Monday, April 28, 2014

It’s No Longer Possible To Avoid the Word “Bubble” | Andy Hoffman


Andy Hoffman discusses that home sales are dropping, retail sales are worst since 2008-2009, China selling treasuries, Yuan at a new multi-year low, QE, droughts in California, gold and silver. 
This video was posted with permission from Andy Hoffman, Media Director at Miles Franklin (http://MilesFranklin.com)
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Read more at http://investmentwatchblog.com/its-no-longer-possible-to-avoid-the-word-bubble-andy-hoffman/#BQP6Yik79WygvlCC.99

This Chart Is A True Picture Of The Bank Credit Bubble In America, Now Bigger Than The Last One (Which Blew Up)

For a while, rumor had it that banks weren’t lending, and that this was the reason the recovery has been so crummy and that businesses weren’t expanding and that jobs weren’t being created fast enough. There was no demand for loans, and banks were too tight with their lending standards. Or so the story went.
Turns out, banks have been lending. Not only that. They’ve been lending more than ever before. They have been lending even more than during the last credit bubble, when too many easy loans were made helter-skelter by loosey-goosey loan officers while the Fed’s spigot was wide open, which helped blow up the financial system.
Note the beautiful big-fat bank credit bubble that emerged in 2002, picked up speed as it went, and took off in earnest in 2007, when the chart begins. And note how it soared exponentially in 2008. At the time, the banking system was coming apart at the seams, the housing market was tanking, Bear Stearns got cooked, and stocks were skidding. Nothing stopped the bank credit bubble. Nothing until Lehman Brothers went belly-up in September. Bank CEOs worried about being next. And that finally punctured it.
So the peak was reported in October 2008. Loans and leases outstanding at all commercial banks in the US (black line, left scale) hit $7.28 trillion and all bank credit (red line, right scale) maxed out at $9.56 trillion. Then the great cliff dive began, hitting bottom in February 2010 – outstanding loans and leases at $6.5 trillion, all bank credit at $8.9 trillion.
Now we’re back! Only this time, the bank credit bubble is even bigger. Last month, outstanding loans and leases reached $7.52 trillion and bank credit $10.3 trillion. Halleluiah!
But wait…. November last year, they started soaring. Because this is the biggest credit bubble in history, and it’s time to pick up speed, in a move that is reminiscent of the jump in mid-2008, even as all heck had already broken loose.
The underlying idea is simple – an idea that has morphed into a special sort of higher religion at the Fed that everyone has to believe in and that no one is allowed to question: the US economy can only grow if debt grows even faster. So total bank credit rose 3% in 2013, for example, and US gross national debt soared by $883 billion, or 5.4%. But GDP rose only 1.9%.
This is what a credit bubble looks like: piling on debt and more debt at all levels while producing only anemic economic growth, so that the debt burden, relative to the economy, gets more and more onerous, and only the Fed’s zero-interest-rate policy can keep the whole construct from collapsing under its own weight, which it will do anyway even with ZIRP, but later and only after even more debt has been piled on so that the damage will be even greater.
This is how the Fed envisions our debt-fueled economy where leveraging everything up to the hilt is the norm, where nearly free money is required at all times to keep the machinery from seizing up, and where inflation, the Fed’s preferred solution to this debacle, will ultimately eat into the wealth of all those who hold this debt.
And those yield-desperate investors, driven to near insanity by the Fed’s interest-rate repression, hold their noses and close their eyes to scrape up even the crappiest debt just to get a little extra yield. “On the way in, there’s insatiable demand.” Alas, “it’s going to be a disaster on the way out.” Read…. Biggest Credit Bubble in History Runs Out Of Time

Decline of US Middle Class – Karl Denninger on Fed Policy

Our lead story: America’s middle class has long been the most affluent in the world. However, new data shows that the US has lost that honor, especially in lower and middle tier income brackets. It’s probably no surprise to learn, America’s wealthiest have outpaced many of their global peers. Erin takes a look.After the break, Erin joins blogger and former white collar caper Sam Antar to talk about some of the recent cases in white collar crime. Take a look on his view of Herbalife and Banamex. Then, Erin brings you part two of her interview with Karl Denninger. He talks about Fed policy, big banks, and fiat currency. Check it out.In today’s Big Deal, Edward Harrison sits down with Erin to look at mobile home economics. Turns out some investors are getting into the trailer park business for its double wide returns. Check it out.

Banksters : how to be a crook


GOLD IS GONE: Cornered by CHINA | Murphy & MacLeod (Encore)

IN THIS ENCORE* PRESENTATION:
- Mainstream Media reports gold manipulation ?1:19 ~ Bloomberg article: http://bloom.bg/1fQiknL
- Central banks should consider that many of them won’t get their gold back ?4:55 ~ Macleod’s article:http://www.goldmoney.com/research/ana…
- Gold market in a new bull phase ?8:54 ~ South Carolina reports gold manipulation: http://youtu.be/UWK5UQDCDTc?t=18m41s
- Fed tapering will have no effect on gold prices ?12:45
- China’s shadow banking system implosion to be the catalyst for gold price spike ? 16:09
- Sergei Glazyev, Kremlin economic aide, “An attempt to announce sanctions would end in a crash for the financial system of the United States” ?19:43 ~ Telegraph article:http://telegraph.co.uk/a/10669670
- Russian parliament is considering the possibility of confiscating U.S. and European companies’ property and assets ?22:52 ~ Source ?http://bloom.bg/1kGIkWp
*This panel discussion was originally posted on March 10th, 2014.
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DISCLAIMER: The financial and political opinions expressed in this interview are those of the guest and not necessarily of “Finance and Liberty” or its staff. Opinions expressed in this video do not constitute personalized investment advice and should not be relied on for making investment decisions.

The Desperate Hustle as a Way of Life

Source: Cryptogon

Via: City Paper:
Here is the future: nobody gets any job security. Nobody gets a fair wage while they have a job. Nobody gets a retirement fund or even any guarantee they’ll be able to eat tomorrow. And almost everyone is doing everything they can just to get by—and paying some substantial portion of their earnings to a pimp or “platform” which controls the business they are in. And ain’t life a grand adventure? Isn’t it all so fun?
Welcome to the Sharing Economy.
This is the model of the new economy, where anyone with a car ought to be a Lyft contractor (your fare pays what he or she thinks is right but the company is tweeting out “we’ve slashed prices 20 percent”) and anyone with a house or apartment is renting it out on Air BnB and crashing at their boyfriend’s parents’ place.
All of this came about by design. The world is arranged according to the people who arrange things—the people who make money by this arrangement. We’re in our fourth decade of this. The Times reported this week that the American middle class has been surpassed by Canada’s.
And it’s much worse than the New York Times imagines. As Dean Baker points out, the middle classes in most other countries have increased their incomes while getting longer vacations. In the U.S.A.? Not so much.

But this life of hustle—the idea that everything you do, every day, needs to turn a profit or you starve—is familiar to anyone who lives or grew up in an inner city. In Salon today, D. Watkins points to the junkies putting on a fight-show for crack, and the lady who runs the candy/cig shop out of her second floor window, lowering the product down in a pencil box tied to a rope of shoelaces. You’ve seen the guys moving “loosies” and the guys selling the bags from the food pantry.
They are fucked. And we are them.

Better to be Poor in Europe than in U.S.; Better to be Middle Class in Canada than in U.S.

Source: All Gov.


Of the 16 teams that qualified for this year’s Stanley Cup Playoffs, only one, the Montreal Canadiens, is from Canada. The rest are from the United States, which some would say means Americans have beaten their neighbors to the north at their own game.
But Canada has outpaced the United States in a contest of which Americans always proudly declared ourselves the winners: whose middle class is faring best?
Median per-capita incomes in the United States and Canada were about tied in 2010 at $18,700 after taxes, but Canada’s figures have improved since then, according to The New York Times. This comes even though the United States is still the world’s richest country. However, increasing income inequality in the U.S. has caused median incomes to drop even as average incomes increase because of huge gains at the high end of the scale.
Poor people in the United States fare even worse, as they are far behind the median incomes of those living in Canada and much of Europe. A U.S. family at the 20th percentile of the income distribution makes far less money than a similar family in Canada, Sweden, Norway, Finland or the Netherlands. The income data were compiled by LIS, a group that maintains the Luxembourg Income Study Database and studies income levels worldwide.
Pay has risen much faster in Canada and Western Europe than it has in the United States. Even though U.S. companies are doing well, they’re not sharing the wealth with their workers. And the money Americans do have is buying less.
“The idea that the median American has so much more income than the middle class in all other parts of the world is not true these days,” Harvard economist Lawrence Katz told The Times.
According to a study by The Third Way, the costs of things those in the middle class are most concerned about, housing, health care, college for their children and retirement, are rising much faster than wages.
Educational attainment is rising at a slower rate in the United States now than in other nations, putting American young people behind in the race for technological jobs. And other nations are more aggressive about redistributing wealth to the less fortunate than Americans are, taxing the wealthy at higher rates and insuring better benefits for those with lower incomes.
Even Sweden, with its extensive social welfare system, has seen its per-capita gross domestic product grow faster than it has in the United States. Part of that growth is fueled by the large number of college graduates in Sweden, which allow that country to compete better for high-tech jobs.
Not all European countries are doing better than the United States, of course. Nations with weaker economies, such as Portugal and Greece, have struggled.
-Steve Straehley

Collapse Of Western Ponzi Scheme To Send Gold Skyrocketing


Today, Grant Williams, one of the most highly respected fund managers in Singapore claimed in an interview that the collapse of the Western Ponzi scheme will send the price of gold skyrocketing. Williams also discussed the coming implosion of the Western scheme as well as how the Russians and the Chinese positioning themselves ahead of this collapse. Brian covers highlights from the interview on today’s show and offers his perspective on Williams’ claims.

Retail Bankruptcies, Closings Sweeping America


35 Countries Where the U.S. Has Supported Fascists, Drug Lords and Terrorists Here's a handy A to Z guide to U.S.-backed international crime.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com
By Nicolas J.S. Davies
 
The U.S. is backing Ukraine's extreme right-wing Svoboda party and violent neo-Nazis whose armed uprising paved the way for a Western-backed coup. Events in the Ukraine are giving us another glimpse through the looking-glass of U.S. propaganda wars against fascism, drugs and terrorism. The ugly reality behind the mirror is that the U.S. government has a long and unbroken record of working with fascists, dictators, druglords and state sponsors of terrorism in every region of the world in its elusive but relentless quest for unchallenged global power.  
Behind a firewall of impunity and protection from the State Department and the CIA, U.S. clients and puppets have engaged in the worst crimes known to man, from murder and torture to coups and genocide. The trail of blood from this carnage and chaos leads directly back to the steps of the U.S. Capitol and the White House. As historian Gabriel Kolko observed in 1988, "The notion of an honest puppet is a contradiction Washington has failed to resolve anywhere in the world since 1945." What follows is a brief A to Z guide to the history of that failure.
1. Afghanistan
In the 1980s, the U.S. worked with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to overthrow Afghanistan's socialist government. It funded, trained and armed forces led by conservative tribal leaders whose power was threatened by their country's progress on education, women's rights and land reform. After Mikhail Gorbachev withdrew Soviet forces in 1989, these U.S.-backed warlords tore the country apart and boosted opium production to an unprecedented level of 2,000 to 3,400 tons per year.  The Taliban government cut opium production by 95% in two years between 1999 and 2001, but the U.S. invasion in 2001 restored the warlords and drug lords to power. Afghanistan now ranks 175th out of 177 countries in the world for corruption, 175th out of 186 in human development, and since 2004, it has produced an unprecedented 5,300 tons of opium per year.  President Karzai's brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, was well known as a CIA-backed drug lord. After a major U.S. offensive in Kandahar province in 2011, Colonel Abdul Razziq was appointed provincial police chief, boosting a heroin smuggling operation that already earned him $60 million per year in one of the poorest countries in the world.
2. Albania
Between 1949 and 1953, the U.S. and U.K. set out to overthrow the government of Albania, the smallest and most vulnerable communist country in Eastern Europe.  Exiles were recruited and trained to return to Albania to stir up dissent and plan an armed uprising. Many of the exiles involved in the plan were former collaborators with the Italian and German occupation during World War II. They included former Interior Minister Xhafer Deva, who oversaw the deportations of "Jews, Communists, partisans and suspicious persons" (as described in a Nazi document) to Auschwitz. Declassified U.S. documents have since revealed that Deva was one of 743 fascist war criminals recruited by the U.S. after the war.
3. Argentina
U.S. documents declassified in 2003 detail conversations between U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Argentinian Foreign Minister Admiral Guzzetti in October 1976, soon after the military junta seized power in Argentina. Kissinger explicitly approved the junta's "dirty war," in which it eventually killed up to 30,000, most of them young people, and stole 400 children from the families of their murdered parents. Kissinger told Guzzetti, "Look, our basic attitude is that we would like you to succeed... the quicker you succeed the better." The U.S. Ambassador in Buenos Aires reported that Guzzetti "returned in a state of jubilation, convinced that there is no real problem with the US government over that issue."  (" Daniel Gandolfo," "Presente!")

 

Altyn Becomes New Currency For The Eurasian Customs Union – Koos Jansen


Published on Apr 24, 2014Altyn becomes new currency for the Eurasian customs union.
New Eurasia currency may appear in the next five years.
Read more on In Gold We Trust
http://www.ingoldwetrust.ch/wp-admin/…

Great Things Keep Happening | Andy Hoffman

In this interview with Andrew Hoffman:
The Ukraine going from bad to worse;
First week after sales tax hike in Japan sales down 25%;
What if anything has been successful about Abenomics;
ECB 1.4 trillion QE coming;
Draghi says loosening of monetary policy coming soon;
In US 20 percent food price increase affecting fake PPI numbers;
FOMC minutes proved ending fake ZIRP was false;
HFT and Flash Boys discussion;
Gold physicla demand keeps going up-wonder why.
This interview was recorded on 4/14/14 posted with permission from Kerry Lutz of http://FinancialSurvivalNetwork.com 
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Japan's ridiculous "abenomics" now wants 29% interest rates

Kathy Fettke: Real Estate Market is not a Free Market

Wall St for Main St interviewed Real Estate expert Kathy Fettke, who is the CEO and Co-Founder of The Real Wealth Network. In this podcast, we discussed Kathy’s background and what got her interested in real estate.Kathy told us her thoughts about the general real estate market and the housing bubbles that are still brewing in California and other parts of the U.S.Kathy also gave advice for young investors wanting to get into the real estate market and told us her criteria for looking for a good location to invest in real estate. Plus much more!

Todd Harrison: There’s Many Financial Ticking Time Bombs Out There

Former top hedge fund manager, 20+ year Wall St veteran and founder of Minyanville http://www.minyanville.com/ Todd Harrison returned for another Wall St for Main St podcast interview.During this 30 minute interview, Jason asks Todd about the global macroeconomic situation and what is happening in markets when countries like Japan and China print even more money than the US does.Todd talks about market sentiment being very negative even though US stock prices still remain high and Todd expects a major stock price correction in the near future.Jason and Todd talk about how markets have tested past new Fed Chairman and if Janet Yellen will be tested with a potential 1987 or 2007 style crash.Jason then asks Todd about how in his last interview on a WS4MS podcast in 2012 he predicted a secular bull market in marijuana and how many marijuana stocks are up over 500% since then. Todd talks in details about why the bull market is occurring and the conditions he thinks are necessary for it to continue.Finally, Jason asks Todd about the inflation vs deflation debate. Todd thinks we have both occurring simultaneously but thinks the people at the Fed clearly prefer to have inflation.To wrap up the interview, Todd says he expects enormous volatility in all markets going forward because of the amount of global liquidity pumped into markets even though the Federal Reserve is tapering. He says the “little guy” will need to learn to hedge, adapt and be nimble or he should avoid investing or trading markets going forward.

"I Don't Trust The Government!" Dwight Yoakam Explains To Piers Morgan W...