Thursday, February 21, 2013

U.S. farmers may stop planting GMOs after horrific crop yields

(NaturalNews) Some farmers across the United States may stop planting genetically modified crops after poor yields are increasing costs beyond what they can absorb.

According to Farmers Weekly, those farmers are considering returning to conventional seed after increased pest resistance and crop failures have meant smaller GM crop yields over non-GM counterparts.

Farmers in the U.S. pay about $100 more per acre for GM seed. Many have begun questioning "whether they will continue to see benefits from using GMs," the farmer's publication reported.

"It's all about cost benefit analysis," economist Dan Basse, president of AgResource, an American agricultural research firm, said.

"Farmers are paying extra for the technology but have seen yields which are no better than 10 years ago," he told the Weekly. "They're starting to wonder why they're spending extra money on the technology."

A problem that is becoming more widespread

The publication said one of the biggest problems U.S. farmers have experienced with GM seed is resistance. When GM seeds were first introduced, biotech engineers said it would be 40 years before resistance would develop; but pests such as corn rootworm have instead developed a resistance to GM crops in as few as 14 years.

"Some of these bugs will eat the plant and it will make them sick, but not kill them. It starts off in pockets of the country but then becomes more widespread," Basse said.

"We're looking at going back to cultivation to control it. I now use insecticides again," he said.

If farmers don't move back towards non-GMOs, the availability of seed will become an issue, he said, noting that some 87 percent of U.S. farmers currently plant genetically modified seed.

Countries around the world that do not use GM seed are outperforming U.S. farmers. The largest crop yields last year were in Asia, and China in particular, where farmers don't plant GM seed.

For years, there has been concern that GM seeds would develop resistance to pesticides and weed killers, though some of the largest biotech firms that push such seeds - like Monsanto - have consistently denied or downplayed such concerns.

Scott McAllister, a third-generation farmer in Iowa, told The Huffington Post in October he was leery of Monsanto's claims when a seed peddler came to see him last fall.

"Down the road, are we going to experience resistance in weeds with the continued use of Roundup?" McAllister said he recalls asking the salesman.

"Oh no, that'll never happen," he was told.

Sure it won't...

Monsanto's combination of GM seed and Roundup herbicide was supposed to help crops thrive, not weeds and bugs. But 15 years later, when most corn, soybeans and cotton cultivated in the U.S. comes from Roundup Ready seed, an increasing number of these crops are falling prey to "superweeds" that have become resistant to the GM seeds and herbicide that was supposed to kill them forever.

From HuffPo:

Repeated application of the herbicide has literally weeded out the weak weeds and given the rare resistant weeds the opportunity to take over. The situation, according to a report published...in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Sciences Europe, has driven growers to use larger quantities of Roundup, more often and in conjunction with a broader arsenal of other weed-killing chemicals.

"It's been a slowly unfolding train wreck," Charles Benbrook, author of the study and professor at the Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources at Washington State University, said.

"Before biotech came on the market, we had one airplane in the county to do all the aerial spraying," McAllister told the online newspaper. "Now they bring in seven or eight. We've got the same acreage of crops. They're just spraying more."

Sources:

http://www.fwi.co.uk

http://www.huffingtonpost.com

http://www.naturalnews.com/027827_GM_seeds_food_supply.html

Suddenly Everyone Sells Everything For Dollars: Stocks Fall, Oil Tanks, Gold Gets Crushed, Volume Exploded. Fed Officials Divided On Future of QE. Is the Big Reset Imminent?

STOCKS FALL, OIL TANKS, GOLD GETS CRUSHED: Here’s What You Need To Know

Things got ugly.

First the scoreboard:
Dow: 13,927, -108.1 pts, -0.7 percent
S&P 500: 1,511, -18.9 pts, -1.2 percent
NASDAQ: 3,164. -49.1 pts, -1.5 percent
And now the top stories:
  • There was a hodge-podge of news today, and for the most part it was negative.
  • Housing starts dropped 8.5 percent to 890k from last month’s reading of 973k.  This was much worse than the 920k level economists were looking for.  Housing has been a rare bright spot for the global economy.  So far this week, we’ve gotten two disappointing housing reports.
  • Caterpillar, the global supplier of construction machinery, reported a set of ugly dealer sales statistics.  In the three months ending in January, the global sales decline accelerated to 4 percent.  The North America and Asia/Pacific regions both saw double-digit declines.

PAPER SILVER VOLUME NEARING ONE MILLION!!!!!!!!
Dow
13,928 -108 0.77%
 
Nasdaq
3,164 -50 1.54%
 
S&P 500
1,512 -19 1.24%
 
GlobalDow
2,098 -18 0.86%
 
Gold
1,569 -9 0.57%
 
Oil
94.77 -1.89 1.96%

USD INDEX:

http://finviz.com/futures_charts.ashx?t=DX&p=m5

TICK Plunges As Suddenly Everyone Sells

It took the algos a good hour of digesting the Fed’s PR before slowly and surely, as we observed when noting the stealthy action in the VIX, the crowd shifted suddenly from the right side of the boat to the left. In the process, it pushed the TICK indicator well below 1000. But it is probably more notable that a modest 1% drop in the S&P is enough to bring up rumors of a “Markets in Crisis” special, and force all those who were buying on the low-volume levitation into a coordinated sell-off. New York Fed’s Kevin Henry better show up soon or the last hour of trading will get messy without an invisible hand propping it up.

and volume explodes…


Fed Officials Divided on Future of QE

Federal Reserve policymakers remain divided on the future of the central bank’s bond buying program, according to minutes of the January meetingof the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee released Wednesday. Some believe that the program may need to end prior to the achievement of the Fed’s announced goal of improvement in employment.
Fed officials announced on January 30th that they would continue to buy mortgage-backed securities at a pace of $40 billion per month and longer-term Treasury securities at a pace of $45 billion per month, a policy popularly known as quantitative easing. The Fed hasn’t said when these asset purchases will end. Instead, it has said that the purchases will continue if “the outlook for the labor market does not improve substantially.”

FED MINUTES MOPE: FED TO END QE; GOLD & SILVER VERTICAL SMASH IN PROGRESS

silverdoctors
As expected here at SD, the latest Fed minutes are pure propaganda claiming the Fed will end QE soon as the economy is recovering more quickly than expected.
Que the smash in gold and silver.
and….Gold & silver dropping vertically on que.  Unbelievable.
Full Fed Minutes release is below:


silver

2013: ‘The End Game’- Is the Big Reset Imminent?

Raoul Paul sent shock-waves throughout the financial markets in June in what Tyler Durden called the scariest presentation ever, when Paul predicted a complete systemic collapse of the financial system was merely 6-9 months awayIs the Big Reset still imminent?
The world has no engine of growth with most of the G20 countries approaching stall speed at the same time. The western world is about to enter its second recession in an ongoing depression…
For the first time since the 1930?s we are entering a recession- before industrial production, durable goods orders, employment, and private sector GDP have made back their previous highs. ‘

Marc Faber: Global financial system will reset by ‘imploding markets’













“I think the whole global financial system will have to be reset and it won’t be reset by central bankers but by imploding markets — either the currency [markets, debt market or stock markets,” he said. “It will happen — it will happen one day and then we’ll be lucky if we still have 50 percent of the asset values that we have today.”

Ron Paul- “It is no coincidence that the century of total war coincided with the century of central banking.”

20 Signs That The U.S. Economy Is Heading For Big Trouble In The Months Ahead

#1 Freight shipment volumes have hit their lowest level in two years, and freight expenditures have gone negative for the first time since the last recession.
#2 The average price of a gallon of gasoline has risen by more than 50 cents over the past two months.  This is making things tougher on our economy, because nearly every form of economic activity involves moving people or goods around.
#3 Reader’s Digest, once one of the most popular magazines in the world, has filed for bankruptcy.
#4 Atlantic City’s newest casino, Revel, has just filed for bankruptcy.  It had been hoped that Revel would help lead a turnaround for Atlantic City.
#5 A state-appointed review board has determined that there is “no satisfactory plan” to solve Detroit’s financial emergency, and many believe that bankruptcy is imminent.  If Detroit does declare bankruptcy, it will be the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history.
#6 David Gallagher, the CEO of Town Sports International, recently said that his company is struggling right now because consumers simply do not have as much disposable income anymore…
“As we moved into January membership trends were tracking to expectations in the first half of the month, but fell off track and did not meet our expectations in the second half of the month. We believe the driver of this was the rapid decline in consumer sentiment that has been reported and is connected to the reduction in net pay consumers earn given the changes in tax rates that went into effect in January.
#7 According to the Conference Board, consumer confidence in the U.S. has hit its lowest level in more than a year.
#8 Sales of the Apple iPhone have been slower than projected, and as a result Chinese manufacturing giant FoxConn has instituted a hiring freeze.  The following is from a CNET report that was posted on Wednesday…
The Financial Times noted that it was the first time since a 2009 downturn that the company opted to halt hiring in all of its facilities across the country. The publication talked to multiple recruiters.
The actions taken by Foxconn fuel the concern over the perceived weakened demand for the iPhone 5 and slumping sentiment around Apple in general, with production activity a leading indicator of interest in the product.
#9 In 2012, global cell phone sales posted their first decline since the end of the last recession.
#10 We appear to be in the midst of a “retail apocalypse“.  It is being projected that Sears, J.C. Penney, Best Buy and RadioShack will also close hundreds of stores by the end of 2013.
#11 An internal memo authored by a Wal-Mart executive that was recently leaked to the press said that February sales were a “total disaster” and that the beginning of February was the “worst start to a month I have seen in my ~7 years with the company.”
#12 If Congress does not do anything and “sequestration” goes into effect on March 1st, the Pentagon says that approximately 800,000 civilian employees will be facing mandatory furloughs.

Who will Pay for Nuclear Power Plant Cleanup?

By John Daly | Tue, 19 February 2013 22:56 | 3
Many of the civilian nuclear power plants built in the US. and Western Europe during the halcyon days of the Eisenhower administration are coming to the end of their operational lives as their operating licenses expire.
The looming deadlines leave their operators with two stark choices – apply for a license extension beyond the original forty years, or decommission.
A bad choice, however you look at it. For a license extension, aging NPPs must upgrade, while decommissioning raises the primordial question sidestepped since the dawn of the civilian nuclear age – what to do with the radioactive debris?
The British imbroglio.
Related article: Why is Iran Going Nuclear?
The predicted cost of decommissioning Sellafield nuclear facility in Cumbria, Britain’s largest nuclear complex, is now estimated at an eye-watering $104.3 billion over the next three decades, a figure that inexorably year by year continues to rise and represents over $1,546 for every man, woman and child in the British Isles.
Sellafield is a nuclear reprocessing site, close to the village of Seascale on the British coast of the Irish Sea in Cumbria, England, a subsidiary of the original nuclear reactor site at Windscale, which, along with neighboring Calder Hall, is undergoing decommissioning and dismantling of its four nuclear power generating reactors.
Now, the aging facility, one of the first established under the Eisenhower’s administration’s civilian “atoms for peace” program, is due for decommissioning.
So, where to store the nuclear waste?
The decision follows in the wake of a 30 January meeting of three local authorities which have yet to decide whether to agree to further investigation of the possibilities of an underground store in their districts. After local authorities in Kent passed on the proejct, Cumbria county, Allerdale and Copeland are the British councils still expressing interest in the possibility of hosting a nuclear dump site. Sellafield remains a massive local employer, with over 9,000 people directly employed there.
Related article: Iran to Install Thousands of New Centrifuges for Nuclear Enrichment
Poisoning the regional picture, in April 2010, the company managing Sellafield sent four bags of radioactive waste from its plant to Lillyhall landfill, instead of the low-level repository at Drigg. All of the bags, which contained low-level radioactive waste, including gloves, mops and rubber, were retrieved and returned to Sellafield for correct disposal. Complicating the picture, seven charges were subsequently brought by Britain’s Environment Agency and the Office for Nuclear Regulation following an investigation into “multiple failures” involving the incorrect disposal of low-level radioactive waste. While Sellafield admitted the charges, Sellafield spokesman Eleanor Sanderson disputed the charge that the error was out of complacency and negligence and insisted that staff work “tirelessly” to maintain safety on site. Dr. Rob Allott, EA nuclear regulator team leader, maintained,  “It’s highly likely that some groups of people would have been exposed to radioactivity. The waste is inherently hazardous, but with a low risk factor.”
Addressing the case over the pollution, heard at West Cumbria Courthouse last week, Barry Berlin, for the Health Safety Executive and EA, said an error was caused by a new monitor which had passed the bags as “general” waste, exempting them from strict disposal controls an error that was only uncovered when a training exercise was carried out at Sellafield. Seeking to ameliorate the implications of the sloppy bookkeeping Berlin told the court, “There is no doubt that these are welcomed changes. But because we are dealing with radioactivity we submit these should have checked beforehand.”
What remains unsaid that the court case is where the more than $104 billion to decommission
Sellafield will come from, much less where the nuclear debris will reside after the facility is offline. The British electorate deserves answers to the questions.
Across the Pond, Florida’s Progress Energy’s Crystal River 3 Nuclear Power Plant is also in the process of being decommissioned. Not only for consumers but those living nearby, the decisions regarding Sellafield’s decommissioning are likely to reverberate across the Atlantic.
By. John C.K. Daly of Oilprice.com

Consumers Unknowingly Sit On 29,750,000 Ounces of Silver In Old iPhones

by sv
With 85 million iPhones having been sold since 2007, consumers are sitting on $154,700,000 worth of gold or  85,000 ounces of gold. That is because, in each one of those iPhones, there is approximately 0.034 grams of gold, according to the US Geological Survey. That is approximately $1.82 of gold. In each phone, there are also 16 grams of copper, worth about 12 cents, meaning about $10 million in that base metal overall. With 0.35 grams of silver (29,750,000 ounces), worth 36 cents a pop (30,600,000 altogether), and 0.00034 grams of platinum, approximately 2 cents.
While not an overwhelming amount of metals being sat on in the US, it is still a considerable amount of metals that will only increase over time as Apple continues to make iPhones. There is a chance, to be sure, that the development of new iPhones slows as the models year-to-year change less than the year prior.

More than half of US consumers claim they have two or more cell phones in their household, with an overall trade-in value of $34 billion. New iPhones make up a quarter of that total, as Apple has released since 2007 85 million phones for $50 billion in revenue. Despite a new model each year, users clearly are hoarding their old phones. One-in-five US persons claim they are “too lazy” to sell their old devices.
Apple enjoys one of the higher upgrade rates in the industry at 83% for 2012-201oc3, up 10% from a year prior, according to Morgan Stanley.An interesting question to pose is how much of these precious metals does Apple buy in anticipation of the continuance of the secular bull market in these metals?

Glock: Why It's America's Most Popular Handgun



More than $100 million in sales for 26 straight years.
Feb. 12 (Bloomberg) -- Bloomberg's Matt Miller takes a look at the history of the Glock handgun, and how the rise of the weapon's popularity mirrored its appearance in pop culture and on the streets during the 1980s cocaine wars.

JUST PUBLISHED:

RED ALERT - New Bill Requires $1 Million In Liability Insurance To Own A Gun

The Market Sell-Off Is Accelerating: The Spending Crunch Is Official And Global Growth Slowdown Confirmed By Caterpillar, Housing Starts And Homebuilder Sentiment Starting To Decline, And 800,000 Set to be Unemployed by Government

The Market Sell-Off Is Accelerating

Dow
13,965 -71 0.50%
Nasdaq
3,180 -34 1.05%
S&P 500
1,518 -13 0.85%
GlobalDow
2,104 -13 0.61%
Gold
1,566 -38 2.38%
Oil
94.85 -1.74 1.80%

The Spending Crunch Is Official: “We Are Confident There Is An Issue With The Consumer”

Think the Walmart “disastrous” sales memo was a one-off event, which net of Walmart’s damage should be completely ignored (something the market has been perfectly happy to oblige with)? Then listen to a separate perspective on the US consumer, this time from a very different angle: that of Town Sports International which operates such gyms as New York Sports Club, and specifically its CEO David Gallagher, who in last night’s conference call just confirmed what everyone knows: “As we moved into January membership trends were tracking to expectations in the first half of the month, but fell off track and did not meet our expectations in the second half of the month. We believe the driver of this was the rapid decline in consumer sentiment that has been reported and is connected to the reduction in net pay consumers earn given the changes in tax rates that went into effect in January.

UH-OH: Industrial Bellwether Caterpillar Just Posted Some Ugly Sales Stats

Double-digit declines in North America and the Asia/Pacific regions.


From the SEC Filing:

caterpillar
SEC via Yahoo Finance
Caterpillar Sales Latest Cratering Confirm Global Growth Slowdown


Housing Starts Miss Estimates, Fall 8.5% In January

Housing starts fell to 8.5 percent to 890,000 – missing expectations of a slighter drop to 920,000 – from last month’s 973,000.

Homebuilder sentiment, considered a leading indicator for housing starts, declined to 46 in February. This would lead us to think that housing starts should slow.

We Just Got Two Weak Housing Numbers In A Row

Oil Is Getting Crushed On Heavy Volume As Commodities Get Massacred

Oil Is Getting Crushed On Heavy Volume As Commodities Get Massacred
WTI crude oil futures are getting slammed in today’s session. Right now, they’re down over 2.2 percent, and a big part of the drop came in just the last 20 minutes.
Metals like gold, silver, palladium, copper, aluminum, etc. are all tanking today as well.
800,000 Set to be Unemployed by Government
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta had the unenviable job today of informing hundreds of thousands of his civilian employees that they could be furloughed if the sequester takes effect on March 1.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta had the unenviable job today of informing hundreds of thousands of his civilian employees that they could be furloughed if the sequester takes effect on March 1.
In a letter to the entire DoD workforce, Panetta warned that “should sequestration occur and continue for a substantial period, DoD will be forced to place the vast majority of its civilian workforce on administrative furlough.”
This could impact as many as 800,000 civilian employees, which Panetta argued “will result in a serious erosion of readiness across the force.”



Spain: The System Is Blowing Up Again!! 

At this point it is clear that Europe is totally finished. The house is burning. It’s just a matter of time before it collapses.
Indeed, we get a clear signal of this from Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, who just announced the following: “It is not enough, there are no green shoots, there is no spring.”
To understand the significance of this statement, you need to know a bit …

BREAKING: Fed Officials Divided on Future of QE

Federal Reserve policymakers remain divided on the future of the central bank’s bond buying program, according to minutes of the January meetingof the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee released Wednesday. Some believe that the program may need to end prior to the achievement of the Fed’s announced goal of improvement in employment.
Fed officials announced on January 30th that they would continue to buy mortgage-backed securities at a pace of $40 billion per month and longer-term Treasury securities at a pace of $45 billion per month, a policy popularly known as quantitative easing. The Fed hasn’t said when these asset purchases will end. Instead, it has said that the purchases will continue if “the outlook for the labor market does not improve substantially.”

20 Signs That The U.S. Economy Is Heading For Big Trouble In The Months Ahead

 
20 Signs That The U.S. Economy Is Heading For Big Trouble In The Months Ahead - Photo by Frank KovalchekIs the U.S. economy about to experience a major downturn?  Unfortunately, there are a whole bunch of signs that economic activity in the United States is really slowing down right now.  Freight volumes and freight expenditures are way down, consumer confidence has declined sharply, major retail chains all over America are closing hundreds of stores, and the "sequester" threatens to give the American people their first significant opportunity to experience what "austerity" tastes like.  Gas prices are going up rapidly, corporate insiders are dumping massive amounts of stock and there are high profile corporate bankruptcies in the news almost every single day now.  In many ways, what we are going through right now feels very similar to 2008 before the crash happened.  Back then the warning signs of economic trouble were very obvious, but our politicians and the mainstream media insisted that everything was just fine, and the stock market was very much detached from reality.  When the stock market did finally catch up with reality, it happened very, very rapidly.  Sadly, most people do not appear to have learned any lessons from the crisis of 2008.  Americans continue to rack up staggering amounts of debt, and Wall Street is more reckless than ever.  As a society, we seem to have concluded that 2008 was just a temporary malfunction rather than an indication that our entire system was fundamentally flawed.  In the end, we will pay a great price for our overconfidence and our recklessness.
So what will the rest of 2013 bring?
Hopefully the economy will remain stable for as long as possible, but right now things do not look particularly promising.
The following are 20 signs that the U.S. economy is heading for big trouble in the months ahead...
#1 Freight shipment volumes have hit their lowest level in two years, and freight expenditures have gone negative for the first time since the last recession.
#2 The average price of a gallon of gasoline has risen by more than 50 cents over the past two months.  This is making things tougher on our economy, because nearly every form of economic activity involves moving people or goods around.
#3 Reader's Digest, once one of the most popular magazines in the world, has filed for bankruptcy.
#4 Atlantic City's newest casino, Revel, has just filed for bankruptcy.  It had been hoped that Revel would help lead a turnaround for Atlantic City.
#5 A state-appointed review board has determined that there is "no satisfactory plan" to solve Detroit's financial emergency, and many believe that bankruptcy is imminent.  If Detroit does declare bankruptcy, it will be the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history.
#6 David Gallagher, the CEO of Town Sports International, recently said that his company is struggling right now because consumers simply do not have as much disposable income anymore...
"As we moved into January membership trends were tracking to expectations in the first half of the month, but fell off track and did not meet our expectations in the second half of the month. We believe the driver of this was the rapid decline in consumer sentiment that has been reported and is connected to the reduction in net pay consumers earn given the changes in tax rates that went into effect in January."
#7 According to the Conference Board, consumer confidence in the U.S. has hit its lowest level in more than a year.
#8 Sales of the Apple iPhone have been slower than projected, and as a result Chinese manufacturing giant FoxConn has instituted a hiring freeze.  The following is from a CNET report that was posted on Wednesday...
The Financial Times noted that it was the first time since a 2009 downturn that the company opted to halt hiring in all of its facilities across the country. The publication talked to multiple recruiters.
The actions taken by Foxconn fuel the concern over the perceived weakened demand for the iPhone 5 and slumping sentiment around Apple in general, with production activity a leading indicator of interest in the product.
#9 In 2012, global cell phone sales posted their first decline since the end of the last recession.
#10 We appear to be in the midst of a "retail apocalypse".  It is being projected that Sears, J.C. Penney, Best Buy and RadioShack will also close hundreds of stores by the end of 2013.
#11 An internal memo authored by a Wal-Mart executive that was recently leaked to the press said that February sales were a "total disaster" and that the beginning of February was the "worst start to a month I have seen in my ~7 years with the company."
#12 If Congress does not do anything and "sequestration" goes into effect on March 1st, the Pentagon says that approximately 800,000 civilian employees will be facing mandatory furloughs.
#13 Barack Obama is admitting that the "sequester" could have a crippling impact on the U.S. economy.  The following is from a recent CNBC article...
Obama cautioned that if the $85 billion in immediate cuts -- known as the sequester -- occur, the full range of government would feel the effects. Among those he listed: furloughed FBI agents, reductions in spending for communities to pay police and fire personnel and teachers, and decreased ability to respond to threats around the world.
He said the consequences would be felt across the economy.
"People will lose their jobs," he said. "The unemployment rate might tick up again."
#14 If the "sequester" is allowed to go into effect, the CBO is projecting that it will cause U.S. GDP growth to go down by at least 0.6 percent and that it will "reduce job growth by 750,000 jobs".
#15 According to a recent Gallup survey, 65 percent of all Americans believe that 2013 will be a year of "economic difficulty", and 50 percent of all Americans believe that the "best days" of America are now in the past.
#16 U.S. GDP actually contracted at an annual rate of 0.1 percent during the fourth quarter of 2012.  This was the first GDP contraction that the official numbers have shown in more than three years.
#17 For the entire year of 2012, U.S. GDP growth was only about 1.5 percent.  According to Art Cashin, every time GDP growth has fallen this low for an entire year, the U.S. economy has always ended up going into a recession.
#18 The global economy overall is really starting to slow down...
The world's richest countries saw their economies contract for the first time in almost four years during the final three months of 2012, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development said.
The Paris-based thinktank said gross domestic product across its 34 member states fell by 0.2% – breaking a period of rising activity stretching back to a 2.3% slump in output in the first quarter of 2009.
All the major economies of the OECD – the US, Japan, Germany, France, Italy and the UK – have already reported falls in output at the end of 2012, with the thinktank noting that the steepest declines had been seen in the European Union, where GDP fell by 0.5%. Canada is the only member of the G7 currently on course to register an increase in national output.
#19 Corporate insiders are dumping enormous amounts of stock right now.  Do they know something that we don't?
#20 Even some of the biggest names on Wall Street are warning that we are heading for an economic collapse.  For example, Seth Klarman, one of the most respected investors on Wall Street, said in his year-end letter that the collapse of the U.S. financial system could happen at any time...
"Investing today may well be harder than it has been at any time in our three decades of existence," writes Seth Klarman in his year-end letter. The Fed's "relentless interventions and manipulations" have left few purchase targets for Baupost, he laments. "(The) underpinnings of our economy and financial system are so precarious that the un-abating risks of collapse dwarf all other factors."
So what do you think is going to happen to the U.S. economy in the months ahead?

FLASH CRASH: Cramer & Burnett Watch Dow Fall 1,000 Pts



Panic at CNBC studios.  Flash Crash Classic.
Jim Cramer and Erin Burnett during the hft crash and recovery of May 6, 2010.
---
This is how Armageddon actually sounds:

Listen To The Stock Market Flash Crash - Tick By Tick

SANTELLI: 'We Need A Debt Alarm Clock!'














'We can't even cut 1/3 of one percent of our budget!'
'That's the alarm clock we need in this country.  One that will wake young people up to their diminishing future.'
Rick Santelli yesterday on Squawk Box.  Great clip.  Runs 90 seconds.
---

In case you missed it:

SANTELLI: "When A Spending Cut Isn't Really A Cut"

Jim Rogers Washington Lies About Inflation

via

Nanex CEO: 'HFT Makes A Mockery Of Markets'



'It's all about one class of people who are not following the rules. It's that simple.'
-- Eric Hunsader, CEO of Nanex on High-Frequency Trading
-- Photo by William Banzai7
---
Guest post by John Titus, producer of Bailout.
HFT Mocks Law, Allows Elite To Steal Even More 
High-frequency computer trading now accounts for between 70% and 84% of volume on the New York Stock Exchange, yet receives scant attention in the popular media. And with good reason: HFT represents yet another triumph of criminals over the Rule of Law whereby the ultra-wealthy use HFT to steal from the rest of us via illegal practices like quote-stuffing and front-running with the assistance of the government.
Call it Criminal Welfare Chic.
Below, Lauren Lyster of Capital Account interviews Eric Hunsader, whose firm Nanex gathers, analyzes, and packages exchange data that summarize high-frequency trading activity in the markets.
Hunsader has been in the data collection business since the advent of high-frequency trading in 1987—three months before the record-breaking market crash in October of that year (a record of which Hunsader has memorialized on a floppy diskette). This makes Hunsader one of the world’s leading experts—if not the leading expert--on high-frequency trading.
Lyster, who is easily the best interviewer in all of daily financial television, does a superb job of eliciting jargon-free disclosures from Hunsader that cut to the core of high-frequency trading. Like virtually all other "markets" today, HFT is characterized by regulations that are selectively enforced, i.e., the rich and powerful break the law with complete impunity, stealing from everyone else while regulators look the other way and apply regulations punitively to little people (not big enough to have cabinet members and congressmen on speed dial).
Towards the end of the interview, Hunsader exposes the one essential truth that’s altogether ignored in the regulation-deregulation debates that rage in their internecine promotion of the Left-Right divide: “if you’re not going to enforce regulations that you already have, you have no business creating new ones.”
Again we see an instance where the Left, which complains about too much corporate power, and the Right, which complains about too much government, are mysteriously blind to the fact that they are both correct now that corporations and the state have merged into a single entity politely known as Fascism, wherein the interests of a tiny elite are advanced through rampant illegality.
At the end of the interview, Lyster and Hunsader finger the real reason behind the overtly coordinated crackdown on Occupy Wall Street, namely, its organically viable threat to unite under one flag two forces that the Corporate State absolutely needs to be at each other’s throats: those who demand transparent and fair markets free of officious government intermeddling, and those who demand that lawless mega-corporate predators be reigned in:
"High-frequency trading is the poster child that the Occupy Wall Street protesters have been looking for.  You just don’t know it yet."




Lauren Lyster interviews Nanex Chief Eric Hunsader - Oct. 18, 2012
Transcript
LL: When did it [high-frequency trading] really explode?
EH: July of ’87 was the first footprints of when we saw them testing these new algos that were blasting lots of fake orders in the market.
[Ed.—To frame that, Paul Volcker stepped down as Chairman of the Federal Reserve and was replaced by Alan Greenspan in August 1987, and the stock market experienced its biggest one-day crash ever—22% down—on October 18, 1987 (a record that stands to this day).]
LL: After the passage of Reg. NMS, you saw kind of an explosion [of HFT] go on. Why was that a pivotal turning point?
EH: Well, Reg. NMS is regulations that were debated in the industry in 2006 and—well, in 2006. And it was passed in February of 2007, and that really changed the structure of the market. It took them about a couple of months to learn how to exploit it.
LL: But then exploit away they did, right?
EH: Yes.
LL: So then let’s talk about some of the issues, and the concerns surrounding high-frequency trading from market participants—both for individual investors, retail investors, but also the impact on the market as a whole, because it’s hard for me to imagine that it’s good for the ecosystem.
EH: Well, it’s destroyed the diversity of participants. It boils down to: they chased away everybody who can’t compete on speed, people who aren’t willing to invest in millions of dollars in equipment, hire a staff of quants, et cetera, et cetera. Basically you have to do that now to have the same informational—on par that you did before Reg. NMS.
LL: What about for the average trader, though? Should it matter to them that they can’t exploit a millisecond?
EH: No, not at all. The problem is, is that—well, there are a couple problems. One is, without diversity in participants, whenever something unexpected happens—like perhaps, Google this afternoon—it can severely impact the market in way that could cause prices based on stock market closing prices. It could severely affect the economy.
EH: And so that risk is there because people—the diversity of participants who have different viewpoints on the market, and may be willing to buy the market [when it’s] 10% down, aren’t gonna be there to do that because the information that they’re receiving is delayed or is untrusted or the exchanges might selectively cancel some orders and others. They’re going to be reluctant to pull the trigger. And so you don’t really have that buying power available. It’s not there any more.
LL: And is there a problem, too, that without those folks in the market, you have the algos that are all reacting, that are providing the illusion of liquidity, and that they’re all programmed to pull out when they catch any sign that things are awry?
EH: Oh, yes. We saw that today. We saw liquidity just evaporate—from Google! Which was pretty surprising to see it impact the market like it did. We went from a pretty moderate, okay day to absolute—absolute, well, we were on the edge. As long as no other bad news came out for the rest of the day, we’d be fine. But one day we’re not gonna be so lucky. We’re not gonna get away from that.
EH: The other thing that the average investor has to face now, every once in awhile, when they go to buy or sell, they’re going to be facing this pocket of liquidity where all of a sudden, if they make a mistake, like for example use a market order, which by the way, when a regulator tells you that you’re not supposed to use market orders, it’s usually a pretty good sign that you don’t have a market anymore. Let’s say he makes a mistake, or he doesn’t have his supercomputers on and he’s not processing the data fast enough and he makes a mistake and enters in the wrong price, today he’s gonna get that—if the price is not in his favor—he’s gonna get that price.
* * *
LL: Which is the more exploitative or the edge, really, coming from? Is it coming from the algorithmic software or is it coming more from the speed?
EH: You know, it’s not really whether it’s algorithmic or high-frequency or some kind of a phone [ph.]. It’s about exploiting the regulations. It’s about not following the rules. Reg. NMS lays out the rules, and it’s—we’re mainly concerned with—we’re not concerned with how fast trading goes. We’re concerned with those who break the rules.
* * *
LL: One of the things that I often hear from folks that watch this is that it’s just gotten so fast, and regulators are just so behind, and so late to the party. I wanna know your view on that especially since last month we did get a fine from the S.E.C. to the New York Stock Exchange from them getting information more quickly to proprietary—the people who have their proprietary fee versus everyone else. So what do you think is the state of the regulation of this industry?
EH: Well, you know, the high-frequency trading debate, you don’t have to understand microseconds or high technology. It’s really all about one class of people who are not following the rules. It’s that simple. And the fine levied by the S.E.C. was simply enforcing the rules for the first time since Reg. NMS passed.
EH: And probably more important than the fine itself was the worrying in [sic: about] the fine, which spelled out: you can’t do this; these things are not legal. These things have become some commonplace that, you know, my fear was that the S.E.C. was gonna go full tilt and now start enforcing this. Well, we’re not going to have anyone trading the next day on Wall Street, because it’s that common.
LL: Wow. But do you see an impact when you’re looking at your screens after we have that enforcement action, or there was another against a firm for layering and Knight Capital, [S.E.C. Chairman] Mary Schapiro wouldn’t cancel the trades for Knight. So what impact do you see?
EH: Well, that’s interesting. So I don’t know about you, but I don’t I have a private—Mary Schapiro’s private number, and I can’t call her up when my trade goes bad. I mean, the gall that he would even make that phone call is like, wow. It just shows you: there are two classes of people here.
EH: We have seen significant changes—improvements—on the data side. And we suspect—my suspicion is that the reason you’re seeing some of these high-frequency trading firms close up is because these—they see the writing on the wall. They know if they can’t exploit (break) the rule, if they can’t, that would not lead to profitability. They’re gonna pull out.
EH: And it’s interesting. They’re claiming that it’s not profitable now when it wasn’t very long ago that some of them had 90 days straight, in a row, of profitability, which is just unbelievable that they would announce that. You’d think they’d throw a couple of negative days in there just, um [laughs], so people didn’t raise their eyebrows.
LL: Right, right. So you think that these stories about high-frequency trading firms shutting because they can’t be as profitable any more. You think it’s actually more tied to the fact that they’re starting to be regulated, you think?
EH: Yes. I’m sure of it. I’m sure of it.
LL: Wow. And you actually do notice a difference in the manipulative processes on your screen since these enforcement actions?
EH: Absolutely. It’s crystal clear. Night and day.
LL: Wow. So do you think there needs to be more actions, kill switch or transaction tax, or do you think that these just need to be enforced—what’s on the books?
EH: If we would enforce what’s on the books, we wouldn’t need a transaction tax. We wouldn’t need a minimum quote life. We wouldn’t need any of the things that they’re proposing.
EH: And really, if they’re going to try to pass new regulations, when they’re not going to enforce existing regulations, who’s going to take them seriously? I wouldn’t take them seriously. I mean, if you’re not going to enforce regulations that you already have, you have no business creating new ones.
LL: I totally hear you there. Real quickly before we go, then, what ‘s your best advice for the average investor if they want to have a fair market?
EH: Call your congressman and demand that the rules be followed. It’s that simple.
LL: And I just want one more second before we go. Should Occupy Wall Street be on the street protesting this? You mentioned them.
EH: High-frequency trading is the poster child that the Occupy Wall Street protesters have been looking for. You just don’t know it yet.

Germany's gold slaughtered and turned into jewellery?

Germany's gold slaughtered and turned into jewellery?

Why does a Duke worth £320m want to double the rents of his farmers? Tenants told to pay up or face eviction

  • Duke of Northumberland nearly doubles rent for some farmers on estate
  • Some farmers fearing they may have to give up properties
  • NFU Northumberland chairman says estate is 'wanting its pound of flesh'

  • Wealthy: The Duke of Northumberland has been accused by farmers on his estate-owned land of a 'get rich quick' attitude, after claiming they were hit by rent hikes of up to 98 per cent
    Wealthy: The Duke of Northumberland has been accused by farmers on his estate-owned land of a 'get rich quick' attitude, after claiming they were hit by rent hikes of up to 98 per cent
    He is the aristocratic owner of the castle featured in Harry Potter.
    And although his fortune is said to be around £320million, it seems the Duke of Northumberland wants more.
    Ralph Percy, 56, has been accused of wrecking the livelihoods of tenant farmers after his land agents demanded massive rent increases.
    Some have been asked to pay up to 98 per cent more or face eviction.

    The Duke, whose son George was last year rumoured to be dating Pippa Middleton, owns some 132,000 acres of land.
    His 1,000-year-old castle at Alnwick, which featured as Hogwarts in the Harry Potter films, is known as the Windsor of the North.
    But despite his wealth, it emerged yesterday that the Duke’s Estate is conducting a crippling round of rent reviews on its farmers in Northumberland.
    There is no legal limit to the rent  the land agents can ask for, and tenants are unlikely to challenge them because this can end up costing them even more. 
    With many farmers suffering from a slump in lamb prices, some fear they might have to give up their properties altogether.
    Stoker Frater, who runs two farms on land near Alnwick, has been told to expect a 40 per cent increase, following on from a 30 per cent rise three years ago.
    He said: ‘Tenants are expected to pay outlandish rents just to get the land.
    ‘The Estate has become so business-orientated that it will take the highest offer.’
    Another, who also farms near Alnwick but did not want to be named, was told his annual rent was due to go up by 98 per cent this year.
    Hit: Farmer Stoker Frater, who farms on two Northumberland Estates-owned farms, has been told to expect a 40 per cent increase in his rent, following on from a 30 per cent rent rise three years ago
    Hit: Farmer Stoker Frater, who farms on two Northumberland Estates-owned farms, has been told to expect a 40 per cent increase in his rent, following on from a 30 per cent rent rise three years ago
    Grand: Alnwick Castle, the residency of the Duke of Northumberland, which was also used as a location in the Harry Potter films
    Grand: Alnwick Castle, the residency of the Duke of Northumberland, which was also used as a location in the Harry Potter films

    After saying he could not afford it, he was told to accept a 64 per cent rise or be off the land by the following month. He said: ‘My rent will go up from £21,000 a year to £34,000, which is completely unachievable.
    ‘This is affecting my entire family as I won’t be able to afford to run the farm if my rent goes up by this much.’

    Northumberland Estates, which has land in the West Country and Yorkshire as well as Northumberland, has about 100 tenanted farms. It said the rent reviews reflected rises in market rates.
    But David Robson, of the NFU in Northumberland, said the Estate was taking advantage of its tenants.

    He said: ‘It seems the Estate is wanting its pound of flesh. Historically, they were run more on the traditional basis where a farmer was actively encouraged to look after the land. Now if the farmer can’t pay he’s out the door.’

    The rises come as the Duke prepares for a multi-million pound bill linked to the demolition of flood-hit flats in Newburn, Newcastle upon Tyne, although the Estate says the issues are not linked.
    Tenants have the right to call in an arbitrator if they dispute a rent rise, but can end up paying costs of up to £40,000 if the ruling is in the landlord’s favour.
    An Estate spokesman said: ‘We understand tenants do not welcome potential increases in rent but believe that, by encouraging open and honest discussions during negotiations, rent reviews take into account the type of tenancy, the individual farm and rents accurately reflect market conditions.’
    KING OF THE CASTLES.jpg



    ‘Some Cuts Don’t Heal!’ Simpson-Bowles Face Protest for Attack on Medicare, Social Security


    Common Dreams – by Jon Queally
    Community activists in Washington, DC on Tuesday took the opportunity of a morning Q&A breakfast with the nation’s premiere ‘deficit scolds‘—former Republican senator from Wyoming Alan Simpson and establishment Democrat Erskine Bowles—to declare that the pair’s recommended policies unfairly punish the sick, the elderly and working people in the name of a ‘deficit reduction’ plan backed by the nation’s wealthiest beneficiaries and corporate elite.
    Five protestors, rising at intervals, disrupted thePolitico-sponsored event held at a Newseum conference room, pressed the two men to defend the inequity and misguided nature of their proposals. Each was removed, in turn, by security officials.
    “Some cuts don’t heal,” the National Journal reports one protester repeating as he was escorted from the room. “How could you entertain the fact that you want to cut Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security?” he asked, before being escorted out by security.
    ABC News adds:
    As the interview began, a man rose in the front row to protest their suggested cuts to entitlement programs.
    “Pay your fair share of taxes,” the man shouted as Newseum security escorted him out. “Pay your fair share.”
    “We’ll bring you into the discussion,” Allen told him.
    After the interview resumed, three more protesters rose to interrupt the event in sequence and were removed. According to a man filming the protesters on an iPad, they are members of the liberal group Our DC, which has organized protests on Capitol Hill in the past.
    Simpson and Bowles this morning released a rehashed plan to cut the deficit and reshape America’s fiscal outlook. They appeared at the Politico event to promote their new proposal.
    According to the National Journal:
    OurDC, a non-profit focused on bringing jobs to the District of Columbia, was behind the protest, a spokesman said. The group strives, according to its website, to ensure “the voices of unemployed and under employed city residents are heard and listened to in local and national dialogs on jobs and job creation.”
    The protest was orchestrated to maximize disruption, with each protester standing up and speaking out as another was escorted from the room.
    Commenting on the new Bowles-Simpson framework overall, MSNBC‘s Ned Reskikoff says it’s much like the old plan—which did not even muster majority approval from the bi-partisan commission they were appointed to co-chair in 2010—except their new one has, “more cuts!”
    “The plan includes cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, ‘reforms’ to Social Security [read chained CPI] and the elimination or reduction of various tax deductions,” says Resnikoff. “Notably, many of the most significant cuts seem to fall on programs which benefit seniors.”
    And the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein, along with an explanation of the plan’s essential points, posted this graph to show the new plan—dubbed Simpson-Bowles 2.0—is far heavier on cuts to social programs, with less strident plans for raising revenue from taxes:

    But, as many economists continue to declare and the Campaign for America’s Future co-founder Robert Borosage argues in an op-ed on Tuesday, we don’t have an entitlement problem or a spending problem, we have an austerity problem and a healthcare cost problem.
    “As economist Dean Baker has shown,” writes Borosage, “if we paid anything near what European nations pay per capita for health care that produces better results, we would be projecting surpluses as far as the eye can see.”
    Instead, he argues—taking the side of the protesters who took the time to combat the public relations breakfast on Tuesday—policy-makers subscribing to proposals by Bowles-Simpson are making the elderly and middle-class taxpayers “victims of a classic example of shock doctrine” in which the right uses “an economic calamity to roll back social protections.”
    “At a time of Gilded Age inequality, they seek to exact more pain from an already declining middle class – and get the president and Democrats to offer bipartisan cover.”
    “It’s a jackal time,” Borosage warned, “and it’s likely to get worse.”
    http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/02/19-5

    Currency wars: It’s starting to look a bit too much like 1931

    Source: Globe and Mail
    History may not repeat itself, but the parallels between the world economy in the 1930s and the world economy today are becoming hard to ignore. Then, as now, the world was in the grip of a severe economic downturn and painfully high unemployment. Then, as now, governments tried to restore growth and exports by devaluing their currencies and carving out trade blocs, risking a chain reaction around the world. Then, as now, the system was rudderless, unstable, and insecure – which persuaded countries to protect their own national interests, even at the expense of the collective good.
     
    The world has not yet plunged into a full-scale currency war, but the trends are not good. This fact was implicitly acknowledged by G7 finance ministers meeting last Tuesday who went out of their way to renounce “targeting exchange rates,” only to sett off a new and even larger wave of currency volatility. China continues to rebuff pressure to end the fixed and undervalued Yuan, exacerbating global imbalances and fuelling accusations of beggar-thy-neighbour trade strategies. The U.S. continues to drive down the dollar and flood the world with capital through successive rounds of quantitative easing. Brazil, Switzerland, and others continue to intervene aggressively intervene in markets to arrest their currencies from appreciation.
    The latest salvo is Japan’s decision in December to pursue a radically expansionary monetary policy, which is both pushing the yen to new lows against all major currencies and dramatically ramping up global currency tensions. Korea is threatening “an active response,” Russia is warning of reciprocal devaluations, Venezuela has just announced a massive devaluation, soon to be followed by Argentina, while the euro zone is again split between France, which is demanding immediate action to weaken a fast-rising euro, and Germany, which is so-far resisting political interference in the European Central Bank. Not without reason, Jens Weidmann, Germany’s Bundesbank president, warned last month that the growing politicization of exchange rate policy was unleashing a global “race to the bottom.”
    Recent actions on the trade front, though less volatile, are just as worrying. For the first time in history, the United States and Europe are talking seriously about forming a vast transatlantic free-trade bloc, encompassing half the world’s economic output. This follows the United States’ equally ambitious strategy to link ten or more “like-minded” Pacific Rim economies in a Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement. Both initiatives are clearly aimed as much at restoring the West’s dwindling leverage vis-à-vis China and other recalcitrant emerging giants as at increasing intra-bloc trade. As Joao Vale de Almeida, the EU’s ambassador to Washington, recently put it, “if we get the [transatlantic] agreement right, we can call the shots around the world.”
    These trade trends also have historical echoes. The Great Depression entered its most virulent phase not during the financial crisis of 1929, but during the trade crisis that followed, when the U.S.’s infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930 set off an escalating global trade war and splintered the world economy into rival regional blocs. World trade collapsed, falling by an astonishing two-thirds between 1929 and 1932.
    To repeat, 2013 is not 1931. Global economic integration is deeper today, trade and capital flows are greater, and governments have less scope to manipulate exchange rates or even tariffs in the face of powerful market forces. Policy-makers have also presumably learned from past mistakes. The current international economic system – composed of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (formerly the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) – was specifically designed to prevent a replay of the competitive devaluations and trade battles that caused the economic chaos of the 1930s and, ultimately, the outbreak of war. The fact that G7 finance ministers are clearly conscious of the currency war threat shows that the world has made progress.
    Is it enough? In his seminal The World in Depression, Charles Kindleberger argued that the root problem in the 1930s lay less in countries’ “mistakes” than in their collective lack of faith in the possibility of an international solution and the absence of an actor powerful enough to provide leadership. In 1929, the old hegemon, Britain, “couldn’t” stabilize the global economy and the new hegemon, the United States “wouldn’t,” Mr. Kindleberger observed. This left countries scrambling to protect their narrow national interests, with the result that “the world public interest went down the drain, and with it the private interests of all.”
    Widespread financial instability and volatility, lack of trust in international co-operation, and a diminishing global hegemon with no obvious successor…it all sounds a little too familiar.
    John Hancockis senior counsellor at the World Trade Organization. This article is published in partnership with the Canadian International Counciland its international-affairs hubOpenCanada.

    Future Bleak for Wal-Mart, Kmart, Radio Shack – Big Box Store Model Momentum Shifts


    As our economy slides further into the abyss, the era of the huge mega stores will slide as well. You can put the blame squarely where it belongs, the printing of funny money which in turn killed the dollar. This will spell the end for the huge box store phenomenon that has grown like a cancerous growth, previously taking advantage of the easy credit and trade agreements with other countries that has basically enabled these monstrosities to fester for the last 25 or 30 years.
    Because of our collapsing economy the middle class are just not buying like they used to. When you have huge gas price increases such as we have seen over these last months, together with the middle class disappearing, you can start to see why. Trucking will see a huge loss in independent operators because of the insane fuel prices. This in turn will hurt the distribution needs of these huge stores along with the easy credit needed to run them. The current economy cannot support this model any longer.
    Trucks are basically a warehouse on wheels, a well timed system to further profits to the supplier and seller, cutting warehouse cost down dramatically. 2 million trucks a day command our roads to accommodate America’s distribution needs.
    The good news is that this will eventually enable young upstarts to regroup into mom and pops again giving the American middle class a chance at redemption as the huge box store chains start to fall. Already, this is starting to happen. Wal-Mart, Radio shack and Kmart are closing stores because of the picky buying attitudes of the middle class. Soon we will see huge distribution centers along with supercenters sitting empty which originally cost billions to build.
    These huge distribution centers were financed with banks that bundled toxic derivatives to further the credit scenario, something that was basically a “Three Card Monte” scheme that was destined to fail. These huge monoliths cannot survive without credit, suffice to say the “Three Card Monte” has just been shut down.
    Again, what comes around goes around. Young families from all over our country will have a chance to start where they left off by building a future for themselves and their children. New stores will start to pop up as these huge monoliths start to fall. It’s only a matter of time. It might be years in the coming, but there is light at the end of the tunnel.
    What will become of the huge distribution centers and supercenters that will be sitting empty; once filled with trucks and forklifts running around like a well run ant farm? God only knows…

    Cramer: 'Why Every Portfolio Should Own Gold'














    Get phyzz.
    'Consider it stock insurance.  If you can own physical, all the better.'
    Gold discussion begins at the 1:10 mark.  Aired Feb. 15.
    ---
    This is an eye-opener:

    How Central Banks Lease Their Gold