“Under the Federal Reserve Act, panics are scientifically created. The present panic is the first scientific one, worked out as we figure a mathematical equation.” ~ Charles Lindbergh

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“Georgia homebuilder Blankenship Homes lost its source of loans for new construction after four local community banks failed since 2009.

“The economy just shut down,” said owner Johnny Blankenship, 54, a builder for more than 30 years in Douglasville, 20 miles west of Atlanta. “We are just starting back to do a few homes. The economy is still very, very slow.”

While the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury rescued major banks amid the 2008 financial crisis to avert a meltdown of the nation’s financial system, the bailouts didn’t prevent the collapse of about 500 small lenders. Their disappearance, part of a syndrome of economic weakness, still weighs on growth and employment in dozens of counties across the U.S.

“It will be difficult to fill the void left by failing small banks,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics Inc. in West Chester, Pennsylvania. “Small bank failures matter a lot to the communities in which they operate, especially in non-urban areas. Small banks are key to small businesses.”

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Counties that experienced bank failures from 2008 to 2010 saw income growth reduced as much as 1.43 percent, job growth cut as much as 0.5 percentage point and poverty rise as much as 1.4 percent in the following year, Fed economist John Kandrac reported in research presented last October at a community banking conference at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

He concluded bank failures had “measurable effects” on economic performance. On average, that meant a drop of as much as $700 in per capita income and a loss of close to 600 jobs in the first year after a failure, Kandrac’s research found.

Small Businesses

The demise of local lenders has inflicted a disproportionate blow on small enterprises, said Mark Gertler, an economist at New York University and co-author of research with former Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke on how bank failures contributed to the severity of the Great Depression. Community banks provide almost half of small loans, those under $1 million, to farms and businesses, according to a 2012 Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. report.

Bank failures have been more common in four states that experienced real estate booms and busts or had large concentrations of community lenders. Georgia has had the most failures with 88 since September 2007, followed by Florida’s 70, Illinois’s 56 and California’s 39, according to Trepp LLC, a real estate and financial data provider in New York….”

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“Rather than deal forthrightly with the reality that unrealistic promises made to their employees cannot be honored, local government has pursued a strategy of legalizing looting.

The gradual erosion of civil liberties, legal rights and government ethics are connected: our rights don’t just vanish into thin air, they are expropriated by government: Federal, state and local. Though much is written about the loss of civil liberties at the Federal level, many of the most blatantly illegal power grabs are occurring in local government.

This expropriation is under the radar of the average citizen because the process slowly chips away the fundamentals of legality and justice: bit by bit, due process and the rights of the individual have been eroded by state and local governments until the fundamental Constitutional protections simply cease to exist.

When local government looting is legalized, the entire system is illegal. Here are three recent examples of blatantly illegal looting by local governments.

First up: privatizing the collection of traffic fines and probation to create a modernized debtor’s prison. We turn to The Nation for the story:

The Town That Turned Poverty Into a Prison Sentence Most states shut down their debtors’ prisons more than 100 years ago; in 2005, Harpersville, Alabama, opened one back up.

 

What happened to Ford in the small town of Harpersville was tangled and unconstitutional– but hardly unique. Similar tales have been playing out in more than 1,000 courts across the country, from Georgia to Idaho. In the face of strained budgets and cuts to public services, state and local governments have been stepping up their efforts to ensure that the criminal justice system pays for itself. They have increased fines and court costs, intensified law enforcement efforts, and passed so-called “pay-to-stay” laws that charge offenders daily jail fees. They have also begun contracting with “offender-funded” probation companies like JCS, which offer a particularly attractive solution—collection, at no cost to the court.Harpersville’s experiment with private probation began nearly ten years ago. In Alabama, people know Harpersville best as a speed trap, the stretch of country highway where the speed limit changes six times in roughly as many miles. Indeed, traffic is by far the biggest business in the town of 1,600, where there is little more than Big Man’s BBQ, the Sudden Impact Collision Center and a dollar store.

In 2005, the court’s revenue was nearly three times the amount that the town received from a sales tax, Harpersville’s second-largest source of income. Fines had become key to Harpersville’s development, but it proved difficult to chase down those who did not pay. So, that year, Harpersville decided to follow in the footsteps of other Alabama cities and hire JCS to help collect.

It was a system of extraction and coercion so flagrant that Alabama Circuit Court Judge Hub Harrington likened it to a modern-day “debtors’ prison.”

Her fines for the three charges added up to $2,922, court papers show. Ward sentenced her–and others who said they couldn’t pay their full fines that day– to probation. Once a means of allowing convicted offenders to stay out of jail on the condition of good behavior, probation had now become a court-sanctioned tool for debt collection.

Burdette reported to the JCS office in nearby Childersburg, where she paid her probation officer $100. Of that, $45 went toward her fine, $10 toward a one-time “start-up fee,” and the last $45 went to JCS as a monthly fee for service.

Next up: illegal search and seizure under the pretext of traffic violations. As if “driving while black” isn’t bad enough, now “driving with cash” is pretext enough to be stripped of your rights and your property stolen by local government:

 

Lawsuits over cash seizures settled in Nevada

 

Tan Nguyen of Newport, Calif., and Michael Lee of Denver said in lawsuits filed in U.S. District Court in Reno they were stopped last year on U.S. Interstate 80 near Winnemucca about 165 miles east of Reno under the pretext of speeding. They said they were subjected to illegal searches and told they wouldn’t be released with their vehicles unless they forfeited their cash.The lawsuits claimed the cash seizures were part of a pattern of stopping drivers for speeding as a pretext for drug busts in violation of the Constitution.

Nguyen was given a written warning for speeding but wasn’t cited. As a condition of release, he signed a “property for safekeeping receipt,” which indicated the money was abandoned or seized and not returnable. But the lawsuit says he did so only because Dove threatened to seize his vehicle unless he “got in his car and drove off and forgot this ever happened.”

“He wasn’t charged with anything. He had no drugs in his car. The pretext for stopping him was he was doing 78 in a 75,” John Ohlson told KRNV-TV. “It’s like Jesse James or Black Bart,” he told AP in an interview last week.

The district attorney’s statement said both men were stopped legally and that “every asset that was seized pursuant to those stops was lawfully seized.”

Exhibit # 3: guilty until proven innocent: State of California seizes cash from “suspected” tax evaders with no evidence, no court action, no recourse. I have documented in detail how the jackboot of the State of California has pressed on the necks of thousands of law-abiding citizens whose only crime was moving out of California.

The State of California presumes anyone moving out of the state who still has a source of income in California–for example, a few dollars of interest earned on a bank account–owes California income tax on all their presumed income, even if they have filed income tax returns in another state.

If this isn’t the acme of illegal seizure and denial of basic rights, i.e. presumed innocent until proven guilty, then what is?…..”

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[youtube://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMaH6ecDxsQ 450 300]

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“The Justice Department’s much ballyhooed battle against mortgage fraud in the years following the 2008 housing meltdown was mostly a sham, with gross exaggerations about its success from top government officials including Attorney General Eric Holder, according to The Fiscal Times.

The department’s own Office of the Inspector General (OIG), an internal agency watchdog, studied the results of the government’s mortgage industry investigations in the wake of the economic disaster that still haunts many Americans.

What the OIG found was that the Justice Department did not assign the high priority to mortgage fraud that was commonly believed, the Times said. To the contrary, the Justice Department’s FBI “ranked mortgage fraud as the lowest ranked criminal threat in its lowest crime category,” according to the OIG.

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In fact, through the FBI received $196 million to battle mortgage fraud from 2009 through 2011, the agency actually reduced the number of agents assigned to the matter and the number of pending investigations.

The Fiscal Times reported that “perhaps the most damning finding to emerge” from an OIG audit came at a 2012 news conference in which Holder maintained that 530 people had been charged with mortgage fraud the previous year, including 172 executives, and that 110 civil cases had been launched – a major undertaking involving $1 billion in losses and 73,000 “homeowner victims.

But after months of prodding from the OIG, the Justice Department admitted that only 107 people had been charged with mortgage fraud, and the losses added up to just $95 million…..”

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[youtube://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQ0-3fQIB2g#t=118 450 300]

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“We get experts on everything that sound like they’re scientific experts … They’ll sit at a typewriter and make up all this stuff as if it’s science and then become an expert … Now, I might be quite wrong, maybe they do know all these things. But I don’t think I’m wrong. You see I have the advantage of having found out how hard it is to get to really know something … how easy it is to make mistakes and fool yourself. I know what it means to know something. And therefore, I see how they get their information and I can’t believe that they know it. They haven’t done the work necessary. They haven’t done the checks necessary. They haven’t done the care necessary … and they’re intimidating people. -Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize-winning physicist.

The excerpt is from a 1981 BBC documentary about Richard Feynman that was linked in a Zero Hedge post several years ago. Unfortunately, Feynman passed away in 1988 and never had the chance to watch the “experts” on financial television. We would have particularly liked to hear the great physicist’s thoughts on economics punditry.

To understand economics experts in Feynman’s absence, the best analogy that we can think of is to the methods of a magician. Magicians operate by showing their audience a small window on reality, and then tricking people into mentally filling in the rest incorrectly. Because the economy has so many moving parts, a similar approach also works in economics. Pundits can draw our attention to a couple of indicators, ignore everything else, and make claims that sound realistic even though they make little sense in the bigger picture. One difference between economists and magicians, though, is that economists are often unaware of their trickery because they fool themselves before fooling others.

To be clear, we don’t claim to be immune to such deceptions, but we do try to root them out as best we can and will do that here.

We’ll look at capital expenditures (capex), in particular. You can’t take in much media commentary today before finding someone arguing that capex is lower than it should be. Crystal ball gazers predict a capex resurgence that lifts the economy into a robust recovery, while pundits with an activist bentimplore businesses (and public officials) to ramp up their investments.

There’s usually some combination of four pieces to what we’ll call the “CNBC” story:

1. Corporate cash is high
2. Net investment is low
3. Bond yields are low
4. Corporate profits are high

These four observations are said to demonstrate that businesses are behaving irrationally or improperly by not pushing capex higher. And the story may sound reasonable on the surface, but is it really that simple?

To dig deeper, we’ll critique the proposition linked to each observation, while testing them with over 60 years of data.  Our results show that the CNBC story is yet another careless economic illusion.

Proposition 1: Corporate cash is high, and therefore, businesses should put that cash to work through capex.

Comments: This is the most obviously deceptive of the four propositions, hence Mark Spitznagel’s incredulous response when asked to address cash balances by Maria Bartiromo last week. As Spitznagel explained, it makes little sense to isolate the cash that sits on corporate balance sheets without netting the credit portions of both assets and liabilities. We last updated corporations’ net credit position here, showing that gradual increases in cash balances are dwarfed by rising debt.

A longer history further disproves the proposition; it shows that there’s no correlation between capex and corporate cash:

Proposition 2: Net investment (capex less depreciation) is unusually low and should be much higher at this point in the business cycle.

Comments: This argument implies that businesses should invest more when depreciation is higher, as that’s the only way to drive the net amount of investment towards “normal” levels. Our criticism is that it combines current capex with an accounting measure of depreciation on past capex. This is extremely misleading after periods of malinvestment, in particular, when the capital stock is too high for the level of demand. Unusually high depreciation after such periods is a sign that capex should be managed carefully to keep the capital stock from further outpacing fundamentals, not increased blindly to maintain an assumed margin over depreciation. Therefore, net investment fails to tell us anything about the “right” amount of capex.

Turning again to the last six decades, data confirms that the second proposition is just as faulty as the first:

Proposition 3: Low interest rates should encourage more capex.

Comments: This is a trickier proposition than the first two, since low rates should certainly spur higher spending when other factors are held constant. The problem is that other factors are never constant. On the contrary, low rates are typically associated with a challenging economy, and this is especially true in today’s highly manipulated markets. The Fed seems to be discouraging long-term investment in some respects by holding rates well below where they would otherwise be. As perceived by us and many others (including Spitznagel per the interview linked above), the Fed’s approach raises long-term risks while drawing capital into short-term financial strategies.

Needless to say, this isn’t the ideal environment for capex. It’s not that companies aren’t taking advantage of low rates; they’ve increased borrowing substantially as noted above. It’s just that the proceeds of that borrowing aren’t flowing into capex as much as they would in less manipulated markets.

Moreover, history once again refutes the proposition. Adjusting corporate bond yields for inflation, the chart below shows that capex has tended to be slightly lower than average when real yields are low….”

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“A few days ago, copper prices and the Chinese stock market were roiled by speculation that another – the second in a row – Chinese bond default may be imminent, in the shape of Baoding Tianwei Baobian Electric (TBE) a maker of electrical equipment and solar panels, whose bonds and stock were suspended from trading a week ago after reporting massive losses. A few days later, TBE “promised” not to defaultwhen its next interest payment is due in July (although how the insolvent company can see that far into the future is just a little confusing). And yet the market shrugged and contrary to its recent idiotic euphoria to surge on even the tiniest of non-horrible news, barely saw a rise. Today we may know the reason: overnight Bloomberg reports that second Chinese corporate bond default may be imminent after the collapse and arrest of the largest shareholder of closely held Chinese real estate developer Zhejiang Xingrun Real Estate Co, which just happens to be saddled with 3.5 billion yuan ($566.6 million) of debt.

Debt which absent a bailout, which at this point is very improbable, will not be repaid.

From Bloomberg:

Zhejiang Xingrun Real Estate Co. doesn’t have enough cash to repay creditors that include more than 15 banks, with China Construction Bank Corp. (939) holding more than 1 billion yuan of its debt, according to the officials, who asked not to be named because they weren’t authorized to discuss the matter. The company’s majority shareholder and his son, its legal representative, have been detained and face charges of illegal fundraising, the officials said.

What is curious about this particular potential default is that it touches not only on the massive leverage in the Chinese system, but on the one real bubble in China (since nobody there seems to care about the Shanghai Composite): housing.

The collapse of the company, in the eastern town of Fenghua, adds to concern of strains in China’s real estate sector. The property market in smaller Chinese cities faces “true risks of a sharp correction” due to oversupply and investors may have underestimated the risk, Nomura Holdings Inc. economists said in a March 14 report.

Two calls to the chairman’s office and financial department at Zhejiang Xingrun weren’t answered today…..”

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[youtube://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWkfpGCAAuw#t=11 450 300]

 

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“For years, many Americans followed a simple career path: Land an entry-level job. Accept a modest wage. Gain skills. Leave eventually for a better-paying job.

The workers benefited, and so did lower-wage retailers such as Wal-Mart: When its staffers left for better-paying jobs, they could spend more at its stores. And the U.S. economy gained, too, because more consumer spending fueled growth.

Not so much anymore. Since the Great Recession began in late 2007, that path has narrowed because many of the next-tier jobs no longer exist. That means more lower-wage workers have to stay put. The resulting bottleneck is helping widen a gap between the richest Americans and everyone else.

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“Some people took those jobs because they were the only ones available and haven’t been able to figure out how to move out of that,” Bill Simon, CEO of Wal-Mart U.S., acknowledged in an interview with The Associated Press.

If Wal-Mart employees “can go to another company and another job and make more money and develop, they’ll be better,” Simon explained. “It’ll be better for the economy. It’ll be better for us as a business, to be quite honest, because they’ll continue to advance in their economic life.”

Yet for now, the lower-wage jobs once seen as stepping stones are increasingly being held for longer periods by older, better-educated, more experienced workers.

The trend extends well beyond Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest employer, and is reverberating across the U.S. economy. It’s partly why average inflation-adjusted income has declined 9 percent for the bottom 40 percent of households since 2007, even as incomes for the top 5 percent now slightly exceed where they were when the recession began late that year, according to the Census Bureau.

Research shows that occupations that once helped elevate people from the minimum wage into the middle class have disappeared during the past three recessions dating to 1991.

One such category includes bookkeepers and executive secretaries, with average wages of $16.54 an hour, according to the Labor Department. Since the mid-1980s, the economy has shed these middle-income jobs — a trend that’s become more pronounced with the recoveries that have followed each subsequent recession, according to research by Henry Siu, an economist at the University of British Columbia, and Duke University economist Nir Jaimovich.

That leaves many workers remaining in jobs as cashiers earning an average of $9.79 an hour, or in retail sales at roughly $10.50 — jobs that used to be entry points to higher-paying work. Hourly pay at Wal-Mart averages $8.90, according to the site Glassdoor.com. (Wal-Mart disputes that figure; it says its pay for hourly workers averages $11.83.)

Since the Great Recession began, the share of U.S workers employed by the retail and restaurant sector has risen from 16.5 percent to 17.1 percent.

“It really has contributed to this widening of inequality,” Siu said…..”

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What the article fails  to mention is that corporattions hold multiple headquarters overseas to bring their tax rates down to as little as 1-4% in most cases….so repartiating dollars back home is really not that big of a deal…..espcially when you get corporte welfare.

[youtube://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I01-9yujhCA 450 300]

“An inefficiency in the US tax code is causing US multinationals to hold more and more cash overseas.

According to data analyzed by Bloomberg, US companies are now holding about $2 trillion abroad.

The multinational companies have accumulated $1.95 trillion outside the U.S., up 11.8 percent from a year earlier, according to securities filings from 307 corporations reviewed by Bloomberg News. Three U.S.-based companies — Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), Apple Inc. and International Business Machines Corp. — added $37.5 billion, or 18.2 percent of the total increase.

The basic issue is that US companies are taxed again on money they make abroad when they repatriate that money to the US (for investment or dividends). So they opt to let it pile up in bank accounts abroad. …”

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“It has been quite some time since we did a ‘Myth Busters’, even though there obviously remains quite a bit of mythology. So we’re going to chop away at it piece by piece and demonstrate once again that the media, government, and what I like to the call the ‘establishment’ (which is the concatenation of the aforementioned and the banksters) couldn’t give a rip about the truth. The establishment only cares about what is expedient and convenient for itself.

I am continually amazed, especially when I step outside the world of economics and finance, how LITTLE people really understand what is going on. It’s all about paradigms and where your comfort zone is.  At any rate, we’re here to smash paradigms and hopefully encourage some critical thought in the process. This week’s Myth Buster deals with the idea of a minimum wage. Recently there has been quite a bit of scuttlebutt as Congress and politicians in general try to cozy up to the public before another set of what will almost assuredly be ‘more of the same’ elections slated for this fall. The catering is on. Suddenly the local intelligencia is on the radar of the politicians and we’ll get to spend the next 8 months listening to them tell us how they hear us and feel our pain, etc. Hogwash.

One of these cheap show gimmicks is the idea of raising the minimum wage. It sounds really good because all those people who are working for $7+/hour up to maybe $9 or so are expecting a nice raise if this goes through. It has already gone through for certain government contractors. One might make a very good case for discrimination, but we’ll leave that for the slip and fall crowd to hash out. We’re going to throw some cold water on the euphoria – as usual – and tell you why this is yet another really BAD idea.

The Myth:

“A minimum wage is good for the economy because it ensures that everyone has an equal chance to earn a living wage.”

It is my opinion that this gimmick is particularly appealing because we live in an instant gratification world for the most part. People will have their wage go up by as much as, say 40% from one week to the next, and suddenly the economy will be absolutely splendid. And they will benefit in real terms. But this is the NFL – and in this case that means ‘not for long’. But since most can’t see past their noses financially, it’ll work – until the inevitable happens and they find themselves right back where they started – and probably in worse shape when all is said and done. Will the establishment then pump another increase? There are ramifications to that, but we’ll save that for the end.

The Anatomy of the ‘Minimum Wage’

Essentially, the minimum wage is nothing more than a price control. Think of a supply and demand chart. Price is on the y-axis (see below). Well, labor has a price as well, just like any other good or service. And the price of labor is generally referred to as the wage. So, in classical fashion, we can plot a simple supply and demand chart. For the purposes of this essay, we’ll use linear functions to depict supply (QS) and demand (QD), but acknowledge that these functions are almost never linear. In the case of a price floor, the price is set (by the government) at some point above the equilibrium price. We’re already in trouble, because now the system is not efficient. There is what we economists call a welfare loss. If we were to analyze this quantitatively, we could calculate the magnitude of the welfare loss. However, in this case, we’re only interested in demonstrating that such an inefficiency exists. This is a point of very hot contention between the various schools of economic thought, but it’s actually a lot worse than the price control alone.

There is another concept one needs to consider and that is the cost of labor. This is the point of view the employer looks at. What does it cost the shop to hire another worker? Well, obviously there is the wages paid. Then there are various carrying costs associated with the new marginal (economic definition) employee. This is not to imply that the employee is of a low quality, but it is an employee who is hired at the margin, or edge. Think of a microeconomic situation where we look at marginal cost. That is the cost of adding one more unit of production. Well, the marginal employee is adding one more employee. What is the marginal cost (MC) of that employee? It is his/her wages, plus unemployment insurance costs, plus workmen’s compensation costs, plus social insecurity costs, training, and the list goes on. So it’s not just the minimum wage. The cost, depending on the industry, can be much, much higher.

At this point, the employer asks the question: “Does this employee’s marginal revenue (the value the marginal employee generates for the firm) at least equal the marginal cost of having the employee? If the answer is no, a smart employer won’t hire. If the answer is ‘yes’, the hire will happen, and there will likely be additional hires until MR=MC. In the case where MC > MR, there will be layoffs until that micro equilibrium is met. I realize there are factors and variables that play into these decisions that are simply too numerous to count. The point is to paint a general picture and bring some common sense to the subject.

Now let’s consider the situation where we have an individual who is working for $8/hour. Let’s say the carrying costs are another $2/hour, making the cost of that employee $10/hour. At this level, the business is fairly near equilibrium (MR~MC). The employee is paying for him or herself by working there. Then you have Congress, with its infinite desire to meddle in the business of others in its never-ending quest to be loved, stepping in. Given that Congress’ approval rating currently rests several orders of magnitude lower than the Titanic, it figures it needs to do something for the people before asking for votes. And all the advisors think this is a great idea because they were taught by a bunch of Marxist-Keynesians – like the ones who ‘educated’ Bernanke and Yellen.

So Congress steps in and jacks the minimum wage to $10/hour. Looking back on the aforementioned example, the carrying costs are still $2/hour – for now. Suddenly the MC for any new hires is greater than the MR and subsequent hires won’t be made – or the firm will raise prices. Perhaps a combination of the two will be used. In addition, it is also very likely that some firms will cut back on employees because their equilibrium is now upset. Many firms don’t have the pricing power to just pass it all on to the consumer. They have to eat it. Well, they don’t end up eating it – their employees do because they now have people on the payroll that can’t pay for themselves. It’s not any fault of the employee, but rather, is the fault of Congress for using an idiotic price control.

The Macro Perspective

Let’s look at things from a macro perspective. Most people are aware of the fact that the vast majority of the jobs that have been ‘created’ since the great recession allegedly ended have been lower-end service/retail and temporary positions. They’re exactly the types of positions that stand to be affected by a change in the minimum wage. Again, we’re assuming these jobs were even created at all. We know for a fact there haven’t been nearly as many as the government says, but that’s another essay. We’ve been down that road. So the net effect is that you’re going to have a bunch of people who are suddenly going to get the equivalent of a raise. What do you think they’re going to do with it? The responsible thing would be to attack the liabilities portion of their balance sheets, but a thinking person is going to look at past history and conclude that since we learn next to nothing from history, that this money, by and large, will be spent. More dollars chasing a fairly static supply of product? Shazam – price inflation. There is plenty of money in the system. There now needs to be a vehicle to get it into the hands of the spenders because the economy is flagging big time.

This is precisely the thinking of what I like to call ‘Flat-Earth Economists’. These are intellectual reprobates like Paul Krugman, Ken Rogoff, Mike Norman, and the majority of the policy steering arm of the Western banking syndicate. These are the sort of klutzes who think that the government should take your retirement accounts, force you to buy their debt, and bombard you with massive inflation – and yes, the minimum wage is a very good vehicle. More on that in the conclusion section.

It is very likely that I’m not the only one who is paying attention to the velocity of money metrics and staring aghast. The big shots in DC and NY watch those metrics too and they know full well what they mean. There is no recovery. M2 velocity of circulation is cratering with no bottom in sight. This means that money is moving more and more slowly through the economy. Not good. Things need a boost. People are strung out on credit and they must know the end is in sight. After all, there is a point certain when one simply cannot borrow anymore, at least from a practical perspective. The establishment needs to get some money in the hands of these people. It is not to increase their standard of living, however, it is merely another trick to buy some more time. A stunt to push the sun up just enough to get past another election.

Some Common Arguments for a Minimum Wage….”

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“Across the planet, new technologies and business models are decentralizing power and placing it in the hands of communities and individuals.

“We are seeing technology-driven networks replacing bureacratically-driven hierarchies,” says VC and futurist Fred Wilson, speaking on what to expect in the next ten years. View the entire 25-minute video below (it’s worth it!) and then check out the 21 innovations below.

[youtube://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R43OKYmGbhU 450 300]

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Depends on your definition of the truth….

“Among my favorite anecdotes of the mortgage-industry decadence that preceded the global financial crisis is the one about Ameriquest’s wind machine. A motivational tool for managers, it made its appearance in the late ’90s at an executive conference at Las Vegas’s MGM Grand Hotel, where the future subprime leader hooked up a powerful fan to a plastic tent. Inside, exuberant branch managers jumped around amid a cascade of cash, allowed to keep as many swirling bills as they could grab.

That was how it went at mortgage-firm retreats: Here, a money-grabbing contest; there, a round of ritual chanting—“The power of yes! The power of yes!”—at a 2004 Washington Mutual gathering that was like the high ceremony of some bizarre money cult. Before long such incentivizing was part of the daily culture, if not official policy. Countrywide, for example, had a marketing program called the “High-Speed Swim Lane” that linked the bonuses of sales reps working in football-field-sized call centers to the volume of loans they originated. Compressing the programs initials—and cutting to the chase—employees nicknamed it “The Hustle.”

Mere excess was never enough for these companies. Though we’re all aware, by now, of the crookedness that infected the mortgage business last decade, the particulars are still striking. Did you know, for instance, that WMC Mortgage Corporation, owned by General Electric, hired former strippers and an ex-porn actress to entice brokers into selling their mortgages, according to a report by theCenter for Public Integrity? Or that Wells Fargo gave its mortgage stars all-expense-paid vacations to Cancun and the Bahamas and treated them to private performances by Aerosmith, the Eagles, and Elton John? Or that New Century sent top loan sales reps toPorsche driving school?

The upshot is clear enough: With Wall Street’s demand for mortgages unending and some loan producers managing to book up to 70 loans per day, the system didn’t just crash. It was brought down.

But we’ve also been made to understand that subprime lenders and their Wall Street funders didn’t act alone. Instead, they were aided by the avarice of the American people, who were not victims of the crash so much as accomplices in it. Respondents to a Rasmussen poll done during the throes of the crisis overwhelmingly blamed “individuals who borrowed more than they could afford” (54 percent) over Wall Street (25 percent). To this day, the view is widespread and bipartisan: Main Street was an essential cause of the meltdown. The enemy was us.

“It all goes back to the increase in the tolerance for debt,” David Brooks wrote a couple of years ago. The Brookings Institution, meanwhile, has argued that of all the possible crisis narratives, “ ‘everyone was at fault’ comes closest to the truth.” The “wider society” must face the music, it said in a 2009 paper. “People in all types of institutions and as individuals became blasé about risk-taking and leverage.”

Or, as Michael Lewis, our financial-writer laureate, observed: “The tsunami of cheap credit … was temptation, offering entire societies the chance to reveal aspects of their characters they could not normally afford to indulge.” Reveal themselves, they did, and it wasn’t pretty. Writing for Vanity Fair, Lewis quoted at length Dr. Peter Whybrow, a British neuroscientist at UCLA, who posited that human beings have “the core of the average lizard.” Lewis, running with the analogy, relayed Whybrow’s conclusion, which was that “the succession of financial bubbles, and the amassing of personal and public debt” were “simply an expression of the lizard-brained way of life.”

Is that not the truth?

Actually: No, it’s not. The notion that American consumers share the blame for the mortgage crisis is a lie. And it is one of the most pernicious out there.

 

Everyone-Is-To-Blame (or EITB, for brevity’s sake) has done much to mute the public outcry essential for sweeping efforts to respond to the financial catastrophe. To the extent that Dodd-Frank fell short of the root-and-branch reform that followed the last great crash in 1929, EITB is to blame. The fact that banks too big to fail before the crisis have been allowed to grow to twice their pre-bubble sizes can be traced to a nagging sense that they didn’t act alone. And if you wonder why, six years after the fact, no significant Wall Street figure has been criminally prosecuted, I would suggest that EITB has muddied perceptions just enough to allow the administration to sidestep the necessary legal mobilization. If everyone is to blame, then criminal indictments of individual executives can be framed as exercises in scapegoating……”

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“……..It is interesting that, as humans, we fail to pay attention to the warnings signs as long as we see no immediate danger.  Yet, when the inevitable occurs, we refuse to accept responsibility for the consequences.

I was recently discussing the market, current sentiment and other investing related issues with a money manager friend of mine in California. (Normally, I would include a credit for the following work but since he works for a major firm he asked me not to identify him directly.) However, in one of our many email exchanges he sent me the following note detailing the 10 typical warning signs of stock market exuberance.

(1) Expected strong OR acceleration of GDP and EPS  (40% of 2013′s EPS increase occurred in the 4th quarter)

(2) Large number of IPOs of unprofitable AND speculative companies

(3) Parabolic move up in stock prices of hot industries (not just individual stocks)

(4) High valuations (many metrics are at near-record highs, a few at record highs)

(5) Fantastic high valuation of some large mergers (e.g., Facebook & WhatsApp)

(6) High NYSE margin debt

Margin debt/gdp (March 2000: 2.7%, July 2007: 2.6%, Jan 2014: 2.6%)

Margin debt/market cap (March 2000: 1.8%, July 2007: 2.3%, Jan 2014: 2.0%)….”

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“At some point over the next few years, the rate of money flow and inflation will start to catch up to each other, eventually sending the economy into a recession, according to a new analysis from banking analyst Dick Bove.

The good news in Bove’s forecast is that the day of reckoning is probably four years away.

The bad news is that a 7 percent rate in the 10-year note looms out there, something that would put a severe crimp in the current debt-happy economy….”

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“The desperation of the Anglo-American leadership, guided by the steady corrupt banker hands, has never been more acutely high, nor obvious in full view. The entire Ukraine situation is a travesty. It includes Langley agents killing police and street demonstrators from rooftops, the confirmation coming from the Estonian Embassy (translation of scripts). It includes thefts of official Ukrainian Govt funds, again sent to the Swiss hill sanctuary. It includes sanctions delivered by a US Paper Tiger, sure to cause horrific backlash. It involves the last gasp attempt to obstruct the Gazprom energy pipelines, which will inevitably corner the European market in monopoly. It involves subterfuge with the NATO card (aka Narcotics And Treachery Outlaws) with missiles placed on the Russian borders. Look for NATO members to find a back door to exit the spurious treaty. It involves playing with nitro-glycerine in the Petro-Dollar room. It involves putting tremendous risk for much more clear isolation of the United States. The more the USGovt pushes, the more the US will be isolated. Remember that Nazis steal from their enemy states, de-fraud from their allied states, and force themselves into an isolated state. In Ukraine, the United States has over-played its weak hand. Already, a secret document was leaked in London that the UKGovt would not support the US-led sanctions against Russia.

 

History repeats itself from the Kremlin phone calls made during the Syrian conflict just a few months ago, when the UKGovt withdrew its support and left the US isolated, looking very weak. Already, Putin has threatened to dump USTreasury Bonds. Putin aptly calls the Anglo-Americans as Mutants. Imagine the lunacy of trying to cut off the only Russian warm water military naval port in the Crimea. Just as stupid as the Trans Pacific Partnership faux pas, trying to cut off China from its Asian neighbors and partners in trade. The intelligence level of the USGovt has never been more stupid, destructive, and in full view. The lost ground for the United States is obvious and glaring in the Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Caucasus region.

IMMEDIATE PETRO-DOLLAR RISK

If the Kremlin demands Gold bullion (or even Russian Rubles) for oil payments, then the interventions to subvert the Ruble currency by the London and Wall Street houses will backfire and blow up in the bankster faces. Expect any surplus Rubles would be converted quickly to Gold bullion. If the Chinese demand that they are permitted to pay for oil shipments in Yuan currency, then the entire Petro-Dollar platform will be subjected to sledge hammers and wrecking balls. The new Petro-Yuan defacto standard will have been launched from the Shanghai outpost. If the Saudis curry favor to the Russians and Chinese by accepting non-USDollar payments for oil shipments, then the Petro-Dollar is dead and buried. The rise of the Nat Gas Coop run by Gazprom is in progress, its gas pipelines to strangle the OPEC and its bastard Petro-Dollar child. The entire USDollar foundation with the USTreasury Bond bank reserve structure is at risk is collapsing, as consequence to the desperate adventure and criminal activity conducted in Ukraine.Just like with Syria, a hidden giant energy deposit is concealed under the table. Off the Lebanese and Syrian coast, a massive off-shore energy deposit was recently discovered. The US & UK & Israeli oligarchs wish to take it all. Confusion is their game. In the western plains of Ukraine, a massive gas deposit was recently discovered. The US & European oligarchs wish to take it all. Confusion is their game.

The danger level has never been higher. No resolution to the Global Monetary War can come, which we have been seeking, without a climax. It is hardly just a financial crisis amidst a stubborn economic recovery. The nature of the currencies and their underlying sovereign bond foundation is highly toxic, which requires a strong replacement as solution, using an alternative to the USDollar alongside its reserve ledger item the USTreasury Bond. A return to the Gold Standard is coming, but the birth will have loud pangs and possibly broad damage suffered. The Global Currency Reset is better named the Return to the Gold Standard. The United States and London will not give up their control of the Weimar Printing Press easily, used for elite self-dole of extreme wealth. It has served well as the Elite credit card. They will not go quietly, and assume their place in the backwater without taking the world to the brink. No climax can occur without enormous risk and loss. The Global Paradigm Shift is in full gear, with attendant risk huge here and now. My Jackass firm belief is that the US/UK fascist team face a Waterloo event in Ukraine, the victim to be the Imperial Dollar. This bulletin will not be a comprehensive note, as the situation is too vast. The information in the Hat Trick Letter is used to interweave a story of the impending removal of the USDollar from its corrupt throne.

UNITED STATES TRAPPED AND CORNERED

The Anglo Americans have fallen into a carefully designed trap by the Russians and Chinese in a clever designed sequence. More Sun Tzu tactics have been put into practice, which utilize the momentum from the enemy to be thrust back on them. Planning for final steps must have taken place during high level Putin meetings with Xi from the elite Sochi viewing box. The unfolding of events has been more carefully engineered and orchestrated than what appears. The US/UK team has been caught in a vise for months, as the rejection of the USDollar as global reserve currency is in high gear, the refusal of the USTBond a recognized trend in diversifications. The death process is slow and grueling. Much of the American Hemisphere is surrounded and controlled by Russia & China, whether the canal, the port facilities, the oil supply, the mineral deposits, even Yuan Swap facilities. Africa has largely gone under Chinese control, with Russia playing a hidden role as well.

The Persian Gulf is in transition, with the critical protectorate role shifting to China. The Qatar royals have just ordered a dismissal of USGovt ambassadors from their nation. Note that Qatar is the site of a giant USNaval base. To be sure, the Sochi Olympic Games are over, a successful event. The gloves have thus come off. The risks have reached acute levels. The US leadership seems cavalier to the risks that over half the USGovt debt is in foreign hands, over 30% of it in Russian & Chinese hands. A severe backlash cometh. The most vulnerable player in the room is the most aggressive, arrogant, vile, and obnoxious. The instability of the situation is far beyond acute. The victim will be the USDollar and its sidekick the USTreasury Bond. The USTBonds will be kicked out of the global banking system. The Third World awaits the United States, for its domestic betrayals, its financial failures, its criminal deeds, and its war aggression.

THE RUSSIAN BACKLASH TO BE SUDDEN

Russian President Vladimir Putin will slam the West, and very soon. The initial salvo might be a natural gas cutoff by Gazprom, the Russian giant which has fast moved into the global monopoly position. Eventually, Putin might demand gold payment for the natgas in the captured pipelines, that being the plan according to The Voice. Russia supplies one quarter of Western European gas needs. It will be the opening salvo for Gold Trade Settlement, for which the Iran workarounds to the sanctions provided the critical prototype. Combined with a formal announcement of USTreasury Bond sales in volume by Russia & China, the impact would be tremendous, even devastating. The reverberation will be soon seen as the pending demise of the defacto Petro-Dollar Standard, dictated by crude oil sales in USD terms. It will also be soon seen as the end of the USTBond as the global reserve standard in banking systems. Notice for over two years, the primary buyer of USGovt debt (and its refunded rollover) has been the US Federal Reserve via bond monetization, an absolute heresy to central banking. Hyper monetary inflation cannot stand as fixed policy. The world has responded by constructing an alternative to trade settlement. The forum has been the BRICS conferences and the G-20 Meetings of finance ministers. The US & UK will gradually be excluded from both forums, a process well along. Even traditional allies like Japan are buying gold in high volume, with suppressed lowball data so far. This is game over for the USDollar, the direct victim of Ukraine backlash. The war against Russia has been veiled, but the Jackass has exposed it.

VEILED ATTACKS AGAINST RUSSIAN GAZPROM

First was the attack against Russian Gazprom in Cyprus. It was a hidden attack made to look like a bank confiscation event. Notice no bank account confiscations outside the small but important island nation. The entire Russian banking clearance system had been done through Cyprus. Also, Russia was making significant transactions to purchase Gold bullion using Cyprus as clearing house for the purchases. Second was the attack against Russian Gazprom in Syria, another complicated event. The US had used the Libyan Embassy as a weapons running facility (major diplomatic violation), after which the US lost Egypt as a transfer station on the weapons running. The false flag attack in Syria was made to look like a chemical weapons event. However, the Saudis were the guilty party. The motive by the US was to block the advance of Russian Gazprom pipelines, which are to connect to the vast Iran supply centers. Iran has far more oil & gas than Iraq. In fact, Iran is the linchpin nation, which will throw its support toward Russia. Iran will push the Nat Gas Coop certain to eclipse Saudi Arabia and the loud gaggle of OPEC members. With the Russian Gazprom, together Iran and the Nat Gas Coop will usher in the Petro-Yuan Standard and bury the Petro-Dollar, the price set by Russia, the contracts set in Shanghai. Thus the Saudis will be expendable, and their Gold in London to be totally stolen.

Move to the present. Third was the attack against Russia Gazprom in Ukraine, done by the CIA and its partner security agents from the small ally nation on the SouthEast Med corner. The old game of destabilization, popular uprising, bank thefts, and now data files stolen has been put into action. The theft of significant funds in Ukraine has only started, funds gone to Swiss banks. The full betrayal will be seen soon. The US & UK have a lunatic plan to corral the Ukraine pipelines and possibly the vast farmlands of Ukraine. The wrong-footed plan will backfire, when Putin cuts off the natgas supply to Europe, when Putin demands a new type of energy supply payment structure, and when Putin engineers certain other steps. They might execute a Nat Gas Coop double in price, much like the OPEC event in 1973. Witness the upcoming Birth of the Eurasian Trade Zone, the birth pangs heard in Ukraine. The United States and Great Britain will not be included. The Eurasian Trade Zone will span 14 time zones and will settle in gold.

IRAN WORKAROUND AS KEY PROTOTYPE SOLUTION

The Anglo Americans have disrupted a key nation with longstanding historical and religious ties to Russia. The land of Ukraine also contains Russia’s only warm water naval port in the Crimea, the site of a recent suspicious earthquake. The response will be swift and firm. The Eastern nations (led by China & Russia) have been making detailed preparations in the last couple years to launch the alternative trade system founded in Gold Settlement. Its launch lacks a potential open door trigger, possibly offered by the Ukraine situation. The Gold Standard could return in a baptism by fire. The open door trigger appears to be the Western interventions into Ukraine, since the Western banking structures will not be permitted to collapse, the ugly reality. The abuse of the central bank monetary expansion and fraudulent bond redemption has gone totally out of control, forcing an endless cycle of alternative preparations and motivated reactions, including the Iran workaround with Turkey as intermediary in gold provision. Other attacks have taken place in the last few months against the Russian Ruble by Wall Street firms. The reaction will possibly be the launch of what could eventually be understood to be a gold-backed Ruble currency, combined with natgas cutoffs to Europe and USTBond dumps. At first it could be perceived as the oil-backed Ruble, but its quick hidden conversion to Gold bullion could be revealed later on. The USDollar will be discarded as obsolete, even toxic. The USDollar debt basis might be widely accepted to be the cause of the global financial crisis, and the USFed Quantitative Easing be widely understood to be the cause of the global financial collapse.

EUROPE AS KEY REGION TO TIP EASTWARD

Events inside Western Europe could unfold rapidly…….”

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“Philadelphia Federal Reserve President Charles Plosser is “very worried” about the potential for unintended consequences of the Fed’s massive quantitative easing program.

Plosser told CNBC that the U.S. was still suffering from “lasting effects” of the recession and “may never return” to its previous growth rates – and warned that policy should not bet on growth returning to previous rates, saying it could be “many, many years”. …”

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“This may seem like a far out idea, but is it possible that our thoughts create fields of information that go into the Global Mind we share? Is it possible our thoughts might create ‘thought fields’ that can interact with the thought fields of others? There is a fascinating phenomenon in science known as the ‘multiples effect’. The multiples effect if when multiple people geographically isolated from one another come up with the exact same discovery at the exact same time. By 1922, there had been 148 major scientific breakthroughs identified to have been discovered in such a way. Here are just a FEW examples:

– Evolution (Darwin and Wallace)
– Calculus (Newton and Leibniz)
– Decimal fractions – 3 people
– Sunspots – 4 people in 1611
– Law of conservation of energy – 4 people in 1847
– Steamboat – 4 people
– Telescope – 9 people
– Thermometer – 6 people

Is it really possible that all 148 major discoveries happened at the exact same time coincidentally by people who were not sharing their ideas with each other? Imagine two people completely geographically isolated from each other working on the same problem at the same time. They are each intently working on the same exact dilemma, with their thoughts floating around in the consciousness field energetically interacting with each other. It’s kind of like the experience we all have with our friends where we know what they are going to say right before they say it.

CONSCIOUSNESS IS NON-LOCAL.

Below is a picture of pyramids build in three separate ancient cultures geographically isolated from one another. There is no possible way these cultures would be able to communicate with one another, yet the pyramids they build are exactly alike. Is this sheer coincidence?

………”

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[youtube://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmN2RL4VJsE#t=683 450 300]

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