Financial topics

[aedens]

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2 ... o?page=0,0

[vincecate]

John, you said recently that the fact that the Fed's current low interest rates are not now causing a housing bubble was evidence that the Fed's low rates earlier did not cause the main housing bubble. I don't agree. In the 1920s the Fed had low rates and first they made a bond bubble, then a real estate bubble, then a sock bubble. Each bubble was bigger than the last but different. This time I would put the order at Nasdaq bubble, housing bubble, bond bubble (starting to pop in Europe but mostly not popped yet). Human nature is such that cheap loans do not re-inflated the most recent bubble, it makes a new bubble. For the moment people have learned their lesson about housing bubbles, but they don't remember the last time a bond bubble popped. Soon memories of a bond bubble pop will be fresh and new.

[aedens]

When the main event ensues it will boil over from this.
http://indoliberty.wordpress.com/2012/0 ... -pakistan/
Many have watched this effect for years and if secular governments have to murder thousands to preserve the herd they will. Amazing, and we surrounded by idiots who would kill us all in a millisecond as Government thugs push hookers out of cars. You wonder why we want fifty or more bases closed and let village idiots left alone to kill each other off. Americans seem to consider a solution there very own. We have sent over 50000 plus manufacturing sites out of our States and still people bitch about bread and circus. Utterly amazing how termally naive the herd is. Also for you sniffers the supply has been tainted with animal dewormer drugs and you will rot from the inside out and your body parts will drop off. Think Im kidding? Good luck.. We assumed in 1982 Aids would bankrupt the health system now to be mandated by gun powder and this will finish us off since besides rotting off the human flesh it produces another major issue. Levamisole stops the bone marrow from producing infection fighting white blood cells. Dr. Craft in closing adds, this is a little like having HIV, without medical attention it can become fatal. He notes that about 10% of patients will die from severe infections. They may already be a walking time bomb. Now we see the rest of the story on biological attacks.

[OLD1953]

You cannot shock me with stories of what government will do to ensure "morality" is observed. How do you think they catch pedophiles? Where do all those pedo ads in the backs of magazines come from? That's all US govt ads and material, that's where most of the pedo stuff in the USA comes from, it's government sourced material used for entrapment. This is a stone cold fact, proven in court. So the US government encourages the making of actual pedophile material outside the US so they can entrap people who look at such material here. Where is the morality in that? How about delibrately blinding or poisoning thousands of US citizens because of prohibtion?

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_an ... s_war.html

Or maybe a govt official who bragged about driving people to suicide is your cup of tea?

http://academic.evergreen.edu/k/klalor0 ... 20home.htm

Mixing "moral" and law doesn't work because the people willing to do the work are going to be fanatic about it, others will seek other assignments as ordinary people everywhere have very much a "live and let live" attitude in general. That is the exact reason why I oppose any and all morals legislation, because it is the most commonly abused of any in history.

Now this guy
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/heis ... z1sOtBoBYs
I can't decide if he was just stupid and irresponsible or if this is an insurance job and he's getting a cut of the diamonds from the woman. I note the story says the diamonds are not insured, but I'd claim that myself if it was an insurance scam to keep the police from asking questions in that direction.

The recovery has slowed, shock shock, of course that drove the market up. Odd how later readjustments downwards don't move the market at all.

Given the performane of the market on negative news, apparently if the US economy crashes to a GDP of five trillion and the banks all fail and 50% are out of work, the market will call that "good news for the future" and then, rise.

[John]

Bertolt Brecht in The Three-Penny Opera, referring to
late 1920s Germany:

Erst kommt das Fressen, dann die Moral.

First comes the gluttony, then the morality.

[aedens]

Some of the blow that hit Detriot was flown from Canada to obscure landing strips in northern central Michigan. The Canadians got kind of "are" pissy about drone patrols in the zone areas. Since I have two in medical now for some years, I will see if they note these devastating issues ongoing. At this point of independent query I am under the conviction it is coming in this way. I feel as you do that one cannot legislate morality but it gives no right in and of license of office to murder and I would on jury vote it murder one. No one here is prone to shock value.

[Higgenbotham]

The recovery has slowed, shock shock, of course that drove the market up. Odd how later readjustments downwards don't move the market at all.

Given the performance of the market on negative news, apparently if the US economy crashes to a GDP of five trillion and the banks all fail and 50% are out of work, the market will call that "good news for the future" and then, rise.

I was thinking about discussing this before tuning in.

This stuff gets funny. Yesterday we got the unemployment claims number. They said it was down. Why was it down? Because last week's was revised up. Based on pre-revised numbers, claims were up. But the press reported the claims as down.

Now it gets even funnier. March pending home sales were reported up. March, mind you. But unemployment claims for April have been high for 3 weeks running. So what did the market do? It went up, of course.

Wednesday, I think durable goods orders were reported down 4.2%. There as a time in the 1970s when a report like that would take the market way down. Not now. What did they do? Bought the market 10 or 15 minutes after it went down on that release and drove the market up all day.

Today there were a lot of people looking at the 1.54% GDP deflator. For those who don't know, that's the assumed inflation rate for the first quarter by which GDP was adjusted from nominal to real. And estimates varied, but throughout the blogosphere it is recognized that inflation is running something like 2.9%, so therefore GDP grew less than 1% and some are even saying zero.

In the GDP report, the issues we have been discussing for months are coming to light. The economy is growing almost entirely with consumer spending, per capita incomes are down, savings rates are down, and now it is being said this is unsustainable. Really?! How long does it take people to figure this stuff out? This was already happening 3 months ago and it was obvious.

Here's another funny one. Apple stock went gangbusters right until the beginning of this quarter, then started to tank. So this week Apple's earnings from last quarter were released and zoom, up goes the stock. But those were the earnings from last quarter. And if the stock has been tanking this quarter, it's my guess that those in the know realize that this quarter is not going as well for Apple. We'll see.

The summary is the market is so crazy it wants to buy based on old data and ignore new data. Or buy bad data on the hopes Bernanke will use bad data as a basis to print more money.

[Trevor]

Consumer spending can't keep everything afloat forever. In the early years of the Depression, total debt continued to skyrocket, at least until 1933. Ours is increasing, but not to the degree it was a few years ago. (I'm referring here to total debt, not just national debt)

[aedens]

http://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/91764042 Irony and paradox.
currency peg and the repression to maintain it.

Some time ago charted was peg of float currency and the snap shot outlier yen of that context.
I have still not been timely to drill down why the fragmentation
other than the proxy engagement esclations.

http://generationaldynamics.com/forum/v ... nts#p13256 restructured and loaded
First comes the gluttony, then the morality. CIC declined comment

[ Anarchy, Tyrants, Destruction http://generationaldynamics.com/forum/v ... 296#p13296 ]

"The answer is simple: In today's world, we cannot afford the luxury of staying in our own mental backyards." IMF
The IMF is wrong since every adult is free to fashion his life according to his own plans. He is not forced to live according to the plan of a planning authority enforcing its unique plan by the police, i.e., the social apparatus of compulsion and coercion. What restricts the individual’s freedom is not other people’s violence or threat of violence, but the physiological structure of his body and the inescapable nature-given scarcity of the factors of production. lvm
Per capita is not GNP being that inflation theft is Statist seisures of intent. We have know the cause of credit induced malinvestment and repressionary intent.

Mokusatsu
http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/t ... usatsu.pdf

[OLD1953]

I don't go into detail at that level, I simply know that attempts to count something as nothing or nothing as something can't continue forever. China can't hold their money down forever at a false value, it will create distortions in their own economy that will either destroy their money or will destroy their economy, though it could destroy the world economy first. The latter, in fact, is more closely aligned with what I think happened originally, but the buzzard is now home to roost on their own doorstep. As always, their nationalism is going ballistic in response to any internal problem. The carry trade developments will be curious. The odd idea that one can control matters that originate beyond ones borders is ever in the political mind.
http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/20 ... arry-trade

I watch comments on articles to see what people interested are thinking, those comments show strong tendencies towards opium dreams. Are most of the worlds investors hooked on Chinese opium?

Value investing nowadays is a bad joke. Corporate data shows far too much debt to be considered "value" at any price. Instead, the US companies keep stock prices up by borrowing money to buy their stock. When they reissue to retire that debt, these stocks will crash like bombs.