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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Although America's economic malaise has been in place for decades, since labor is exchanged via "money", ANY sudden disruption of money flow or currency value will cause sudden kinks in employment as well.

A disruption in money flow because of financial crisis will cause unemployment immediately. However, loss of currency value will cause inflation and (in a panic situation) hyperinflation for the USA because we are dependent on imports for so many items.

It seems to me that our economic malaise (jobs shifting overseas and money being conveyored up to the elite and out of general circulation) was the approximate cause of financial crisis: To paper over (so to speak!) lost production/ lost wages the policy became an extension of credit/ creation of debt beyond all reason or hope of payback. When the presence of so many bad debts based on speculative values (of real estate in this case) came to a crashing halt was when money flow locked up.

This problems was "solved" by creating MORE debt. But it seems to me that the creation of debt is laying the foundation for a currency crisis, when nations, institutions, and individuals realize that they're holding instruments of debt that will never be made whole.

This is the crises that many people in the alt-sphere are worried about. And The Fed, by backstopping the banks and encouraging reserves above and beyond what is required by law, is fighting the last war but not 1) solving the problem or 2) preparing for the next crisis.

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Sometimes I imagine that all reasonable people understand that an exorbitant National Debt is not sustainable.

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But then I observe Election results. The Department of Educamation has done a good job of dumbing down America, removing Math from the collective comprehension.

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And the Unions did a good job in the 70s and 80s of pushing jobs out of America.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

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Sometimes I imagine that all reasonable people understand that an exorbitant National Debt is not sustainable.

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Agreed.

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But then I observe Election results. The Department of Educamation has done a good job of dumbing down America, removing Math from the collective comprehension.

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That's not the problem. We have been collectively propagandized into mass consumption, and beguiled into believing that debt doesn't count. It wasn't the schools that did that, but corporate and bank advertising, and the steady erosion of buying power over those decades of economic predation.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

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Sometimes I imagine that all reasonable people understand that an exorbitant National Debt is not sustainable.

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Agreed.

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But then I observe Election results. The Department of Educamation has done a good job of dumbing down America, removing Math from the collective comprehension.

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That's not the problem. We have been collectively propagandized into mass consumption, and beguiled into believing that debt doesn't count. It wasn't the schools that did that, but corporate and bank advertising, and the steady erosion of buying power over those decades of economic predation.

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And the Unions did a good job in the 70s and 80s of pushing jobs out of America.

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So, what is your solution, JSF? That we should be content to work for a smaller bowl of rice than the average Chinese or Vietnamese? That's what is called the "race to the bottom".

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Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:

So your accurate analogy would be the Union demanding 10 Rice bowls for doing less work than the Chinese worker does for 1. Or demanding 25 Rice bowls for doing less work than the Vietnamese worker does for 1.
Your claim of Race To the Bottom does not hold up to mild scrutiny.

The Union demanding such exorbitant funds that it became actually cheaper to pay to ship all materials across the ocean to the opposite side of the planet, have the work or assembly performed there, then pay to ship the finished product back across the planet.
Genius.

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Originally posted by reaverfan:
Thanks, Trump.

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Son, Nixon went off the gold standard and created the petrodollar. He was the first American President to visit China.

BushI negotiated NAFTA.

Clinton pushed NAFTA thru, and created a special trade relationship which China to pave the way for accession into the WTO. (he also got rid of Glass Steagall and signed the Commodities Futures Trading Act, which made credit default swaps possible. Oh, the mischief that man created!)

China joined the WTO under BushII.

Obama negotiated the TTP and TTIP ... see where this is going?

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Son, Nixon went off the gold standard and created the petrodollar. He was the first American President to visit China.
BushI negotiated NAFTA.
Clinton pushed NAFTA thru, and created a special trade relationship which China to pave the way for accession into the WTO. (he also got rid of Glass Steagall and signed the Commodities Futures Trading Act, which made credit default swaps possible. Oh, the mischief that man created!)
China joined the WTO under BushII.
Obama negotiated the TTP and TTIP ... see where this is going?

Originally posted by GSTRING:
Yes, I sure do. Another SIGGY whinging thread, whinging about x or y or z. And who can save us? Who has the answers to all our problems? See where this is going? Again?

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Originally posted by second:

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

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Sometimes I imagine that all reasonable people understand that an exorbitant National Debt is not sustainable.

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Agreed.

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But then I observe Election results. The Department of Educamation has done a good job of dumbing down America, removing Math from the collective comprehension.

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That's not the problem. We have been collectively propagandized into mass consumption, and beguiled into believing that debt doesn't count. It wasn't the schools that did that, but corporate and bank advertising, and the steady erosion of buying power over those decades of economic predation.

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May I suggest that the IRS force Americans to learn about their debts? "According to new estimates by the Internal Revenue Service, tax evasion is a pretty lucrative business, costing the federal government on average $458 billion per year between 2008 through 2010. That’s a slight increase from the previous estimate, issued in 2006, of $450 billion. The feds call that dollar figure the “tax gap” and say the rise is the result of better measurement rather than Americans engaging in more tax evasion."
http://fortune.com/2016/04/29/tax-evasion-cost/

Maybe the IRS could teach them to engage in less tax evasion? It is better to learn that lesson late than not at all.

"The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has identified small business and sole proprietorship employees as the largest contributors to the tax gap between what Americans owe in federal taxes and what the federal government receives."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_evasion_in_the_United_States

The wikipedia helpfully estimated $3.44 trillion was Lost to Tax Evasion from 2001 to 2010. Getting that money back from the tax evaders would certainly teach them a hard lesson about too much debt, don't you think? Unfortunately, the IRS’s budget has been repeatedly cut since 2011, forcing it to reduce its enforcement staff by a third. The result? I.R.S. Tax Fraud Cases Plummet After Budget Cuts. Obviously, there are lessons not being learned nor being taught, even.
www.nytimes.com/2018/10/01/business/economy/irs-tax-fraud-audit.html


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Originally posted by 1kiki:
I can't think of a solution. The essential conundrum of profit is that the worker can't afford to buy the product they make. (That is the very definition of profit.)

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Stop your fucking whining. You could live in Russia.

T

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Originally posted by REAVERFAN:

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Stop your fucking whining. You could live in Russia.

T

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Tell us about Indiana, 6.

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Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
“We need to find a new marginal buyer of Treasuries as central banks and banks overall are exiting stage left,” said Glen Capelo, who spent more than three decades on Wall Street bond-trading desks and is now a managing director at Mischler Financial. “It’s still not clear yet who that will be, but we know they’re going to be a lot more price sensitive.”

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
The solution is to get out of the competition. We have to ask ourselves the fundamental question: Is the economy supposed to serve the people, or are people supposed to serve the economy?

Putting people on a treadmill to hell just so that some people can get ultra-wealthy is not "serving the people". That is one of the reasons why I think it's so important for nations to maintain their sovereign powers to direct their own economy. If you can't do that, nations will just be pitted against each other by the transnational elites.

Also, why it's so important for nations to be as self-sufficient as possible, and with a near-neutral balance of trade. It's bad for a nation such as ours to be indebted up to our eyeballs to almost every other nation in the world. We have almost every resource required to intelligently run a modern economy, people who are out of decent jobs, and crying unmet needs. So what's the problem?

OTOH, basing your economy on exports is a problem too ... it distorts your economy to produce for a foreign market, and if that foreign market should dry up then your economy stumbles too: Just look at China in 2008, when they discovered the fatal flaw in their export-to-the-west plan.

It comes down to Shakespeare: "Neither a borrower (trade deficit) nor a lender (trade surplus) be"


*****

The IMF has been planning for the death of the petrodollar for years. They've already set up a system call Special Drawing Rights (SDR) which is to serve as the "new" reserve currency. China fought hard to, and succeeded in getting included in the SDR basket. I think that's a mistake. I look at Russia, which is working hard to isolate itself from whatever chaos may erupt. They've paid down their debts, created an electronic exchange free from SWIFT, signed deals in bilateral currency swaps, and are working towards self-sufficiency. They're battening down the hatches. I think we should too, but nobody will admit that there's even a problem so ...

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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

"The messy American environment, where most people don't agree, is perfect for people like me. I CAN DO AS I PLEASE." - SECOND

America is an oligarchy http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876 .

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Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
We'll be fine.

I seriously doubt TPTB want to turn this into Mad Max world.

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Falsus in unum, falsus in omnibus

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oftwominds-Charles Hugh Smith
Wednesday, December 28, 2022
My One Prediction for 2023

The question that should be on our minds is: how are my household's buffers holding up?

Lists of predictions for the new year are reliably popular. Here's 10 predictions, there's 17 predictions, over here we have 23 and a half... let's strip it all down to one prediction: everyone's predictions will be wrong because 2023 isn't going to follow anyone's script.

There are several reasons for this. One is that the vast majority of predictions are based on historical comparisons to previous eras. If the current era is unique in its combination of dynamics and instability, previous pathways are not going to accurately predict what happens next.

Recency bias leads us astray. The past 50 years of relatively mild weather, the past 40 years of Bull Markets, the past 30 years of financialization and the supremacy of monetary policy--all of these offer a warm and fuzzy confidence that the future will be comfortingly similar to the recent past. This assumption works pretty well in stable eras but fails dismally in destabilizing, transitional eras.

Stability and instability are not evenly distributed, so every cherry-picked bias can be supported. You predict slow sales? Here's an empty shopping mall. See, I'm right! You predict a return to the good old days? Here's a crowded street fair. See, I'm right!

Those who happen to be living inside an island of coherence are inside a bubble that they mistakenly think encompasses the entire world. This is especially prevalent in the top 5% who shape the narratives that influence the rest of us. If real estate is sinking in their little corner of the world, they predict real estate will crash everywhere.

If everything's rosy in their protected enclave, they predict a mild recession and steady growth, blah blah blah.

Those living in a place that has lost its coherence and stability see the world differently. Systems are breaking down and when they are restored, they're not the same: they're less reliable, more expensive and prone to decay / decoherence.

This tracks the core-periphery model I often reference. Those in the still-coherent core cherry-pick evidence that all is well in the decohering periphery while those in the periphery expect the rot to spread quickly to the core.

It depends on how much is left in the buffers protecting core systems. As the diagram below illustrates, a system's ability to bounce back (restore stability and function) depends on the robustness of its buffers: how much labor, capital, expertise, spare parts, etc. can be rushed into service to repair damage and restore functionality.

The quality and quantity of these buffers are invisible to outsiders. When staffing has eroded and there's no one available to call up, when spare parts have been depleted, when budget constraints, corruption and managerial incompetence have stripped the system of expertise and the willingness to sacrifice, the system breaks down and cannot be restored because the means to do so are no longer available.

Outsiders clinging to recency bias are thus shocked when systems they assumed were rock-solid no longer function reliably. Insiders are amazed the duct-tape has held this long while outsiders are stunned to learn that student nurses are being passed off as certified nurses and the maintenance of critical systems has completely collapsed.

As I explained in How Things Fall Apart, The Blowback from Stripmining Labor for 45 Years Is Just Beginning and The "Let It Rot" Death Spiral, the competent are leaving in droves, leaving the ambitiously incompetent at the wheel while those keeping the whole mess glued together are burning out and retiring, quitting or downsizing to gigs with less pressure and more control of their work.

Systems that are still competently managed with ample buffers will maintain their coherence. The systems that are incompetently managed, riddled with corruption and favoritism and coasting on buffers that have been worn down and are now wafer-thin will break down and lose coherence and functionality.

This process is uneven and unpredictable. In some cases, the core will shield itself from the decay and breakdown in the periphery, in other cases the falling dominoes will destabilize the core that everyone in the bubble thought was permanently safe and secure.

The question that should be on our minds is: how are my household's buffers holding up? What resources do we have in reserve when systems lose their reliability and predictability?

Counting on the demi-gods in central banks to save us is not a substitute for strengthening your own buffers. There's no substitute for owning and controlling everything that counts in your life, and developing trusted personal networks of reliable, trustworthy, productive people. Those are the foundations of self-reliance.

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THUGR: Poor Polish Russian Colaberator signym. She is forever predicting, praying for, Americas' downfall. Sorry to disapoint ya moron but America is the most stable major country at this point in time.

That, and watching you continually posting how well Russia is doing at this time shows you are clueless.

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Here lies a fallen god.
His fall was not a small one.
We did but build his pedestal
A narrow and a tall one





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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE someone poor - William Blake

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

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THUGR: Poor Polish Russian Collaborator signym. She is forever predicting, praying for, Americas' downfall. Sorry to disappoint ya moron but America is the most stable major country at this point in time.

That, and watching you continually posting how well Russia is doing at this time, both militarily and economically shows you are clueless. Someone not to be taken seriously.

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THUGR, I think you miss my point completely. I'm not cheering for our collapse, I'm WARNING AGAINST IT.

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Nope, don't think so. I want to thank you though. When you use my coffee emoticon in your posts, you are showing me it bugs the shit out of you. Good to know, because that's what I was going for comrade.

T

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THUGR: Poor Polish Russian Collaborator signym. She is forever predicting, praying for, Americas' downfall. Sorry to disappoint ya moron but America is the most stable major country at this point in time.

That, and watching you continually posting how well Russia is doing at this time, both militarily and economically shows you are clueless. Someone not to be taken seriously.

SIGNY: THUGR, I think you miss my point completely. I'm not cheering for our collapse, I'm WARNING AGAINST IT.

THUGR: Nope, don't think so.

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On The Cusp Of A Global Liquidity Crisis

Wednesday, Jan 04, 2023 - 11:21 AM

Authored by James Rickards via DailyReckoning.com,

Is there a financial calamity worse than a severe recession in early 2023? Unfortunately, the answer is “yes” and it’s coming quickly.

That greater calamity is a global liquidity crisis. Before considering the dynamics of a global liquidity crisis, it’s critical to distinguish between a liquidity crisis and a recession. A recession is part of the business cycle.

It’s characterized by higher unemployment, declining GDP growth, inventory liquidation, business failures, reduced discretionary spending by consumers, reduced business investment, higher savings rates (for those still employed), larger loan losses, and declining asset prices in stocks and real estate.

The length and depth of a recession can vary widely. And although recessions have certain common characteristics, they also have diverse causes. Sometimes the Federal Reserve blunders in monetary policy and holds interest rates too high for too long (that seems to be happening now).

Sometimes an external supply shock occurs which causes a recessionary reaction. This happened after the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973, which caused a severe recession from November 1973 to March 1975. Recessions can also arise when asset bubbles pop such as the stock market crash in 1929 or the bursting of a real estate bubble caused by the Savings & Loan crisis in 1990.

Whatever the cause, the course of a recession is somewhat standard. Eventually asset prices bottom, those with cash go shopping for bargains in stocks, inventory liquidations end, and consumers resume some discretionary spending. These tentative steps eventually lead to a recovery and new expansion often with help from fiscal policy.

Global financial crises are entirely different. They emerge suddenly and unexpectedly to most market participants, although there are always warning signs for those who know where to look. They usually become known to the public and regulators through the failure of a major institution, which could be a bank, hedge fund, money market fund or commodity trader.

While the initial failure makes headlines, the greater danger lies ahead in the form of contagion. Capital markets are densely connected. Banks lend to hedge funds. Hedge funds speculate in markets for stocks, bonds, currencies and commodities both directly and in derivative form.

Money market funds buy government debt. Banks guarantee some instruments held by those funds. Primary dealers (big banks) underwrite government debt issues but finance those activities in repo markets where the purchased securities are pledged for more cash to buy more securities in long chains of rehypothecated collateral.

You get the point. The linkages go on and on.

The Federal Reserve has printed $6 trillion as part of its monetary base (M0). But the total notional value of the derivatives of all banks in the world is estimated at $1 quadrillion. For those unfamiliar, $1 quadrillion = $1,000 trillion. This means the total value of derivatives is 167 times all of the money printed by the Fed.

And the Fed money supply is itself leveraged on a small sliver of only $60 billion of capital. So, the Fed’s balance sheet is leveraged 100-to-1, and the derivatives market is leveraged 167-to-1 to the Fed money supply, which means the derivatives market is leveraged 16,700-to-1 in terms of Fed capital.

Nervous yet?

Experts say, so what? These numbers are not new and have been even more stretched at certain times in the past. Simply because the financial system is highly leveraged and densely connected does not mean it’s ready to collapse. That’s true. Still, it does mean the system could collapse catastrophically and unexpectedly at any time. All it takes to collapse the system is a shock failure leading quickly to panic.

Margin calls are issued on losing position and immediate payment is demanded. Overnight repos are not rolled over. Overnight deposits are not renewed, and repayment is required. Everyone wants his money back at once. Assets are dumped to meet repayment obligations, which causes collapses in stock and bond markets, which causes even more losses and liquidations among banks and traders.

Suddenly all eyes are on the Fed for easy money and on Congress for bailouts, guarantees and more spending. We’ve seen this pattern in 1994 (Mexico Tequila Crisis), 1998 (RussiaLTCM crisis), and 2008 (Lehman Brothers-AIG crisis).

Note that two of those three most recent financial crises were not accompanied by a recession. There was no recession in 1994 and none in 1998. Only the 2008 global financial crisis happened to coincide with a severe recession.

The point is that recessions and financial crises are both bad, but they are different and do not always come together. When they do, as in 2008, stocks can easily decline 50% or more. We may be looking at such a situation today. This brings us to the key question:

If financial markets are almost always highly leveraged but financial crises occur once every eight years on average, what signs can investors look for that indicate a crisis is coming and conditions are not just business as usual for financial markets?

One of the most powerful warning signs is an inverted yield curve. This signal was last seen in 2007 just ahead of the 2008 financial crisis. A normal yield curve slopes upward from left to right reflecting higher interest rates at longer maturities. That makes sense.

If I lend you money for ten years, I want a higher interest rate than if I lend it for two years to compensate me for added risks from the longer maturity such as inflation, policy changes, default, and more.

When a yield curve is inverted, that means that longer maturities have lower interest rates. That happens, but it’s rare. It means that market participants are expecting economic adversity in the form of recession or liquidity risk. They want to lock in long-term yields even if they’re lower than short-term yields because they expect yields will be even lower in the future.

In a nutshell, investors see trouble ahead.

Other ominous signs include sharp declines in the dollar-denominated reserve positions in U.S. Treasury securities of China, Japan, India and other major economies. Naïve observers take this as a sign that those countries are trying to “dump dollars” and dislike the role of the dollar as the leading global reserve currency.

In reality, the opposite is true. They’re desperately short of dollars and are selling Treasuries as a way to get cash to prop up their own banking systems.

These are some of the many signs pointing to a global liquidity crisis. As we’ve learned in the past, these liquidity crises seem to emerge overnight, but that’s not true. They actually take a year or more to develop until they hit a critical stage at which point, they burst into the headlines.

The 1998 Russia-LTCM crisis started in June 1997 in Thailand. The 2008 Lehman Brothers crisis started in the spring of 2007 with reported mortgage losses by HSBC. The warning signs are always there in advance. Most observers either don’t know what the signs are or are simply not looking.

Well, I am looking and what I see is a rare convergence of a severe recession and a liquidity crisis at the same time as happened in 2008.

It’s coming.

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Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
Sec. Buttigieg says he can 'safely' walk dog, but DC native is more frightened: 'Prisoner in your own home'

https://www.foxnews.com/media/sec-buttigieg-says-safely-walk-dog-dc-na
tive-frightened-prisoner-home

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Originally posted by SIGNYM: Saturday, December 22, 2018 7:00 AM

SIGNYM
I just wanted to share an insight and clarify my own thinking on the topic. Peter Schiff (the perennial gold bug) made a distinction between and financial collapse and a currency collapse. I think I heard it before, but it didn't stick.

So a lot of people tend to conflate economic collapse, financial collapse, and currency collapse; and while the three are interrelated they're not the same.

ECONOMIC COLLAPSE
What is an economic collapse? Well, I think in order to define that, you have to define "economy". At it's heart, an economy is the exchange of labor ... an exchange among people of goods produced (by labor) and services provided (by labor) so that people can take advantage of division of labor, economies of scale, and distribution of resources in order to have a better quality of life than can be provided by each individual attempting to produce their own necessities. Since I'm an advocate of economies being directed by democratic nation-states. I would judge economies nation-by-nation, not at some overall "international" level ... frankly, I don't care how well the Chinese are doing if Americans are suffering. So MY metric for judging the health of a (national) economy is by assessing the quality of life of its citizens AND its balance of trade.

If people are living a decent life and the balance of trade is near-neutral, I would judge that economy at doing a good job of providing for the needs and some wants of its citizens through exchange of labor within and outside of its own economy.

By that metric, the USA economy collapsed a long time ago. Our balance of trade went into the shitter around 1976.


It's not for lack of resources, and it's not for lack of people, it's due to the economic policies of the government, which reflect the economic desires of the elite.

FINANCIAL COLLAPSE
Like an economic collapse, in order to judge whether the financial structure is collapsing you must for decide what "finances" are. Well, "finances" are the flow of money. There seem to be a lot of ways to judge the health of finances and financialism ... mostly related to stock, bond, or real estate speculation, or to the amount of money in circulation ... but best way to judge the flow of money is called the "velocity of money", which measures how often each dollar in circulation changes hands. When the flow locks up is when a crisis occurs.



This chart is continued here, but you need to click on the link

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2V

What the charts show is money velocity reached its peak in 1997 but has been dropping ever since. It took a precipitous drop in 2007, but has continued to drop like a stone ever since, reaching lows not seen... ever, in this chart. By THIS chart, the financial collapse hasn't even been solved yet.

Now, the solution to a financial collapse is to put more money into circulation. The Fed did a half-step in that direction: they bought a lot of banks' bad loans in order to refill their coffers with money and dropped interest rates to near-zero, but then they paid banks interest in order to keep that money on their coffers. So unless you were one of those lucky ones at the money-pipeline outflow and could access loans at near-zero interest rates (like corporations taking on debt for stock buybacks) that money never made it into widespread circulation.

CURRENCY COLLAPSE
This is an entirely different kettle of fish than a financial collapse. In a financial collapse, the flow of money stops. The answer is to "print more money" and lower interest rates.

In a CURRENCY collapse, faith in your currency collapses: Demand for government bonds drops because nobody thinks that you'll make good on your loans, or that if you DO pay on your loans it will be in currency that's worth substantially less that today. The metric of THAT is the bond yield: When short-term bonds are worth more than long-term bonds it means that other nations and institutions have lost faith in the long-term prospects of your currency. That is called a (bond) yield curve inversion.

The answer to that is to RAISE interest rates and to REDUCE the amount of money in circulation, making your currency worth MORE ... the opposite of what you would do for a financial collapse.

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THUGR: Poor comrade signym. Her wish to see America fail; just keeps punching her in the face.

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THUGR: Add to the good news of the DOW setting records,

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THUGR: manufacturing is taking off big time in this country. Good paying blue color jobs are going to be abundant to the point we won't have enough workers to fill them.

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