Tag: finance

When it comes to financial assets, Apollo’s legendary founder Leon Black has been gloomy for years, and said in a recent Milken Conference that his firm has been “selling everything that is not nailed down.” The billionaire (who at last check was worth around $4.7 billion) however appears to have a soft spot for Hollywood A-lister real estate. Because we were surprised to learn that the buyer of Tom Cruise’s $40 million 10,000 square foot Beverly Hills home is none other than Leon Black.

As TMZ reports, Tom Cruise has decided to leave Los Angeles because he’s saying goodbye to the estate he called home for nearly a decade.

Tom has sold the mansion he shared with Katie Holmes for $40 million. Cruise first offered the house for $50 million in September 2015, and then lowered the price to $45 million but could find no buyers at even the reduced price. Nonetheless, he still cashed in: he bought the house from real estate guru Kurt Rappaport, who owed it back in 2007, for $32.5 million.

As for the house, it has 7 bedrooms, 9 bathrooms, a tennis court, a swimming pool (of course), a children’s playground and a couple of guesthouses. The heavily fortified, 1.3-acre spread includes a roomy motor court with swimming-pool-sized fountain, a lighted tennis court with basketball hoops, a lap-length swimming pool, a children’s playground, and a couple of guesthouses.

Meanwhile, the world’s most famous scientologist is clearly getting out of the city of angles: Cruise recently sold a Hollywood Hills compound back in October for $11.4 million to Eva Longoria.

And this is what $40 million will buy any self-respecting private equity billionaires.

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While the warning flags are raging in Illinois and Connecticut, JPMorgan's Michael Cembalest states that New Jersey's problems are "not mathematically solvable." The stunning admission from a status-quo-sustaining bank that is “very focused on the total indebtedness of US states," should be worrisome enough but as Cembalest explains the answer to a debt problem is not always piling up more debt; the issue is to address the root of the problem, which can be a delicate and at times politically incorrect topic.

Reviewing the JPMorgan research might lead to several conclusions, one of them being that when any government starts to get ahead of logical debt ratios investors might best be advised to proceed with caution. As ValueWalk.com's Mark Melin continues, Cembalest takes a step back and looks at the servicing cost for the mounting state debt.

What he does is look at unfunded liabilities and given several formula factors, including an allowance to return 6% on assets. Using this formula, he projects what starts are currently paying and what they might be paying on a 30-year accrual basis. Such forward modeling helps investors determine debt sustainability much more so than does an institutional research report that might seem to omit or de-emphasize material facts.

Using this as a measure a group of bad-boy states that have been abusing their debt privileges appears to emerge. On top of this list and over the projected danger threshold of 25% are heavyweight states such as Illinois, New Jersey, Connecticut who sit next to relatively rural Kentucky.

 

In these states, a unique battle is being fought with very real and legitimate arguments on each side.

 

State debt requires understanding “The Arc of The Covenants”

When he starts to look at state debt and the economic reality, Cembalest has deft insight to recognize that while math is unemotional, he is about to wade into a deeply emotional argument involving trust and promises made to government employees.

He starts the sometimes delicate task of wading into an issue that rips deep into the social contract by addressing “The ARC and the Covenants.” This refers to the need states have to fulfill their very real obligations to public employees, and Cembalest explains this using an incredible touch:

Public sector workers form a critical part of American civil society. They rescue and protect us when we’re in danger; they make our lives safer, cleaner and more efficient; they educate our children; they enforce the rule of law and provide remedies when laws are broken; they ensure access to clean air, water and food; and they heal us when we’re sick. The legal, medical, environmental and educational problems sometimes found in other countries are a reminder of what life might be like without them. They earned the benefits they accrued and which were granted by state legislatures, and have the right to expect them to be paid.

That said, math and the fiscal responsibility of a lender not to overburden the logical constraints of the borrower can be determined non-emotionally and mathematically.

 

Cembalest models the problem using shared sacrifice as the solution

The gist of the state debt problem can be summed up in one sentence and it applies to municipal as well as sovereign debt as well.  When debt reaches a certain level, the can kicking is over and difficult decisions need to be made.

For Cembalest this means “states would need to raise substantial funds from increased tax revenues, cuts in non-retirement spending or increases in public sector worker contributions.”

Here Cembalest looks at the solutions and one realizes the difficult task ahead.

Tax increases are difficult on a political level. This is especially true given some states with the highest debt burden already have effective tax rates ranking among the highest in the US, which includes Illinois, Connecticut, Kentucky and Hawaii.

Cembalest then considers the appropriate solution of shared sacrifice – a non-emotional approach but one that, when placed through a political ringer, might come out lopsided in the end.  He looks at the revenue burden given an equal contribution from all participants. He develops a revised ratio that splits the state’s revenue needs equally across tax increases, spending cuts and worker contributions to develop a solution.

 

“Whether this kind of comprise is feasible will only be revealed with the passage of time,” he says, as residents of most of the states continue to live their wonderful lives as if the problem doesn’t exist. In reality, the problem will be upon them and once they realize it, once the knowledge is widely disseminated into the mainstream, it will likely be too late to act.

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Following this week’s FOMC Minutes shows, which violently repriced June rate hike odds from 4% to 30% and July from 20% to 50%, the cries of lenienecy have begun, and nobody is doing so louder than Deutsche Bank which in an overnight credit summary note tries to make it clear that “the market is not ready for a June hike.”

Why is Germany’s largest bank, whose stock price is trading just barely above 52 weeks lows and level not seen since the financial crisis so worried? Simple: “the hawkish minutes will weigh on risk, bias yields lower, and flatten the curve” for the simple reason that the Fed is so clueless it “seems to be interpreting recent easing in financial conditions as an opportunity to force rate expectations higher.” Instead, the Fed is once again confusing cause and effect, and DB says the “ease in financial conditions occurred precisely because of the Fed’s dovish turn earlier this year.” Hence why DB is confident a hawkish turn will push markets right back where they were in December and January, prior to the February Shanghai Accord.

Of course, we already gave this explanation last fall, just before the Fed’s December rate hike. It’s time to give it again, and amusingly, DB agrees because as Dominic Konstam writes, “If you think you’ve seen this movie before it’s because you have.”

Alas, it is indeed deja vu all over again:

Like during 2015, the Fed appears bent on pushing rate expectations higher, and the operative question is whether the more hawkish turn to Fed rhetoric will up-end risk and tighten financial conditions to the extent that a rate hike is imprudent if not impossible given the latent fault lines in the global economy.

 

Last year the Fed attempted to prepare the market for a September hike at the June meeting with a decidedly negative result, and then had another go in October for the December meeting with the result that markets tolerated December lift-off before coming apart early in 2016. The operative question is whether markets are sufficiently calm for the Fed to use the June 2016 meeting to pave the way for a July hike.

And this is why Deutsche Thinks that just like in July/August and January/February, as the market starts to earnestly pricing in a June/July rate hike, everything is about to plunge once more:

We think the answer is no because the issue is not just the timing of a single hike toward some static goal for rate level in 2017. What is at issue is the existence of some Shanghai “accord” whereby global policymakers have agreed explicitly or implicitly that excessive dollar strength is counterproductive and that policymakers should shift their focus to domestic demand and structural reform within an environment of dollar stability, at least through the next G20 in early autumn. If there is no accord then divergent monetary policy could drive the dollar stronger, restarting among other things speculation against CNH versus the dollar rather than CNY versus the entire CNY basket with now very familiar results: reserve loss exacerbating higher Fed expectations for US rates, and downward pressure on risk assets with a non-trivial chance that China might devalue and, worse yet, do so in a lumpy fashion.

Or just as we said on Thursday, it will be all up to China again to stop the Fed’s rate hike:

Looks like its up to China again to derail the Fed’s June rate hike plans

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) May 19, 2016

Still, assuming the Fed ignores Deutsche Bank’s laments for a reprieve – because as we saw in February, DB may well be the first bank to go under should the market be swept by another global round of risk off – this is how a rate hike could take place.

The risk is that the Fed might use the June meeting to pre-announce a press conference around the July meeting, or in some other way “pre-commit” to a July hike. The issue is that with still benign wage pressure and inflation, premature and more aggressive Fed hikes would drive real yields higher for the wrong reason. This is the policy error scenario. Yellen’s timeout drove real yields roughly 70 bp lower from the late 2015 highs, but levels have already more than doubled from the lows by virtue of little more than “why not raise rates for the sake of it” rhetoric. What Fed officials seem to be suggesting is that they might be growing increasingly nervous about low real rates fuelling asset classes like equities, investment grade credit, and gold even though other risky assets such as high yield and emerging markets do not perform  well absent higher breakevens. The risk case is then that an overly aggressive Fed would push real yields up and breakevens down, thus undermining risk assets generally.

But which risk asset is at most, pardon the pun, at risk?

One issue is precisely what risk asset valuations are telling us. If we consider risk asset valuations as a function of Fed-related variables – say, breakevens and real yields –market valuations of HY, IG, and EM are more or less consistent with “fair” levels given these variables and their historical relationship with asset valuations. Note that DXY appears too high from this perspective, while oil appears too low.

 

 

The outlier appears to be SPX, where valuations appear excessive given the breakeven/real yield framework.

And while DB’s points are mostly valid, its agenda becomes fully transparent with the next sentence:

This is not to say that the Fed can never raise rates because of negative impact on financial variables, but it is far from clear to us that the Fed should be hiking against financial market froth when many asset classes have only partially recovered from losses last year.

Actually that’s exactly what it says (ignoring the pleas by all those hundreds of millions of elderly retirees whose only source of income used to be interest income and who have been left for dead under a central bank regime which only caters to its commercial bank owners) and the longer the world eases financial conditions, either via QE or ZIRP or NIRP, the more impossible it will be for the Fed to ever hike; in fact the next big move will be just the one Deutsche Bank has been begging for all along – unleashing helicopter money.

In fact, we are confused by Konstam’s note: if indeed DB wants (and needs) a monetary paradrop (recall “According To Deutsche Bank, The “Worst Kind Of Recession” May Have Already Started”), then a policy error is precisely what the Fed should engage in.  Not only will it send markets into a long, long overdue tailspin, one from which the only recovery will be the bubble to end all bubbles, the end of monetarism as we know it courtesy of the quite literal money paradrop, but reset not just the US economy but that of the entire world, in the process wiping out tens of trillions in unrepayable debt, and allowing the system the much needed reboot we have been urging ever since our start in 2009.

We are confident that just like everything else predicted on these pages, it is only a matter of time now before this final outcome is also realized.

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Authored by Bill Bonner of Bonner & Partners (annotated by Acting-Man's Pater Tenebrarum),

High on the Hog

Much of The Deep State's growth is recorded in the pages of the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). This tracks all the laws laid down by successive governments.

Lower extremities of typical Deep State enforcer

 

A privilege, a special tax break, a rule, a prohibition, a piece of meat here, a piece of meat there… and soon the foxes are eating high on the hog.  But what’s meat for the foxes is poison for the economy.

 

The relentless growth of Leviathan: total pages in the Code of Federal Regulations, 1950-2013 (it has continued to grow since then…). No wonder the economy is in the dumps – click to enlarge.

 

Each piece requires paperwork, delays, permits, accountants, lawyers. You can’t do this… you can’t do that – with so many hurdles in their way, entrepreneurs think twice, capital investment declines, and the economy slows.

Each favor to the foxes is an act of larceny, taking something away from the people who earned it to redistribute wealth, power, and status to the insiders.

 

Number of regulatory restrictions – the chart  is a bit dated, but it shows the trend quite well. Once upon a time, none of these restrictions existed. One wonders how the world managed to keep turning!

 

From fewer than 25,000 pages when President Eisenhower left the White House, the CFR now has nearly 200,000 pages – each one a honeypot for Deep State cronies. And who reads this stuff?

Do you know what rules and regulations you are breaking right now? Most people are too busy earning their money and raising their families to spend much time tracking the federal bureaucracy and its cronies. But the foxes make it their business to pay attention… and make the rules that work for them.

An honest person is at a great disadvantage.

 

Rules and Regulations

Think you’re going to change this system by voting for Hillary or Trump, Democrat or Republican? Maybe, but there’s no evidence of it in the CFR. The number of pages kept rising, year after year, no matter who was in the White House.

 

Aggregate word count of Dodd-Frank regulations alone as of 2012 (when about one third of the regulatory implementation was finished!). Has the financial system become “safer” because of this? Not one bit actually – on the contrary, it may well be even more dangerous now. The root causes of the crisis (fractional reserve banking,  fiat money and central economic planning) have remained untouched – click to enlarge.

 

Twenty-five thousand pages were added during the Kennedy and Johnson years… another 25,000 under Nixon and Ford… and another 25,000 during the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations.

Federal spending per capita shows the same basic trend, an almost unbroken uptrend – through Democratic and Republican administrations – stretching back from 2016 to 1952.

Under President Eisenhower, domestic discretionary spending per person was under $500. Today it’s over $4,500. Like the Federal Code, real spending per person has increased about nine times in the last 64 years.

 

Federal tax rules – from 400 in 1913 to 74,000 in 2012. The cost of compliance alone amounts to $160 billion per year! So why are there so many rules in view of this immense waste? It’s all about cronyism actually. This is why proposals to “simplify the tax code” never get anywhere. Modern-day regulatory democracies are little more than tax farms – and the average citizen fulfills the role of the cattle.

 

There were two presidents under whom spending went down – Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. Go figure. In neither case, however, did it stay down for long. Once Reagan and Clinton were out of the way, the foxes went to work and quickly brought spending back to the trend line.

What will happen to the little foxes under Donald Trump? Or Hillary?  The earnings of the top 5% – the “foxy five” – began to diverge from the earnings of everybody else in the mid-1970s.

Since then, they increased alongside the FCR and government spending. Rules and regulations multiplied. Spending increased. The foxes got richer; everyone else got poorer.

 

What are foxes? Some say they are evil, wily, conniving and duplicitous… essentially rats in expensive coats.

Photo via pinterest.com

 

All this happened through both Republican and Democratic administrations. Most likely the foxes will continue to earn more through a Trump or Clinton administration too.

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As we've chronicled the pure insanity that has been taking place in the real estate market, most recently with the revelation that for just $499,000 one could be the proud owner of a 20-by-97 foot lot with a "house" on it in Brooklyn, we continue to be amazed at what we find.

Now we learn that an unidentified buyer has spent a mind-boggling $5.3 million for a triple-wide mobile home in Malibu, California. The four bedroom, four bathroom mobile overlooks the coastline, and comes with hardwood floors, skylights and a pair of gas fireplaces.

The sale is the most ever paid for a mobile home in Malibu according to Elizabeth Seaman, the Pinnacle Estate Properties agent who represented the buyer.

You don't say…

The most stunning part of the deal is that the same property sold for $4 million only a year ago. What could possibly go wrong flipping mobile homes for millions in a softening economy? In light of of all of this, we expect to see a pilot for "Flip This Malibu Mobile" coming to a network very soon.

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When it comes to Ron Paul’s feelings about Donald Trump, he has made it quite clear what he thinks in the past:

Sorry…Trump’s Not Really An Outsider https://t.co/9TXSltEFMM http://pic.twitter.com/gH4BgrZL4u

— Ron Paul (@RonPaul) March 21, 2016

As Paul added, Donald Trump is shrewd and really wants to sell himself as an outsider. He understands how to stir the many people who are unhappy.

In case this was not clear enough, Paul then also said that he could not support Trump as the republican nominee, and therefore he would not vote for Trump.

So is there a candidate that Ron Paul would support?

The libertarian former presidential candidate gave a partial answer when he told Larry King that he feels a “kinship” with Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders, noting that the two occasionally agree on some policies and oppose favors to the corporate world. 

“We’re both against corporatism. We’re both against the special benefits to big business,” Paul said in an interview on Politicking with Larry King.

“His answer to that wouldn’t always be the same. Mine would always drift to the free markets. His would drift to ‘well we need more government to redistribute wealth,’ but we could both attack subsidies to business or the military industrial complex,” he continued. “In that sense, there is a kinship.”

An odd pair, to be sure: a libertarian sharing a “kinship” with a socialist, simply because both are against corporatism and the MIC. Curious to say the least. Almost as if the two, while on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, have a common enemy in what some would call creeping fascism.

Paul, a Libertarian who ran for president in 2008 and 2012, also touted the relationship between Libertarians and progressives. “I think you can come together without compromising just because we overlap. That to me would be a much better coalition,” he said.

The kinship stops here though and as a reminder, Paul hasn’t always offered praise to the Vermont senator. During an interview in March on CNN, Paul vowed that he wouldn’t back Sanders’s presidential bid and likened him to presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump.

“No, because he’s an authoritarian,” he said when asked if he’d back the independent Vermont senator on “CNN Newsroom.” “He’s just a variant of Trump. Even the things I worked with on Bernie, some of the foreign policy, he’s a part of the military industrial complex.”

Sounds somewhat contradictory with his previous statement, although in this presidential race where every candidate’s opinion changes on a daily basis just to appease whatever crowd is listening on that day, it’s easy to get confused.

As for Trump, Paul’s opinion remains unwavering. “I was very explicit about that. I wouldn’t vote for Donald Trump,” he said on CNN. “If you can’t stand any of them and you happen to be a dedicated progressive, you ought to make your vote count and vote for the Green Party and if you happen to be a libertarian, vote for the Libertarian Party.”

He has also blasted Trump’s proposal for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

“I think it sounds like theft,” he said in April on Fox Business Network’s “Kennedy.” “And I think it sounds like something illegal. I think it sounds like it’s immoral.”

Perhaps, but at least for now, that’s what a great number of Americans want, and that is precisely what Trump has promised to give them.

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Submitted by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog,

Two charts revealing how stupid the average American remains.

Despite what should have been a once in lifetime lesson from 2005 through 2010 on the dangers of excessive leverage, dumbass Americans have been led like sheep to slaughter again by the Wall Street cabal, Madison Avenue maggots, and the mega-corporate purveyors of materialism. Wall Street is issuing more credit cards today than they did at the 2008 peak, and 90% more than they did in 2009.

 

The automakers, their finance divisions, and Wall Street have “sold” a new $40,000 vehicle to every Tom, Dick, and Lakesha in Amurica with subprime loans, 7 year 0% interest “deals”, and low payment leases. Now, tens of millions of these dumbasses are underwater on their auto loans. But wait. These people are so fucking stupid they NEED a new vehicle and are trading in their underwater 3 year old vehicles for another $40,000 ride. Gotta keep up with the Joneses. Just roll the old loan into the new loan and drive off the lot underwater from the get go. Simply brilliant. Meanwhile, auto loan delinquencies are soaring.

 

The idiocy of people taking on this level of debt once again, so they can pretend to live the good life, is mind boggling to behold by rational thinking individuals. The decay and rot of this unsustainable system is clear and the stench from our fetid putrefying carcass of a faux democracy is overwhelming.

Two quotes come to mind when you see mindless Americans in action in this great democracy of ours.

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.” – Mencken

“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” – Carlin

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Between student loan debt projected to hit $17 trillion (the same today’s US GDP) by 2030, and the fact that over 40% of student borrowers aren’t making any payments on their loans, the table is already set for a new financial crisis of epic proportions.

Of course, current college students who are taking on student debt today load aren’t concerned with that – those things are for economists, money managers, and bank CFO’s to worry about. No, college students have other concerns, such as who is going to be responsible for booking the spring break vacation in Cancun this year, and who is buying the ice luge for the party the night before everyone leaves.

 

According to a survey, about one in five American students graduating this year who carry debt said they used student loans to pay for expenses such as vacations, dining out, and entertainment reports Bloomberg.

Texas A&M graduate Eric Hazard recalls the excitement of student loan refund day.

“Checks were celebrated across the campus as almost like a bonus for being a college kid. [Students] would go directly to the bank to cash it. I bought electronics for my dorm room and drinks were on me for a month or two. In an abstract way, I knew I would have to pay it back. But you don’t have a timeline in your mind about what that was going to look like. I just knew it would happen later.”

Ah later, later is good. However, if Visa has anything to say about it college debt is just phase one, those millennials who are graduating will be ushered into a plan where they will be saddled with a lot more debt throughout life, so that “later” may have to turn into “much later”, or perhaps “never.”

Does taking the left over student loan money and blowing it on electronics, booze, and vacations violate lending agreements? Not necessarily says Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of a student loan informational website Cappex. And even if there were violations, students wouldn’t face consequences.

“If someone is using it for something like going out on a date, to see a baseball game, it’s not a legal violation,” he said. “Once that money is in the student’s hand, there is no control to ensure that they’re spending it on textbooks, apartments, or food. There’s nothing to prevent them from buying an iPad, and technically an iPad might be OK.“

How about spring break, or a six-pack? Kantrowitz said it might violate the letter of the lending contract, but the student wouldn’t face repercussions.

Schools are looking into disbursing excess funds over a longer period of time to prevent students from wasting it all at once, but with many of student expenses occuring up front, that plan may not work very well for students. The asnwer, at least to Justin Draeger, president of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrations, is to educate students about responsible money management.

“We are moving to experiment to disburse funds over a longer a period of time, which might work for some students but not other students,” said Justin Draeger, president of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. “Schools are supportive of the ability to be flexible.”

Because most expenses come at the beginning of the semester, the slow-burn payout might prove impractical. Ultimately, the solution lies in further educating students about the purpose of their loans and in responsible money management, Draeger said, noting that students will inevitably make mistakes.

Of course what would be a good unsustainable debt story without the inevitable “but it makes them feel good to spend money they don’t have” line of thinking.

“If taking on a little bit extra in student loans means they get to live the life they want to live and be a happy person, then it can be worth it,” said Erik Almon, director of financial planning at the Society of Grown Ups, a Brookline, Mass., financial literacy group.

That said, everyone surely needs time to unwind and de-stress (ideally on someone else’s dime). However it is probably not a bad idea to teach these mostly young adults who now collectively owe more in student loans than there is total credit card debt outstanding, about the consequences of racking up unrepaybale debt just to have biggest flat screen in the fraternity. Then again, with the push for “free everything”, why would anyone listen to that boring speech.

 

At the end of the day can one really blame students: they merely look for/at role models and what these role models do. And in a world in which the answer to everything is more debt, is there any wonder why the chart of total student loans issued by Uncle Sam looks like this.

Finally, it’s not like anyone else will repay their debt, and neither will students, so may as well enjoy the moment, especially since everyone else – those who still idiotically believe in acting responsibly – is paying for it…

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The Forgotten Depression tells of the slump of 1920-21: high unemployment, collapse in commodity prices, upsurge in bankruptcies and sharp break in stock prices. However, unlike the Great Depression, the 1920 affair was over in 18 months. What explains its brevity? James Grant, publisher of the prestigious Grant's Interest Rate Observer, tells the story of America's last governmentally-untreated depression; relatively brief and self-correcting which gave way to the Roaring Twenties…

As ValueWalk.com's Jacob Wolinksy explains, in 1920–21, Woodrow Wilson and Warren G. Harding met a deep economic slump by seeming to ignore it, implementing policies that most twenty-first century economists would call backward. Confronted with plunging prices, wages, and employment, the government balanced the budget and, through the Federal Reserve, raised interest rates. No “stimulus” was administered, and a powerful, job-filled recovery was under way by late in 1921.

In 1929, the economy once again slumped—and kept right on slumping as the Hoover administration adopted the very policies that Wilson and Harding had declined to put in place. Grant argues that well-intended federal intervention, notably the White House-led campaign to prop up industrial wages, helped to turn a bad recession into America’s worst depression. He offers the experience of the earlier depression for lessons for today and the future. This is a powerful response to the prevailing notion of how to fight recession. The enterprise system is more resilient than even its friends give it credit for being, Grant demonstrates.

 

As Grant so perfectly summarized previously, while we seem incapable of learning from what has worked in the past, future citizens will reflect on this so-called PhD standard (that runs the world), thus…

"My generation gave former tenured economics professors discretionary authority to fabricate money and to fix interest rates.

 

We put the cart of asset prices before the horse of enterprise.

 

We entertained the fantasy that high asset prices made for prosperity, rather than the other way around.

 

We actually worked to foster inflation, which we called 'price stability' (this was on the eve of the hyperinflation of 2017).

 

We seem to have miscalculated."

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As economist William Anderson explains, "presidential elections in the United States spawn Really Bad Economic Policies, and 2016 is a vintage year."

Candidates promise everything from living wages to free health care and college. Proposals about how to run whole segments of the economy are made with a straight face. The most tired and hackneyed ideas about income equality, corporate greed, creating jobs, and paying one's fair share of taxes are trotted out. And millions of voters apparently believe it all, falling for the same promises of free stuff and prosperity from Washington. 

How do political candidates get away with this nonsense, year after year and election after election? More importantly, what can we do as individuals to fight the entrenched economic illiteracy that keeps politicians in business?

Schedule (all times PDT)

11:30 a.m.  Jeff Deist "The Greatest Myth"
11:50 a.m.  Walter Block "Me, Bernie, and Minimum Wage"
12:10 p.m.  Ryan McMaken "Three Lies You’ll Hear from the Candidates This Year"
12:30 p.m.  Q&A
12:50 p.m.  Break
1:10 p.m.    Contra Krugman Show with Tom Woods and Bob Murphy
2:00 p.m.    Adjourn

Join Walter Block, Tom Woods, Bob Murphy, Ryan McMaken, and Jeff Deist at the Mises Circle, Town Hall Seattle, as they demolish the economic myths of the 2016 election…

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