Weekend Economists Examine (E)sc(h)atology January 24-26, 2014

[Demeter]

WEE are What?

...Karl Quilter spent much of his life carefully and painstakingly sculpting out of clay the mold for what would eventually be cast into the golden angel perched atop The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints temples. All but an estimated 10 or so Angel Moroni sculptures on temples worldwide are Quilter’s work, said his daughter, Elizabeth Quilter Finlinson...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/03/karl-a-quilter-dead_n_4378019.html

This beautiful grieving angel, draped over the grave of Emelyn Story, was the last work of her husband, the American sculptor, William W. Story, created in 1895 in her memory in the same year of her death.

Eschatology is a part of theology concerned with what are believed to be the final events of history, or the ultimate destiny of humanity. This concept is commonly referred to as the "end of the world" or "end time".

The word arises from the Greek ἔ??????/ἐ??ά??/ἔ??????, eschatos/eschatē/eschaton meaning "last" and -logy meaning "the study of", first used in English around 1550. The Oxford English Dictionary defines eschatology as "The department of theological science concerned with ‘the four last things: death, judgment, heaven and hell’."

In the context of mysticism, the phrase refers metaphorically to the end of ordinary reality and reunion with the Divine. In many religions it is taught as an existing future event prophesied in sacred texts or folklore. More broadly, eschatology may encompass related concepts such as the Messiah or Messianic Age, the end time, and the end of days.

History is often divided into "ages" (Gk. aeons), which are time periods each with certain commonalities. One age comes to an end and a new age, where different realities are present, begins. When such transitions from one age to another are the subject of eschatological discussion, the phrase, "end of the world", is replaced by "end of the age", "end of an era", or "end of life as we know it". Much apocalyptic fiction does not deal with the "end of time" but rather with the end of a certain period of time, the end of life as it is now, and the beginning of a new period of time. It is usually a crisis that brings an end to current reality and ushers in a new way of living, thinking, or being. This crisis may take the form of the intervention of a deity in history, a war, a change in the environment, or the reaching of a new level of consciousness.

Most modern eschatology and apocalypticism, both religious and secular, involve the violent disruption or destruction of the world; whereas Christian and Jewish eschatologies view the end times as the consummation or perfection of God's creation of the world. For example, according to ancient Hebrew belief, life takes a linear (and not cyclical) path; the world began with God and is constantly headed toward God’s final goal for creation, which is the world to come.

Eschatologies vary as to their degree of optimism or pessimism about the future. In some eschatologies, conditions are better for some and worse for others, e.g. "heaven and hell"...

Not to be confused with Scatology....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eschatology

To spare you the need to Google it:

Scatology

In medicine and biology, scatology or coprology is the study of feces.

Scatological studies allow one to determine a wide range of biological information about a creature, including its diet (and thus where it has been), healthiness, and diseases such as tapeworms. The word derives from the Greek ??ώ? (genitive ????ό?, modern ????ό, pl. ????ά meaning "feces".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scatology

We'll explore on both sides of this pair....for what else is Economics, but a combination of the two?








This astonishing sculpture forms part of Barcelona’s Poblenou Cemetery. The Kiss of Death (El Petó de la Mort in Catalan and El beso de la muerte in Spanish) dates back to 1930. A winged skeleton bestows a kiss on the forehead of a handsome young man: is it ecstasy on his face or resignation? Little wonder the sculpture elicits strong and varying responses from whoever gazes upon it....

http://www.kuriositas.com/2012/03/kiss-of-death.html

[Demeter]

1. Well, that was a week that was!

Panic at how good a recovery the global economy is making sent markets across the world plunging this week. Investors are piling into Treasuries, it is said, and yields dropping.

The end of QE4ever has brought an end to the party with a bang. I'm sure there will be a whimper following at some point.


As soon as somebody posts a summary, I will bring to your attention.

Meanwhile, back at the FDIC...WE HAVE ANOTHER BANK FAILURE! Imagine that!

The Bank of Union, El Reno, Oklahoma, was closed today by the Oklahoma State Banking Department, which appointed the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) as receiver. To protect the depositors, the FDIC entered into a purchase and assumption agreement with BancFirst, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, to assume all of the deposits of The Bank of Union. The two branches of The Bank of Union will reopen as branches of BancFirst during their normal business hours...

As of September 30, 2013, The Bank of Union had approximately $331.4 million in total assets and $328.8 million in total deposits. In addition to assuming all of the deposits of the failed bank, BancFirst agreed to purchase approximately $225.5 million of the failed bank's assets. The FDIC will retain the remaining assets for later disposition...

The FDIC estimates that the cost to the Deposit Insurance Fund (DIF) will be $70.0 million. Compared to other alternatives, BancFirst's acquisition was the least costly resolution for the FDIC's DIF. The Bank of Union is the second FDIC-insured institution to fail in the nation this year, and the first in Oklahoma. The last FDIC-insured institution closed in the state was First Capital Bank, Kingfisher, on June 8, 2012.

[Demeter]

2. Pick your Requiem!

[Demeter]

3. IMF warns more work is needed to tackle big bank risk

A DAY LATE AND A DOLLAR SHORT, METHINKS.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/01/23/us-imf-banks-warning-idUSBREA0M1KF20140123

Big banks still pose a threat to the world financial system because there is a general assumption that governments will come to their rescue in case of trouble, an International Monetary Fund executive said on Thursday.

"It is astonishing that officials in countries are still largely ill-equipped to deal with a Lehman Brothers-style bankruptcy, where assets and liabilities are scattered across multiple jurisdictions and entities," Jose Vinals, tasked with financial oversight at the IMF, said in a blog post.

The 2008 bankruptcy of investment bank Lehman Brothers marked the height of the global credit crisis, and many of the reforms that have since been implemented were aimed at preventing a repeat of such a collapse. During the financial crisis, a number of the world's big banks were bailed out by governments with billions of dollars in taxpayer money.

"The not-so-good news is that, despite these efforts, implicit subsidies to these systemically important financial institutions remain too large," Vinals said, who said a related IMF study was due in April.

The problem of so-called too-big-to-fail banks is a priority for regulators in the Group of 20, which is due to convene in November and expected to discuss a global financial reform agenda, Vinals said.

The G20 includes Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkey, the UK, the United States and the European Union. The Basel III bank capital rules require banks to borrow less to fund their business, so they are better able to deal with problems. Governments have also told banks to draw up plans that would enable them to systematically unwind their businesses if the necessity arose. The United States and Europe are putting into place so-called resolution authorities that would protect the wider financial system without the use of taxpayer funds in the event a bank needed to be bailed out.

Vinals said the G20 had "yet to do much of the heavy lifting" to sort out what would happen if a bank with major operations abroad were to go under.

[Demeter]

4. No bank too big to indict, U.S. attorney general says

ERIC HOLDER GOT RELIGION! WHAT AREN'T THEY TELLING US? SOMEBODY CALL EDWARD SNOWDEN...

http://news.yahoo.com/no-bank-too-big-indict-u-attorney-general-144841971--sector.html

No American financial institution is too large to indict and no bank executive immune from criminal prosecution, Attorney General Eric Holder said in a television interview. In an interview with MSNBC scheduled to be broadcast on Friday, Holder cited the case against JPMorgan Chase & Co, which in November agreed to a civil settlement under which it would pay $13 billion to end a series of government investigations into its marketing and sale of mortgage-backed securities. The settlement with JPMorgan, the largest U.S. bank, allowed prosecutors to pursue criminal charges if warranted, and that investigation is ongoing.

"There are no institutions that are too big to indict," Holder said, according to an MSNBC transcript released before the interview.

"There are no individuals who are in such high level positions that they cannot be indicted, criminally investigated," he said.

The Justice Department is investigating "significant financial institutions," Holder said without elaborating.

"And the focus of those investigations is not only on the institutions but on individuals as well," he told MSNBC.

Holder told Reuters in December the Justice Department plans to bring civil mortgage fraud cases against several financial institutions early in 2014, using the JPMorgan case as a template.


TRULY, THE END TIME APPROACHETH

[Hotler]

53. "TRULY, THE END TIME APPROACHETH"

For us not the bankers.

Dear Mr. Holder,
Civil suit, really? Jamie Dimon and his fellow bankers need to be rotting in prison. Wall ST. bankers need to be treated like drug dealers. Speaking of drugs. It is well known that pot and cocaine flows freely through the halls of Wall St. I you can't send them to jail for fraud send them to jail for drugs. It should be real easy for you since you go after pot smokers all the time.
Sincerely,
Hotler

[Demeter]

56. Now Hotler, you wouldn't expect the Wall St. Gods, the Masters of the Universe

to suffer like a normal person, would you? In fact, I was called some AWFUL names here on DU for saying just that....see this, and the whole thread...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=4382437

[Hotler]

81. It's crazy isn't it?

And some wonder why we in SMW refer to GD as Jones Town. Any more when I venture in to GD I ask myself, Who are these people?????

[Demeter]

82. I feel like a modern Cyrano De Bergerac

Panache and all.

[Demeter]

5. Senators urge Fannie, Freddie to aid lower-income households

SAY WHAT?


http://news.yahoo.com/senators-urge-fannie-freddie-aid-lower-income-households-191527352--sector.html

More than 30 Democrats in the U.S. Senate called on Friday for the regulator of government-controlled Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to direct the companies to resume contributions for affordable housing initiatives. The senators focused on two unused funds that Congress established in 2008 to finance low-income housing with a portion of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's revenue. The Federal Housing Finance Agency, the companies' regulator, suspended payments into the funds in November of that year, after the government seized the companies as mortgage losses mounted.

After suffering huge losses, the companies have turned the corner and are now seeing record profits. The 33 lawmakers, led by Democrats Jack Reed of Rhode Island and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and independent Bernie Sanders of Vermont, want the agency to resume contributing to the fund to help ameliorate a shortage of affordable housing for low-income Americans.

"The time is long overdue to lift the current suspension of contributions, and we ask your full and fair consideration of our request," the letter to newly installed FHFA Director Mel Watt said.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have taken $187.5 billion in U.S. aid since they became state wards in September 2008. They have since paid about $185.2 billion in dividends to the government thanks to a surge in the U.S. housing market...Congress created the two housing trust funds to build a revenue source for low-income housing. The trust funds provide funds to finance new rental housing or rehabilitate existing units for families with very low incomes....President Barack Obama and lawmakers from both parties have said they want to wind down the two mortgage finance giants, which own or guarantee 60 percent of all U.S. home loans, but an overhaul process is years off.

In the meantime, their return to profitability has led to competing demands. Nonprofit housing groups have sued the FHFA, challenging the decision to suspend payments to the trust funds, while a large hedge fund that owns preferred shares of the companies is challenging the terms of their taxpayer bailout, which requires them to sweep most of the profits into the U.S. Treasury.

[Demeter]

6. How An 18-Year-Old Code Was Cracked On The Web In 13 Minutes

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/01/24/265693864/how-an-18-year-old-code-was-cracked-on-the-web-in-13-minutes?ft=1&f=1001

"MINNEAPOLIS — When a brain tumor took away Dorothy Holm's ability to speak, she picked up index cards and began filling them, edge to edge, with seemingly random, indecipherable sequences of letters. Her grandchildren saw her scribbling and thought she was leaving them a code — but it was one the preteens couldn't crack.

"Eighteen years later, the puzzle has been solved after one of Holm's granddaughters posted images of a card online. In just 13 minutes, a MetaFilter.com user figured out that as Dorothy Holm was dying, she was writing out prayers."

The first code to be broken:

"OFWAIHHBTNTKCTWBDOEAIIIHFUTDODBAFUOT
AWFTWTAUALUNITBDUFEFTITKTPATGFAEA"

The code crackers' conclusion: — "Our Father, who art in heaven ..."

Janna Holm, the granddaughter who posted about Dorothy Holm's index cards Monday at 4:13 p.m. CT, to see that solution pop up on the MetaFilter thread at 4:26 p.m. the same day. "Holy cow!" That fast an answer to something "that has been bugging my family for 20 years ... is amazing!"

...One big mystery still remains, though. Why did Dorothy Holm spend time during the final weeks of her life in 1996 filling 20 index cards with capital letters?

Janna Holm emailed MPR with this theory:

"My dad thinks that Dorothy Holm was so worried about losing her memory that she was just copying down the first letter of words to remind herself of common prayers. I think everyone has just been a little curious about the mysteries that she left behind, and even just knowing that it was a prayer (whether or not we can decipher it) is kind of comforting."

[DemReadingDU]

15. That's fascinating!

Appears this lady was raised Catholic, then Lutheran when she got married in the 1940s.
http://ask.metafilter.com/255675/Decoding-cancer-addled-ramblings


I'm wondering if some of her code was praying the rosary?

[Demeter]

7. Tech Week That Was: The Mac Turns 30, More NSA Rumblings

http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/01/24/265703368/tech-week-that-was-the-mac-turns-30-more-nsa-rumblings?ft=1&f=1001



Well, that's not good ... The blog took some time this week to look at the broader implications of the massive security breach at Target, Neiman Marcus and, potentially, other merchants. Elise Hu reports that this might finally force the U.S. to start using cards with encrypted chips because industry leaders know that current cards with magnetic stripes are outdated and easily exploitable. And Laura Sydell writes that the breach brought to light the inconsistent laws around the country concerning how quickly companies are required to alert customers that sensitive data were stolen.

You don't look a day over 29. The original Macintosh is celebrating an important birthday Friday: It's now old enough for run for U.S. senator. Steve Henn has a retrospective on its plucky beginnings. On the other side of the PC vs. Mac aisle, the once-acclaimed Windows XP just turned 12, and Microsoft wants the stragglers to switch over to an operating system that wasn't developed in the previous millennium. I found that it's proving harder than it seems — partly because mobile computing is getting so powerful. Alan Yu reports that your smartphone might soon be able to detect gamma radiation...

The Big Conversation

Even without a major revelation this week, the NSA has still been the subject of many in-depth analyses. An independent review board in the executive branch determined that the phone data collection system is illegal and called for it to end. WNYC's Brian Lehrer collected a list of the mass intelligence-gathering capabilities we know the NSA currently has. Columbia Journalism Review's Lauren Kirchner documented the FOIA fight over NSA-related documents...

...China's Web traffic mysteriously failed for several hours on Wednesday. Ever weirder, some of its traffic redirected to a website based in a Wyoming building that some think normally helps people get around the Chinese firewall. Weirder still, that building is home to several thousand companies. Odd all around.

SEE LINK FOR SOURCE MATERIAL AND MORE

[Demeter]

8. Schaeuble Says German Bank Split Law Can Serve as European Model

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-20/schaeuble-says-german-bank-split-law-can-serve-as-european-model.html

Germany’s plan to order banks to separate some of their riskiest businesses from deposits to protect clients could serve as a model for Europe, Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said.

Starting in 2017, German banks must supply capital and funding for proprietary and high-frequency trading operations as well as some business with hedge funds. The law stops short of ordering banks to split off trading on behalf of clients, as suggested by a panel led by Bank of Finland Governor Erkki Liikanen which advised the European Commission on its proposals.

The commission set a provisional date of Jan. 29 to publish a draft law on bank structure, Chantal Hughes, a spokeswoman for Michel Barnier, the EU’s financial services chief, wrote in an e-mail to Bloomberg News today.

“I assume that, as with our German bank split law, the European rule won’t threaten the financing of the real economy through the proven universal banking model,” Schaeuble said at an event near Frankfurt hosted by Deutsche Boerse AG, the operator of the city’s stock exchange...

YEAH, SURE

[Demeter]

9. LEGALIZE DEMOCRACY--THE "MOVE TO AMEND" DOCUMENTARY

[Demeter]

10. Business chiefs fear ticking jobless time bomb REPORT FROM DAVOS

AND THIS EXPLAINS A LOT

http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/business/Business_chiefs_fear_ticking_jobless_time_bomb.html?cid=37801578

The nascent global economic recovery is failing to trickle down to the man or woman on the street in the shape of new jobs or improved incomes, the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Davos meeting has heard.

Another five million people were added to the unemployed ranks last year to reach a total of 202 million job seekers worldwide. At the same time, prosperity is concentrated in the hands of the few, with NGO Oxfam calculating that the 85 richest people have the same wealth as half the world’s population.

The growing divide between the haves and have-nots had already been identified by the WEF Global Risks report. But while the well-heeled delegates in Davos have recognised the problem, they are less enthusiastic about doing something about it, according to UNI Global Union Secretary-General Philip Jennings.

“The benefits of economic recovery are not widespread; they are gravitating towards the elite,” the head of the Geneva-based international trade union movement told swissinfo.ch. “Business people are not going to open their wallets voluntarily.”

THEIR LOSS

[Demeter]

11. Davos 2014: World Economic Forum - Day Two as it happened

MINUTE BY MINUTE--BLOW BY BLOW

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/jan/23/davos-2014-world-economic-forum-day-two-live?CMP=ema_565


DAY ONE

http://www.theguardian.com/business/blog/2014/jan/22/davos-2014-world-economic-forum-day-one-live

[Demeter]

16. West's 30-year vendetta with Iran is finally buried in Davos

IS THAT SO? WELL, WE WILL JUST HAVE TO WAIT AND SEE. PERSONALLY, I THINK IT UNLIKELY

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/ambroseevans-pritchard/100026456/wests-30-year-vendetta-with-iran-is-finally-buried-in-davos/

[Demeter]

22. DR. DOOM AT DAVOS: VIDEO INTERVIEW

http://www.bloomberg.com/video/dr-doom-roubini-tech-to-replace-white-collar-jobs-HLoOVr06QYC9nC0OPIpFWQ.html

[Demeter]

65. Bill Black: Dimon Does Davos, and His Board Gives Him a Raise

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/01/bill-black-dimon-davos-board-gives-raise.html




If, as an effort at satire, I had written the story that the New York Times’ “DealBook” has just written about what JPMorgan’s board of directors has just actually done, people would have dismissed my piece as absurdly over the top. The board has decided to increase Jamie Dimon’s compensation substantially. The reason the board gives (in leaks to DealBook) must have resonated with Deal Book because it is the theme song that Deal Book has been singing for months, another “‘somebody done Dimon wrong’ song.”

Recall that the title of Andrew Ross Sorkin’s country-western lament was that Dimon was the victim of “bloodlust” because Dennis Kelleher, the head of the NGO “Better Markets,” believed that Dimon should be fired for poor performance.

As a slight reality check, which DealBook religiously avoids, Dimon led JPMorgan while it committed what government investigators have identified as over 15 frauds, most of them massive. As I’ve explained, Deal Book’s graphic laying out (very tersely) these frauds goes on for pages. These frauds represent the greatest financial crime spree the government has ever identified. I am not counting the frauds of Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual (WaMu)....


AND IT JUST GETS BETTER!

[Demeter]

12. Almost Everything in “Dr. Strangelove” Was True by Eric Schlosser

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2014/01/strangelove-for-real.html?mobify=0

This month marks the fiftieth anniversary of Stanley Kubrick’s black comedy about nuclear weapons, “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” Released on January 29, 1964, the film caused a good deal of controversy. Its plot suggested that a mentally deranged American general could order a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, without consulting the President. One reviewer described the film as “dangerous … an evil thing about an evil thing.” Another compared it to Soviet propaganda. Although “Strangelove” was clearly a farce, with the comedian Peter Sellers playing three roles, it was criticized for being implausible. An expert at the Institute for Strategic Studies called the events in the film “impossible on a dozen counts.” A former Deputy Secretary of Defense dismissed the idea that someone could authorize the use of a nuclear weapon without the President’s approval: “Nothing, in fact, could be further from the truth.” (See a compendium of clips from the film.) When “Fail-Safe”—a Hollywood thriller with a similar plot, directed by Sidney Lumet—opened, later that year, it was criticized in much the same way. “The incidents in ‘Fail-Safe’ are deliberate lies!” General Curtis LeMay, the Air Force chief of staff, said. “Nothing like that could happen.” The first casualty of every war is the truth—and the Cold War was no exception to that dictum. Half a century after Kubrick’s mad general, Jack D. Ripper, launched a nuclear strike on the Soviets to defend the purity of “our precious bodily fluids” from Communist subversion, we now know that American officers did indeed have the ability to start a Third World War on their own. And despite the introduction of rigorous safeguards in the years since then, the risk of an accidental or unauthorized nuclear detonation hasn’t been completely eliminated.

The command and control of nuclear weapons has long been plagued by an “always/never” dilemma. The administrative and technological systems that are necessary to insure that nuclear weapons are always available for use in wartime may be quite different from those necessary to guarantee that such weapons can never be used, without proper authorization, in peacetime. During the nineteen-fifties and sixties, the “always” in American war planning was given far greater precedence than the “never.” Through two terms in office, beginning in 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower struggled with this dilemma. He wanted to retain Presidential control of nuclear weapons while defending America and its allies from attack. But, in a crisis, those two goals might prove contradictory, raising all sorts of difficult questions. What if Soviet bombers were en route to the United States but the President somehow couldn’t be reached? What if Soviet tanks were rolling into West Germany but a communications breakdown prevented NATO officers from contacting the White House? What if the President were killed during a surprise attack on Washington, D.C., along with the rest of the nation’s civilian leadership? Who would order a nuclear retaliation then?

With great reluctance, Eisenhower agreed to let American officers use their nuclear weapons, in an emergency, if there were no time or no means to contact the President. Air Force pilots were allowed to fire their nuclear anti-aircraft rockets to shoot down Soviet bombers heading toward the United States. And about half a dozen high-level American commanders were allowed to use far more powerful nuclear weapons, without contacting the White House first, when their forces were under attack and “the urgency of time and circumstances clearly does not permit a specific decision by the President, or other person empowered to act in his stead.” Eisenhower worried that providing that sort of authorization in advance could make it possible for someone to do “something foolish down the chain of command” and start an all-out nuclear war. But the alternative—allowing an attack on the United States to go unanswered or NATO forces to be overrun—seemed a lot worse. Aware that his decision might create public unease about who really controlled America’s nuclear arsenal, Eisenhower insisted that his delegation of Presidential authority be kept secret. At a meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he confessed to being “very fearful of having written papers on this matter.”

President John F. Kennedy was surprised to learn, just a few weeks after taking office, about this secret delegation of power. “A subordinate commander faced with a substantial military action,” Kennedy was told in a top-secret memo, “could start the thermonuclear holocaust on his own initiative if he could not reach you.” Kennedy and his national-security advisers were shocked not only by the wide latitude given to American officers but also by the loose custody of the roughly three thousand American nuclear weapons stored in Europe. Few of the weapons had locks on them. Anyone who got hold of them could detonate them. And there was little to prevent NATO officers from Turkey, Holland, Italy, Great Britain, and Germany from using them without the approval of the United States.

In December, 1960, fifteen members of Congress serving on the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy had toured NATO bases to investigate how American nuclear weapons were being deployed. They found that the weapons—some of them about a hundred times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima—were routinely guarded, transported, and handled by foreign military personnel. American control of the weapons was practically nonexistent. Harold Agnew, a Los Alamos physicist who accompanied the group, was especially concerned to see German pilots sitting in German planes that were decorated with Iron Crosses—and carrying American atomic bombs. Agnew, in his own words, “nearly wet his pants” when he realized that a lone American sentry with a rifle was all that prevented someone from taking off in one of those planes and bombing the Soviet Union.

* * *

As Dr. Leonard McCoy noted, in Star Trek IV: "It's a miracle these people ever got out of the 20th century."

* * *


You can read Eric Schlosser’s guide to the long-secret documents that help explain the risks America took with its nuclear arsenal, and watch and read his deconstruction of clips from “Dr. Strangelove” and from a little-seen film about permissive action links.

Eric Schlosser is the author of “Command and Control.”

[Demeter]

13. 54% of Republicans Say We’ve Got Too Much Inequality

THE LAST TRUMP IS BLOWING

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/01/54-republicans-say-weve-got-much-inequality.html


6 Conservative Reasons – Based Upon Conservative Values – For Making Sure Inequality Doesn’t Spiral Out of Control Even More

We’ve noted for years that it’s a myth that conservatives accept runaway inequality. Conservatives are very concerned about the stunning collapse of upward mobility. A poll from Gallup shows that a majority of Republicans think we’ve got too much inequality:

Two out of three Americans are dissatisfied with the way income and wealth are currently distributed in the U.S. This includes three-fourths of Democrats and 54% of Republicans.

And the conservative website Townhall.com ran a story last month entitled, “Inequality is a Conservative Issue“. In fact, there are at least 6 solid conservative reasons – based upon conservative values – for reducing runaway inequality:

(1) It has now finally become widely accepted by economists that inequality drags down the economy. Conservatives like prosperity and economic growth, not things which pull down the economy;

(2) Inequality increases the nation’s debt. Conservatives don’t like debt;

(3) Runaway inequality leads to social unrest and violence. Conservatives like stability and order;

(4) Much of the cause of our soaring inequality is bailouts for the big banks and socialism for the buddies of the high-and-mighty at the Federal Reserve, Treasury, and White House. The government has consistently picked Wall Street over Main Street, and virtually all of the the big banks’ profits come from taxpayer bailouts. The Fed is still throwing many tens of billions a month at the big banks in “the greatest backdoor Wall Street bailout of all time”, which sucks the wealth away from the rest of the economy. Conservatives don’t like bailouts (a 2012 Harris poll showed that 87% of Republicans are against bank bailouts) or socialism; and

(5) One of the biggest causes of runaway inequality is that the big banks are manipulating every market, and committing massive crimes. Fraud disproportionally benefits the big banks, makes boom-bust cycles more severe, and otherwise harms the economy … all of which increase inequality and warp the market. These actions artificially redistribute wealth from honest, hard-working people to a handful of crooks. Conservatives hate redistribution … as well as crooks.

(6) Religious leaders have slammed the criminality of the heads of the big banks; and the Bible teaches - and top economists agree – that their crimes must be punished, or else things will get worse. A 2011 Gallup poll showed that 91% of U.S. conservatives believe that the Bible is either literally true or is the inspired word of God. If the crimes of the bankers are punished, inequality will start to decline, because a more lawful, orderly and even playing field will be reestablished.

We’re not calling for redistributing wealth from the rich. But we do support clawing back ill-gotten gains from criminals under well-established fraud principles:

The government could use existing laws to force ill-gotten gains to be disgorged (see this and this) and fraudulent transfers to be voided …

We’re mainly talking about stopping further redistribution from Main Street to Wall Street. As Robert Shiller said in 2009:

And it’s not like we want to level income. I’m not saying spread the wealth around, which got Obama in trouble. But I think, I would hope that this would be a time for a national consideration about policies that would focus on restraining any possible further increases in inequality.

For example, if we stop bailing out the Wall Street welfare queens, the big banks would focus more on traditional lending and less on speculative casino gambling. Indeed, if we break up the big banks, it will increase the ability of smaller banks to make loans to Main Street, which will level the playing field. We don’t even have to use government power to break up the banks … if the government just stops propping them up, they’ll collapse on their own. Indeed, many Republicans have pointed out that the big banks would fail on their own if the government stopped bailing them out. And using current fraud laws would do the trick in prosecuting Wall Street criminality.

Postscript: If you want to know the stunning truth of how bad inequality has gotten, read
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/09/the-stunning-truth-about-inequality-in-america.html

If you want to hear what top economists say inequality does to our economy:
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/12/mainstream-economists-finally-admit-runaway-inequality-hurting-economy.html

And if you want to find out whether government policy is making things better or worse, here’s your answer: http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/09/bad-government-policy-has-created-the-worst-inequality-in-world-history-and-it-is-destroying-our-economy.html

[Demeter]

14. Live Q&A with Edward Snowden: Thursday 23rd January, 8pm GMT, 3pm EST

TRANSCRIPT AT LINK

http://www.freesnowden.is/asksnowden/

[Demeter]

17. Some Bytes about Bitcoin

Bitcoin is not optimized for privacy

http://www.ianwelsh.net/bitcoin-is-not-optimized-for-privacy/


Just another quick note: Bitcoins keep track of every single transaction. That information is filed into the bitcoin itself.

Do not think that this is anonymous money, it is anything but. You’re still best off using cash for anonymous transactions or buying one use cards, etc… for online anonymous transactions.

China got bitcoin right. It is a virtual good. You could just as easily use any other virtual good to transfer money out of a country, so long as there is a liquid market you trust.

Follow The Bitcoins: How We Got Busted Buying Drugs On Silk Road's Black Market

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/09/05/follow-the-bitcoins-how-we-got-busted-buying-drugs-on-silk-roads-black-market/

The crypto-currency Bitcoin has become the preferred payment method for much of the online underground, hailed by none other than the administrator of the booming Silk Road black market as the key to making his illicit business possible. But spending Bitcoins to anonymously score drugs online isn’t as simple as it’s often made out to be.

We at Forbes should know: We tried, and we got caught.

To be clear, we weren’t caught by law enforcement–so far at least, our experiment last month in ordering small amounts of marijuana from three different Bitcoin-based online black markets hasn’t resulted in anyone getting arrested. But a few weeks after those purchases, I asked Sarah Meiklejohn, a Bitcoin-focused computer science researcher at the University of California at San Diego, to put the privacy of our black market transactions to the test by tracing the digital breadcrumbs that Bitcoin leaves behind. The result of her analysis: On Silk Road, and possibly on smaller competitor markets, our online drug buys were visible to practically anyone who took the time to look. “There are ways of using Bitcoin privately,” says Meiklejohn. “But if you’re a casual Bitcoin user, you’re probably not hiding your activity very well.”

Bitcoin’s privacy properties are a kind of paradox: Every Bitcoin transaction that occurs in the entire payment network is recorded in the “blockchain,” Bitcoin’s decentralized mechanism for tracking who has what coins when, and preventing fraud and counterfeiting. But the transactions are recorded only as addresses, which aren’t necessarily tied to anyone’s identity–hence Bitcoin’s use for anonymous and often illegal applications...

Jack Lew and Jamie Dimon warn of Bitcoin dangers


THE QUESTION ARISES: DANGER TO WHOM? TO JACK LEW AND JAMIE DIMON?

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/a00df0fc-8496-11e3-b72e-00144feab7de.html??siteedition=uk

Bitcoin has been tossed into the virtual gutter at the World Economic Forum in Davos this week, as top US financial leaders warned the vitrual currency could be used to fund terrorism and predicted that regulation would put it out of business.

Jack Lew, US Treasury secretary, said: “From the government’s point of view, we have to make sure it does not become an avenue to funding illegal activities or to funding activities that have malign purposes like terrorist activities...“It is an anonymous form of transaction and it offers places for people to hide,” Mr Lew said in an interview with CNBC at Davos.

Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan chairman and chief executive, told the same channel: “The question isn’t whether we accept it. The question is do we even participate with people who facilitate Bitcoin?” Ultimately, Mr Dimon said, Bitcoin would be subjected to the same regulatory standards as other payment systems and “that will probably be the end of them”. Regulatory uncertainty has deterred banks from offering services to virtual currency start-ups. But Mr Dimon’s cautious approach contrasts with rival Wells Fargo, which recently launched a group to examine how it might safely offer Bitcoin-related services or banking arrangements to virtual currency entrepreneurs.

The JPMorgan boss said: “Governments put a huge amount of pressure on banks, and so, to know who your client is, anti-money laundering, did you do real reviews of that? Obviously it’s almost impossible with something like that.” He added that Bitcoin was “a terrible store of value” that “can be replicated over and over”, and that according to reports, “a lot of it is being used for illicit purposes”.

[Demeter]

18. U.S. stocks tumble; Dow drops 318 points; Indexes post worst weekly losses in more than a year

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-stocks-sell-off-another-triple-digit-drop-for-dow-2014-01-24?siteid=YAHOOB

U.S. stocks finished the week with deep losses as investors fled equities and emerging-markets currencies on concerns about a contagion effect from China’s manufacturing slowdown. The S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average recorded their worst weekly losses in more than a year while volumes on Wall Street on Thursday and Friday were significantly higher than their 30-day averages.

The S&P 500 SPX -2.09% closed below the psychologically significant level of 1,800 for the first time since Dec. 17, dropping 38.17 points, or 2.1%, to 1,790.29. The benchmark index shed 2.6% over the past week, its worst weekly percentage loss since June 2012. The index is now 3.1% below its record high, reached Jan. 15. The trading week was shortened by Monday’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA -1.97% dropped 318.24 points, or 2%, to 15,879.11 and lost 3.5% over the week, its worst weekly percentage decline since 2011. The last time the blue chip index had two consecutive days of triple digit losses were in Dec 11. and Dec 12.

The Nasdaq Composite COMP -2.15% lost 90.70 points, or 2.2%, to 4,128.17 and registered a weekly loss of 1.7% after two weeks of gains. On Friday, the tech-heavy index reversed its early 2014 gains and is now down 1.2% since the start of the year. Read the recap of the U.S. markets on the live blog

The CBOE Volatility Index VIX +31.74% , known as the Vix, surged 32%, its steepest rise since the April 15 Boston Marathon bombings.

Investors began selling stocks and emerging-markets currencies heavily on Thursday following weak Chinese economic data. The sharp selloffs on Wall Street prompted some analysts to call it the beginning of a long-awaited correction.

[Demeter]

19. Why a stock market correction should make you happy

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-a-stock-market-correction-should-make-you-happy-2014-01-24?siteid=YAHOOB

“Excesses in one direction will lead to an opposite excess in the other direction.”

So says rule No. 2 from retired and respected market technician Bob Farrell, whose 10 “Market Rules to Remember” offer investors a reality check on stocks, bonds and their money. Farrell’s advice is especially timely after the disappointing week stock investors have had, with the S&P 500 SPX -2.09% suffering its worst one-week percentage decline since June 2012, and the Dow Jones Industrials DJIA -1.97% taking its worst beating since November 2011. So far this year the S&P 500 has lost 3.1% and the Dow is down 4.2%. Where she stops, nobody knows. But the conviction that stocks are due for a correction – meaning at least a 10% slide – is the worst-kept secret on Wall Street. Pundits have been opining for months about how stocks are overbought and investors are too optimistic.

It’s about time stock prices turned south. Even a year without a meaningful correction is too long a stretch. Investors get comfortable; the market’s proverbial wall of worry breaks down. A correction gives investors who want to get out of the market an excuse to exit, and sets the stage for buyers to come off the sidelines. A selloff early in the year is even more welcome, since it gives the market a chance to form a new base from which to move higher.

Lower stock prices remind us that Mr. Market is mortal. “There are no new eras – excesses are never permanent,” Farrell noted in another of his famous rules. Indeed, if your investment portfolio is diversified to your specifications, market stumbles can be opportunities.

The dust from this market storm will settle, as it always does. Meantime, give your portfolio a checkup and figure out how to move forward. What’s different about the longer-term prospects for the global economy and the market that we didn’t see two weeks ago, when buyers were still lined up? Likely, not much.

[westerebus]

25. As goes the QE so goes the markets.

Poor china less and less low cost dollars, so they print more and more Yuan.

Has anyone noticed Mr Soros has been quiet re the unbalancing of the Turkish Lira.

May be I haven't been paying attention.

Then there's the POTUS and the TPP.

I was looking at the map and thought, if I wanted to ensure certain choke points or ports of call were on friendly terms with our consumer base in a quid pro quo, it makes sense in one sense. Not that we would ever deny a Asian power access to the right of way of the high seas.

This brings me to look at Myanmar. Out of the prison of military dictatorship just in time to possibly become the next Asian miracle? Did the pipeline on its coast into south China provide an incentive to open up as the Pakistan pipeline might not be Taliban proof?

The end of the 1972 bear market. Take a Google if you like gold history.

The Munich massacre was a 1972 event just for perspective.

[Demeter]

26. IF QE was the only thing making the wheels on the bus go round and round

we are truly up the creek without a paddle...to mix a few metaphors.

[DemReadingDU]

28. QE was designed for the 1% wealthy to get wealthier

QE was not designed for the remaining 99%.

[westerebus]

29. Shaken not stirred.

For those of us who swim against the tide, knowing when to float home is a must.

[Demeter]

20. Tsunami of Retail Store Closings and Downsizings Coming; Expect Layoffs and Shorter Hours

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2014/01/tsunami-of-retail-store-closings-and.html



Due to competition from online retailers like Amazon and dismal holiday sales at Target, J.C. Penny, Sears, Best Buy, and other major retailers, a flood of retail store closings are on the way. Moreover, that same competition also dictates a decided shift away from large stores in large malls, to smaller facilities. All things considered, expect nothing less than a massive Tsunami of Retail Store Closings and Downsizings.

On Tuesday, Sears said that it will shutter its flagship store in downtown Chicago in April. It's the latest of about 300 store closures in the U.S. that Sears has made since 2010.

Earlier this month J.C. Penney and Macy's announced multiple store closings. J.C. Penney will close 33 stores.

Target said that it will eliminate 475 jobs worldwide, including some at its Minnesota headquarters, and not fill 700 empty positions.

American Eagle will move some of its aerie lingerie locations into its main stores.

Aéropostale will close 175 stores over the next few years.

Wal-Mart has about 100 stores in the U.S. producing same-store sales declines deeper than 3 percent.

Experts said these headlines are only the tip of the iceberg for the industry, which is set to undergo a multiyear period of shuttering stores and trimming square footage. Shoppers will likely see an average decrease in overall retail square footage of between one-third and one-half within the next five to 10 years, as a shift to e-commerce brings with it fewer mall visits and a lesser need to keep inventory stocked in-store, said Michael Burden, a principal with Excess Space Retail Services.

January is typically a busy month for retailers to announce store closings. According to the International Council of Shopping Centers, 44 percent of annual store closings announced since 2010 have occurred in the first quarter. But this year's closings are likely indicative of a new trend, sparked by more and more shoppers turning to the Web, experts said.

Paired with a compressed holiday shopping calendar and a spate of freezing weather across much of the U.S., online shopping contributed to a nearly 15 percent decline in foot traffic this past holiday season, according to ShopperTrak.

"Stores are making a long-term bet on technology," said Belus Capital Advisors analyst Brian Sozzi. "It simply doesn't make strategic sense to enter a new 15-year lease as consumers are likely to continue curtailing physical visits to the mall."

Sozzi said that after a profitable but below-expectations holiday season, the retail industry will face its second "tsunami of store closures across the U.S.," only a few years after what he called the "fire sale holiday season of 2008."

Steering Clear of Traditional Malls

One big shift in store closings has come from retailers shying away from indoor malls, instead favoring outlet centers, outdoor malls or stand-alone stores. Although new retail construction completions are at an all-time low, according to CB Richard Ellis, the supply of new outlet centers has picked up in recent quarters.

"There's no question that mall stores are closing quicker than open air, as far as the department stores," Birnbrey said.

Rick Caruso, founder and CEO of Caruso Affiliated, said at the recent National Retail Federation convention that without a major reinvention, traditional malls will soon go extinct, adding that he is unaware of an indoor mall being built since 2006.

"Any time you stop building a product, that's usually the best indication that the customer doesn't want it anymore," he said.

Expect Layoffs and Decreased Hours

Fewer, smaller stores requires layoffs or shorter hours. Given that job growth over the past year or more has been largely influenced by Obamacare artifacts, and that wave has played out, expect economists (but not Mish readers) to be shocked by what happens next to future headline job numbers.

[Demeter]

21. Low-Wage Workers Have far More Education than They Did in 1968, yet They Make far Less

http://www.epi.org/publication/wage-workers-education-1968/

The minimum wage is 23 percent less than its peak inflation-adjusted value in 1968. This is despite productivity (how much output can be produced in an average hour of work in the economy) more than doubling in that time period. The low-wage workforce has surely contributed to this rise in economy-wide productivity, since as a group they have far more education now than they did then. For the workforce overall, 37 percent in 1968 had not completed high school (or received a GED), which was true for only 9 percent in 2012 (the latest year with comparable data). We can drill down to examine low-wage workers, which we are defining for this analysis as those earning in the bottom fifth of the wage distribution.

The figure below shows that low-wage workers have far more education now than they did back in 1968. In 1968, 48 percent of low-wage workers had a high school degree, compared to 79 percent in 2012. Correspondingly, many more low-wage workers have attended at least some college or have a college degree, which the graph identifies as ‘college experience.’ While only 16.8 percent of low-wage workers in 1968 had gone to some college or had a college degree, that group had grown to nearly half (45.7 percent) by 2012. The bottom line is that minimum wage in 2013 is far less now than it was in 1968 despite the economy’s productivity more than doubling, and low-wage workers attaining far more education.

[Demeter]

23. DEMETER PAUSES FOR INTERMISSION

Stay warm, everyone. It's unbearable here, and I went absolutely nowhere today. Unfortunately, the weather will stink for AT LEAST another full week.

[Demeter]

24. Michael Olenick: “Conversation with the Receptionists” – An Obamacare Skit

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/01/michael-olenick-conversation-receptionists-obamacare-skit.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29

(Phone rings)

Receptionist: Beegbaux Medical Clinic, can I help you?

Newly Insured: Hi. I have a new Obamacare policy and I’d like to schedule a visit.

Receptionist: Who is your insurance with?

Newly Insured: A company called Corporate Welfare Assurance Company. You’ve seen their ads on TV, “The President’s giving you CWAP so sign up”

Receptionist: Duh: don’t you read the news? This is a respectable medical clinic: we don’t take CWAP here.

Newly Insured: I pay 18% of my gross salary for quality affordable healthcare. I’ve had a strange looking growth for ten months but after scheduling an appointment under my old plan my last insurance company dropped me before I could show up.

Receptionist: All that is very interesting and I can relate – despite working in a medical office I have ACA CWAP insurance myself — but there’s nothing I can do. Bye. [Click sound]

{Cut to a montage of various receptionists for each line]

Receptionist 2: No, we don’t take the President’s CWAP.

Receptionist 3: We tried working with CWAP insurance but they kept threatening to drop us from their network if we demanded to be paid, and eventually did so. Sorry.

Receptionist 4: We’re out of network for CWAP but if you’d pay us $150 we’ll look at you.

Receptionist 5: For a regular doctor visit? Nope. Sorry. But…

Newly Insured: {Cutting her off] Trying to use CWAP is a hopeless pain in the ass.

Receptionist 5: Well, if it’s a screening colonoscopy you’re looking for you should have said so. CWAP covers those if you’re over 50 though you have to pay more if during the procedure the doctor finds anything and fixes it.

Newly Insured: I’m still pretty young and .. wait; who said anything about a colonoscopy? I just want a doctor.

Receptionist 5: Well, let me look at the menu of items covered… Are you into wine?

Newly Insured: Uh, yeah, I guess. I usually have a glass of wine with dinner.

Receptionist 5: Great! CWAP covers residential substance abuse treatment. Pack a bag, leave the bottle behind, and we’ll have you enrolled this evening.

Newly Insured: I don’t think it’s a good idea to try giving up alcohol while trying to navigate this CWAP.

Receptionist 5: Hmm. Well then how about a syphilis test? If you were a woman I could offer you tests for syphilis, chlamydia, gonorrhea, hepatitis, a urinary tract infection and HPV but you’re a man so it’s one Bad Blood test for you.

Newly Insured: Bad blood test?

Receptionist 5: That means syphilis. It’s from a list of slang terms for venereal diseases that the CDC created at this web address: http://www.cdc.gov/std/healthcomm/HPVGenPub2004ApD.pdf

Newly Insured: Wouldn’t it make more sense to test anybody willing be tested for venereal disease since curing one man or woman prevents infection from spreading?

Receptionist 5: Look – this is all philosophically interesting, and I’m trying to work with you and all, but I’m not the one who defined what this CWAP covers. My job is to sell procedures and it doesn’t sound like you want one, which they’ve told me to tell you is like totally irresponsible, but don’t waste my time. {Play sound of phone clicking down.]

Receptionist 6: Yes – we’ll take your CWAP. Our next appointment is in two months. Is that acceptable?

Newly Insured: Really!

Receptionist 6: Really what? Two months? That seems to annoy some people. Tough. Honestly we’ve lost a lot of patients lately or it’d be 3-4 months.

Newly Insured: Lost them because they obtained superior health insurance and went to high end clinics at training hospitals?

Receptionist 6: No, lost them because they died. I mean we’re not like a high-cost clinic where bankers, oil sheiks, drug dealers, and shadier types like the owners of government-hired foreclosure review consultancies can just whip out a brief case and pay cash. But there are doctors and nurses here.

Newly Insured: I wasn’t questioning: I’m just happy to hear you have an opening: I’ll take it! Who is my doctor?

Receptionist 6: Dr. Frank. He’s one of my favorites here! He used to be in a rock band then, while playing a gig on an island somewhere he caught something from a groupie and wandered into a local medical school. He loved the place and dated the Dean for awhile – Frank has great taste like that ‘cause, not to brag, but he’s dating me now, well, and a few others here but, like, whatever, they’ll go away — and, oh yeah, eventually they gave him an MD.

Newly Insured: But he is a doctor? Licensed in the US? He knows what he’s doing?

Receptionist 6: Oh yeah. He’s great. CWAP actually gave him an award for the lowest cost of care out of any doctor in the whole state. CWAP sends him all sorts of goodies. Soon he’ll be training stodgier doctors, with more boring backgrounds. Frank’s suggested a training cruise: I’m hoping he’ll bring me with.

Newly Insured: Does he have a specialty?

Receptionist 6: He convinces people with cancer to skip treatment. “Die high and happy,” that’s Frank’s motto, his contribution to modern medicine as he likes to call it. If you’re gonna’ go you may as well die a little sooner — flying on top of the world — rather than puking and bald, right? It’s not like we live forever.

Newly Insured: I guess, though if death is avoidable I’d rather put it off a few years. Anyway I suppose he’s a start. OK; we’re scheduled. I’ll see you in four months.

Receptionist 6: Wait, I forgot something…. Oh yeah, I’m supposed to tell you to remember that your visit is under the deductible so it will cost at $200 and more if tests are needed and, like, since you’re seeing Frank, and he owns the lab, tests are always needed.

Newly Insured: But that’s more than it cost for the clinic that didn’t take CWAP!

Receptionist 6: Yeah, but it counts towards your deductible so if anything is really wrong, assuming that you pay us another $6,000 of so, your CWAP will be worth something. Unless of course it takes until the end of the year to reach $6,000, then you’ll have to start counting your CWAP all over again.

Newly Insured: You know I can fly to Europe, pay a top quality doctor, and receive quite a bit of treatment all for less than $6,000, plane ticket included?

Receptionist 6: Au Revoir. Want company?

[DemReadingDU]

27. HSBC imposes restrictions on large cash withdrawals

1/24/14 HSBC imposes restrictions on large cash withdrawals

Some HSBC customers have been prevented from withdrawing large amounts of cash because they could not provide evidence of why they wanted it, the BBC has learnt.

Listeners have told Radio 4's Money Box they were stopped from withdrawing amounts ranging from £5,000 to £10,000.

HSBC admitted it has not informed customers of the change in policy, which was implemented in November.

The bank says it has now changed its guidance to staff.

more...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-25861717

[xchrom]

30. Gold Mint Runs Overtime in Race to Meet World Coin Demand

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-25/gold-mint-runs-overtime-in-race-to-meet-world-coin-demand.html


Austria’s mint is running 24 hours a day to meet orders for gold coins, joining counterparts from the U.S. to the U.K. to Australia in reporting accelerating demand boosted by the bear market in bullion.

Austria’s Muenze Oesterreich AG mint hired extra employees and added a third eight-hour shift to the day in a bid to keep up with demand. Purchases of bullion coins at Australia’s Perth Mint rose 20 percent this year through Jan. 20 from a year earlier. Sales by the U.S. Mint are set for the best month since April, when the metal plunged into a bear market.

Global mints are manufacturing as fast as they can after a 28 percent drop in gold prices last year, the biggest slump since 1981, attracted buyers of physical metal. The demand gains helped bullion rally for five straight weeks, the longest streak since September 2012. That won’t be enough to stem the metal’s slump according to Morgan Stanley, while Goldman Sachs Group Inc. predicts bullion will “grind lower” over 2014.

“The long-term physical buyers see these price drops as opportunities to accumulate more assets,” said Michael Haynes, the chief executive officer of American Precious Metals Exchange, an online bullion dealer. “We have witnessed some top selling days in the past few weeks.”

[xchrom]

31. Won Leads Weekly Drop in Asia Currencies on Fed Bets, China Data

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-25/won-leads-weekly-drop-in-asia-currencies-on-fed-bets-china-data.html

Asian currencies fell this week, led by South Korea’s won, as Chinese economic data missed estimates and a stronger U.S. recovery added to speculation the Federal Reserve will cut its stimulus further.

The Bloomberg-JPMorgan Asia Dollar Index (ADXY) dropped for a second week as reports showed U.S. December sales of existing homes capped the best year since 2006 and jobless claims held near a six-week low. Signs of a sustained economic pickup fueled bets the Fed will continue to reduce bond-buying that has spurred fund flows to emerging markets. Manufacturing in China, Asia’s biggest economy, may have contracted this month, a preliminary reading showed on Jan. 23.

“Weak data in China are strengthening demand for safety assets like the dollar,” said Hong Seok Chan, a currency analyst at Daishin Economy Research Institute in Seoul. “U.S. tapering expectations offer a continued boost for the greenback.”

The won recorded its worst week in seven months, slumping 1.9 percent from Jan. 17 to 1080.36 per dollar, data compiled by Bloomberg show. Malaysia’s ringgit slid 1.1 percent, its biggest weekly loss in a month, to 3.3334. India’s rupee dropped 1.8 percent, the most since August, to 62.6850 and Indonesia’s rupiah fell 0.7 percent to 12,180.

[xchrom]

32. Yen Rallies With Franc on Rout in Amid Emerging Markets

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-24/yen-set-for-biggest-weekly-gain-since-september-on-haven-demand.html

The yen and the Swiss franc rallied as a selloff in emerging-market currencies deepened, stoking demand for haven assets.

The yen strengthened against all but two of 174 global peers as increased scrutiny of credit risks in China supported demand for Japanese assets. Argentina’s peso was the fourth worst global performer after a 13 percent slump yesterday as the country devalued the currency. The dollar was underpinned by speculation the Federal Reserve will continue to scale back stimulus. Turkey’s lira slid to a record and Russia’s ruble fell to a five-year low.

“We’re having a risk-off move,” Douglas Borthwick, the head of foreign exchange at Chapdelaine & Co. in New York, said in a phone interview. “Japan and Switzerland are both very interested in weakening their currency, so you’d expect that any sort of pullback in dollar-yen or dollar-Swiss would be bought into, which is why they’re seeing strength today.”

The yen rose 0.9 percent to 102.31 per dollar at 5 p.m. New York time after reaching 102, the strongest level since Dec. 6. It appreciated 1 percent to 139.98 per euro. The franc gained 0.3 percent to 89.45 centimes per dollar and added 0.4 percent to 1.2235 per euro.

[xchrom]

33. Angst Over Argentina Upends Alpine Complacency in Davos

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-24/davos-cries-for-argentina-as-risk-upends-alpine-complacency.html

Over a three-hour lunch in Davos yesterday, Carlyle Group LP (CG) co-founder David Rubenstein told a group of investors and bankers his biggest worry: nobody appeared to be worried about anything at all.

Less than 24 hours later, the devaluation of the Argentine peso accelerated the worst selloff in emerging market stocks in five years, unnerving delegates at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland. As they shuttled from meetings to meals, losses were piling up by the minute as developing nation currencies slid with equities.

“I don’t want to look,” Daniel Loeb, billionaire founder of hedge fund Third Point LLC, said of the financial markets as he walked between meetings at the Congress center in Davos.

After recent gatherings were dominated by crises from Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. to Greece, this year’s had begun to reflect a mood of optimism as economies and stock markets recovered. That enthusiasm waned today as the rout in emerging markets exacerbated concern that the engines of global growth since the crisis have now stalled.

[Demeter]

47. It's nasty, but it's real

[xchrom]

49. soon there will be official expressions of deflationary SURPRISE!11 nt

[xchrom]

34. Emerging markets selloff picks up, drags down Europe, U.S.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/01/25/uk-markets-global-idUKBRE9920LO20140125

(Reuters) - A full-scale flight from emerging markets accelerated on Friday, as investors sold shares in major markets and bought safe-haven assets such as U.S. Treasuries, the yen and gold.

On Wall Street, the benchmark S&P 500 stock index tumbled 2.0 percent on the day, and ended the week down 2.6 percent, its worst week since June 2012.

Concerns about slower growth in China, reduced support from U.S. monetary policy and political problems in Turkey, Argentina and Ukraine drove the selling.

The Turkish lira hit a record low as the cost of insuring against a Turkish default rose to an 18-month high. Argentina's peso fell again after the country's central bank abandoned its support of the currency.

[xchrom]

35. Euro zone to assure IMF it will keep funding Greece - EU official

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/01/24/uk-eurozone-greece-idUKBREA0N1D020140124

(Reuters) - The euro zone will assure the International Monetary Fund in coming months that it will continue to bankroll Greece, enabling the IMF to disburse its share of international aid to Athens, a senior European Union official said on Friday.

Progress in Greek reforms, undertaken by Athens in return for international financial aid, will be among the topics for talks among euro zone finance ministers, called the Eurogroup, at a meeting on Monday.

Under IMF rules, the Fund cannot disburse its part of the loans to Greece unless it is financed 12 months ahead. But according to the IMF, Athens is 4.4 billion euros short in 2014 and 6.5 billion short in 2015.

For IMF money to flow to Greece, therefore, the euro zone will have to affirm that Athens will get more money.

[xchrom]

36. Mexico draws over $7 billion in foreign investment at Davos

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/01/24/us-davos-mexico-idUSBREA0N1GM20140124

(Reuters) - Pepsico, Nestle and Cisco on Friday announced major investments that together totaled more than $7 billion in Mexico, where the government has pushed through a series of economic reforms that aim to boost foreign investment and growth.

Mexico has embraced free trade policies in recent decades, and has drawn growing investment interest after President Enrique Pena Nieto made a landmark reform drive in his first year in office, pushing major telecommunications, energy, banking and tax legislation through a divided Congress.

"It is very encouraging to see the enthusiasm that has been awoken by our country due to the structural changes that are happening," Pena Nieto said at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos.

Pepsico (PEP.N) said it would spend $5 billion in Mexico over five years to strengthen its food and beverage business, adding it planned to expand its production capacity by adding new manufacturing lines and expand delivery routes.

[xchrom]

37. foes of obama trade pacts mostly democrats

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_TRADE_PACT_POLITICS?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2014-01-25-04-06-18

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Debates on lowering trade barriers can turn Congress upside down for Democratic presidents promoting such legislation. Business-minded Republicans suddenly turn into allies and Democrats aligned with organized labor can become outspoken foes.

It's a reversal of the usual order of things, where a Democratic president can generally count on plenty of support from fellow Democrats in Congress along with varying levels of resistance from Republicans.

Now it is President Barack Obama's turn to experience such a role reversal. Already, he is encountering pockets of Democratic resistance, especially from those representing manufacturing states, to his efforts to win congressional approval for renewal of "fast track" negotiating authority.

Such expedited powers help speed the process for major trade agreements by restricting Congress to up-and-down votes on what's already been negotiated - with no amendments allowed.

[xchrom]

38. PLATINUM, PALLADIUM DROP ON EMERGING MARKET WOES

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_COMMODITIES_REVIEW?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2014-01-24-16-46-43

NEW YORK (AP) -- Platinum and palladium slumped Friday as investors fretted about the prospects for growth in emerging markets.

Both metals, which are used to make catalytic converters for autos, tend to track the outlook for growth in emerging economies such as China and Latin America. A downturn in emerging markets began Thursday following signs that manufacturing was contracting in China, a major importer of raw materials and a key driver of global economic growth.

"For platinum and palladium, more than half of the demand is (for use) in automobiles," said Howard Wen, a precious metals analyst at HSBC Securities. "So, global growth has an influence on these metals, obviously."

The price of platinum for delivery in April fell $34.60, or 2.4 percent, to $1,428.60 an ounce. Palladium for March dropped $11.10, or 1.5 percent, to $734.80 an ounce.

[xchrom]

39. NATURAL GAS SOARS AS COLD GRIPS HOMES, DRILLERS

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_NATURAL_GAS_PRICE_SPIKE?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2014-01-24-18-18-25

NEW YORK (AP) -- The frigid winter of 2014 is setting the price of natural gas on fire.

The price in the futures market soared to $5.18 per 1,000 cubic feet Friday, up 10 percent to the highest level in three and a half years. The price of natural gas is up 29 percent in two weeks, and is 50 percent higher than last year at this time.

Record amounts of natural gas are being burned for heat and electricity. Meanwhile, it's so cold that drillers are struggling to produce enough to keep up with the high demand. So much natural gas is coming out of storage that the Energy Department says supplies have fallen 20 percent below a year ago - and that was before this latest cold spell.

"We've got record demand, record withdrawals from storage, and short-term production is threatened," says energy analyst Stephen Schork. "It's a dangerous market right now."

Natural gas and electric customers are sure to see somewhat higher rates in the coming months. But they will be insulated from sharp increases because regulators often force natural gas and electric utilities to use financial instruments and fuel-buying strategies that protect residential customers from high volatility.

[xchrom]

40. EURO BANK CHIEF POINTS TO EUROZONE GROWTH PICK-UP

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/EU_EUROPE_ECONOMY?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2014-01-24-14-20-19

DAVOS, Switzerland (AP) -- European Central Bank president Mario Draghi laid out the hope that the ailing eurozone economic recovery will pick up steam over the coming months.

He told delegates Friday at the World Economic Forum that a stream of "solid" survey data are pointing to better times ahead for a region that's grappled with a debt crisis, recession and sky-high unemployment over the past few years. Recent surveys of purchasing managers and consumers have indicated growing buoyancy.

"The hard data are not however as uniformly good as the survey data," said Draghi, who has been widely credited for helping to douse the debt crisis fires. "In a sense, this behavior reflects very similar behavior that took place in the United States a year, a year and a half ago."

The U.S. has achieved so-called escape velocity that is bearing down on unemployment and prompted the Federal Reserve to start reducing its extraordinary monetary stimulus, which has been in place, in its various guises, for around five years.

[Demeter]

64. Crippled eurozone to face fresh debt crisis this year, warns ex-ECB strongman Axel Weber

LOOKS LIKE IT'S STARTING EARLY, WITH THE RUN ON HKCB

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/davos/10590134/Crippled-eurozone-to-face-fresh-debt-crisis-this-year-warns-ex-ECB-strongman-Axel-Weber.html



A top panel of experts in Davos has poured cold water on claims that the European crisis is over, warning that the eurozone remains stuck in a low-growth debt trap and risks being left on the margins of the global economy by US and China.

Axel Weber, the former head of the German Bundesbank, said the underlying disorder continues to fester and region is likely to face a fresh market attack this year.

"Europe is under threat. I am still really concerned. Markets have improved but the economic situation for most countries has not improved," he said that the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Mr Weber, now chairman of UBS, said the European Central Bank's stress test for banks in November risks setting off a new sovereign debt scare, reviving the crisis in the Mediterranean countries...

EURO-BASHING AND MORE AT LINK

[xchrom]

41. The World Got A Major Wake-Up Call From China

http://www.businessinsider.com/chinas-wake-up-call-2014-1

The market declined significantly in the face of the unexpected drop in the Chinese Purchasing Managers Index, following closely on the heels of China’s declining GDP growth and potentially serious credit problems. According to HSBC, China faces a cash shortage in its financial system, creating a dilemma for the Chinese leadership that is focused on rebalancing the economy and reining in credit. The market’s decline was on target, as the disappointments cast doubt on the widespread consensus of recovering global growth. Without the impetus from the Chinese growth engine, the global economy cannot recover and is likely to fall into recession. This is particularly true since U.S. economic growth has still not reached “escape velocity” at a time when the Fed seems set to wind down Quantitative Easing (QE) by year-end.

While the stock market seems to have accepted the prospect of an end to QE, the rationale for the continuation of the bull market has shifted to a belief in accelerating growth in the economy and in corporate earnings, both globally and domestically. For the last few years the market was able to accept tepid growth on the grounds that QE would provide enough liquidity to move stocks ahead. But without the prospect of continuing boosts to liquidity, tepid growth is no longer enough, and, unfortunately, it looks as if that is the most we are likely to get.

Despite the belief of most strategists and economists that the U.S. economy is picking up steam, it is far from evident in the data. Examination of the evidence indicates to us that the economy is still not at a point where we can conclude that growth is now self-sustaining in the new world of Fed tapering.

Where is the so-called consumer resurgence? Year-over-year real retail sales were up 4.1% in December, compared to an increase of 5.2% in the year ended December 2012 and 6.2% in December 2011. Similarly, overall consumer spending increased 1.2% in the year ended November 2013 compared to 2.1% in the year ended November 2012. Anecdotal information from retailors does not indicate much of a pickup, if any, in December. And remember that consumer spending accounts for about 70% of GDP. These results should not be surprising, since real disposable income was up only 0.6% year-over-year in the latest reported period.



Read more: http://comstockfunds.com/default.aspx?act=newsletter.aspx&category=MarketCommentary&MenuGroup=Home&NewsLetterID=1758&startrow=1#ixzz2rPjRXgm1

[xchrom]

42. Here's What Emerging-Market Leaders Are Saying And Doing As Their Currencies Burn

http://www.businessinsider.com/emerging-market-leaders-on-currencies-2014-1

DAVOS/LONDON (Reuters) - Top emerging market policymakers moved to allay concerns about their economies on Friday after investors sold off their currencies, raising fears of a broad market rout.

The U.S. Federal Reserve's plan to gradually withdraw its stimulus has long been expected to lead to a pullout from emerging markets. But the prospect of an economic slowdown in China added to concerns on Friday that emerging markets, particularly those with large current account deficits, may struggle to support their currencies this year.

Argentina said on Friday it would relax currency controls it had long defended as essential, in a policy reversal forced by high inflation and a tumble in the peso.

Turkey's lira hit a record low despite an estimated $3 billion of intervention by its central bank the previous day. The rouble and the rand also languished at levels not seen since the 2008-2009 financial crisis.



Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/emerging-market-leaders-on-currencies-2014-1#ixzz2rPmeeppc

[xchrom]

43. Investors Poured Billions Of Dollars Into The Stock Market Last Week Even As Prices Fell

http://www.businessinsider.com/baml-equity-fund-flows-2014-1

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Fund investors worldwide poured $6.6 billion into stock funds in the week ended January 22 on optimism that stocks would push higher this year, data from a Bank of America Merrill Lynch Global Research report showed on Friday.

The new demand brought inflows into stock funds so far this year to $16 billion, following a record inflow of $358 billion in 2013, according to the report, which also cited data from fund-tracking firm EPFR Global.

The inflows came even as the benchmark Standard & Poor's 500 <.SPX> stock index fell a modest 0.2 percent over the holiday-shortened week on some disappointing corporate earnings. The U.S. stock market was closed Monday for the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

"If you get a pullback, that's a natural time for people who have been wanting to buy to step in," said Michael Jones, chief investment officer of RiverFront Investment Group, with $4.3 billion in assets.



Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/baml-equity-fund-flows-2014-1#ixzz2rPqkiKLG

[xchrom]

44. Warren Buffett Just Offered Jamie Dimon An Insanely High-Paying Job

http://www.businessinsider.com/warren-buffett-on-jamie-dimons-pay-2014-1

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal's Anupreeta Das, Warren Buffett says Dimon is not getting paid enough.

“If I owned J.P. Morgan Chase, he would be running it and he would be making more money than the directors are paying him,” he told her.

Buffett has publicly defended Dimon previously, and said he personally owns JPM shares.

Buffett added that the firm was a “huge plus to the American financial system” during the financial crisis

“If Jamie decides he wants to make more money, all he has to do is call me and I’d hire him at Berkshire,” Buffett said.



Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/warren-buffett-on-jamie-dimons-pay-2014-1#ixzz2rPsZ02zM

[Demeter]

48. Sounds like Jamie needs a bolt-hole

Why Warren Buffett would sully himself....

[xchrom]

45. Wall Street’s Frightening New Plan To Become America’s Landlord

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/01/24/3203471/wall-street-landlord/

Anyone who has ever struggled to get her landlord to fix a broken appliance can imagine how much worse it could have been if she were paying rent to a faceless hedge fund based thousands of miles away. That tenant’s nightmare may be on its way to reality for hundreds of thousands of Americans, as Wall Street firms have snapped up 200,000 family houses with the intention of renting them out.

Banks, hedge funds, and private equity firms have been amassing those real estate holdings for a few years now, but their plan for wringing profit out of the rental market is just starting to draw real scrutiny. The New York-based hedge fund Blackstone Group is now the nation’s largest landlord after purchasing over 40,000 foreclosed family homes for the purpose of renting them out.

While firms like Blackstone often farm out the day-to-day management of the rental properties to third-party companies, those intermediaries are often also based in faraway states. Some have a track record of being unresponsive to basic things like broken sewer pipes, as the Huffington Post has reported. The banks and their intermediaries may neglect basic upkeep of these properties. In that worst-case scenario for renters, local and attentive property managers and building supers will get replaced with “Wall Street-based absentee slumlords,” in David Dayen’s phrase.

On-the-ground concerns for communities and renters go beyond neglect, however. The rising influence of financial titans turned local landlords could threaten all sorts of public services. In the case of Huber Heights, OH, the hedge fund Magnetar Capital has become the largest landlord in the whole town and is using that influence to try to extract lower property tax charges from the town — a change that would undermine funding for schools and other public services for locals, but boost the bottom line of the Illinois-based financial giant. (Magnetar’s dodgy past dealings from the subprime era also underscore an unsettling dynamic to Wall Street’s entry into the rental market: the same companies that helped turn homeowners into renters through mass foreclosures are now preparing to make even more money off of the same rental demand they helped create.)

[Demeter]

50. This calls for a massive, nation-wide boycott

[DemReadingDU]

52. Oh yeh

But as I replied last week, most Americans have other priorities and really are not paying attention. Not until there is no food and they are hungry, no income nor savings, and are desperate. Desperate people will do desperate things.

And really, how many people have even heard Magnetar? I think if I went shopping in my previous town of Huber Heights, and asked other shoppers about Magnetar owning the rentals in H.H., maybe I might find 1 or 2 who know of Magnetar and its dodgy past.

[Demeter]

57. Each one, teach one

It falls to those who know to spread the word.

[DemReadingDU]

60. Doesn't work if the recipients have closed ears and eyes

It's like discussions with many Republicans, they refuse to cooperate!

[xchrom]

46. Wages Are Growing At The Slowest Rate Since The 1960s

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/01/24/3203481/wages-grow-1960s/

American workers’ wages are growing at just 2 percent per year, the slowest rate since at least 1965, according to a new research note from Goldman Sachs.

That means wage growth is only barely outpacing inflation, which rose by 1.5 percent last year. The research also expects the trend to continue.



Wage growth has been particularly slow in the aftermath of the recession. Real wages have declined 7 percent since 2007 and the pace of growth has been slowing down. There are currently about three job seekers for every job opening — making it risky for the employed to push their bosses too hard for pay increases — and those who do find a job are increasingly ending up in work that pays very little.

But wage stagnation is not a brand new trend. American workers have seen a “lost decade” of wage growth, with wages flat or declining for the bottom 60 percent of the workforce between 2000 and 2012. At the same time, workers’ productivity jumped 25 percent during that time. And things have been bad at the bottom of the income scale for decades: since the 1970s, the richest 20 percent of Americans have seen far more income growth than the bottom.

[Demeter]

51. I have to go move 4 inches of freshly fallen powder and a ton of paper

before I or the temperatures drop...24F no windchilll....it's a heat wave!


See you all later, if I survive.

[Hotler]

54. Awesome post Demeter.

Thank you. I learn more here in WEE and SMW than I do on Google. Stay warm.

[Demeter]

58. That's funny!

Because I get a whacky idea, and then start Googling....

My mind is filled higglety-piggelty worse than my house with all sorts of stuff that might come in handy some day....

And then I have a truly bizarre circle of friends who feed the collecting imperative...and the whacky ideas.

[Hotler]

55. A tad off topic.

We're coming up on the 40th anniversary of Blazing Saddles.

"My mind is a raging torrent, flooded with rivulets of thought, cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives."

"Gal-darnit, Mr. Lamarr, you use your tongue purttier than a twenty-dollar whore"

One of my favorite movies. I saw that movie when it first came out, I was 19, I saw it with my mom and that was the hardest I ever heard her laugh. I sure miss my mom. Think about her makes a little misty.

[Demeter]

59. We're there with you....sometimes it seems the whole world is missing Mom

16 years, and counting

[hamerfan]

61. Musical Interlude

Great photos of the sculptures, Demeter. Thanks for them!

It's The End Of The World As We Know It by REM:

[Demeter]

62. The perfect music for the theme!

How do you do that?

[Demeter]

63. Shaken but secure Claude Fischer, professor of sociology

http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2011/03/24/shaken-but-secure/

The horrific images from the Japanese earthquake-tsunami have probably shaken everyone’s confidence. When a nation so modern — so modern that its technology is considered cutting edge — is knocked down so badly, with thousands of citizens dead and many more left in the cold dark for days, with food running short, communities isolated, and anxieties about a nuclear energy threat, the rest of us can only wonder how secure we are. The anxiety will pass. The worst of tragedies — like the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami which killed 230,000 people and the 2008 earthquake in China which took 68,000 lives — pass into vague memory as we go about our daily lives. (The public’s amnesia for natural disasters drives emergency preparedness experts batty.) But the experience at the moment creates a sort of historical flashback to an era when it was a lot harder to feel secure, when insecurity was the norm. There was a time, a long time, from when humans appeared on earth to about the 20th century, when death was a constant companion. I don’t mean this in the sense of an existential foreboding (as in a Woody Allen movie), but in the sense of an everyday experience and threat. Death — along with serious disability and chronic pain — was all around and could strike suddenly. Most Americans today live without that constant fear.

In America of the 1700s and early 1800s, the average woman would have already buried both of her parents and four of her children by the time she had reached middle age. The diaries and letters of mothers from that era show that the experience of losing and fearing the loss of infants constantly pressed on their thoughts and emotions. It was not until after World War I that the typical mother would live to see all her children grow up. Early Americans understood the precariousness of life. Puritan ministers stressed death’s whim and the need to stay religiously prepared. Many could recite the saying, as Reverend Cotton Mather did, “If an old man has death before his face, a young man has death behind his back; the Deadly Blow may be as near to one as ’tis the other.” Similarly, a 1776 gravestone in Schenectady, New York, warned passers-by that the Angel of Death is close, so be ready for Judgement: “The soul prepared needs no delay / The summon comes the saint obeys.” Death often rode in with the plague, the First Horseman of the Apocalypse. In 1832, residents of Schenectady tracked reports of cholera in England, its arrival by ship in New York harbor, and then its advance upstate. Civic leaders mobilized citizens to clean the streets, experiment with disinfectants, reform their personal habits, and join in prayer. In the end, little helped and more than 40 died in a town of five thousand people. (Story told here SEE OP FOR LINK.) New York City suffered even more. Tens of thousands of the well-to-do fled Manhattan ahead of the disease. “The roads, in all directions, were lined with well-filled stagecoaches, livery coaches, private vehicles, and equestrians, all panic-struck, fleeing the city” and filling up farm homes for miles around. Over 3,500 largely poor, immigrant, and black New Yorkers died (proportionally it was as if over 100,000 New Yorkers died today). In some neighborhoods death arrived so quickly that bodies remained lying in the gutter. On the Illinois frontier, federal troops carried the same cholera into communities which were already beset by seasonal epidemics. Cholera lasted there into 1834. Deaths mounted so rapidly in what was then “the West” that sometimes two bodies shared a blanket for a coffin. Add to these episodic catastrophes the chronic ones such as common illnesses and infections (in 1900, about one of every 500 Americans died of tuberculosis; compare that to the rates for AIDS in 2000, when 1 of every 6,000 Americans was just diagnosed with HIV); accidents (one study found that a large proportion of Boston men in the 19th century ended their lives falling off scaffolds, getting caught in machinery, or in other accidents); wars on the frontiers; alcoholism; and everyday interpersonal violence.

Death’s retreat

Americans gained much distance on the Angel of Death in the 20th century. The life expectancy of an American newborn lengthened by about 30 years over the twentieth century. For the average white baby girl, that meant the difference between dying at about age 50 and dying at about age 80. Many factors contributed to greater security of life: increasing physical immunity, much better nutrition, deeper understanding of disease, greater personal and home cleanliness, vaccinations, fewer work accidents, antibiotics and other new medicines, much more effective law enforcement, more schooling, and others. The largest single factor was public construction of facilities to provide clean water and to safely remove sewage. It was the major reason so many fewer American mothers had to bury their children...Certainly, the improvement was not uniform. There are American communities today where death is a lot closer than it is elsewhere, neighborhoods where infant mortality is near third-world levels and deadly violence seems to be at wild-west levels. Even there, as hard as the daily experience seems, life is longer and more secure than generations ago. For most Americans, it has been a dramatic transformation. Cotton Mather’s warning, that “the Deadly Blow may be as near” to the young as the old, makes little sense today. Death, personal experience tells us (although television dramas may tell us otherwise), is a matter for the old.

Greater security of life is one reason why the American birth rate dropped so rapidly in the last century and a half. When we expect all our children to grow up, and almost all do, we decide to have fewer of them. This security is why we look forward to the future and plan as much as we do, why it makes sense to save money for college, to take out a 30-year mortgage, to enroll in a 401K plan, to scout out a retirement home, and so forth. It makes sense because we expect to be there to fulfill those plans....


THIS PROFESSOR HAS A PHENOMENAL BLOG! GO SEE IT:

http://madeinamericathebook.wordpress.com/page/3/

[Demeter]

66. WEE PAUSE NOW FOR ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

KEEP WARM!

[hamerfan]

67. Musical Interlude II

One Note Samba (scat singing) by Ella Fitzgerald:

[xchrom]

68. Tax Amnesty Program Draws 106 Swiss Banks, U.S. Prosecutor Says

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-25/tax-amnesty-program-draws-106-swiss-banks-u-s-prosecutor-says.html


The top U.S. tax prosecutor said that 106 Swiss banks are seeking U.S. amnesty for helping American clients evade taxes, according to three lawyers who heard her speak at a conference in Phoenix.

U.S. prosecutors gave more than 300 Swiss banks until Dec. 31 to seek non-prosecution agreements if they have “reason to believe” they violated tax laws. Banks must disclose how they helped Americans hide assets, hand over data on undeclared accounts and pay penalties. The program is the largest assault in a five-year U.S. crackdown on offshore tax evasion.

Kathryn Keneally, assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s tax division, disclosed the number yesterday while cautioning that the final figure could change, lawyers said. She didn’t name any banks seeking entry into the program, which isn’t open to 14 already under criminal investigation, including Credit Suisse Group AG (CSGN), HSBC Holdings Plc (HSBA) and Basler Kantonalbank. (BSKP)

“She said 106 Swiss banks had signed letters of intent,” said Bryan Skarlatos, of Kostelanetz & Fink LLP in New York. “That was more than most people expected. It’s a result of the banks’ desire to have some certainty regarding their status with DOJ. I believe that DOJ is pleased with the response to the program so far.”

[DemReadingDU]

76. Tiny Switzerland has more than 300 Swiss banks?

Maybe the article is referring to banks operating in Switzerland?

List of banks in Switzerland
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banks_in_Switzerland

[xchrom]

69. Dubai Stocks Lead Mideast Drop on Global Rout; Abu Dhabi Falls

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-26/dubai-shares-drop-most-in-month-on-global-slump-abu-dhabi-falls.html

Dubai’s benchmark stock index retreated the most in more than two months, joining a global equities selloff. Abu Dhabi’s gauge suffered the biggest decline in almost five months.

The DFM General Index (DFMGI) dropped 2.2 percent, the most since Nov. 11, to 3,733.70, at the close in the emirate. The measure, which rose 3.6 percent on Jan. 23, has still more than doubled in the past 12 months. Emaar Properties PJSC (EMAAR), the emirate’s biggest real-estate developer, had the biggest decline in more than two weeks and Dubai Islamic Bank lost 2.6 percent. Abu Dhabi’s gauge slid 1.8 percent, the most since Sept. 5, as the United Arab Emirates’ government said the country’s president is recovering from a stroke.

Today’s declines follow a broader retreat in world markets last week, when China spurred investor concern that global growth will slow. The MSCI Emerging Markets Index lost 2.3 percent last week, while the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index posted the largest weekly slump since June 2012.

“Investors here are following this global weakness,” Montasser Khelifi, a Dubai-based senior manager for global markets at Quantum Investment Bank Ltd., said by phone. The president’s stroke may have “a limited effect on the market,” he said.

[xchrom]

70. BofA Swaps Desk Investigated by CFTC, DOJ, Filing Disclosed

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-25/bofa-swaps-desk-investigated-by-cftc-doj-june-filing-disclosed.html

Bank of America Corp.’s handling of futures trades has been investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, according to a regulatory filing in June.

The probe, reported earlier today by Reuters, was disclosed in a June 14 notice included in the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority BrokerCheck report on Eric Alan Beckwith, a former employee of Bank of America and its Merrill Lynch subsidiary. Bill Halldin, a spokesman for Charlotte, North Carolina-based Bank of America, declined to comment.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of North Carolina is examining “whether it was proper for the swaps desk to execute futures trades prior to the desk’s execution of block future trades on behalf of counterparties,” according to the filing, which cites the bank as the source of the information.

Authorities also are investigating whether Beckwith “provided accurate information” for a probe into the matter by CME Group Inc.’s Chicago Mercantile Exchange. The CFTC is conducting a parallel investigation, according to the filing.

[xchrom]

71. Euro-Area Direct Bank Aid Ready in March: Dijsselbloem

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-25/euro-area-direct-bank-aid-ready-in-march-dijsselbloem.html

Euro-area finance chiefs will complete the rules for direct bank aid from the currency bloc’s backstop in March so the tool is ready when the European Central Bank concludes its assessment of lenders later this year, Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem said.

If a euro-zone government can’t deliver assistance to a bank that requests it, “then the ESM can step in with a banking program or direct recap of banks,” Dijsselbloem said today in Davos, Switzerland. “That instrument we will finalize in March, so that will also be available on strict conditions on the outcome of the asset-quality review” by the ECB.

A long-running debate over backstops has direct implications for the success of the ECB’s Comprehensive Assessment of the largest euro-zone lenders, which it will begin to supervise in November. German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble has warned that allowing the ESM to aid banks directly would require changes to German law.

“The stress test and the asset-quality review must be tough,” Federico Ghizzoni, chief executive officer of UniCredit SpA (UCG), said today on a panel with Dijsselbloem at the World Economic Forum. “And I agree that it would not be accepted by the markets unless we have evidence of some problems to be addressed.”

[xchrom]

72. ROUBINI: We Just Saw A 'Mini Perfect Storm'

http://www.businessinsider.com/nouriel-roubini-mini-perfect-storm-2014-1

Our Q&A is below.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

What was the main theme at Davos this year?

Probably the biggest one was the rising tension between China and Japan. People are starting to make comparisons to 1914: You have a rising power facing an existing power, and in the past that has led to war.

Of course, it's not inevitable, but both the Japanese side and even the Chinese side have made bellicose statements. So I hope diplomacy can succeed but I'd say that that was one of the big stories.

How big of a risk to the world economy are the troubles we've seen in emerging markets recently?

I was in a panel in plenary session about emerging markets, and I said that I think what happened last year might repeat itself this year. You still have, on the one side, concerns about the Chinese economic slowdown, there are concerns about how fast the Fed tapers and raises interest rates, commodities prices are becoming softer, many of these countries have not done structural reforms, and many of them have a lot of fragility, have lax monetary credit and fiscal policy.

And now there is a layer of political uncertainty, with the "Fragile Five" having parliamentary or presidential elections: India, Indonesia, Turkey, Brazil, South Africa. There's also additional political uncertainty coming from other places like Ukraine, places like Argentina, places like Thailand, that affects markets.

So what happened this week was a bit of a mini perfect storm between Chinese PMI of 50, Argentina letting its currency go, noises coming politically from Ukraine, Turkey, and Thailand … so the contagion is not just within emerging markets but also affects advanced economies' equity markets.



Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/nouriel-roubini-mini-perfect-storm-2014-1#ixzz2rVrDPMgC

[xchrom]

73. Americans Will Have To Step Up In The Treasury Bond Market And There's Only One Way To Get Them To

http://www.businessinsider.com/why-yields-must-rise-across-the-curve-2014-1

Americans Will Have To Step Up In The Treasury Bond Market And There's Only One Way To Get Them To Buy

In a couple of earlier discussions (here and here) we talked about a significant buildup of treasury short positions. Since then there are indications that a few of the larger direct players have been covering their short bond exposure, pushing treasury yields lower. If the emerging markets contagion (discussed here) persists, more short covering is expected.

But what about the longer-term outlook for treasuries? As the Fed cuts its buying program, we are left with two major categories of purchasers - foreign and private domestic. Foreign buying is directly linked to growth in current account surplus of key US trading partners, particularly in Asia. And while nations like China and Japan hold enormous amounts of US government paper, it's unclear if they will return to the volumes of purchases from 5 years ago. For example the explosive growth in China's current account surplus through 2009 is no longer there, which should translate to a more modest rate of treasury buying.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-8pMR7PvMYA8/UuLuvaCPNQI/AAAAAAAAdnE/0fCkZE0Kbdc/s1600/China+Current+Account.png

Read more: http://soberlook.com/2014/01/feds-taper-and-weaker-foreign.html#ixzz2rVv3e4CA

[xchrom]

74. Germany Plans To Expand Military Presence In Africa

http://www.businessinsider.com/germany-plans-to-expand-military-in-africa-2014-1

Germany's new defence minister said Sunday her country should engage more strongly in Africa by sending additional military trainers to Mali and supporting the French intervention in Central African Republic.

Ursula von der Leyen said she foresaw boosting the training mission in Mali from its current mandate of 180 personnel, with 99 now on the ground, to up to 250, and deploying a medical services airbus to back up the French mission in CAR.

Asked by news weekly Der Spiegel whether Germany -- often criticised for its post-World War II reluctance to send troops abroad -- should boost its international military engagement, she said "within the framework of our alliances, yes."

In crisis-hit African countries, Germany "cannot look the other way when murder and rape are a daily occurrence, if only for humanitarian reasons," said Germany's first female defence minister, a powerful member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's cabinet.



Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/germany-plans-to-expand-military-in-africa-2014-1#ixzz2rVw0j2IR

[xchrom]

75. China Has Gone From Making The World's Stuff To Buying It

http://www.businessinsider.com/china-from-makers-to-consumers-2014-1

For the better part of 20 years, China has been the world’s factory, and its low labor costs have helped tamp down inflation in developed nations by allowing them to import cheap, Chinese-made goods. The torrent of foreign direct investment (FDI) that flowed into mainland China—some $900 billion since 1990, according to United Nations data—helped finance factories along the southeastern coast that slaked the global thirst for inexpensive goods. It also underpinned phenomenal economic growth. The country’s GDP grew from $357 billion in 1990 to $9.3 trillion last year, a nearly thirty-fold increase in a single generation. But that growth also spurred deep social changes. Millions migrated from inland, rural provinces to coastal cities in search of manufacturing jobs, and some 300 million Chinese vaulted into the middle class. The net result: China’s days as the world’s low-cost factory are numbered. They’re going to be buyers now.
That shift has picked up pace in the last five years, says Robert Prior-Wandesforde, Credit Suisse’s Head of Macroeconomic Research for Southeast Asia and India, who recently published a report entitled, “Asia: FDI Truths, Myths and Prospects.” The latest catalyst, of course, was the global financial crisis, the ensuing economic slowdown that sapped demand for China’s industrial output, and the immediate response from the country’s leaders—a huge dose of Keynesian stimulus.

To a large extent, the strategy worked. Beijing was able to maintain domestic demand and strong economic growth during the worst of the global slowdown, while building infrastructure that in some cases has leapfrogged that of the West. China’s high-speed rail system, for example, may still be relatively small for such a large place, but it far outstrips what the United States has been able to build in the last 50 years. The country’s middle class remains vibrant, and a growing sense of national pride underpins an increasingly muscular foreign policy. But there are limits to what Keynesian spending can do, and there is an emerging consensus in China that the response to the financial crisis was excessive. The country’s new leaders, headed by President Xi Jinping, seem to have concluded that they can no longer rely on government spending, which has caused local government debt to soar, to underpin domestic demand.



Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/china-from-makers-to-consumers-2014-1#ixzz2rVxc1kGS

[Demeter]

77. Forget 'Keep Your Plan' And The Website, Obamacare Taxes Are Worse

MY SIS SENT ME THE LINK...JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT IT COULDN'T GET ANY WORSE....

http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwood/2014/01/04/forget-keep-your-plan-website-obamacare-taxes-are-worse/

There is no shortage of complaints about the Affordable Care Act, the unfortunately named massive health-care law still roiling the nation. Embarrassing website issues and keep-your-doctor-keep-your-plan backtracking have occupied center stage. Add to that a kind of Hunger Games, the system’s voracious need to sign up young people to offset the cost for others...It must be underscored that this isn’t only the President’s law. Congress passed it, and it is hard to get past the naming ironies so prevalent in Washington. Taxes and fees abound, and when it comes out of your pocket, it matters little whether a tax or fee label is applied. In 2014, Americans must dig deeper for the health care they need in ways that don’t meet the eye.

As with many tax laws–and on many fundamental levels, the Affordable Care Act is a tax law–determining exactly where the tax burden falls isn’t always clear. One of the new taxes funds the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI). (I wish this institute included “affordable” for it makes a better acronym.) This 2% levy on health plans is expected to collect a cool $8?billion this year alone. By 2018, annual receipts from the little 2% climb to $14.3 billion. Over a decade, it reaps over $100 billion. Here comes the zinger. Self-insured employers (public companies and 4 of every 5 employers with over 500 employees) don’t have to pay it, according to IRS rules. Oh, but the health plans pay it, right? That is the Obama administration’s official position. In fact, though, as is plainly no surprise, the insurers pass it along to those who pay the premiums. And that means small employers and people who buy their own insurance have to pay. This is one of the worst features of the new law. The little guy–small business and the self-employed–have to pay. Kaiser Health News said the new taxes end up on customer bills. One customer’s bill went up by $23.14 a month, or $277.68 annually, for the tax. It meant the person’s monthly premium rose from $322.26 to $345.40.

More taxes? Sure, come on down. A $2 fee per policy too, also earmarked for the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute. Insurers also pay a 3.5% user fee to sell medical plans on the HealthCare.gov site. American taxpayers must also pay a 2.3% medical-device tax. There is no doubt where the burden of this tax falls. It will inflate the cost of pacemakers, prosthetic limbs, stents, and more. That isn’t the end of the higher taxes. Income and payroll taxes go up to fuel the enormous machinery that Obamacare has become. When you pay medical expenses out-of-pocket you should get an income-tax deduction. Americans may be used to deducting medical expenses that exceed 7.5% of their annual income. But now they must eat another 2.5%. The threshold jumps to 10% under the Affordable Care Act. That costs taxpayers about $15 billion over 10 years.

Then there’s the new Medicare tax. Under the Affordable Care Act, individual tax filers earning more than $200,000 and families earning more than $250,000 pay a 0.9% Medicare surtax on top of the existing 1.45% Medicare payroll tax. Then to cap off all this good news, they pay an extra 3.8% Medicare tax on unearned income, such as investment dividends, rental income and capital gains. If you sold your house in 2012, you paid a maximum 15% federal capital gain tax on profits above $250,000 per individual or $500,000 per couple. Now, depending on your income level, you may pay as much as 23.8% on gains above that level.

[Demeter]

78. Why Is The Public Being Stonewalled On Serious ObamaCare Fixes?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/scottatlas/2014/01/26/why-is-the-public-being-stonewalled-on-serious-obamacare-fixes/


...And what has been the president’s reaction? More likely due to the undeniable reality of the situation rather than anything else, President Obama has shown some flexibility, at least enough to make short-term changes in the ACA where the law is failing. Indeed, the administration has backpedaled on several deadlines and even deleted some parts of the ACA since it officially became law. In 2011, the administration scrapped the CLASS program designed to provide unlimited, lifetime benefits for long-term care. HHS Secretary Sebelius ultimately admitted it was too costly and would not work, even though it represented a key source of the ACA’s projected savings. Then, HHS urgently granted more than a thousand waivers to prevent widespread loss of coverage and substantial premium increases caused by ObamaCare’s own rules. Such waivers were granted to unions, states, and corporations that cover about 4 million people to avoid “significant increases in premiums or significant decreases in access to health care benefits”… “needed to meet the annual (ObamaCare) limit requirement” wrote John Dicken, Director of Health Care Issues for the Government Accountability Office, in his letter to Congress. The administration has given temporary amnesties to businesses, too. In July, the White House announced a one-year delay in the “employer mandate” that requires businesses with more than 50 employees to provide health insurance or pay a fine. Then, in November, small businesses were also temporarily pardoned, so that they do not need to offer their workers online enrollment through the exchanges until 2015. Lately, multiple postponements in the enforcement of the law’s penalties and deadlines were instituted, including delaying deadlines to enroll and pay for insurance – from December 15 all the way until March 31 (so far) to buy coverage and avoid the law’s penalty (“tax”). We have now seen the government grant an exemption from one of its most fundamental components, the individual mandate, the requirement in the health care law that individual Americans have insurance as of January 1. According to healthcare.gov, the millions of Americans whose insurance was cancelled by ObamaCare will not have to pay any fine if their “individual insurance plan was cancelled and (you) believe other (ObamaCare) Marketplace plans are unaffordable”.

Clearly, there has been no shortage of pivots and ad hoc modifications to the ACA by the Obama administration. In fact, the president is coming under fire from eleven states’ attorneys and numerous legal scholars for acting outside the boundaries of his constitutional authority to unilaterally and selectively delay deadlines and modify parts of the law, regardless of the need for those delays. Beyond those important legal questions, critics also point to the seemingly brazen political motivation for relief from isolated parts of the ACA, as the Obama administration conveniently pushed back enforcement of rules until after the 2014 Congressional elections.

Regardless of the legitimacy of the administration’s actions, the shifts were effected because the law was either literally impossible to obey as written, or because the consequences of the law became embarrassingly indefensible for President Obama personally....But what remains disturbing is that this president does not seem to be interested in truly fixing the ACA in response to the general public’s mounting concerns and the law’s undeniable flaws. Preliminary estimates indicate that only 11 percent of the 2.2 million people buying insurance on the ObamaCare exchanges were previously uninsured, and most cite lack of affordability as the reason for not purchasing. If the honest goal is to increase the population with insurance, improve access to health care and control costs, then some of the most destructive provisions in the ACA – specific rules that raise insurance premiums and jeopardize coverage for existing policyholders – should be reconsidered...

AND THE LIST AT LENGTH CAN BE FOUND AT THE LINK

[antigop]

80. high-deductible plans are not the answer! nt

[Demeter]

79. NSA MOVES THE WORLD

http://assets.amuniversal.com/904334c067550131e0d1005056a9545d