping to 12th position, the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom shows. As Bloomberg’s Niraj Shah points out, Ireland is the most economically liberal nation in the euro area and Hong Kong the most liberal in the world. Greece, Italy, France, Cyprus and the U.K. had lower scores than 20 years ago.

But it is the ongoing tumble in the US that is of most relevance and concern…

Submitted by Michael Snyder of The Economic Collapse blog,

Americans have never had less economic freedom than they do right now. The 2014 Index of Economic Freedom has just been released, and it turns out that the level of economic freedom in the United States has now fallen for seven consecutive years. But of course none of us need a report or a survey to tell us that. All we have to do is open our eyes and look around. At this point our entire society is completely dominated by control freaks and bureaucrats. Our economy is literally being suffocated to death by millions of laws, rules and regulations and each year brings a fresh tsunami of red tape. As you will see below, the U.S. government issued more than 80,000 pages of brand new rules and regulations last year on top of what we already had. Even if we didn’t have all of the other monumental economic problems that we are currently facing, all of this bureaucracy alone would be enough to kill our economy.

Yes, every society needs a few basic rules. We would have total chaos if we did not have any laws at all. But in general, when there is more economic freedom there tends to be more economic prosperity. In fact, the greatest period of economic growth in U.S. history was during a time when the federal government was much smaller, there was no Federal Reserve and there was no income tax. Most Americans do not know this.

Those that founded this nation intended for it to be a place where freedom was maximized and government intrusion into our lives was minimized.

If they were still alive today, they would be absolutely horrified. We are literally drowning in red tape.

The photo posted below was shared by U.S. Senator Mike Lee on his Facebook page. Study it carefully…

The following is what he had to say about this photo…

“Behold my display of the 2013 Federal Register. It contains over 80,000 pages of new rules, regulations, and notices all written and passed by unelected bureaucrats. The small stack of papers on top of the display are the laws passed by elected members of Congress and signed into law by the president.”

I didn’t even see the small stack of paper at the top of the cabinet until I read his explanation. Most of the time everyone is so focused on what Congress is doing, but the truth is that the real oppression is happening behind the scenes as unelected federal bureaucrats pump out millions upon millions of useless regulations that are systematically killing our economic freedom.

On Tuesday, an article about the 2014 Index of Economic Freedom was published by the Wall Street Journal. As I mentioned above, the United States has fallen for seven years in a row…

World economic freedom has reached record levels, according to the 2014 Index of Economic Freedom, released Tuesday by the Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal. But after seven straight years of decline, the U.S. has dropped out of the top 10 most economically free countries.

That same article mentioned some of the reasons why the United States is falling…

It’s not hard to see why the U.S. is losing ground. Even marginal tax rates exceeding 43% cannot finance runaway government spending, which has caused the national debt to skyrocket. The Obama administration continues to shackle entire sectors of the economy with regulation, including health care, finance and energy. The intervention impedes both personal freedom and national prosperity.

And of course the results are predictable. Our economy has been steadily declining for many years, and that decline appears to be ready to start picking up speed once again. The following is an excerpt from a recent article by Dave in Denver…

In the latest retail sales report for December, auto sales were nailed – down 1.8%. The only reason overall retail sales from November to December showed a slight “gain” that November’s number was revised lower. Electronics fell off of a cliff. The housing market is about to get crushed. Feedback I’m getting from my Seeking Alpha articles and blog posts on housing from housing market professionals all around the country tells me that the housing market hit a wall at the end of 2013, as I have been forecasting.

What he said about the housing market is definitely true. In recent months, mortgage originations have been falling like a rock. Just check out this chart.

And as I wrote about the other day, there has been absolutely no employment recovery since the end of the last recession. In fact, 1,687,000 fewer Americans have jobs today compared to exactly six years ago even though the population has grown significantly since then.

Unfortunately, these are not just “cyclical problems”. Long ago we abandoned the fundamental principles that once made our economy great, and now we are paying a tremendous price for that.

Posted below is a story that has been circulating all over the Internet for quite some time. It is a fake story. Once again, let me repeat that. This is a fake story. But I think that it does a great job of illustrating what is happening to America as we march toward full-fledged socialism…

An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before, but had recently failed an entire class. That class had insisted that Obama’s socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer.

The professor then said, “OK, we will have an experiment in this class on Obama’s plan”.. All grades will be averaged and everyone will receive the same grade so no one will fail and no one will receive an A…. (substituting grades for dollars – something closer to home and more readily understood by all).

After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy. As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little.

The second test average was a D! No one was happy. When the 3rd test rolled around, the average was an F. As the tests proceeded, the scores never increased as bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else.

To their great surprise, ALL FAILED and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great, but when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed. Could not be any simpler than that.

But of course it would be disingenuous to pin all of the blame for this just on Obama. The truth is that our nation has continued to march toward socialism no matter who has been in the White House and no matter who has been in control of Congress. So if you want to place some of the blame on a “Bush” or a “Clinton” or a “Boehner” or a “Pelosi” please feel free.

And the American people are getting sick and tired of this one party system that has two heads. According to a recent Gallup survey, only 29 percent of all Americans consider themselves to be Democrats right now. And the news was even worse for Republicans. According to that survey, only 24 percent of all Americans consider themselves to be Republicans at this point.

A staggering 45 percent of all Americans now consider themselves to be Independents. Deep down, most Americans know that something is seriously wrong with our nation and that they are being lied to be our politicians and the mainstream media.

Unfortunately, there is very little agreement about how to fix things because Americans do not have a set of shared values that we all agree on anymore.

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

Why the Cops Who Beat Kelly Thomas to Death Should Not Be Tried Again

Like most
people who have watched the fatal beating of Kelly Thomas by
Fullerton police officers, I was dismayed at a jury’s decision
to acquit two
of them. Actually, dismayed does not quite cover it.
Flabbergasted is more like it. It is hard for me to
imagine how 12 people agreed that it was reasonable to view the
appalling violence that Manuel Ramos and Jay Cicinelli
committed in subduing a pleading and apologetic Thomas as
legally justified. At the very least, the verdict seems to reflect
a disturbing deference to police, who too often get away with
actions that would be universally viewed as crimes if carried out
by someone without a badge.

Then again, I did not sit through the trial. I did not hear the
defense dissect the video frame by frame, arguing that at every
step police responded in a way that was appropriate given their
training. Something similar happened in the 1992 trial of the Los
Angeles cops who beat Rodney King. What looked like an obvious case
of police brutality seemed more ambiguous to the jury after it was
broken into its component pieces.

In both cases, I thought the jury got it wrong. But that
conviction, by itself, does not justify trying the defendants again
in the hope that another jury will get it right. That’s what
happened
in the Rodney King case: Two officers who were acquitted by a state
jury in 1992, a decision that triggered riots in the streets of Los
Angeles, were convicted by a federal jury in 1993. It looked a lot
like a justice system capitulating to mob violence. It also looked
a lot like double jeopardy, which the Fifth Amendment notionally
prohibits. It supposedly was not, thanks to the “dual sovereignty”
doctrine, which sanctions serial state and federal prosecutions for
the same actions based on the fiction that relabeling them makes
them into something new.

The understandable outrage provoked by the Kelly Thomas verdict
may likewise lead to federal charges, which his family
would like to see. The FBI, which has been looking into the
case since 2011,
says it will now examine the evidence and testimony presented
at the trial before deciding whether to charge the acquitted
officers with violating Thomas’ civil rights. But that sort of
review cannot answer the question of whether federal charges are
appropriate. Instead it will reveal whether federal prosecutors
might be able to obtain a conviction, which is not the same thing.
In the absence of evidence that the process by which Ramos and
Cicinelli were acquitted was fundamentally corrupt, such that their
trial was a sham—something no one has alleged—the federal
government has no business intervening.

To try Ramos and Cininelli again in anticipation of a different
result is the very definition of double jeopardy, no matter what
the Supreme Court says. That sort of second-guessing invites
arbitrary, politically driven prosecutions that threaten the
innocent as well as the guilty. If it can be wielded against brutal
cops you think should have been convicted, it can be wielded
against defendants whose acquittals were
entirely appropriate. The safeguards that defendants enjoy
under our Constitution, including the ban on double jeopardy, do
not always produce just results, but they are better than the
alternative.

The original Reason TV story on Thomas’ death:

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China Broad Credit Grows By Record RMB17.3 Trillion In 2013; FX Reserves Increase By Record $508 Billion

So much for China’s mission to gradually deleverage in 2013. Despite two near-taper episodes, one in June and one in December, which send short-term lending rates soaring, the PBOC party line has been that the Chinese banking system is slowly but surely issuing less debt as it already has an epic debt overhang, much of which is turning sour at an accelerated pace. One needs to look nowhere else than the country’s declining GDP to visualize the declining marginal utility of every dollar in newly credit loans. And yet following last night’s release of Chinese lending data we found that in 2013, the broadest measure of Chinese credit issuance, the so-called aggregated financing, just hit a record high of 17.3 trillion. So much for the deleveraging myth.

Of course, what is going on in China is more nuanced. Because while official lending indeed dipped, falling 23% in December to RMB 483 billion from 625 billion in November, it was the non-bank lending channel which made up for the difference. As a result Total Social Financing remained flat in December at RMB 1,230 billion. And it was the TSF aggregate that roared to a new all time high in 2013, which simply means that as the central bank and government pretends to clamp down on official lending channels, surplus credit is being released through unofficial pathways, where it is even more difficult to track and quantify.

Summarizing China’s full year credit numbers via BofA: YoY growth of outstanding TSF, bank loans and M2 moderated to 18.8%, 14.1% and 13.6% respectively in December from 19.5%, 14.2% and 14.2% in November. New bank loans rose 8% in 2013 from the previous year to 8.89 trillion yuan, the central bank said.

Broken down by component:

New entrusted loans and trusted loans remained quite resilient in December at RMB276bn and RMB110bn respectively compared to RMB270bn and RMB102bn in November.
New corporate bond dropped to RMB24bn in December from RMB138bn in November. We note that government and coporates delayed their bond issuance or scaled down the size due to the tightened interbank liquidity and jump in interbank rates.
New FX loan rebounded to RMB51bn in December from RMB12bn in November. It is appealing to corporates to borrow FX due to continued RMB appreciation and rising interest rates in China.
Non-discounted bankers acceptance (BA) jumped by RMB168bn in December after staying sluggish for 3 months previously. One possible reason is that corporates used BA to avoid the too high short-term rates. We think the monthly numbers are particularly volatile, and there is no need to overlyinterpret it (This is also the reason why we exclude it from calculating our revised TSF growth).

And the punchline: FX reserves rose rose by US$157bn in 4Q to US$3,820bn at end-2013. In comparison, it was up by US$163bn in 3Q and US$54bn in 2Q13. For the full year of 2013, FX reserves jumped a record high of US$508bn, compared to US$130bn in 2012 and US$334bn in 2011. An initial estimate suggests that “unexplained FX inflows” could fall to about US$22bn in 4Q from US$65bn in 3Q.

Just what China will do (is doing) with this record FX hoard, especially since we know it is barely buying US Treasury paper, is anyone’s guess.

Finally, where China’s (official) credit stock to GDP is projected to grow, here is a chart from Goldman that attempts to forecast just this.