Financial topics

[Trevor]

And once their economy either collapses or even slows down, China will be ripe for another civil war. I have the feeling that their crisis war is going to start as a civil war, sort of like the French Revolution and Iranian Revolution.

[OLD1953]

This morning I was sitting quietly in a somewhat dark room, when I realized that I had never seen the structural purpose of the investor laid out clearly, which I found odd. Has anyone seen this expressed plainly?

To draw an analogy, the intent of the honeybee is to gather nectar and raise more bees so more nectar can be gathered. This has nothing to do with the structural purpose of the honeybee in its environment, which is pollination. Without this pollination, you will not have flowers and without flowers you will not have honeybees. There was life on the planet before bees were developed, but they allow for a much fuller expression of life and a much more varied type of life and more complex interactions.

Investors are very similar to honeybees in their intent, they want to make money and increase their holdings, so they can raise little investors and keep the cycle going.* However, that intent is not their structural purpose in the economy.

The structural purpose of the investor is to pursue money by any and all means, and by such pursuit to reveal and take advantage of all possible inequities and imbalances in the system at every level, global, national or local, and by exploiting those advantages to eventually nullify them.

Exploitation of systemic weaknesses will eventually cause that part of the system to crash, and this is a warning to rebuild the system differently. Looked at in this fashion, the crisis causes all systems to be rebuilt with safeguards against the old weaknesses, and the subsequent erosion of safeguards is equivalent to rust on a bridge, which eventually collapses and has to be rebuilt.

*(Do this successfully for a couple of generations and you become "old" money, which is socially better than "new" money, since you've set up a family system that apparently perpetuates the money making cycle and are therefore eligible to enter the upper social circles and apply to marry other "old" money, which is very jealous of KEEPING the "old" money right where it is. Bees just swarm, which is more efficient but less amusing.)

[aedens]

Old I agree with your logic but consolidations will be swaps or warrant options we will never see for initial cool off they extol. How any hedged raws are sitting untouched on some reports are a different color of political economy discussion. Of course more stringent are margin of JIT but that is a separate discussion and discourse of pricing. The two extremes in weakened private property rights are socialism and “commonly owned” resources. Under socialism, government agents—those whom the government assigns—exercise control over resources. The rights of these agents to make decisions about the property they control are highly restricted. People who think they can put the resources to more valuable uses cannot do so by purchasing the rights because the rights are not for sale at any price. http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PropertyRights.html

[OLD1953]

Take note that I carefully did not restrict the investor to legal means. Under very tight regimes of central control, the grey and black markets become the economy, bribes and payola take the place of taxes; in some areas this isn't even hidden as minor government officials are not paid a living wage. It is well known that Russian state owned farms were not productive, while the small plot each family was allowed to use for their own purposes was effectively feeding Russia, with the most intensive crop production imaginable. Such is the nature of a decision to invest labor where it was most productive of profit.

That the US black market is as small as it is, and is mostly centered on drugs, tells me we aren't nearly the regulatory hell I hear described on the evening news every day. OTOH, a quick glance at the European black markets shows such to be a much larger part of the economy than in the US. One would have to conclude that US citizens just naturally like to obey the law (and I'll die laughing) or that there simply aren't many opportunities for profit besides drugs outside the mainstream economy here. Europe, especially in southern Europe, that's another matter.

And this JPost article explains why Israel will go the way of Greece.

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists ... ?id=267978

[aedens]

https://projectmeshnet.org/

Tired of .gov Leave em behind in the dust.

[Trevor]

I heard about the Soviet Union that their private plots, which were only two percent of their land, produced nearly half of their food supply. Says a lot about how well socialism actually works.

As for big business, they don't give a damn about regulations that are passed. It just means that it's harder for smaller businesses to expand. After all, they've got legions of lawyers that can find every loophole in the book, sometimes put there due to their political connections.

[aedens]

I heard about the Soviet Union that their private plots, which were only two percent of their land, produced nearly half of their food supply. Says a lot about how well socialism actually works.

As for big business, they don't give a damn about regulations that are passed. It just means that it's harder for smaller businesses to expand. After all, they've got legions of lawyers that can find every loophole in the book, sometimes put there due to their political connections.

That may not matter Trev.
So while futures on this side of the pond now actively ignore everything that is happening in Europe, the EURUSD has tumbled overnight. Yet if Europe is any indication, the collapse in the world's largest economic block is not only not slowing but is accelerating as the region tried hard to get back to a viable debt ratio: something the US will not do until it is far too late. z/h The peg issue has the dragon chasing its tail and I have as many doubted the outcome of this repressionary nature. As was forwarded from Hugh, other than Irony and paradox, currency peg and the repression to maintain it.
A few weeks ago I was unaware of the extent of the cratering and will just as many see the extent. Again debt is a future claim to labor and in context to repressionary saturations it explains the durations we are witnessing to nominal leakages from per capita wage. It amplifys the inability to clearing mechanisms even the Germans Banks are decrying.

http://www.ekathimerini.com/4dcgi/_w_ar ... 012_440062

Bolivia has said it will expropriate the assets of Spain’s Red Eléctrica, sending armed troops to its headquarters in the second nationalisation of a Spanish company’s business in Latin America in two weeks. In a move likely to trigger further unease for Spanish companies operating in the continent following seizure of Repsol’s YPF unit in Argentina last week, Evo Morales, Bolivian president, on Tuesday announced the state would take control of Transportadora de Electricidad, the Spanish electricity grid’s Bolivian subsidiary.

http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/japtrap.html The way to make monetary policy effective, then, is for the central bank to credibly promise to be irresponsible - to make a persuasive case that it will permit inflation to occur, thereby producing the negative real interest rates the economy needs.

[John]

I keep talking about how our culture has fallen completely into fraud
and extortion, but this is really the limit.

Layers of Deceit

Why do recipe writers lie and lie and lie about how long it takes to
caramelize onions?
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/scoc ... ingle.html

Is there no end to the fraud?

John

[aedens]

Chesapeake stripped McClendon of his chairmanship and agreed to end the Founders Well Participation Program -- the cozy deal
at the center of McClendon's viewtopic.php?f=14&t=2&start=5560#p13296
$1 billion borrowing spree. I agree with your analogy on cooking since his recipe was $4 not $2
Wrong recipe against better chefs with deeper zone pockets. http://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/inde ... _gas_where
I do not eat onions and the cooking in timing issue is a preference to size and amount. http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Files/ ... xports.pdf

[Trevor]

Well, the latest news on the economic front is that only about 112,000 private sector jobs were created in April, instead of the roughly 200,000 analysts and economists were expecting. Haven't we heard this line before?