Financial topics

[Trevor]

Maybe, but you can be a tall midget and still be pretty short. It's the reason our bond yields are still low; our economy is weak, but Europe looks worse and China and India are also slowing down. Our hiring is slowing, so it's affecting us as well.

[aedens]

Prosecutions for fraud occur when there are sudden losses and resultant anger due to bankruptcy (Madoff for example). When there are no sudden losses but only debasement losses as when the Fed keeps fraudulent and insolvent institutions afloat, there is not enough concentrated anger to trigger sufficient demand for prosecutions. Bankruptcy, therefore, is necessary to maintain morality as well as to avoid monetary breakdown. Just my 2 cents.

Would be ironic to go through the stone, bronze, iron, information age to end up as the silicon age. I could imagine the ridicule and jokes of that.
After the bronze age crash circa 1200 BC for two hundred years history basically ceased other than the the Egyptians recording the subsequent events
we have from them. The records indicated they had to adjust stratagem to survive and even that cost them in real terms. As they observe today we are 9 meals from total breakdown since JIT rules the realms in truth. Humans are as fragile as data and group think polemics. There are some decent folks left but the over arching themes cancel to many things out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yz0VxX ... re=related
If I remember Judges the last sentence is all did was right in there own eyes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpudDNoR ... re=related the wall on my back was so cold

[Marc]

In a real sense, it seems that the US and much of the Western world is allowing "micro bankruptcy" to occur — that is, bankruptcies for individuals and small-to-medium-sized businesses, but have affected a kind of hiatus on "macro bankruptcy" — regarding the large institutions — with the aforementioned nations preferring to use bailouts/backstops on such entities instead. Indeed, such a strategy does generate quite a bit of moral hazard, along with an absence of revolutions in the streets (so far). Perhaps we will see the "slow crisis" outcome that contributor "falopex" mentioned, provided that China or the Mideast doesn't suck the US into a global war first. —Best regards, Marc

[aedens]

In a real sense, it seems that the US and much of the Western world is allowing "micro bankruptcy" to occur — that is, bankruptcies for individuals and small-to-medium-sized businesses, but have affected a kind of hiatus on "macro bankruptcy" — regarding the large institutions — with the aforementioned nations preferring to use bailouts/backstops on such entities instead. Indeed, such a strategy does generate quite a bit of moral hazard, along with an absence of revolutions in the streets (so far). Perhaps we will see the "slow crisis" outcome that contributor "falopex" mentioned, provided that China or the Mideast doesn't suck the US into a global war first. —Best regards, Marc

Today: Hostess 18,000 employees - poof
marc we are bleeding as in arterial. Swaps will be "are" the new finance. Just as before. Who has cash now. Corporate, we are years ahead of the news.
We have no choice my friend. We will help our own Globally to keep JIT alive. Other zones must stop flooding or we all go down and them also. To be clear about 2/3 of the economy is functioning. Everybody knows this.

[Marc]

Today: Hostess 18,000 employees - poof
marc we are bleeding as in arterial.

I guess that I had better stock up on both canned beans and Ho Ho's.... —Regards/Peace, Marc

(PS: Seriously, I can see how people will economize regarding snacks by buying snack/dessert items that require slicing as opposed to being individually wrapped. Frugality is certainly back, at least for those items that don't start with "i".)

[aedens]

Jared has been working on GGS theory ongoing and I admire alot of his work. I keep things in perpective first.
Some of there products will be will be missed with Hostess. It was a older Firm from interstate brands and they came from the great depression if memory serves correct. People need to wake up and remember no one is exempt and
not be asleep at the wheel.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHufiHAb ... re=related

Interstate Brands Corporation (IBC) is the largest wholesale baker and distributor of fresh delivered bread and snack cakes in the United States. Since its inception in 1927, IBC has grown to own and operate 68 bakeries throughout the United States and employs more than 34,000 people. From these strategically dispersed bakeries, the Company's sales force delivers baked goods to more than 200,000 food outlets on approximately 11,000 delivery routes.

The IBC product line is marketed under a number of well-known national and regional brands, which include Wonder Bread, Hostess, Home Pride, Drake's, Beefsteak, Bread du Jour, Dolly Madison, Butternut, Merita, Parisian, Colombo, Sunbeam, Millbrook, Eddy's Holsum, Sweetheart, Cotton's Holsum, J.J. Nissen, Marie Callender's and Mrs. Cubbison's. In addition, the Company is a baker and distributor of Roman Meal and Sun Maid bread.

Note: private equity firm Castle Harlan Inc., which acquired the Perkins chain in 2005 for $245 million so above text is older conveyances. We all know how the models work in equity here to spin out lines.
Context: On July 6, Castle Harlan bought the Toronto-based supplier of mill liners and other products to the mining industry from Pala Investments for $190 million; within seven hours, it had sold it to Bradken Ltd, an Australian competitor of Norcast’s that has a long history with Castle Harlan, for $217 million.
The subpoenas had been granted to Norcast S.ar.L., the former owner of Norcast Wear Solutions and a wholly owned subsidiary of Pala. Norcast and Pala maintain that Bradken was a “potential buyer” in the initial transaction that “expressed no interest,” according to the Nov. 17 ruling by U.S. District Judge Paul A. Crotty in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Castle Harlan and Bradken have had a decade-long relationship. CHAMP Private Equity, Castle Harlan’s Australian affiliate, bought Bradken in 2001 for $94.2 million and took it public in 2004, as Buyouts previously reported.
Bottum line its a 3 country flip with lives being destroyed to profit models crushed in fiat designed to fail and not from viability.
Banks first used synthetic collateralized debt obligations (SCDOs) in the late 1990s to transfer corporate credit risk off their balance sheets without transferring physical ownership of the assets.
http://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/93190243 h/t Prophet

[aedens]

From the net: In both cases Spanish multinationals had prioritised the repatriation of dividends over investment. This indirect form of asset stripping was driven by the priorities of bankers in London and New York. Behind the Repsol-YPF affair, in particular, was something very close to the sick capitalism that caused the 2008 crisis: high-yield, high-risk assets, sliced and diced via complex derivatives.
But the fury on the pages of the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal is not ultimately about oil or profits, nor even about the bad precedent it might set for future expropriations elsewhere. Rather, it is provoked by Argentina having interrupted a chain of securitisation anchored in the real world by its oil at one end, but with investment banks in London and New York, the holders of swap and other derivative liabilities on Repsol and YPF debt, at the other.

[OLD1953]

I'm certain the plantation owners in 1855 thought they were all rich as the price of slaves increased exponentially, until the war.

Here's the rub, however, they could not have sold those slaves for that price to someone who had a logical reason for owning slaves. A logical reason for owning property means you will make a profit over time, either directly or in the use of that property for your own purposes. The idea of a profit with a base investment of that magnitude was not logical, even though the high prices drove everyone to try to buy at least one slave to hold for a rise in value and a later sale. The logical thing to do was to sell out and leave the area and wait for the crash. Very few ever do that.

The same was true of tulips or pearls or (more recently) houses. These things always end in a crash, and then a war. We have had an arrested crash, and we are certainly running towards the war as rapidly as possible. It may be the war will start before the crash continues, or the war will mask the final crash (and in that event I'll buy drastic inflation after the war is over) or we lose the war and have a worldwide monetary collapse with a total loss of all trade.

Or we could have a revolution in the US, which in in the world since the invention of banking is an almost certain guarantee of totalitarianism every time, assuming the legitimate government loses the fight and collapses. If you think not, then we need some examples to put up against Russia, China, France and so forth. The British government did not collapse after the revolt in the US, nor would the US government collapse now if there was a revolt and we were evicted from Puerto Rico, I'm speaking of a revolt or war in which a government loses totally and the old government is executed or exiled.

Something to always keep in mind is there is not a whit of evidence to support the notion that having money means you always act in the best interests of either the country as a whole or even in your own best interests. Example that pops to the front of my mind is the large number of businessmen and aristocrats that supported communism in China or Russia, until after the communists took over and the knives came out. The same goes for business and Nazi's in Germany. Being able to amass sums of money does not mean a person has any competence in anything else whatsoever, and that certainly includes common sense.

[aedens]

They push it because they can. Your correct, and enjoy your candor. As we say debt is a future claim to labor and nothing else by definition. As for the British when cotton collapsed here they flooded egypt and just reset the need for raw cotton material. I would say about a ~60 year cycle and when I get time I will confirm just that peak to peak commodity cycle of value added product. They will buy the bank paper for cents on the dollar now. I would add the market seems to eliminate them until they procur the cover.

[OLD1953]

Forbes was quite nasty about the 2 billion loss by JPMorgan. They didn't pull any punches.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/ ... lion-foot/

They also very cynically point out that the large banks spent 5 billion to buy elections over ten years.

To prevent the abuses of civil power which we see under every socioeconomic system would require something new in the way of governance. Simply modifying ownership rules is not enough, and the unity of purpose which often carries small countries through with minimal damage does not do so in larger countries - and not always in the smaller ones. In terms of system dynamics, what would be required would be analogous to the services provided by antivirus or antimalware software in a computer system, especially the types that rely on heuristic detection.* Such a system in government would have the capacity to halt an ongoing financial or government process and require it to cease unless it was overridden by higher authority - hopefully something that would be very difficult to do. How such a system could be established in practice I have no idea, any more than King George imagined there would ever be a system of government that separated the power of the purse and the executive.

*(This means they analyze the behavior of everything on the machine, looking for patterns of malicious intent. Heuristic detection does not have a set of fixed detection signatures.)