- Who’s Crazy Now? American Psychological Association Supported Torture “At Every Critical Juncture”
While most psychologists are good people, tyrannies have always deployed corrupt psychologists to punish dissenters, and label them “crazy”.
The Nazi government substantially supported psychologists … many of whom, in turn, espoused extermination of the people they considered to be “racially and cognitively compromised”.
Soviet psychiatrists famously aided Stalin in applying fake insanity diagnoses to political dissenters. The official explanation was that no sane person would declaim the Soviet government and Communism.
And authoritarian American psychologists are eager to label anyone “taking a cynical stance toward politics, mistrusting authority, endorsing democratic practices, … and displaying an inquisitive, imaginative outlook” as worthy of a trip to the insane asylum. (Those traits may also get one labeled as a potential terrorist.) Indeed, Americans are literally being thrown in the loony bin after they question those in power.
As prominent forensic psychiatrist James Knoll – psychiatry professor at SUNY-Syracuse and director of a forensic fellowship program – writes in the Psychiatric Times:
When psychiatric science becomes co-opted by a political agenda, an unhealthy alliance may be created. It is science that will always be the host organism, to be taken over by political viruses…. [P]sychiatry may come to resemble a new organism entirely — one that serves the ends of the criminal justice system.
Indeed, American psychologists created the American program of torture which was specially-crafted to produce false confessions to justify U.S. military policy.
Ironically – given the background of psychologists deployed by Stalin to crush dissent – the type of torture used by the CIA was a Communist torture technique . And see this. (In reality, we’ve known for 2,000 years that all torture produces false confessions. And we’ve known for a very long time that torture reduces our national security.)
It wasn’t just rogue psychologists: the American Psychological Association was central to the torture program.
Pulitzer-prize winning journalist James Risen reports today in the New York Times:
The American Psychological Association secretly collaborated with the administration of President George W. Bush to bolster a legal and ethical justification for the torture of prisoners swept up in the post-Sept. 11 war on terror …
“The A.P.A. secretly coordinated with officials from the C.I.A., White House and the Department of Defense to create an A.P.A. ethics policy on national security interrogations which comported with then-classified legal guidance authorizing the C.I.A. torture program,” the report’s authors conclude.
***
The involvement of health professionals in the Bush-era interrogation program was significant because it enabled the Justice Department to argue in secret opinions that the program was legal and did not constitute torture, since the interrogations were being monitored by health professionals to make sure they were safe.
***
The American Psychological Association “clearly supports the role of psychologists in a way our behavioral science consultants operate,” said Dr. William Winkenwerder, then the assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, describing to reporters why the Pentagon relied more on psychologists than psychiatrists at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
***
By June 2004, the Bush administration’s torture program was in trouble. The public disclosure of the images of prisoners being abused at the Abu Ghraib prison earlier that year prompted an intense debate about the way the United States was treating detainees in the global war on terror, leading to new scrutiny of the C.I.A.’s so-called enhanced interrogation program, which included sleep deprivation and waterboarding, or simulated drowning. Congress and the news media were starting to ask questions, and there were new doubts about whether the program was legal.
***
In early June 2004, a senior official with the association, the nation’s largest professional organization for psychologists, issued an invitation to a carefully selected group of psychologists and behavioral scientists inside the government to a private meeting to discuss the crisis and the role of psychologists in the interrogation program.
Psychologists from the C.I.A. and other agencies met with association officials in July, and by the next year the association issued guidelines that reaffirmed that it was acceptable for its members to be involved in the interrogation program.
To emphasize their argument that the association grew too close to the interrogation program, the critics’ new report cites a 2003 email from a senior psychologist at the C.I.A. to a senior official at the psychological association. In the email, the C.I.A. psychologist appears to be confiding in the association official about the work of James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, the private contractors who developed and helped run the enhanced interrogation program at the C.I.A.’s secret prisons around the world.
In the email, written years before the involvement of the two contractors in the interrogation program was made public, the C.I.A. psychologist explains to the association official that the contractors “are doing special things to special people in special places.”
***
“In 2004 and 2005 the C.I.A. torture program was threatened from within and outside the Bush administration,” [Stephen Soldz, a clinical psychologist and professor at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis] said by email. “Like clockwork, the A.P.A. directly addressed legal threats at every critical juncture facing the senior intelligence officials at the heart of the program. In some cases the A.P.A. even allowed these same Bush officials to actually help write the association’s policies.”
***
The critics frequently criticized the 2005 findings of an association committee, the Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security, or PENS, which concluded that it was appropriate for psychologists to remain involved with interrogations, to make sure they remained safe, legal, ethical and effective.
Like Nazi and Soviet psychologists, these quack American psychologists have lent their hand to tyranny.
- One Bubble at a Time: 3D-Printing Stocks Implode
Wolf Richter www.wolfstreet.com www.amazon.com/author/wolfrichter
3D printing popped on the scene a few years ago, and soon it was everywhere. The media were raving about it. Companies were formed and attracted VC money, and the hype bloomed, and soon IPOs of even the tiniest outfits flew off the shelf in the US and Europe. Valuations soared, and everyone was in heaven. Even The Economist jumped on the bandwagon with its article, “A Third Industrial Revolution.” A new world had begun.
But not everyone was a true believer. Among these unwelcome detractors and party poopers was Terry Gou, founder and president of Foxconn, one of world’s largest electronics manufacturing companies. It makes the iPhone and other gadgets. In June 2013, when the Taiwanese media pushed him on 3D printing, he retorted, “3D printing is a gimmick” with no “real commercial value.”
Foxconn has been using 3D printing for nearly 30 years, he said. But the technology wasn’t suitable for mass production. You could print a phone, he said, but it would be a useless phone because the technology could not assemble electronic components. That process still required humans or specialized machines.
The modernization of 3D printing didn’t mean “the advent of a third industrial revolution,” he said, debunking The Economist. It was just one of many useful technologies.
His insights were too mundane for the money that went looking for a spiritual place to go. Terry Gou, ultimate industry insider, was ignored (even though I wrote about it at the time, ha!). And valuations skyrocketed.
But at the end of 2013, the phenomenal bubble began to hiss hot air. And since then, it has been tough.
On Wednesday, Stratasys (SSYS), the largest player in the space, warned on revenues and earnings, after having already warned three months ago. For the year, it now expects revenues of $800 million to $860 million. Analysts expected $943 million. Its loss, stuffed with all kinds of write-offs, could reach $245 million, or $4.79 per share. It would be twice as large as its loss in 2013 and 10 times larger than its loss in 2012.
It blamed the “decline in relevant capital spending… particularly in North America”; “a slower than expected channel ramp up” in Asia; and the usual suspects, such as the strong dollar.
Its flagship product, MakerBot – “leading the next industrial revolution,” the company said not long ago – is in deep trouble. Sales plunged 18%. There will be an impairment charge of up to $200 million. Job cuts have already been launched. Capital expenditures and operating expenses will be slashed. Shares plunged 22% on Wednesday and another 6% today, to $37.45, down 73% from their peak at the end of December 2013.
The second largest player, 3D Systems (DDD), is facing a similar scenario. At its peak in early January 2014, the company was worth over $10 billion. Its shares traded at 72 times hoped-for forward earnings. Those hoped-for earnings have since crashed. While revenues increased by 27% to $654 million, profit slumped 73% to $11.6 million.
So it gets worse. On April 24, 3D Systems warned on its outlook, predicting a net loss “in the range of $0.13 per share to $0.15 per share.” The company was “surprised and disappointed by the abrupt interruption in customer demand late in the quarter.” It blamed “macroeconomic pressures,” the dollar, and among other culprits, “the aftershock of lower oil prices,” which “caused the majority of its aerospace, automotive and healthcare customers to curb new printer purchases during the quarter and curtail their materials and service purchases.” Its shares trade at $25.10, down 74% from their peak in early January 2014.
These top two guns are followed in the distance by a gaggle of tiny outfits in the US, Europe, and elsewhere.
There’s Materialise (MTLS). Revenues in 2014 grew 18% to €81 million. Net profits plunged 45% to €1.8 million, but at least it’s a profit. After it went public last summer in the US, its stock soared to a high of nearly $15 a share, then bunny-hopped down 50%.
Then there’s ExOne (XONE) with $44 million in revenues in 2014, up 10%, generating $22 million in red ink. Its shares topped out in August 2013 at $68.50 and have since crashed 80%.
Sweden-based Arcam (ARCM) saw revenues grow 70% to $40 million in 2014. It’s actually profitable. After a parabolic ascent, its shares peaked in November 2013 at 1,073 Swedish Krona but have since plunged 88%.
Germany’s SLM Solutions (XETRA: AM3D), which is into metals-based 3D printing, came in with €36 million in revenues, up 55%, but booked a $5 million net loss. Its shares peaked at €22 in July 2014 shortly after going public and have since dropped only 20% – “only” because that’s a miracle in this space.
Alphaform (ETR:ATF), a German prototyping service, with $30 million in sales and over $3 million in net losses, peaked at nearly €4 per share in Feb 2014 and has since dropped 36%.
Voxeljet (NYSE:VJET), with $20 million in revenues and $5 million in losses, spiked to $59 a share in November 2013, then plunged 86%.
They get smaller as you go, including such stalwarts as Graphene 3D Lab (GPHBF), with a great name, no sales, and only losses. It went public on a wing and a prayer last September while it still could as the bubble was already imploding. Shares made it up all the way to $2.12 but then quickly skittered down 71%.
You get the idea.
After having totally slept through the bubble, even Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) woke up and wants to muscle into the space with some 3D printing products of its own to goose its shares with the “third industrial revolution.” That should be fun.
Manias, like the 3D-printing stock bubble, do something funny to the human brain. Valuations don’t follow rational concepts. Instead, hocus-pocus prevails. New metrics are invented. Conversations over beer or cocktails go haywire. The media love to reproduce the hype without asking questions. Share prices are whipped up by Wall Street and the VC community because it makes them rich. But when these folks exit, the big wealth transfer begins, from those who’re bamboozled into buying the shares to those who dump them. Many billions of dollars have already been transferred. And the bloodletting doesn’t appear to be over.
Other companies too are struggling with crummy revenues and earnings. But heck, they’re redoubling their efforts to get their stocks up. Read… Record Financial Engineering Will Goose Stocks: Goldman
- Baltimore As A Microcosm Of America
Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
In these drug-saturated neighborhoods, they weren’t policing their post anymore, they weren’t policing real estate that they were protecting from crime. They weren’t nurturing informants, or learning how to properly investigate anything. There’s a real skill set to good police work. But no, they were just dragging the sidewalks, hunting stats, and these inner-city neighborhoods — which were indeed drug-saturated because that’s the only industry left — become just hunting grounds. They weren’t protecting anything. They weren’t serving anyone. They were collecting bodies, treating corner folk and citizens alike as an Israeli patrol would treat Gaza, or as the Afrikaners would have treated Soweto back in the day. They’re an army of occupation. And once it’s that, then everybody’s the enemy. The police aren’t looking to make friends, or informants, or learning how to write clean warrants or how to testify in court without perjuring themselves unnecessarily. There’s no incentive to get better as investigators, as cops.
– From the excellent Marshall Project article: David Simon on Baltimore’s Anguish
Baltimore, Maryland is in many ways the perfect microcosm for these United States of America. If you still don’t get that, you’ll be in for a rude awakening in the years ahead.
A gradual erosion of the Constitution and the civil rights of the citizenry, the abuse of power by people in authority, perverse financial incentives that lead to horrible outcomes, zero accountability, and a ubiquitous surveillance state apparatus; Baltimore has it all. Yet all of these troubling traits have also come to characterize early 21st century America.
As tends to be the case, the populations that have been victimized the longest and most systemically — in Baltimore and across the U.S. — are the poor, weak and disenfranchised. Like a cancer, corruption, theft, and blatant abuse of the citizenry by the powerful will spread and spread until it consumes everything unless the tumor is removed. It has now spread so deeply and so dangerously throughout American life, the general public will soon have no choice but to confront it and do something about it, or face a total extinction of opportunity and suffer the same desperate fate as the people out in the streets of Baltimore.
David Simon, creator of the excellent hit HBO series “The Wire,” recently sat down for an interview with former New York Times reporter Bill Keller to explain the situation in Baltimore as he sees it; its origins and what is needed to fix it. As you read, think about the many parallels to the U.S. economy in general; the endless criminal maneuverings within the centers of power in Washington D.C. and Wall Street, the forever spinning revolving door of corruption, the marauding gangs of cronies making impossibly large piles of money based on connections, fraud and rigged markets as opposed to adding value, the idiocy of the war on drugs, the fraudulent accounting, and the overbearing surveillance state. Increasingly, when America looks in the mirror Baltimore and Ferguson are staring right back. We just haven’t admitted it yet.
Now, from the Marshall Project:
Bill Keller: What do people outside the city need to understand about what’s going on there — the death of Freddie Gray and the response to it?
David Simon: I guess there’s an awful lot to understand and I’m not sure I understand all of it. The part that seems systemic and connected is that the drug war — which Baltimore waged as aggressively as any American city — was transforming in terms of police/community relations, in terms of trust, particularly between the black community and the police department. Probable cause was destroyed by the drug war.
Probable cause from a Baltimore police officer has always been a tenuous thing. It’s a tenuous thing anywhere, but in Baltimore, in these high crime, heavily policed areas, it was even worse. When I came on, there were jokes about, “You know what probable cause is on Edmondson Avenue? You roll by in your radio car and the guy looks at you for two seconds too long.” Probable cause was whatever you thought you could safely lie about when you got into district court.
Then at some point when cocaine hit and the city lost control of a lot of corners and the violence was ratcheted up, there was a real panic on the part of the government. And they basically decided that even that loose idea of what the Fourth Amendment was supposed to mean on a street level, even that was too much. Now all bets were off. Now you didn’t even need probable cause. The city council actually passed an ordinance that declared a certain amount of real estate to be drug-free zones. They literally declared maybe a quarter to a third of inner city Baltimore off-limits to its residents, and said that if you were loitering in those areas you were subject to arrest and search. Think about that for a moment: It was a permission for the police to become truly random and arbitrary and to clear streets any way they damn well wanted.
How does race figure into this? It’s a city with a black majority and now a black mayor and black police chief, a substantially black police force.
What did Tom Wolfe write about cops? They all become Irish? That’s a line in “Bonfire of the Vanities.” When Ed and I reported “The Corner,” it became clear that the most brutal cops in our sector of the Western District were black. The guys who would really kick your ass without thinking twice were black officers. If I had to guess and put a name on it, I’d say that at some point, the drug war was as much a function of class and social control as it was of racism. I think the two agendas are inextricably linked, and where one picks up and the other ends is hard to say. But when you have African-American officers beating the dog-piss out of people they’re supposed to be policing, and there isn’t a white guy in the equation on a street level, it’s pretty remarkable. But in some ways they were empowered.
Back then, even before the advent of cell phones and digital cameras — which have been transforming in terms of documenting police violence — back then, you were much more vulnerable if you were white and you wanted to wail on somebody. You take out your nightstick and you’re white and you start hitting somebody, it has a completely different dynamic than if you were a black officer. It was simply safer to be brutal if you were black, and I didn’t know quite what to do with that fact other than report it. It was as disturbing a dynamic as I could imagine. Something had been removed from the equation that gave white officers — however brutal they wanted to be, or however brutal they thought the moment required — it gave them pause before pulling out a nightstick and going at it. Some African American officers seemed to feel no such pause.
This is another fascinating microcosm considering how Barack Obama has done absolutely nothing to help the black community or poor in this country. It took a black President to so shamelessly hand everything to a handful of oligarchs and further oppress black communities.
What the drug war did, though, was make this all a function of social control. This was simply about keeping the poor down, and that war footing has been an excuse for everybody to operate outside the realm of procedure and law.
“The drug war began it, certainly, but the stake through the heart of police procedure in Baltimore was Martin O’Malley.”
In case you aren’t aware, Martin O’Malley was the ambitious Mayor of Baltimore who had his eyes dead set on the Governor’s seat. So much so that he cooked the crime books of Baltimore to create a crime “miracle,” and destroyed city police work in the process. Mr. O’Malley has recently discussed possibly running against Hillary in the 2016 Democrat primary.
But that wasn’t enough. O’Malley needed to show crime reduction stats that were not only improbable, but unsustainable without manipulation. And so there were people from City Hall who walked over Norris and made it clear to the district commanders that crime was going to fall by some astonishing rates. Eventually, Norris got fed up with the interference from City Hall and walked, and then more malleable police commissioners followed, until indeed, the crime rate fell dramatically. On paper.
How? There were two initiatives. First, the department began sweeping the streets of the inner city, taking bodies on ridiculous humbles, mass arrests, sending thousands of people to city jail, hundreds every night, thousands in a month. They actually had police supervisors stationed with printed forms at the city jail – forms that said, essentially, you can go home now if you sign away any liability the city has for false arrest, or you can not sign the form and spend the weekend in jail until you see a court commissioner. And tens of thousands of people signed that form.
Unsurprisingly, the rule of law often dies at the hands of an ambitious politician.
The situation you described has been around for a while. Do you have a sense of why the Freddie Gray death has been such a catalyst for the response we’ve seen in the last 48 hours?
Because the documented litany of police violence is now out in the open. There’s an actual theme here that’s being made evident by the digital revolution. It used to be our word against yours. It used to be said — correctly — that the patrolman on the beat on any American police force was the last perfect tyranny. Absent a herd of reliable witnesses, there were things he could do to deny you your freedom or kick your ass that were between him, you, and the street. The smartphone with its small, digital camera, is a revolution in civil liberties.
In these drug-saturated neighborhoods, they weren’t policing their post anymore, they weren’t policing real estate that they were protecting from crime. They weren’t nurturing informants, or learning how to properly investigate anything. There’s a real skill set to good police work. But no, they were just dragging the sidewalks, hunting stats, and these inner-city neighborhoods — which were indeed drug-saturated because that’s the only industry left — become just hunting grounds. They weren’t protecting anything. They weren’t serving anyone. They were collecting bodies, treating corner folk and citizens alike as an Israeli patrol would treat Gaza, or as the Afrikaners would have treated Soweto back in the day. They’re an army of occupation. And once it’s that, then everybody’s the enemy. The police aren’t looking to make friends, or informants, or learning how to write clean warrants or how to testify in court without perjuring themselves unnecessarily. There’s no incentive to get better as investigators, as cops. There’s no reason to solve crime. In the years they were behaving this way, locking up the entire world, the clearance rate for murder dove by 30 percent. The clearance rate for aggravated assault — every felony arrest rate – took a significant hit. Think about that. If crime is going down, and crime is going down, and if we have less murders than ever before and we have more homicide detectives assigned, and better evidentiary technologies to employ how is the clearance rate for homicide now 48 percent when it used to be 70 percent, or 75 percent?
Because the drug war made cops lazy and less competent?
How do you reward cops? Two ways: promotion and cash. That’s what rewards a cop. If you want to pay overtime pay for having police fill the jails with loitering arrests or simple drug possession or failure to yield, if you want to spend your municipal treasure rewarding that, well the cop who’s going to court 7 or 8 days a month — and court is always overtime pay — you’re going to damn near double your salary every month. On the other hand, the guy who actually goes to his post and investigates who’s burglarizing the homes, at the end of the month maybe he’s made one arrest. It may be the right arrest and one that makes his post safer, but he’s going to court one day and he’s out in two hours. So you fail to reward the cop who actually does police work. But worse, it’s time to make new sergeants or lieutenants, and so you look at the computer and say: Who’s doing the most work? And they say, man, this guy had 80 arrests last month, and this other guy’s only got one. Who do you think gets made sergeant? And then who trains the next generation of cops in how not to do police work? I’ve just described for you the culture of the Baltimore police department amid the deluge of the drug war, where actual investigation goes unrewarded and where rounding up bodies for street dealing, drug possession, loitering such – the easiest and most self-evident arrests a cop can make – is nonetheless the path to enlightenment and promotion and some additional pay. That’s what the drug war built, and that’s what Martin O’Malley affirmed when he sent so much of inner city Baltimore into the police wagons on a regular basis.
So much of what was said there characterizes the perverted culture in Washington D.C. and on Wall Street. People are financially incentivized to commit fraud, crime and deceive customers. Those people are then promoted and train the next class. And the beat goes on…
The second thing Marty did, in order to be governor, involves the stats themselves. In the beginning, under Norris, he did get a better brand of police work and we can credit a legitimate 12 to 15 percent decline in homicides. Again, that was a restoration of an investigative deterrent in the early years of that administration. But it wasn’t enough to declare a Baltimore Miracle, by any means.
What can you do? You can’t artificially lower the murder rate – how do you hide the bodies when it’s the state health department that controls the medical examiner’s office? But the other felony categories? Robbery, aggravated assault, rape? Christ, what they did with that stuff was jaw-dropping.
Now for the accounting fraud. Looks like Baltimore authorities learned well from Wall Street.
So they cooked the books.
Oh yeah. If you hit somebody with a bullet, that had to count. If they went to the hospital with a bullet in them, it probably had to count as an aggravated assault. But if someone just took a gun out and emptied the clip and didn’t hit anything or they didn’t know if you hit anything, suddenly that was a common assault or even an unfounded report. Armed robberies became larcenies if you only had a victim’s description of a gun, but not a recovered weapon. And it only gets worse as some district commanders began to curry favor with the mayoral aides who were sitting on the Comstat data. In the Southwest District, a victim would try to make an armed robbery complaint, saying , ‘I just got robbed, somebody pointed a gun at me,’ and what they would do is tell him, well, okay, we can take the report but the first thing we have to do is run you through the computer to see if there’s any paper on you. Wait, you’re doing a warrant check on me before I can report a robbery? Oh yeah, we gotta know who you are before we take a complaint. You and everyone you’re living with? What’s your address again? You still want to report that robbery?
They cooked their own books in remarkable ways. Guns disappeared from reports and armed robberies became larcenies. Deadly weapons were omitted from reports and aggravated assaults became common assaults. The Baltimore Sun did a fine job looking into the dramatic drop in rapes in the city. Turned out that regardless of how insistent the victims were that they had been raped, the incidents were being quietly unfounded. That tip of the iceberg was reported, but the rest of it, no. And yet there were many veteran commanders and supervisors who were disgusted, who would privately complain about what was happening. If you weren’t a journalist obliged to quote sources and instead, say, someone writing a fictional television drama, they’d share a beer and let you fill cocktail napkins with all the ways in which felonies disappeared in those years.
I mean, think about it. How does the homicide rate decline by 15 percent, while the agg assault rate falls by more than double that rate. Are all of Baltimore’s felons going to gun ranges in the county? Are they becoming better shots? Have the mortality rates for serious assault victims in Baltimore, Maryland suddenly doubled? Did they suddenly close the Hopkins and University emergency rooms and return trauma care to the dark ages? It makes no sense statistically until you realize that you can’t hide a murder, but you can make an attempted murder disappear in a heartbeat, no problem.
But these guys weren’t satisfied with just juking their own stats. No, the O’Malley administration also went back to the last year of the previous mayoralty and performed its own retroactive assessment of those felony totals, and guess what? It was determined from this special review that the preceding administration had underreported its own crime rate, which O’Malley rectified by upgrading a good chunk of misdemeanors into felonies to fatten up the Baltimore crime rate that he was inheriting. Get it? How better than to later claim a 30 or 40 percent reduction in crime than by first juking up your inherited rate as high as she’ll go. It really was that cynical an exercise.
So Martin O’Malley proclaims a Baltimore Miracle and moves to Annapolis. And tellingly, when his successor as mayor allows a new police commissioner to finally de-emphasize street sweeps and mass arrests and instead focus on gun crime, that’s when the murder rate really dives. That’s when violence really goes down. When a drug arrest or a street sweep is suddenly not the standard for police work, when violence itself is directly addressed, that’s when Baltimore makes some progress.
But nothing corrects the legacy of a police department in which the entire rank-and-file has been rewarded and affirmed for collecting bodies, for ignoring probable cause, for grabbing anyone they see for whatever reason. And so, fast forward to Sandtown and the Gilmor Homes, where Freddie Gray gives some Baltimore police the legal equivalent of looking at them a second or two too long. He runs, and so when he’s caught he takes an ass-kicking and then goes into the back of a wagon without so much as a nod to the Fourth Amendment.
So do you see how this ends or how it begins to turn around?
We end the drug war. I know I sound like a broken record, but we end the fucking drug war. The drug war gives everybody permission to do anything. It gives cops permission to stop anybody, to go in anyone’s pockets, to manufacture any lie when they get to district court. You sit in the district court in Baltimore and you hear, ‘Your Honor, he was walking out of the alley and I saw him lift up the glassine bag and tap it lightly.’ No fucking dope fiend in Baltimore has ever walked out of an alley displaying a glassine bag for all the world to see. But it keeps happening over and over in the Western District court. The drug war gives everybody permission. And if it were draconian and we were fixing anything that would be one thing, but it’s draconian and it’s a disaster.
This is true about the drug war, but even more true about the “war on terror.” Also endless, also used to justify anything.
Medicalize the problem, decriminalize — I don’t need drugs to be declared legal, but if a Baltimore State’s Attorney told all his assistant state’s attorneys today, from this moment on, we are not signing overtime slips for court pay for possession, for simple loitering in a drug-free zone, for loitering, for failure to obey, we’re not signing slips for that: Nobody gets paid for that bullshit, go out and do real police work. If that were to happen, then all at once, the standards for what constitutes a worthy arrest in Baltimore would significantly improve. Take away the actual incentive to do bad or useless police work, which is what the drug war has become.
So much of what’s been happening in Baltimore for decades is now also business as usual within the highest corridors of American power. As I’ve said time and time again, incentives are the key variable here. If you’re rewarded for fraud and white collar crime, you will get more of it. If you jail the perpetrators of it, you’ll get less of it. TBTF Wall Street execs and private equity guys don’t want to sit in a jail cell for a decade, believe me. They’d sell 50 Picassos and 30 sharks soaked in formaldehyde before that ever happened.
The sad part is we aren’t even trying to change the incentive structure of status quo criminality. This is because the current generation of power players were trained and molded by the same types before them. This is all they know. Money and power are their gods. Crime is their religion. We have no choice but to stop them.
* * *
For related articles, see:
The U.S. Department of Justice Handles Banker Criminals Like Juvenile Offenders…Literally
Tim Geithner Admits “Too Big To Fail” Hasn’t Gone Anywhere (and that’s the way he likes it)
Meet Mary Jo White: The Next SEC Chief and a Guaranteed Wall Street Patsy
Some Money Launderers are “More Equal” than Others
- One More Reason Why The Student Debt Bubble Is About To Get A Lot Larger
In “The Treasury’s Worst Case Scenario: Over $3.3 Trillion In Student Loans In A Decade,” we presented the following rather disturbing graphic which shows that in the event unemployment “edges up” after 2017 and the gap between unemployment and underemployment doesn’t narrow between now and then, the size of the government’s direct loan program will balloon to $3.3 trillion by 2025.
Based on the real delinquency rate for student borrowers — which, as we have shown on dozens of occasions, is around 30% — some $1 trillion in student loans will be on their way to default in the space of 10 years, and that number could be much higher depending on how many former students opting to enroll in IBR payment plans end up with calculated payments of zero due to their financial circumstances. Note also that extrapolating from “delinquent” to “default” isn’t as much of a stretch as it once was and is in fact becoming less of a stretch by the year because we pointed out earlier this month, the percentage of borrowers delinquent by 90 days or less who eventually make a payment is falling steadily.
With tuition rates rising by a staggering 24% every five years, just about the last thing the government (and by extension, the taxpayer) needs is another reason to suspect that the student debt bubble is going to start growing even faster than it already is. Unfortunately, new evidence suggest that just might be the case.
Via WSJ:
Parents are having a harder time saving for college, a report released Wednesday shows.
Fewer American parents are saving for college and the average sum that families who are saving have accumulated to pay college costs has fallen, according to a report by the country’s largest private student-loan lender SLM Corp., better known as Sallie Mae, and market-research company Ipsos Public Affairs.
Forty-eight percent of parents with children under age 18 are saving for college this year, down from 51% last year and a peak of 62% in 2009, the report says. On average, those families that are saving have $10,040 set aside for college, down 25% from $13,408 in 2014.
The findings come as college costs continue to rise. The average annual cost of tuition, fees and room and board at private nonprofit four-year colleges and universities totaled $42,419 for the current 2014-15 academic year, up 3.6% over a year prior and up 21% from 2009-10, according to data from the College Board. At public four-year colleges, that figure was $18,943 for in-state students, up 3% and
24.3%, respectively.
Parents feel overwhelmed about how to save for college costs, according to the Sallie Mae-Ipsos report, with 20% of parents saving for college and 38% of those not saving sharing that feeling.
And from the report:
Although parents value college and are willing to stretch financially to obtain the opportunity of college for their children, college savings are decreasing. Even amidst continued signs of economic recovery and rising income levels, the amount of money families saved is lower than it was the prior year?both in total and for college. This year, the aggregate amount of savings that families reported for all purposes is $98,867, a 14 percent decrease compared to last year’s $115,604…
Parents are allocating approximately 10 percent of their total savings for their children’s college, a rate that has remained stable over the past three years. However, since savings overall are down, the dollar amounts being saved for college are also lower. On average, parents have saved $10,040 for college, a decrease from the previous year but similar to 2013’s $10,503. The average college savings amount is at the lowest level in three years.
Overall, more than two out of five parents not currently saving for college plan to begin saving in the near future (43%); 21 percent plan to begin within the next year, and 22 percent plan to begin within the next five years. However, another 2 out of 5 parents (41%) are not sure when or if they will begin saving for their child’s future college education. Another 16 percent of parents currently have no plans to begin saving for college.
And of course, ZIRP is a part of the problem, because nearly 40% of parents use general savings accounts — where their money earns no interest — as their vehicle of choice…
Parents are most likely to have started saving for college in a general savings account. Among those who use multiple vehicles to save for college, 24 percent started saving for college that way, and 37 percent named it as their first or second type of account. About 1 in 10 parents started saving for college either through a piggy bank (12%), a 529 plan (12%), or a checking account (11%).
The following graphic sums up the situation nicely: nearly half of those surveyed have neither saved any money for their kids’ college tuition nor are planning to in the future, a figure which doesn’t match up well with the 93% of respondents who believe their children will attend college. We think it goes without saying that the gap will be filled by federal loans.
- Inching Toward Conflict: US Navy To Escort Cargo Ships In Persian Gulf; Iran Refuses To Back Down
Stocks took a nasty fall on Tuesday when Al Arabiya erroneously reported that Iran had captured a cargo ship with a crew of Americans on board. It also sent oil surging. Things promptly normalized when it was revealed that the “confiscated” ship was merely one with a Marshall Island flag, at which point its fate was quickly forgotten (it may still be held by Iran, or not). But one thing is certain: both Iran and the US are itching for a provocation, whether a direct one or the far more traditional false flag type.
Earlier today, Iran’s Navy Commander Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari said that presence of the 34th fleet of the Iranian Navy in the Gulf of Aden is in accordance with international law to protect Iranian trade vessels against pirates.
Quoted by Iran’s IRNA news agency, Sayyari, who was speaking to reporters on the sidelines of a ceremony to mark the National Teacher’s Day, said that the Iranian Navy has maintained a continuous presence in the Gulf of Aden, Bab el-Mandeb Strait and western India since 2008 Sayyari
He added that claims that Iranian warships have been warned and that they have left this region are not correct.
The Navy commander reiterated that the Iranian fleet does not enter territorial waters of other countries and is only present in international waters to ensure security for Iranian trade vessels.
Sayyari said that the 34th fleet of the Iranian Navy has also helped other countries in protecting their ships against pirates.
A laughable excuse of course, but no less laughable than the one provided by the US navy offered ten days ago when we learned that a US Navi aircraft carrier and a warship are being dispatched to intercept Iranian weapons shipment to Yemeni rebels.
And, as expected, moments ago there was yet another step up in the Persian Gulf naval escalation when CNN reported that the U.S. Navy will escort U.S.-flagged cargo ships through Strait of Hormuz in wake of Iran seizure this week, a US official says. Specifically, the Navy will henceforth accompany ships on concern that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard may seize them, CNN’s Jim Sciutto says in Twitter post, citing CNN’s Barbara Starr.
As a reminder the Straits of Hormuz is one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, one which is transited by 35% of all seaborne traded oil.
This takes place just a day after the Pentagon said that the U.S. would “be able to respond” if necessary to help a Marshall Islands-flagged ship that was diverted, and boarded, a day earlier by Iran — though it remains unclear how far the U.S. Navy might be willing to go if the tense situation escalates.
Pentagon spokesman Col. Steve Warren said a U.S. guided-missile destroyer, the USS Farragut, is in the area and “keeping an eye on things,” and in close enough proximity to the ship that they “will be able to respond if a response is required.”
When pressed on what kind of incident aboard the ship would elicit a U.S. Navy response, he was vague, saying: “These [U.S. military] assets give commanders options.” He said he didn’t know “what the possibilities are,” and the U.S. government is “in discussions with the Marshall Islands on the way ahead.”
It is unclear what happens if either the accompanied cargo ship, or the US Navy warship leaves international waters, and enters Iran territory, which as the Bab el-Mandeb Strait is virtually assured: a strait which as the US Naval update map below shows has become as busy for US traffic as the 405 Freeway during rush hour.
- Guess Who Predicted The Failure Of QE
Janet Yellen:
“As Japan found during its quantitative easing program, increasing the size of the monetary base above levels needed to provide ample liquidity to the banking system had no discernible economic effects aside from those associated with communicating the Bank of Japan’s commitment to the zero interest rate policy.
I think my views on this mirror those that you expressed in your opening comments, Mr. Chairman.”
How did that work out?
We assume principles go out the window when the orders come down from the banker-owners on high…
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However, today we get more total hypocrisy from the newly found bond guru and hedge fund adviser via his blog…
Where [monetary policy] can be helpful is in supporting the return to full employment, and there the record has been reasonably good. Indeed, it seems clear that the Fed’s aggressive actions are an important reason that job creation in the United States has outstripped that of other industrial countries by a wide margin.
The WSJ also argues that, because monetary policy has not been a panacea for our economic troubles, we should stop using it. I agree that monetary policy is no panacea, and as Fed chairman I frequently said so. With short-term interest rates pinned near zero, monetary policy is not as powerful or as predictable as at other times. But the right inference is not that we should stop using monetary policy, but rather that we should bring to bear other policy tools as well.
So while in 2008, QE had no discernible economic effects… in 2015 it is a powerful tool for lowering unemployment rates? What a farce!?
- The War On Cash: Transparently Totalitarian
Submitted by Nick Giambruno via Doug Casey's International Man blog,
George Orwell once wrote “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”
Not exactly a cheery thought, and one I don’t agree with.
While the forces pushing for centralization of power have been prevailing for decades, they haven’t won a total victory yet. Technologies that empower the individual and that tend toward decentralization—including the Internet, encryption, 3D printing, and cryptocurrencies—offer a powerful ray of hope, reasons to be optimistic about the future.
So the tug of war between the collectivists and the rest of us continues.
One thing that would tip the scales heavily in favor of the collectivists would be victory in the War on Cash. Their goal is to eliminate the use of hand-to-hand currency, so that governments can document, control, and tax everything.
It’s exactly like what Ron Paul said: “The cashless society is the IRS’s dream: total knowledge of, and control over, the finances of every single American.”
One way they are waging the War on Cash is to lower the threshold at which reporting a cash transaction is mandatory or at which paying in cash is simply illegal. In just the last few years…
- Italy made cash transactions over €1,000 illegal;
- Switzerland has proposed banning cash payments in excess of 100,000 francs;
- Russia banned cash transactions over $10,000;
- Spain banned cash transactions over €2,500;
- Mexico made cash payments of more than 200,000 pesos illegal;
- Uruguay banned cash transactions over $5,000; and
- France made cash transactions over €1,000 illegal, down from the previous limit of €3,000.
I recently spoke about this with Dr. Joe Salerno, an Austrian economist with the Mises Institute. Joe is the best chronicler of the global War on Cash and is here to offer an Austrian rebuttal to the economic nonsense peddled by advocates of this war.
I am happy to bring you his informed insight.
Until next time,
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Nick Giambruno: What is the War on Cash?
Joe Salerno: The War on Cash is the attempt by governments to phase cash out of their economies. Governments hate cash because they hate the financial privacy cash makes possible. And they prefer that you keep your money in a bank to help prop up an unsound fractional reserve banking system.
Nick: How did you get interested in this topic?
Joe: I noticed that every time there was a war on something—a war on crime, a war on drugs, a war on terror and so forth—the more the government encroached on financial privacy. The US government has long been waging a hidden war on cash.
One symptom of the war is that the largest denomination of US currency is the $100 note. US currency used to be issued in denominations running up to $10,000 (including also $500; $1,000; $5,000 notes). The US government stopped printing large denomination notes in 1945 and officially discontinued their issuance in 1969, when the Fed began removing them from circulation.
Since then, the largest currency note available has a face value of $100. But since 1969, the inflationary monetary policy of the Fed has caused the US dollar to depreciate by over 80%, so that a $100 note today has less purchasing power than a $20 bill in 1969.
So in addition to lowering the nominal size of the largest bill, they also reduced the bill’s purchasing power through inflation.
Despite this enormous depreciation, the Federal Reserve has steadfastly refused to issue notes of larger denomination. This has made large cash transactions extremely inconvenient and has forced the American public to make much greater use than is optimal of electronic-payment methods. Of course, this is precisely the intent of the US government.
Nick: Looking around, what are the latest examples of the War on Cash?
Joe: One right here in the United States occurred in 2011. It flew under the radar for a while. The State of Louisiana banned “secondhand dealers” from making more than one cash transaction per week. The term has a broad definition and includes Goodwill stores, specialty stores that sell collectibles like baseball cards, flea markets, garage sales and so on. Anyone deemed a “secondhand dealer” is forbidden to accept cash as payment. They are allowed to take only electronic means of payment or a check, and they must collect the name and other information about each customer and send it to the local police department electronically every day.
Nick: What about Europe?
Joe: In France recently, the limit on cash transactions was lowered from €3,000 to €1,000. The reason given was the attacks on Charlie Hebdo. It turns out that those attacks were financed in part by cash. Well, what a big shock that criminals use cash to finance their operations. They also use, of course, public sidewalks and automobiles, they buy clothing and so on. So this whole thing is ridiculous. It’s just a way of obscuring the government’s true goal, which is to get rid of financial privacy. Governments don’t really think that by lowering the limit of legally allowable cash payments that it’s somehow going to cut down on terrorist attacks. That’s just the narrative we’re given.
Nick: What is the mindset of someone who would advocate the elimination of cash?
Joe: Let me give you an example. Recently Willem Buiter—a prominent economist for Citibank—came out with a proposal to abolish cash. The reason is to enable the Fed to push interest rates into negative territory. He suggested that we could have avoided a lot of the problems with the financial crisis if the Fed could have set the interest rate at negative 6%.
But of course the availability of hand-to-hand currency would get in the way of that plan. People would say “I’m not going to put my money in the bank and have them take 6% every year.” They would avoid the bite of negative interest rates simply by holding hundred-dollar bills.
This really shocked me, that a prominent economist would make a case for abolishing cash, so that the central bank could set interest rates at a negative level. This is really crazy thinking, but it’s their mindset. It’s nuts.
Nick: Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff made a similar argument. Did you hear about that?
Joe: Yes, I did. In fact, Buiter took his cue from Rogoff. But there are a number of hyper-Keynesian economists who want to remove all barriers to negative interest rates, so that you’ll hurry up and spend whatever cash you have. But the only way they can do that is to corral everyone’s money in to the banking system.
It’s absurd, and they’ve gone way beyond Keynes with this craziness.
Nick: It reminds me of how Paul Krugman advocated for faking a space alien invasion as an excuse for the government to waste money on countering it. Or how he later supported minting a trillion-dollar coin. The real scary part is that he—and his juvenile solutions—are taken seriously by many people. Krugman, Buiter, Rogoff and their ilk have the government’s ear, they are presented respectfully by the mainstream media and are given Nobel prizes in economics. How do people not see what they are advocating, like eliminating cash, as transparently totalitarian?
Joe: I think that harkens back to the progressive era, from 1900 or so to the end of World War I. Government-employed experts supposedly were disinterested and dispassionate and would apply their knowledge and skills to do what was best for society. They would be the technocrats.
That’s how they pulled the wool over the American people’s eyes, by saying, well, you know, we are fixing the economy’s problems. This has nothing to do with politics. This has nothing to do with totalitarianism. We are trying to make the economy better for you and for everyone else.
That was just a bunch of nonsense, and it still is. People who believe it are still living in the 1930s, always worried about deflation, rather than worrying about the real problem, which is, of course, the Fed’s monopoly control of money and the inflation the Fed promotes.
Nick: What is the response of Austrian economists to this way of thinking?
Joe: Fortunately, the free market provides the prospect of an escape from the fiscal police state that seeks to stamp out the use of cash through either depreciation of central-bank-issued currency combined with unchanged currency denominations or direct legal limitation on the size of cash transactions. As Carl Menger, the founder of the Austrian School of economics, explained over 140 years ago, money emerges not by government decree but through a market process driven by the actions of individuals who are continually seeking a means to accomplish their goals through exchange most efficiently.
Every so often history offers up another example that illustrates Menger’s point. The use of sheep, bottled water, and cigarettes as media of exchange in Iraqi rural villages after the US invasion and collapse of the dinar is one recent example. Another example was Argentina after the collapse of the peso, when grain contracts priced in dollars were regularly exchanged for big-ticket items like automobiles, trucks, and farm equipment. In fact, Argentine farmers began hoarding grain in silos to substitute for holding cash balances in the form of depreciating pesos.
Austrian economists would think that the War on Cash is really absurd and unscientific. We would say, allow people to choose the form of payment they want to use, whether that be cash, gold, debit card, or something else. We want to remove all barriers to people using different kinds of currency, take all excise taxes, sales taxes, capital gains taxes off gold and silver and off foreign currencies. And also get rid of all legal tender laws. You can keep the dollar in existence, but allow people to use currencies that compete with the dollar.
So we want to move in the exact opposite direction from abolishing cash. In fact, we want to encourage people to withdraw money from banks they don’t trust. Fractional reserve banking, apart from the ethical question, is unsound economically.
Nick: We recently published an article from Doug Casey on sound and unsound banking.
If you look at all the skirmishes in the War on Cash in recent years in so many different countries and map it all out, it looks like there is coordination among those governments. Is that right?
Joe: Formation of the Better than Cash Alliance in 2012 is one piece of evidence. The partners in the Better than Cash Alliance include the Ford Foundation, USAid, Citibank, MasterCard, Visa, and a number of UN agencies. They want to abolish the use of cash and force all payments to be made electronically, especially in emerging nations. These are international organizations that influence almost every government in the world. They could be the basis of coordinated efforts to discourage the use of cash.
They are promoting the idea that the use of cash excludes poor people from the economy. But that’s nonsense. Poor people don’t have checking accounts or credit cards; they depend on cash.
Also, so deeply ingrained is cash in the Italian culture that over 7.5 million Italians do not even have checking accounts. The Italian government will continue to attempt to dragoon these “bankless” Italians into the banking system. That way the notoriously corrupt Italian government can more easily spy on them and invade their financial privacy.
Nick: What happens next?
Joe: I don’t see any end in sight. What keeps this movement going are wars—made-up wars—like the war on terror, the war on organized crime, the war on poverty, war on drugs. That’s what allows governments to ratchet up the intrusiveness into our financial affairs. So I don’t see an end in sight to that. I see the US right now with its Russia policy, for example, goading Russia and inviting more hostility. This feeds a warlike atmosphere in the US so that people just give in, time after time, as the laws become more despotic and intrusive.
What might save us is that we’re due for another crash, we’re due for another financial crisis. In the aftermath, politicians might be forced to move to more free-market-oriented policies. I don’t think that’s a done deal, but I’m hopeful.
Nick: What can International Man readers do to protect themselves from the sociopaths waging the War on Cash?
Joe: I think keeping a good part of your assets outside the banking system is extremely smart. Keeping some cash in a safe is also smart, especially in an era when financial crises are likely. I wouldn’t encourage that as a strategy for earning income, but as a way of protecting yourself and your family.
Nick: One solution I like is the 1,000 Swiss franc note (picture below). It’s the most purchasing power you can pack into a single bill of a relatively sound currency. So if you want to hold cash outside the banking system, having a stash of these might make sense. Any last thoughts?
Joe: The War on Cash reflects the desperation of governments. They want to squeeze every last penny out of their citizens. And they are at wits’ end on how to cure the stagnation of the global economy that began in the 2008 financial crisis. So it really says that they are bankrupt, both literally, in the sense that they can’t pay what they’ve promised, and intellectually.
Nick: I completely agree. Joe, thank you for your time.
Joe: My pleasure.
* * *
Editor’s Note: International diversification is the best way to protect yourself from the destructive actions of a desperate government.
Wealthy families have been doing it for centuries. Today, with modern communications, international diversification is within everyone’s reach.
You don’t even have to leave your living room to do it.
Our free video crash course is a great way to get up to speed on the best strategies.
- Saudis, Russians No Longer Buying Gold In Dubai As Oil Slump Curbs Precious Metals Shopping
Over the course of the oil price slump we’ve documented the far-reaching effects of falling crude. Leaving aside the capital markets for now, the downturn has rippled through oil boom towns both in the US and Canada. Take Fort McMurray (in oil-rich Alberta) for instance, where home sales fell 66% in February or Sidney, Montana where the collapse in oil revenue has left law enforcement and schools strapped for cash in the face of rising crime and crumbling infrastructure. Then there is of course Texas which, until recently, was America’s job creation engine but which shed a recession-like 24,500 non-farm jobs in March alone.
Blue collar workers in North America aren’t the only one’s feeling the pain however. Sliding crude has also taken its toll on precious metals vendors in Dubai whose customer base is drying up now that fewer Saudis and Russians are going on gold shopping sprees in the country’s Dubai Gold Souk marketplace.
Here’s Bloomberg:
Under streets and alleys covered by roofs to protect window shoppers from the intense desert sun, more than 300 stores peddle everything from ingots to Bedouin jewelry. The Dubai Gold Souk had become one of the largest such marketplaces, offering tax-free precious metal, as Persian Gulf oil wealth ballooned in the past few decades.
Now, with the plunge in crude throttling economies across the Middle East, gold buyers are harder to find. Demand for the metal is slowing in the region and Dubai has seen a drop-off in some visitors. Shopkeepers say sales are declining because tourists from Saudi Arabia and Russia have less cash to spend. Sellers offer discounts for gold that two years ago fetched a premium.
“The market is dead,” Jeffrey Rhodes, who has spent 27 years in Dubai’s gold industry and founded Rhodes Precious Metals Consultancy DMCC, said by telephone on April 21. “There’s no real demand here”…
Even with fewer shoppers in the market, which rose to prominence in the 1940s and is spaced across two buildings as high as six floors, Dubai is still a major trading hub. The weight of all the gold jewelry on display comes to about 25 metric tons, the same as five Indian elephants, according to an association representing the vendors.
Shopping trips from the Middle East “are fewer and shorter, and they spend less,” Gerhard Schubert, founder of Schubert Commodities Consultancy DMCC and a member of the Dubai Multi Commodities Centre’s responsible sourcing committee, said by telephone from Dubai on April 28. “This will be even worse after Ramadan, during the Eid holiday when you normally have a million Saudis coming over. I’m sure the numbers will be down this year”…
“We are still surviving, but everyone is worried about the future.”
Yes, everyone is worried about the future for all of the poor souls who can now only afford to go tax-free gold shopping in Dubai four times a year as opposed to say six times, but who knows, with the US Navy now escorting US flagged cargo ships through the Strait Of Hormuz (as a precautionary measure of course), one errant pot shot across the bow could be just what the doctor ordered for still-depressed crude prices and by extension, for the poor gold vendors of Dubai.
- "Purge" Night 4: Baltimore Quiet As Tensions Rise In Philadelphia – Live Feed
A heavy National Guard presence and a draconian curfew have ended the rioting in Baltimore, but, as RT reports, the popular uprising against police brutality has spread across the US. Peaceful protests are taking place in Baltimore and several major cities and on the heels of last night's New York City protests, tonight it is Philadelphia that is seeing clashes between police and civilians…
Protesters organized a demonstration at Philadelphia's City Hall to draw parallels between the death of a man shot during a traffic stop and a death in police custody that sparked riots in Baltimore. The protesters are currently at Broad and Vine Expressway. Protesters are currently trying to get on Vine Street Expressway. According to FOX 29's Dave Kinchen the march is no longer peaceful and fights are breaking out.
Organizers of the "Philly is Baltimore" Demonstration compare the December shooting death of Brandon Tate-Brown in Philadelphia to the April 19 death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore.
The district attorney isn't pressing charges in Tate-Brown's death, saying evidence indicates that he was reaching into his car for a loaded pistol. A lawsuit filed Tuesday alleges that officers planted the gun. Police say city lawyers will respond in court.
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Live Feed:
Broadcast live streaming video on Ustream
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Protestors throwing bottles & objects at Police as protest turns ugly. #BREAKING pic.twitter.com/1l9RhirP04
— Dann Cuellar (@DannCuellar) May 1, 2015
Tense would be an understatement right now. Line still unbroken. #PhillyisBaltimore pic.twitter.com/JF2Xt5AsCz
— Vinny Vella (@Vellastrations) April 30, 2015
Police broke Line, protestors now heading down Vine. pic.twitter.com/tToTSh9pMx
— Vinny Vella (@Vellastrations) May 1, 2015
Protestors arrested in tangle with Police #PhillyisBaltimore pic.twitter.com/9kKzy9I2pQ
— Dann Cuellar (@DannCuellar) April 30, 2015
Chief Inspector Sullivan bloodied in the melee. pic.twitter.com/MkYipS6xqz
— Mike Newall (@MikeNewall) May 1, 2015
#BREAKING #PhillyisBaltimore rally has turned- not looking good. Crowds getting into it w/cops @FOX29philly at scene. pic.twitter.com/v6UfHldY5r
— Lucy Noland (@LucyNolandFOX29) April 30, 2015
Protesters confronting some officers near city hall. #PhillyisBaltimore pic.twitter.com/VzYhZVULqu
— Vinny Vella (@Vellastrations) May 1, 2015
#PhillyisBaltimore pic.twitter.com/8IGmZy906p
— Joshua Scott Albert (@jpegjoshua) May 1, 2015
VIDEO: Some pushing going on in Philadelphia solidarity protest for #Baltimore – @Vellastrations pic.twitter.com/8AhtL6BQHg
— Conflict News (@rConflictNews) April 30, 2015
#PhillyisBaltimore still hundreds deep, about two blocks long, moving north on Broad past Callowhill. pic.twitter.com/3ijWYs1hx9
— McDUH (@mcduh) May 1, 2015
#PhillyisBaltimore pic.twitter.com/er6EuRyTBB
— Austin Dean Park (@FakedCrusader) May 1, 2015
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Meanwhile, it's quiet in Baltimore for now…
So far, the police's out-of-sight, out-of-mind approach has been the right one. The protest is totally peaceful, atmosphere is very relaxed.
— Peter Crispino (@PeterCrispino) May 1, 2015
#Baltimore UPDATE: 10 PM curfew activated; reporters says no large crowds http://t.co/KrKMiHukYM #FreddieGray pic.twitter.com/npbgrnabPd
— RT America (@RT_America) May 1, 2015
And then there's Al Sharpton…
- The Pentagon's "Long War" Pitches NATO Against China, Russia, & Iran
Authored Op-Ed by Pepe Escobar, originally posted at SputnikNews.com,
Whatever happens with the nuclear negotiations this summer, and as much as Tehran wants cooperation and not confrontation, Iran is bound to remain – alongside Russia – a key US geostrategic target.
As much as US President Barack Obama tried to dismiss it, the Russian sale of the S-300 missile system to Iran is a monumental game-changer. Even with the added gambit of the Iranian military assuring the made in Iran Bavar 373 may be even more efficient than the S-300.
This explains why Jane's Defense Weekly was already saying years ago that Israel could not penetrate Iranian airspace even if it managed to get there. And after the S-300s Iran inevitably will be offered the even more sophisticated S-400s, which are to be delivered to China as well.
The unspoken secret behind these game-changing proceedings actually terrifies Washington warmongers; it spells out a further frontline of Eurasian integration, in the form of an evolving Eurasian missile shield deployed against Pentagon/NATO ballistic plans.A precious glimpse of what's ahead was offered at the Moscow Conference on International Security (MICS) in mid-April.Here we had the Iranian Defense Minister, Brigadier-General Hussein Dehghan, openly stating that Iran wanted BRICS members China, India, and Russia to jointly oppose NATO's uncontrolled eastward expansion, and characterizing NATO's for all practical purposes offensive missile shield as a threat to their collective security.We also had Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu and Chinese Defense Minister Chang Wanquan emphasizing their military ties are an "overriding priority"; plus Tehran and Moscow stressing they're strategically in synch in their push towards a new multipolar order.Tearing up the New Iron CurtainWashington's Maidan adventure has yielded not only a crystallization of a new Iron Curtain deployed from the Baltics to the Black Sea. This is NATO's visible game. What's not so visible is that the target is not only Russia, but also Iran and China.The battlefield is now clearly drawn between NATO and Russia/China/Iran. So no wonder they are getting closer. Iran is an observer at the CSTO (Collective Security Treaty Organization) and is bound to become a member of the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization) by 2016.Russia providing S-300 systems to Iran; S-400 systems to China (with new, longer-range guided missiles); and developing the S-500 systems, which are capable of intercepting supersonic targets, for itself, all point to an ultra high-tech counterpunch. And NATO knows it.
This budding military Eurasia integration is a key subplot of the New Great Game that runs parallel to the Chinese-led New Silk Road(s) project.
As a counterpunch to encroachment, it was bound to happen; after all Beijing is confronted by US encroachment via the Asia-Pacific; Russia by encroachment via Eastern Europe; and Iran by encroachment via Southwest Asia.
Washington would also go for encroachment via Central Asia if it had the means (it doesn't, and especially now with the New Silk Roads bound to crisscross Central Asia).
Eurasian geopolitics hinges on what happens next with Iran. Some selected Washington factions entertain the myth that Tehran may "sell out" to the US — thus ditching its complex Russia/China strategic relationships to the benefit of an expanded US reach in the Caucasus and Central Asia.
The Supreme Leader as well as President Rouhani have already made it clear that won't happen. They know Washington trying to seduce Iran away from Russia and turn it into a client state does not mean Washington ever accepting Iran's expanded sphere of influence in Southwest Asia and beyond.
So the multi-vector Russia-China-Iran strategic alliance is a go. Because whatever happens with the nuclear negotiations this summer, and as much as Tehran wants cooperation and not confrontation, Iran is bound to remain — alongside Russia — a key US geostrategic target.
That long and winding road
And that brings us — inevitably — to GWOT (Global War on Terror).
The Pentagon and assorted US neo-cons remain deeply embedded in their strategy of actively promoting Sunni-Shi'ite Divide and Rule with the key objective of demonizing Iran. Yemen is just yet another graphic example.
Only fools would believe that the Houthis in Yemen could get away with mounting a power play right in front of a CIA drone-infested US military base in Djibouti.
Once again, this is all proceeding according to the Divide and Rule playbook. Washington did absolutely nothing to "protect" its Yemeni puppet regime from a Houthi offensive, while immediately afterwards providing all the necessary "leading from behind" for the House of Saud to go bonkers, killing loads of civilians — all in the name of fighting "Iranian expansion". US corporate media, predictably, has gone completely nuts about it.
Nothing new under the sun. This was already foreseen way back in 2008 by the RAND Corporation report Unfolding the Future of the Long War.
Yes, this is the good ol' Pentagon Long War as prosecuted against enemies, fabricated or otherwise, all across the "Muslim world".
What RAND prescribed has become the new normal. Washington supports the petrodollar GCC racket whatever happens, always in the interest of containing "Iranian power and influence"; diverts Salafi-jihadi resources toward "targeting Iranian interests throughout the Middle East," especially in Iraq and Lebanon, hence "cutting back… anti-Western operations"; props up al-Qaeda — and ISIS/ISIL/Daesh — GCC sponsors and "empowers" viciously anti-Shi'ite Islamists everywhere to maintain "Western dominance".
The Long War was first formulated in the "axis of evil" era by the Highlands Forum, a relatively obscure, neo-con infested Pentagon think tank. Not accidentally the RAND Corporation is a major "partner".
It gets even juicier when we know that notorious Long War practitioners such as current Pentagon supremo "Ash" Carter, his deputy Robert Work, and Pentagon intelligence chief Mike Vickers are now in charge of the self-described "Don't Do Stupid Stuff" Obama administration's military strategy.
What the Pentagon — with customary hubris — does not see is Moscow and Tehran easily identifying the power play; the US government's hidden agenda of manipulating a "rehabilitated" Iran to sell plenty of oil and gas to the EU, thus undermining Gazprom.
Technically, this would take years to happen — if ever. Geopolitically, it's nothing but a pipe dream. Call it, in fact, a double pipe dream.
As much as Washington will never "secure" the Middle East with Iran as a vassal state, thus enabling it to transfer key US military assets to NATO with the purpose of facing the Russian "threat", forget about going back to 1990s Russia under disaster capitalism, when the military industrial complex had collapsed and the West was looting Russia's natural resources at will.
The bottom line: the Pentagon barks, and the Russia/China/Iran strategic caravan goes on.
- First Blythe Masters, Now Goldman Investing In Bitcoin
When Bitcoin first appeared, its proponents valiantly claimed that the revolutionary new digital currency was nothing more than a modernized version of a legacy non-fiat currency such as gold or silver, one which would allow global transactions seamlessly and without tracking by monetary authorities, but one which was more convenient than gold as one would never actually have to hold it – the “bitcoin” could be stored safely in virtual vaults that could be accessed anywhere in the world. Most importantly, it would be a libertarian statement of non-compliance with the fiat status quo.
Then MtGox happened and “unexpectedly” thousands of Bitcoin users found out they had been corzined, and their digital “money” – which supposedly was tracable – had disappeared forever.
Of course, fraud happens, so this humiliating incident to what was once the biggest bitcoin exchange was promptly brushed off.
But when a little over a month ago we reported that none other than former head of JPM’s commodities head, Blythe Master, had reemerged from the shadows as chief executive of the Bitcoin startup Digital Asset Holdings, then all those who valiantly clung to the belief that Bitcoin is some aspiration to a libertarian, anti-status quo contrarianism, were promptly quieted.
As the FT reported then, the startup aims to be a venue for buyers and sellers of financial assets to meet and transact, switching currencies into bitcoin in order to cut the cost and time of settlement and make use of the decentralised “block chain” as a secure record of transactions.”
“There is a school of libertarian ‘visionaries’ who want to imagine a world without big banks, big governments,” said Ms Masters, who left JPMorgan last April. “That’s nice, but completely irrelevant to this business model. We don’t imagine a world in which big banks and big governments don’t exist.”
“They say they want the world to change, but the world will change by adopting new technology to do a better job,” she said. Reducing the frictional costs of financial transactions is “one of the great challenges of our time”.
She was right.
And just to hammer the point that Bitcoin has become the playground of precisely those who also control fiat money in all its infinitely dilutable permutations, earlier today we learned thart Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is one of two lead investors in a $50 million funding round for bitcoin startup Circle Internet Financial Ltd.
As WSJ reports, Goldman adds its name to a growing list of Wall Street institutions exploring digital-currency technology’s potential to provide faster and cheaper financial transactions and payments.
Circle, based in Boston, uses bitcoin-based systems to allow customers to digitally store money and transfer it to and from other people and merchants.
The new $50 million injection comes on top of $26 million in prior financing founds for Circle and, according to people familiar with the deal, values the startup at around $200 million.
Goldman declined to comment about its investment beyond a brief statement in the news release from Tom Jessop, managing director of the investment bank’s Principal Strategic Investments Group. He said the investment bank sees “significant opportunities in companies and solutions that have the promise to transform global markets through technical innovation.”
It wasn’t just Goldman: “Goldman’s commitment to Circle follows investments by the New York Stock Exchange, Spain’s Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria SA and USAA Bank in San Francisco startup Coinbase, which runs a bitcoin exchange and competes with Circle in the market for bitcoin wallets, with which users store and send digital currency.”
And if it appears that bitcoin has become a free-for-all for the TBTF banks, that’s probably because it is. Earlier this month UBS said it would establish a special research lab to explore financial uses for the core technology underlying bitcoin—its so-called “blockchain” digital ledger.
And then there was the Fed, whose researcher recently said that “people see that in the long run the supply of bitcoin is capped and they see it’s demand growing, so in the long run you have to expect that it might be a good investment vehicle,” he said. “You might think the same about gold, but just because something’s a good investment vehicle does not make it a good currency.”
Yes, we definitely know how the Fed and the BIS feel about gold.
The good news for those who still hold bitcoins is that with the benefit and full backing of the Fed-insured Goldman, Blythe and so on, the price of Bitcoin has nowhere to go but up: after all, the venture investments of the TBTF banks must be allowed to flourish. And with documented instances of bitcoin manipulation, BTC is just the latest risk asset in the hands of a big bank.
The bad news is that any hopes and aspirations of making a libertarian statement against the status quo by transacting with a monetary medium that now has the full backing and endorsement not only of the biggest commercial banks, but the Fed itself, is now history.
- Is Your State Racist?
With the topic of racial division increasingly top of mind in America, The Washington Post reports a new study suggests that the rural Northeat and South are the most racist regions of America. The study, based on Goggle searches for race-related phrases, shows racist people in the U.S. appear to be clustered along the Appalachian Mountains from Georgia, through New York and all the way up to Vermont.
Think Google Searches for the “n-word” are irrelevant? Think again…
“Results from our study indicate that living in an area characterized by a one standard deviation greater proportion of racist Google searches is associated with an 8.2% increase in the all-cause mortality rate among Blacks,” the authors conclude.
Other hotbeds of racist searches appear in areas of the Gulf Coast, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and a large portion of Ohio.
Perhaps on a bright note,
But the searches get rarer the further West you go.
West of Texas, no region falls into the “much more than average” category.
So America could be less divided that some think… perhaps.
- Well That Hasn't Happened Before – Exhibit 5
We have never, ever, seen more trades per second in stocks than at the peak of yesterday’s post-FOMC reaction…
One glance at this chart shows the ‘arms war’ under way in the so-called markets – this frequency of trading is 10 times higher than 2010 averages… and just keeps getting higher.
This burst of high-frequency-trading – 864,000 trades per second – coincided with the short-term top post-FOMC as the machines “gave it all they could, Cap’n” to prove The Fed has a bloody clue what it is doing now…
It appears the ‘oomph;’ of HFT is running out of gas.
Chart: Bloomberg and Nanex
* * *
- Cost Obsessions Around the World
Google’s autocomplete function provides suggestions derived from common Google searches by other users. Comparing autocomplete results for searches on different countries reveals how certain places are perceived by people around the World.
It turns out that Google searches for the cost of something vary widely depending on the country of interest. For example, people are most interested in the cost of a passport or a patent in North America. As for Europe, many are concerned about practical things like the cost of living, studying, or buying a beer. Google users are interested in basic necessities such as food, livestock, and fuel in Africa. But if you look closely, you will find some more controversial search results, such as prostitution in Brazil, Ukraine, Hong Kong, and Latvia; slaves in Mauritania; a kidney in Iran; in vitro fertilization in Australia; and rhinoplasty in Korea.
Intrigued by the results of our U.S. state-by-state analysis of Google autocomplete results, we decided to see what the worldwide results look like. We began by googling a simple question for each country:
The results were then recorded and put into an infographic to see how countries and continents compare. Here are the results by continent:
Life in North America appears relatively boring. So boring that Canadians are chiefly interested in the cost of a passport for leaving the country. Better to go to Mexico where everyone has great abs.
Panama hats are popular in Ecuador. Prostitution is of interest in Brazil and Uruguay. And in Chile, the price of coke is of prime importance … we’re not sure which kind.
Some quirky search results for Europe include Rolexes in Switzerland, mooring a yacht in Monaco, nose jobs in Albania, and flying a MiG (a Russian fighter aircraft) in Russia.
For Asia there is a wide range of results, reflecting the diversity of cultures within the continent. The biggest financial concern for people searching about Lebanon appears to be the cost of a PS3; for Kuwait it is Lamborghinis, carpets for Armenia, and watermelons for Japan.
Google users are mostly concerned about the necessities of life in Africa. But apparently in the case of Sierra Leone people are more concerned about buying diamonds, and for Mauritania they are more concerned about purchasing slaves.
Apparently New Zealanders are a frisky lot, with great interest in vasectomies, while their Australian neighbors are concerned about the cost of in vitro fertilization. Quite the paradox.
The most common search about costs in Antarctica is for the cost of land. While the land there may not be terribly hospitable, there sure is a lot of it.
Looking at some of the most popular Google searches throughout the World reveals some cultural differences, but also many key similarities. It also provides insights into the sometimes-strange things people think about when they are alone.
Want to see more of the most popular goods and services whose prices people search for across the country? Sign up below for a future update from Fixr on the release of its super-detailed cost of living analysis, based on geography and demographics.
- Do You Want to Know a Secret?
I hate tech bubbles.
No, that’s not the secret. Everyone knows that. The secret I am referring to is a company named, literally, Secret. And the existence of this company, as well as the easy $6 million its co-founders pocketed when they shuttered the place, is absolutely symptomatic of this bubble-of-bubbles we are living in (the third one of the past fifteen years, incredibly).
I didn’t even know Secret existed, because I’m too old to spend my time worrying about every new little app that comes along that lets teenagers engage in cyber-bullying and exchange dick pics. It’s just not my cup of tea. But I happened to stumble across this article yesterday, which was headlined:
Now a startup shutting down isn’t any bigger news than someone finishing a satisfying lunch somewhere, but the “Ferrari” mention intrigued me, so I read further.
Turns out a chap named David Byttow (whose profile picture looks exactly like the sort of person who would do such a thing) started the company way, way, way back in October 2013. He was able to get $35 million – – that’s $35,000,000 – – in funding for his app. The elevator pitch for this thing was: “Share anonymously with friends, co-workers and people nearby. Find out what your friends are really thinking and feeling.”
I dunno, but when I want to know what my friends are thinking and feeling………I ask them. But, then again, I didn’t raise $35 million, so who am I to judge?
The media had some pretty ugly things to say about Secret, but in the Silicon Valley, which is where I live, stupid apps getting tens of millions in funding with no prospect of profits is commonplace. What got my attention was that, as the app’s popularity was cratering, the co-founders managed to raise more cash and – – astonishly – – pocket $6 million from selling a portion of their own holdings to these new investors.
During this time (when, in retrospect, it is obvious that the app was a flash in the pan, and users
had lost interest), the message from the company was that it might “pivot”, which is Silicon-Valley-speak for a product that has failed and, before it is carted off to its grave, will pretend to be something else. Color.com, about which I wrote endlessly on Slope, “pivoted” several times before its $41 million was considered a lost cause.So Byttow’s syrupy post about closing the firm “with a heavy heart” doesn’t really delve into the fact that, in exchange for 18 months of work that resulted in a completely failed endeavor, he and his buddy scored $6 million (out of which he bought himself a Ferrari), on top of whatever handsome salaries they felt they deserved.
So am I bitter about this? Well, no. Bitter isn’t the right word. I’d say I’m simply…….pissed off. Because my own high-tech start-up, Prophet, is something I worked thirteen years to build, and when I finally sold it (for all of $8 million), it was a growing, profitable firm with happy employees, fantastic products, and a very satisfied buyer. Its products are in use to this day, ten years hence. Prophet, you see, wasn’t an overly-funded clown-show where we blew through the cash and just decided we were all fuck-ups and might as well close the place down swiftly. Oh, and pocket the cash.
The quantity of these dim-witted, overly-funded outfits that are going to enter bankruptcy is going to explode over the next few years (Clinkle is bound to be a likely contender…….) In the meantime, keep our anti-nausea medication handy.
- No More Greater Fools: Retail Traders Are "Pretty Fully Invested" In Stocks, TD CEO Says
“Margin loans at high levels, client cash at low levels and account holders at the firm logging in frequently.”
If you didn’t know any better, you might think the above is yet another example of someone describing one of the dynamics driving China’s self-feeding equity mania. After all, the country’s “world-beating” rally has everyone from housewives to banana vendors opening stock trading accounts by the millions while piling on margin debt and trading so often that the computers tracking volume literally give up and shut themselves down.
Alas, the quote featured above is actually from TD Ameritrade CEO Fred Tomczyk and he’s describing America’s own legion of day-trading BTFDers who are apparently all-in at just the wrong time:
A broad look at the 6.5 million customer accounts at TD Ameritrade indicates that retail investors are “pretty fully invested” in stocks, the online brokerage’s CEO said Thursday.
Fred Tomczyk cited several signs of this: margin loans at high levels, client cash at low levels and account holders at the firm logging in frequently. “It’s usually a good indication that people are very engaged in the markets and watching their investments closely,” he said on CNBC’s ” Squawk Box .”
But Tomczyk acknowledged the potential pitfalls of these trends and what they may portend for stocks. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we have a correction here. We’ve had six [or] 6½ years of up markets here.”
Ultimately then, the greater fool theory of investing whereby it doesn’t matter how much you pay as long as the next guy is willing to pay more — the same greater fool theory of investing that China’s regulators have warned has taken hold in Chinese stocks — may have just run out of fools, but we suspect that’s fine as long as price-insensitive corporate management teams can issue new debt and plow the proceeds back into their own stock.
- 25 Years Of US Monetary Policy Explained (In 1 Cartoon)
While Bernanke claims that “Fed actions didn’t favor Wall Street over Main Street,” we suspect the following chart clarifies the effect of his and his predecessors actions on the average American…
h/t @FedPorn
- 16 Signs That The Economy Has Stalled Out And The Next Economic Downturn Is Here
Submitted by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,
If U.S. economic growth falls any lower, we are officially going to be in recession territory. On Wednesday, we learned that U.S. GDP grew at a 0.2 percent annual rate in the first quarter of 2015. That was much lower than all of the “experts” were projecting. And of course there are all sorts of questions whether the GDP numbers the government feeds us are legitimate anyway. According to John Williams of shadowstats.com, if honest numbers were used they would show that U.S. GDP growth has been continuously negative since 2005. But even if we consider the number that the government has given us to be the “real” number, it still shows that the U.S. economy has stalled out. It is almost as if we have hit a “turning point”, and there are many out there (including myself) that believe that the next major economic downturn is dead ahead. As you will see in this article, a whole bunch of things are happening right now that we would expect to see if a recession was beginning. The following are 16 signs that the economy has stalled out and the next economic downturn is here…
#1 We just learned that U.S. GDP grew at an anemic 0.2 percent annual rate during the first quarter of 2015…
The gross domestic product grew between January and March at an annualized rate of 0.2 percent, the U.S. Commerce Department said, adding to the picture of an economy braking sharply after accelerating for much of last year. The pace fell well shy of the 1 percent mark anticipated by analysts and marked the weakest quarter in a year.
#2 If you strip a very unusual inventory buildup out of the GDP number, U.S. GDP would have actually fallen at a -2.5 percent annual rate during the first quarter…
The only good news: the massive inventory build, the largest since 2010, boosted GDP by nearly 3.0%. Without this epic stockpiling of non-farm inventory which will have to be liquidated at some point (and at a very low price) Q1 GDP would have been -2.5%.
#3 Our trade deficit with the rest of the planet is absolutely killing our economic growth. According to the Reality Chek Blog, U.S. economic growth would have been a total of 8 percent higher since the end of the last recession if we actually had balanced trade with other nations…
As of the new first quarter figures, the worsening of the trade deficit has reduced the cumulative real growth of the U.S. economy by 7.99 percent since the current recovery began in the second quarter of 2009.
#4 According to numbers that were just released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in one out of every five American families nobody has a job. So how in the world can the “unemployment rate” be sitting at “5.5 percent” when everyone is unemployed in 20 percent of all families in the United States? It doesn’t make any sense.
#5 The rate of homeownership in the United States has just hit a brand new 25 year low. How can anyone claim that the middle class is “healthy” when the percentage of Americans that own a home is the lowest that it has been in more than two decades?
#6 Back in 2013, 31 percent of all Americans said that they did not anticipate buying a home “for the foreseeable future”. Just two years later, that number has risen to 41 percent.
#7 The student loan bubble is clearly bursting. According to Bloomberg, only 37 percent of all student loan borrowers are actually up to date on their payments and reducing their balances…
With borrowers increasingly struggling to repay their student loans, Moody’s Investors Service is warning it may take investors longer than promised to get their money back. The credit grader said this month it may lower rankings on $3 billion of top-rated debt as investors face the threat of slowing principal payments or even receiving no interest.
The concern underscores the fallout from a record $1.2 trillion in U.S. student loans that’s spreading to everything from the housing market and consumer spending to taxpayers. As a sluggish economic recovery forces borrowers to miss payments or tap relief programs, only 37 percent are current and reducing their balances, according to a Federal Reserve Bank of New York presentation this month.
#8 Procter & Gamble has announced that it will be cutting up to 6,000 more jobs from their payroll. Why would they be doing this if the economy is “getting better”?
#9 McDonald’s plans to permanently shut down 700 “poorly performing” restaurants over the course of 2015. Why would they be doing this if the economy is “getting better”?
#10 It is being projected that half of all fracking companies in the United States will be either “dead or sold” by the end of 2015.
#11 Retail sales in the U.S. have not dropped this rapidly since the last recession.
#12 Wholesale sales in the U.S. have not dropped this rapidly since the last recession.
#13 Factory orders in the U.S. have not dropped this rapidly since the last recession.
#14 Credit requests are being declined at a rate that we haven’t seen since the last recession.
#15 U.S. export growth has gone negative for the first time since the last recession.
#16 As the U.S. economy begins to head into another downturn, most Americans are completely unprepared for it. In fact, one recent survey discovered that 62 percent of all Americans are currently living paycheck to paycheck.
Don’t let this next recession take you by surprise.
Back in 2008 and 2009, millions of Americans suddenly lost their jobs or businesses because of the sharp economic downturn. Because most of them were living paycheck to paycheck, all of a sudden a whole lot of Americans could not make their mortgage payments and foreclosures surged to unprecedented heights. Millions of families that thought they were operating on a solid foundation saw their middle class lifestyles evaporate in just a matter of a few months.
That is why it is so vital to prepare yourself financially, mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually for the great storm that is coming ahead of time. Over the past couple of years, I have been working on a new book entitled “Get Prepared Now” which talks about how to make these preparations. On Wednesday, it was finally released to the public. I hope that you will check it out.
The past few years have been a period of relative stability for the U.S. economy. A lot of people have been lulled into a false sense of security during that time. These people have become convinced that our problems have been fixed. But they haven’t been fixed at all. In fact, our problems are far, far worse than they were just prior to the last financial crisis.
When the next great financial crisis strikes, we are going to see a spike in the suicide rate just like we did during the last one. Millions will be blindsided by what is coming and will give in to depression and despair. But that doesn’t have to happen to you. It is empowering to know what is coming and to understand why it is coming. It is empowering to get prepared in advance for turbulent times. It is empowering to have a plan for the years ahead.
Even though I write about all of the horrible things that are coming to this country every day, I live my life with no fear, and that is what I want for all of you as well.
Do you want to know who will be giving in to fear and panic when things start to go really crazy?
It will be the people that had no idea what was coming and made no preparations whatsoever.
Yes, the times ahead are going to be extremely challenging, but they can also be the best times of your life.
It is all going to come down to how you respond to a world that is going completely insane.
The choice is up to you.
- LInkedIn Crashes 25% After Missing Revenues, Cutting Outlook
LNKD has collapsed 27% on the back of missed revenues and lowered outlooks for Q2 and 2015 drastically. What is most dramatic – just as was seen with YELP and TWTR is the velocity of repricing which indicates just how far expectations for growth in the tech sector are from reality… and strongly suggests all is not well as El-Erian’s “wedge” between markets and fundamentals snaps shut…
Just totally ugly:
- *LINKEDIN SEES 2Q REV. $670M-$675M, EST. $718.3M
- *LINKEDIN SEES 2Q ADJ. EBITDA ABOUT $120M, EST. $197.1M
- *LINKEDIN SEES 2Q ADJ. EPS ABOUT 28C, EST. 74C
- *LINKEDIN SEES 2015 ADJ. EBITDA ABOUT $630M, EST. $815.9M REV.
- *LINKEDIN SEES 2015 ADJ. EPS ABOUT $1.90, EST. $3.03
The result…
Which means LNKD has done nothing for over 2 years…
and th elatest exuberance is all as margin debt soars.
Charts: Bloomberg
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