iftttwall – Page 27371

But, Stocks Are Cheap… Right?

Even as stock prices have corrected in recent weeks with only 36% of stocks having positive performance over the last 200 days and the average stock 19% from its one year high, we are reminded that stock valuations are still stretched pretty much everywhere.

In the charts below we show the trusty price to cash flow ratio for the median stock in the developed world regions and also in the EMs.

We highlight that even in areas of the market that have underperformed dramatically over the last four years (namely EM and Europe) the price to cash flow ratio for the median stock is still quite elevated relative to history.

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1omYQy7 Tyler Durden

Abandoned Allies: Afghan Interpreters Left Behind By US

Last Week
Tonight with John Oliver recently featured a segment about the
US abandonment of its Afghan interpreters. As Oliver notes, these
Afghan interpreters served the US government by fulfilling the much
needed role as a liaison between the military and local Afghan
populations. They made themselves targets of the Taliban by doing
so. Although promised a US visa should their lives become
endangered, red tape is making it impossible for many to leave
their country.

Reason TV had the story first, releasing a documentary in July
featuring
Janis Shinwary, an Afghan interpreter who escaped Afghanistan
and is now speaking out on behalf of the interpreters left
behind.

Original text below. Initially published on July 22, 2014:

“I was getting letters from Taliban, they were showing
up at my house and everywhere. They were telling me that they were
going to kill me or a member of my family, or kidnap my son,”
says Janis
Shinwari, a former Afghan interpreter for the American
military.

The U.S. military relies heavily on locals in Afghanistan and Iraq
to serve as interpreters. The Iraqi Refugee Assistance
Project estimates that 50,000
Iraqi and Afghan nationals served as U.S. military
interpreters over the past decade-plus.

Interpreters provide one of the most crucial roles in a military
unit—without them, service members would not be able to communicate
with local populations. It’s also one of the most dangerous roles.
In Afghanistan, the Taliban labels interpreters traitors and has no
compunction about killing them and their loved ones.

“Interpreters have become a very big target of the Taliban and Al
Queda,” says Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.). “There’s been a lot of
beheadings of people that have worked with the
West.”

The U.S. was able to recruit interpreters by promising them
American visas when the war ended. “If we completely pull out of
Afghanistan and we don’t bring these interpreters back,” says
Kinzinger, “they’re going to be killed. Their families are being
killed too. Their houses are being burned down. It is very messy
over there.”

An officer in the Air National Guard and a veteran of Iraq and
Afghanistan, Kinzinger is pushing Congress to extend
and amend the Afghan
Special Immigrant Visa Program. The program was established in
2009 to give visas to Afghan nationals who helped the U.S.
military. The program has been extremely inefficient and it
can take years for an application to be processed. From 2009
to 2013, Congress said 7,500 visas could be issued but the State
Department approved only 2,000.

“A lot of it is because of bureaucratic wrangling,” says Kinzinger.
“While we do need to have good background checks and we do need to
be cautious about this, its been way too slow at this point and a
lot of translators have given their lives in the wait.”

The State Department has responded to the criticism by improving
the processing time. So far in 2014, approximately 2,300
Afghans received visas out of an allocation limit of
3,000. But State expects to run out of allocated visas within a few
weeks and the whole program expires in September, leaving
6,000 applicants in limbo.

Secretary of State John Kerry has appealed
to Congress to extend the program and to grant more visas
for the remainder of the fiscal year, which ends on September
30.
If left behind, many interpreters will die at the hands of the
Taliban. Janis Shinwari was able to escape that fate and moved to
Virginia in October with his wife and two children. His visa came
largely due to the efforts of Army Capt. Matt Zeller, whose life he
saved (Shinwari is credited with saving the lives of at least four
other American soldiers). In 2008, Zeller returned to the U.S.
while Shinwari stayed in Afghanistan to continue his work as an
interpreter.

“It was the hardest goodbye I’ve ever had in my life,” says Zeller.
“If he had been an American he would have been getting on that
plane with us. It didn’t feel right.”
Zeller relentlessly pressured the State Department to issue
Shinwari his visa. He eventually succeeded and now the two friends
are focused on not only bringing more interpreters to America but
also providing food, shelter, and job opportunities to them once
they arrive through Zeller’s nonprofit, No One Left Behind.

Increasing and extending the
visa program is “the right thing to do,” says Rep. Kinzinger, who
stresses not just the promises the U.S. made in the past but how
abandoning local partners will affect operations in future
wars. ”America is going to find itself in another war one
day—it’s a reality. And then if we go in and we try to bring the
local population on our side, and they look at history and look at
all the promises we made in the past that we didn’t follow through
[on], that harms our national security because we can’t convince
them that America stands by its word.”

About 6 minutes.
Produced by Amanda Winkler. Camera by Joshua Swain, Tracy
Oppenheimer, and Winkler. Narrated by Todd Krainin.
Scroll below for downloadable versions and subscribe
to Reason
TV‘s YouTube channelto receive automatic notifications
when new videos go live.
Music by The Abbasi Brothers.

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021: All the resources already exist for you to take back your freedom

For every crisis that strikes, the government springs up to “save” us.

Introducing new bureaucratic agencies or an “Ebola Tsar” as Obama has just done, they are constantly adding to the already over-bloated expanse of government today.

But when a real danger happens, they completely fail. Repeatedly.

The reality is, we don’t need the government to save us from anything. All the tools and technology that are necessary for society to function without government are there.

I invite you to listen to this week’s podcast, where I discuss some of the tools that are immediately available to you as you take back your freedom.

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Living The Grecovery Dream: Two Jobless Parents, Two Kids, One Cat All Living In A Car

Via KeepTalkingGreece blog,

Squeezed between steering wheel, handbrake, door and dashboard, Katerina reads in her history book, takes notes for school. Next to her, on the driver’s seat, cat Eddy stares right in the camera lens. It may look like a cute snapshot on a sunny day, if it wasn’t for a sad detail: a withering spring stuck in a roll of toilet paper. A distinctive memory of a former normal life that turned into a grim reality for a family of four.

At night the seat where Katerina sits during the day turns into a bed for her sister Fay. Cat Eddy cuddles with Katerina on the back seat. Father Nikos and mother Maria sleep in shifts on the driver’s seat. When the one parent is in the car, the other spends the night on a bench of the park where the car has been parked, on a side road of Irakleio suburb of West Athens. “It’s dangerous when it gets dark,” Maria says “we have to watch out.”

With both parents without a job and all savings already spent, the family of four has been living in the uncomfortable environment of an old car for the last two weeks. They were evicted from the home they were renting due to a mountain of outstanding debts to the landlord and utility companies.

Nikos and Maria at their late 40′s, Fay and Katerina aged 16 and 14, packed a few things, took their pet in their arms and made their old car their new home.

“The girls started to cry when we told them that we’re going to live in the car,” Maria told the reporter of Sunday newspaper Proto Thema that revealed the story. “The first night in the car was the most difficult, psychologically,” Maria adds with a trembling voice.

“We had our decent home, our cooked food, we offered our kids what they needed. I could never think that I will end up like that at my 49. We knew that times are tough, but never thought that we will end up on the street,” Maria said.

It’s Greece’s new homeless: decent families who lost everything due to economic crisis and austerity measures and they live their own hell in social isolation in a collapsed welfare state.

Decent families who live from charity aid, food packages, soup kitchens or neighbors’ help.

Decent families who cannot even enjoy a warm bed and a proper shower, a home-cooked meal, a flower in the vase.

The story of the family is common to many Greek households with no extraordinary means and salaries. Their economic decline started in 2012, when the bakery where Nikos was working closed down. Maria, who was working as a school traffic woman, was fired. The family managed to survive using the thin compensation Nikos received after being fired. Both parents tried to find new jobs but without result. Soon all the money available for the family was vanished.

In Greece of Samaras’ success story and IMF’s wrong calculations, there are hardly job vacancies available after four full years of recession.

According to official statistics, 27 percent, that is 1.3 million people are unemployed, the majority of them long-term jobless. These numbers refer only to employees and not to self-employed or free-lancers. Unemployment allowance is just 365 euro per month for the duration of total 12 months independently of the years of work life.

At the same time, more than 60% of the country’s population lives either in poverty or is at risk of poverty. According to State Budget Office of the Greek Parliament, 2.5 million Greeks live below the line of relative poverty and another 3.8 million people are at risk of poverty. “Relative poverty” is defined when a family of four has less than 908 euro per month.

Being one of the country’s 1.3m unemployed for more than three years, father Nikos managed to find a job at the kiosk. For 300 euro per month. The money maybe enough to feed the family or cover elementary needs but hardly rent and utility bills. Official statistics define as “Relative poverty” the monthly income of below €908 for a family of four.

Maria told the Proto Thema reporter that it was their pride that has hindered them so far from seeking charity aid and possible beds at the Homeless Shelter.

The story of the new-homeless family shocked the public opinion and mobilized a lot of Greeks who urged the media to open a bank account so that they could send donations. Many offered food and clothing and even work.

A man called at a TV-news magazine featuring the drama of the family and offered a home for the family to live in free of charge.

Deputy Labor Minister Vasilis Kerkeroglou intervened in one of the morning TV-news magazines reporting on the fate of the family and said that there was a plan on the way to shelter 1,500 homeless and that “half of them could even find a job.”

When the plan will be implemented in real life, it is not known yet.

PS thank God, the government has plans for the poor, who turned poor after the government taxed also the poor, apart from destroyed any effort for growth and development…

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/10ejE07 Tyler Durden

The Imaginary Specter of Isolationism

At The National Journal, Peter Beinart has a good

riposte to those pols and pundits who raise the specter of
isolationism whenever someone wants the U.S. to reduce its burdens
around the world. Not only are today’s “isolationists” not actually
isolationists, Beinart writes, but neither were many of the alleged
isolationists of yore:

[I]solationism—as commonly
understood—not only doesn’t fit American foreign policy today, it
doesn’t even fit American foreign policy in the 1920s and 1930s.
There are plenty of valid critiques of how the United States
comported itself on the world stage between World War I and World
War II. But the claim that America detached itself from other
countries is simply not true. In 1921, for instance, President
Harding summoned the world’s powers to the Washington Naval
Conference and pushed through what some have called the first
disarmament treaty in history. In 1924, after Germany’s failure to
pay its war reparations led French and Belgian troops to occupy the
Ruhr Valley, the Coolidge administration ended the crisis by
appointing banker Charles Dawes to design a new
reparations-payments system, which Washington muscled the European
powers into accepting. American pressure helped to produce the 1925
Treaty of Locarno, which guaranteed the borders between Germany and
the countries to its west (though not, fatefully, to its east). In
1930, President Hoover played a key role in the London Naval
Conference, which placed further limits on naval construction.

Again and again during the interwar
years, the U.S. deployed its newfound economic power to shape
politics in Europe. And this overseas engagement wasn’t limited to
America’s government alone. Although the United States severely
limited European immigration in the 1920s, Americans built the
avowedly internationalist institutions that would help guide the
country’s foreign policy after World War II. The Council on Foreign
Relations was born in 1921. The University of Chicago created
America’s first graduate program in international affairs in 1928.
And during the interwar years, American travel to Europe expanded
dramatically. To be sure, the U.S. in the interwar years was more
comfortable intervening economically and diplomatically than
militarily. But despite the Neutrality Acts meant to keep the U.S.
out of another European war, the Roosevelt administration began
sending warplanes and warships to Britain two years before Pearl
Harbor. By early 1941, long before America officially entered the
war, its ships were already hunting German vessels across the
Atlantic.

The only sense in which the United States in the interwar years
truly remained apart from other nations lay in its refusal to make
binding military commitments, either via the League of Nations or
through alliances with particular nations. America wielded power
economically, diplomatically, and even militarily, but it jealously
guarded its sovereignty. That’s why one influential history of the
era
dubs U.S. foreign policy between the wars “independent
internationalism.”….The popular “characterization of America as
isolationist in the interwar period,” argues Ohio State
University’s Bear Braumoeller in a useful
review of the academic literature on the period, “is simply
wrong.”

All true, though at a time when you can hear a prominent pundit
call the ’90s a “decade
of not policing the world,” anyone who wants to correct the
record on the ’20s and ’30s will be fighting a rough battle.

Moving to the present, Beinart analyzes Rand Paul’s foreign
policy positions, noting that they were not isolationist even when
Paul first joined the Senate and have moved even further from the
isolationist pole since then. I don’t agree with everything Beinart
says—not surprisingly, since my basic orientation is more
anti-interventionist than his—but his central argument strikes me
as both clearly true and widely underappreciated. You should read
the whole
piece.

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If You Want to Keep Your Guns in New York, Avoid Mental Health Professionals

A few weeks ago I
noted a new California law, prompted by Elliot
Rodger’s murders in
Isla Vista last May, that lets police officers and “immediate
family members” (possibly including angry ex-girlfriends and
estranged in-laws) seek court orders stripping people of their
Second Amendment rights without any notice or adversarial process.
New York’s SAFE Act, which was
hurriedly passed by the state legislature last year in response
to the Sandy Hook massacre, in some ways goes even further. As a

story in yesterday’s New York
Times confirms, the law effectively gives “mental
health professionals” the power to disarm people, and they do not
even need a judge’s approval.

The SAFE Act
requires physicians, psychologists, registered nurses, and licensed
clinical social workers to report any patient they deem “likely to
engage in conduct that will cause serious harm to self or others.”
The report goes to a county mental health official, who is supposed
to review the clinician’s determination and, if he agrees with it,
pass the information on to the New York State Division of Criminal
Justice Services, which checks to see if the subject has a gun
license. If he does, local officials are required to confiscate any
firearms he owns. In practice, the Times reporter
Anemona Hartocollis found, the judgments of mental health
professionals are conclusive:

So many names are funneled to county health authorities through
the system—about 500 per week statewide —that they have become, in
effect, clerical workers, rubber-stamping the decisions, they said.
From when the reporting requirement took effect on March 16, 2013
until Oct. 3, 41,427 reports have been made on people who have been
flagged as potentially dangerous. Among these, 40,678—all but a few
hundred cases—were passed to Albany by county officials, according
to the data obtained by The Times….

Kenneth M. Glatt, commissioner of mental hygiene for Dutchess
County, said that at first, he had carefully scrutinized every name
sent to him through the Safe Act. But then he realized that he was
just “a middleman,” and that it was unlikely he would ever meet or
examine any of the patients. So he began simply checking off the
online boxes, sometimes without even reviewing the narrative about
a patient.

“Every so often I read one just to be sure,” Dr. Glatt, a
psychologist, said. “I am not going to second guess. I don’t see
the patient. I don’t know the patient.” He said it would be more
efficient—and more honest—for therapists to report names directly
to the Division of Criminal Justice Services, which checks them
against gun permit applications.

Presumably the people who wrote the bill did not take the more
honest approach because they wanted to create an illusion of due
process. But the truth is that the SAFE Act gives any licensed
professional consulted by people with psychological problems the
power to take away their right to arms. The
Times reports that so far, after taking duplicative
reports into account, there are about 34,500 New Yorkers in the
state’s database of people who are not allowed to own guns because
they said the wrong thing to someone they turned to for help.
Sometimes, as with the librarian who apparently lost
his guns because of a Xanax prescription, you don’t even have
to say anything particularly disturbing. The state found that 278
of the people in the SAFE Act database had firearm permits, which
are required for all gun purchases in New York City but only for
handguns elsewhere in the state.

How many of those people are potential murderers? Given that
psychiatrists have never been good at
predicting violence, maybe none, especially since preventing
self-harm counts as a legitimate reason to take away someone’s
guns. “The threshold for reporting is so low,” a Queens
psychiatrist told the Times, “that it essentially
advertises that psychiatrists are mandatory reporters for anybody
who expresses any kind of dangerousness.” That might not be the
best way of encouraging troubled people to seek help.

The SAFE Act seems designed to encourage overreporting, since
mental health professionals are required to flag anyone who seems
dangerous, and they face no civil or criminal liability for doing
so as long as they act “reasonably and in good faith.” For
county officials, who supposedly are providing an additional layer
of review, there is very little incentive to second-guess
clinicians’ judgments. If they happen to nix a report on someone
who later commits a violent crime, that would look pretty bad. But
if all they do is pass along a report that has the result of taking
away a harmless person’s constitutional rights, they are not likely
to suffer any negative consequences, even if he is ultimately
successful in challenging that deprivation in court.

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Why Chinese Growth Forecasts Just Crashed To A Paltry 3.9% – And Are Going Even Lower – In One Chart

Up until a few years ago, conventional wisdom was that China would grow at nearly double digits as long as the eye could see. Then, however, something happened, and China’s 9% growth became 8%, then 7% and even lower, as suddenly the Politburo made it quite clear China would not chase growth at any cost, especially when the cost is trillions in bad debt and other NPLs, as we have explained time and again. The collapse in Chinese growth expectations is shown best on the following formerly hockeysticking chart of IMF’s revised Chinese growth projections which has completely collapsed in the past few years.

However, now that “7% is the new 9%” the world may have to brace for another major repricing of Chinese growth, one which would put it just above where the consensus, as wrong as it is as usual, sees US growth in the near future: a miserable 3.9% long-term growth rate!

According to the WSJ, citing a report by the business-research group the Conference Board, China’s growth will slow sharply during the coming decade to 3.9% as its productivity nose dives and the country’s leaders fail to push through tough measures to remake the economy, according to a report expected to come out Monday.

The Conference Board forecasts that China’s annual growth will slow to an average of 5.5% between 2015 and 2019, compared with last year’s 7.7%. It will downshift further to an average of 3.9% between 2020 and 2025, according to the report.

The New York-based Conference Board argues that productivity in China is declining, in part because investments in infrastructure and real estate don’t have the payoff they once did. Meanwhile, government and Communist Party officials who don’t give market forces a large-enough role are stifling innovation.

“The state is too present in the market,” said David Hoffman, managing director of the Conference Board’s China center.

…

Such an outcome could batter an already fragile global recovery. But the report by the business-research group the Conference Board also finds that multinational companies in China would benefit. Lean times would give foreign firms more local talent to choose from. Foreign companies and investors could also expect “more hospitable” treatment from Communist Party and government officials and a wider selection of Chinese firms they could acquire, according to the report, which was shared with The Wall Street Journal.

Foreign companies should realize that China is in “a long, slow fall in economic growth,” the report said. “The competitive game has changed from one of investment-driven expansion to one of fighting for market share.”

Of course, there are many ways to spin the decline as a silver lining, but what is assured is social turmoil: recall that once upon a time the conventional wisdom was that China needs 9% growth just to keep pace with the natural growth rate of the population, the inbound province-to-city migration of the population, and keep everyone employed. Then the 9% became 8%, then it became 7%, and the fundamental reasoning for China’s historical supergrowth was quickly forgotten, because the last thing the world needs is a reminder that Chinese social instability is always just one mass civil riot away. A riot where mass unemployment would merely serve as a catalyst for. A riot of which what is going on in Hong Kong right now is merely a pleasant appetizer.

Sadly for China’s social instability, Chinese growth is going not only to 3.9% but much, much lower.

The reason? Quietly, over the past 5 years, China raked up an epic debt load, which by 2015 is expected to hit a whopping 252% of GDP, or a 100% of GDP increase in debt, just to keep its growth dynamo running. A dynamo which has now fizzled, as can be seen best in the Chinese housing bubble which as we have reported previously, has now burst, and China is desperate to keep imminent hard landing, as controlled as possible.

Here is Exhibit A.

Needless to say, this is an exhibit which China is very well aware of and is already taking measures, only not in the conventional Keynesian sense of issuing even more debt to fix a record debt problem, but somewhat more pragmatically, as we showed before in “China’s Rising ‘Working Class Insurrection’ Problem” and, more importantly, “Stunning Images Of Chinese Riot Police Training For A “Working Class Insurrection”.”

The good news for China at least, is that it is preparing for what it now quite well is the endgame. The bad news for all other Keynesian banana republics such as the US, is that when said insurrection comes, “nobody will have seen it coming.“

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1Frr5kh Tyler Durden

A. Barton Hinkle on America’s Economic Liberty Deficit

If you’ve been wondering why the nation’s
so-called economic recovery seems so weak, writes A. Barton Hinkle,
here’s one partial explanation: The United States has been moving
in the wrong direction on measures of economic freedom.

View this article.

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Vatican Blesses Porsche, Blocks Plebs From Sistine Chapel

For the first time in the 600(or so)-year history of Michelangelo’s masterpiece, Pope Francis has decided to rent out the Sistine Chapel for an $8000-per-head concert organized by Porsche. What makes this unprecedented action even more ‘interesting’ is the fact that The Vatican – in all its omnipotent wisdom – also made an announcement that it will be limiting the number of vistors (read ‘common folk’) allowed inside the chapel and as IBTimes reports, demanding vistors must be silent and cannot take photographs. So much for Pope Francis’ “poor Church of the poor.”

As IB Times reports,

Pope Francis has revealed that the Vatican will rent out the Sistine Chapel for a corporate event for the first

time in its 600-year history.

Porsche will hire the revered chapel, which is covered in Michelangelo’s stunning frescoes, and put on a private concert for 40 lucky – and high paying – guests. The concert, which takes place on Saturday, will be one stop on an exclusive tour of Rome organised by the car brand.

The Vatican has not divulged how much it will earn from the event, but the five-day tour of Italy’s capital, arranged by the Porsche Travel Club, costs up to €5,000 a head, meaning an overall intake of €200,000, reported The Telegraph.

The concert will be performed by a choir from the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome, which traces its origins back to the 16th century. Participants will then sit down to a meal in the midst of the Vatican Museum, “surrounded by masterpieces by world-famous artists such as Michelangelo and Raphael”.

“It’s a one-off event and a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” a spokeswoman for the Porsche Travel Club told The Telegraph. “It will be the highlight of the trip.”

Proceeds from the event will go to charities working with the poor and homeless.

But the unprecedented news has been accompanied by an announcement that the Vatican will limit the number of visitors allowed inside the chapel, where visitors must be silent and cannot take photographs, to six million a year, amid fears that the frescoes are being damaged by the breath and sweat of so many tourists.

The Sistine Chapel receives 25,000 visitors a day and its primary function is to be the site of the Papal conclave, the process by which a new Pope is selected.

* * *

Inequality, Schminequality…

via Zero Hedge http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/0hwkSctzYtU/story01.htm Tyler Durden

The Problem With Letting Academics Run the Economy

There is a common adage that “book learning” is not the same as “street smarts.” In the case of economics PhDs like Janet Yellen, we could adapt this to say that “theory” is not the same as “reality.”

Janet Yellen is a career academic. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Career academics play a critical role in terms of both research and teaching future generations of leaders.

However, unlike most career academics, Janet Yellen is in charge of the US economy. In this light, one has to ask aloud, “why would you put someone with absolutely zero experience in creating jobs, growing a business, lending money, hiring, firing, etc. in charge of the US economy.”

Has Yellen ever had to personally decide whether or not to expand a business? Has Yellen ever had to develop a marketing campaign to increase sales? Has she ever had to concern herself with employment benefits for her staff?

Let’s take the other component of the Fed’s work, the financial markets, into consideration. Has Yellen ever managed a portfolio of any significant size? Has she ever guided a trading team? Has she ever even run a bank? Has she ever had to unwind a bankrupt institution?

The answer to all of these is no. And yet, we’re supposed to entrust her to guide the economy. This would be like asking someone who has never even run a 5K but has read a lot of books on running to win the New York marathon.

We do not mean to pick on Yellen in particular. Indeed, she is not unique in her total lack of qualifications for the job of Fed Chair.

Bernanke was another career academic with next to no real world experience. We’ve since discovered that ALL of his theories on economics misguided. Indeed it is difficult to find a single economic metric that has improved since 2008 other than household net worth which has largely been driven by gains in the stock market.

1) The labor participation rate is virtually the same.

2) Median incomes have fallen.

3) Real unemployment (not the phony official number) is only marginally better.

4) Costs of living are significantly higher.

And yet, Bernanke spent over $4 trillion trying to prove his misguided theories. It was the single most expensive academic study ever performed. Unfortunately it punished billions of people (the Fed’s inflationary policies lead to record food prices which incited starvation and civil unrest globally).

Not once during the five year period between 2008 and 2013 when he retired, did Bernanke change course. Any normal person would have reconsidered their positions after $1 trillion or $2 trillion didn’t do the trick. The Arab spring, record high food prices, food stamp usage and the like would also have given most folks pause. Not Bernanke. And apparently not Yellen either (she was the Fed’s second in command for most of Bernanke’s tenure).

We all know how this will work out: another, even larger crisis is looming on the horizon. And this time around, the Fed has already used up virtually all of its ammo. When and how it will hit, no one knows. But the fact that a mere 10% drop in stock prices from RECORD HIGHS was enough to induce panic around the globe should tell you all you need to know about the fragility of the financial system.

Be warned…

If you’ve yet to take action to prepare for the second round of the financial crisis, we offer a FREE investment report Financial Crisis "Round Two" Survival Guide that outlines easy, simple to follow strategies you can use to not only protect your portfolio from a market downturn, but actually produce profits.

You can pick up a FREE copy at:

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Best Regards

Phoenix Capital Research