Marc Faber: We Have Colossal Asset Inflation

Popescu Report – Central Banks and Gold

 Central Banks and Gold: A love hate relationship
China’s strategy to replace America as the global superpower
Gold and China (Oct.4, 2015)

Welcome to the Recovery – Homelessness Amongst Students Doubles Since Before the Recession

Source: Michael Krieger, Liberty Blitzkrieg

How’s that recovery going for you? That’s what I thought.
Here’s the latest data point from the ongoing oligarch crime spreeshamelessly marketed to the masses as an “economic recovery.”
From Five-Thirty-Eight:

The number of homeless students in the country’s classrooms has more than doubled since before the recession, according to recently released federal data. That’s an alarming trend, but a new report offers some hope: At least part of the increase, the authors say, is not because more students have become homeless, but because states have gotten better at identifying homeless students.

Here’s a visual representation of America’s Banana Republic neo-feualism for those of you so inclined:


Bull market in serfdom. If this is what a recovery looks like, I don’t want to see a recession.

There were about 1.4 million homeless students nationwide in the 2013-14 school year, according to the Department of Education, twice as many as there were in the 2006-07 school year, when roughly 680,000 students were homeless.
The rankings are based on an array of indicators that range from the concrete, like the number of available rental units that are affordable for extremely low-income families, to the less so, like the number of policies that reduce homeless families’ barriers to accessing child care. Matthew Adams, the institute’s principal policy analyst, said that rather than try to measure the effectiveness of policies in each state, which can be hard to quantify, the goal of the report is to identify and compare the efforts being made by each state.

Don’t forget to send thank you notes to America’s #1 criminal at large. Return address optional:

For related articles, see:
In New York City, Workers with Full Time Jobs Are Living in Homeless Shelters
The Face of the Oligarch Recovery – Luxury Skyscrapers Stay Empty as NYC Homeless Population Hits Record High
Welcome to the Recovery Part 2 – Washington D.C.’s Homeless Population Expected to Rise 16% in 2014
Welcome to the Recovery – U.S. Child Homelessness Hits Record as Poverty in Mass. is Highest Since 1960

CITE: The $1 Billion City That Nobody Calls Home

In the arid plains of the southern New Mexico desert, between the site of the first atomic bomb test and the U.S.-Mexico border, a new city is rising from the sand.
Planned for a population of 35,000, the city will showcase a modern business district downtown, and neat rows of terraced housing in the suburbs. It will be supplied with pristine streets, parks, malls and a church.
But no one will ever call it home.
The CITE (Center for Innovation, Testing and Evaluation) project is a full-scale model of an ordinary American town. Yet it will be used as a petri dish to develop new technologies that will shape the future of the urban environment.

The $1 billion scheme, led by telecommunications and tech firm Pegasus Global Holdings, will see 15-square-miles dedicated to ambitious experiments in fields such as transport, construction, communication and security.
CITE will include specialized zones for developing new forms of agriculture, energy, and water treatment. An underground data collection network will provide detailed, real-time feedback. 

Read More... 

Pension Reductions Only Way For Truckers To Save Plan From Insolvency

(Michael A. Fletcher)    Nearly 300,000 former truckers and their families would suffer significant losses under a proposal that uses a controversial new law to cut once sacrosanct pension benefits.
The huge Central States Pension Fund, which administers retirement benefits for some former and current Teamster truckers, said the reductions are the only way to save the plan from insolvency.
“A realistic rescue plan is needed now,” said Thomas C. Nyhan, executive director of the Central States Pension Fund. “The longer we wait to act, the larger the benefit reductions will have to be.”
Under the proposal, pensions for Central States’ 407,000 participants would be cut by an average of nearly 23 percent. But the pain would be distributed unevenly. Some participants, including the disabled, would not be subject to reductions. Older retirees would generally receive smaller cuts, while those who worked for defunct companies that did not keep pace with their pension funding obligations would face steeper reductions.
The proposed cuts were detailed in a plan submitted to the Treasury Department late last month. In it, Central States said the reduced number and increased age of its participants have left it paying out $3.46 for every dollar it takes in. The result is that the plan is disbursing $2 billion more in benefits than it takes in through employer contributions each year.
Officials say the pension plan was hurt by significant membership losses after the trucking industry was deregulated in the 1980s. Central States also suffered catastrophic investment losses during the stock market crash that accompanied the Great Recession. Since then, its investments have returned about 13 percent a year, but that has not been enough to return it to sound footing. Without changes in its benefit formula, the pension plan is on course to be insolvent by 2026, Nyhan said.

A Treasury official said Central States is the first to file a proposal with the federal government to reduce benefits under a law that was passed late last year. The measure for the first time allows the benefits of current retirees to be cut in order to address the fiscal distress confronting some of the nation’s multi-employer pension plans.
An estimated 1 million people, including many retirees, are in multi-employer pension plans that federal officials say are in danger of running out of money in the near future. Multi-employer plans are formed by businesses and unions that join forces to provide pension coverage for working-class Americans, including truck drivers, grocery store clerks and construction workers.
If some of the larger multi-employer plans are allowed to collapse, the federal insurance fund that protects them could also collapse. Given that, a coalition of plan trustees and unions said the only way to salvage the most distressed pension plans is to allow them to cut retirement benefits before they run out of money.
The law was enacted in the face of strident opposition from some unions and pension advocates, who argued that allowing plans to cut retiree benefits violates the core promise of traditional pensions: that they would provide a defined benefit for life.
Now that the first pension plan is moving to make cuts, opponents’ anger has been rekindled.
“Pension fund participants and beneficiaries did not cause the problem of underfunding,” James P. Hoffa, general president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, wrote in a letter to Central States. “They worked day in and day out to earn their pension credits. It is monstrously unfair that they will end up holding the short end of the stick.”
Some union leaders and their supporters, including Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, say the government should step in to shore up the pension funds. Sanders, an independent senator from Vermont, has introduced a bill that would repeal the measure allowing pensions to be cut.
Nyhan said Central States would embrace that solution as well. The problem, he said, is that it appears to be a political impossibility.
Treasury has 225 days to evaluate Central States’ plan to trim pensions. If officials approve the reductions, the cuts would then be voted on by plan participants. But even if participants vote the plan down, the law says it could still be imposed for the sake of protecting the broader pension guarantee system.

Iconic Retailer City Sports Files For Bankruptcy, Plans To Close Or Sell Remaining Stores

(Thomas Dishaw)  Another iconic mom and pop retailer files for bankruptcy. Boston-based City Sports plans to close or sell all remaining stores according to this Boston.com report:

Boston-based sporting goods retailer City Sports filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy Monday and plans to shutter eight of its 26 locations before selling or liquidating the rest.

“We have arranged financing for reorganization and intend to emerge from this process a much healthier company, better positioned for long-term success,” Marty Hanaka, the company’s CEO, said in a statement.

City Sports, which opened its first store on Massachusetts Avenue in Boston in 1983, has yet to announce which stores will be eliminated and when those closures will take place. However, a company spokeswoman told The Boston Globethe retailer does not intend to close any of the nine Boston-area stores. The company estimates that the reorganization process will take between one and three months, according to a release.

Since the spring of 2014, the company has struggled financially and tried to save money by cutting store hours, shrinking its workforce, and slowing delivery time, according to The Wall Street Journal . Still, City Sports could not negotiate better rent deals with its landlords, leading it to file for bankruptcy.

The company currently owes Nike USA Inc., Under Armour, Asics, and Patagonia more than $1 million each, the Globereported.

City Sports hopes to sell the remaining stores by October 30, and says several buyers have expressed interest in them. Until then, the company will continue to operate its remaining stores and online business as usual.

“Our stores remain stocked with the same high-quality products, and we will continue to honor gift cards and returns on merchandise purchased prior to the filing,” Hanaka said. “Our team is focused on developing a reorganization plan and running the business during this time of transition.”

Indeed, Lots Of Propping Going On.

http://investmentresearchdynamics.com/a-liquidity-crisis-hit-the-banking…
Something occurred in the banking system in September that required a massive reverse repo operation in order to force the largest ever Treasury collateral injection into the repo market.   Ordinarily the Fed might engage in routine reverse repos as a means of managing the Fed funds rate.   However, as you can see from the graph below, there have been sudden spikes up in the amount of reverse repos that tend to correspond the some kind of crisis – the obvious one being the de facto collapse of the financial system in 2008:

……..