Once more for everyone who’s got even the lightest slightest shade of green in their thoughts and dreams and fingers, I’ll try and address the issue of why going or being green is a futile undertaking as long as it isn’t accompanied by a drive for a radical upheaval of the economic system we live in. Thinking we can be green – that is to say, achieve anything real when it comes to restoring our habitat to a healthy state
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US President Barack Obama begins a three-day visit to Japan on Wednesday. As for what he’s going to be talking about, I can give you a hint or two. First of all, there are ongoing tensions between Japan and China, something both nations have a very long history of. And second, these tensions risk flaring up as they move towards intensifying domestic economic troubles, as their exports dwindle. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe may himself be a nationalist, for what that’s
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LEAP2020 is a European political/economic research institute that doesn’t shy away from volunteering opinions on the topics it researches, something that works both for and against it. It publishes a new GEAB (Global Europe Anticipation Bulletin) report every month. I thought I’d share the ‘public announcement’ of the April 2014 issue with you, because it provides a clear idea of what some people think is going on with regards to the US/EU involvement in Ukraine and the war of verbal
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There are times when time needs to stand still for a seemingly fleeting moment that lasts until the end of time. Yesterday was such a time. But it didn’t happen. Nothing stood still. News was slow coming in, and trickled on as the hours passed, to reach a minor crescendo later, that the world’s greatest living writer had died. And I know it’s because I’m an incurable romantic (I know because incurable romantics are not that stupid) that I feel
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Last week we saw that China exports were down 18% in February and 6.6% in March, and that US mortgage originations are at their lowest level in 14 years. This week, the scary numbers just keep rolling in. Still, markets are up because Beijing has claimed a 7.4% GDP growth rate for 2014, and initial jobless claims in the US are falling somewhat, and most of all because everyone wants to believe in the recovery because they’re to scared of
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I did an interview last Saturday with KMO at C-Realm, who serves up a great free podcast every week on a wide variety of topics. Here’s his description of this one: KMO welcomes Ilargi of The Automatic Earth to the C-Realm to talk about the sorry state of watchdog journalism, the unhelpful rhetoric of American politicians and pundits around Vladimir Putin’s actions with regard to Ukraine, the media’s failure to examine the US role in bringing down the Yanukovych government,
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On a day like this, when Bloomberg runs the hilarious and preposterous headline “Euro Periphery Emerges as Haven as Bonds Rise”, and markets are up because the Chinese government announces a 7.4% GDP growth number, which might as well be 4.7% for all we know given the opaqueness and rosy bubbly with which Beijing is known to “calculate” these numbers, let’s talk about something entirely different. And what better to talk about than a topic I know beforehand will antagonize
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Update: Michael Ruppert Has Committed Suicide RIP Let’s start the day with the best – or should I say the funniest – graph I’ve seen in a while, picked up from Tyler Durden. It speaks for itself. If this means things are going according to plan, we might want to wonder what the plan is. American markets went up yesterday, and it was suggested that this had something to do with March retail numbers, which were up 1.1%. But then
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It’s hard enough to be optimistic about the future of mankind, and his habitat, on any given day of the week. And then there are days when it’s impossible not to lean towards utter despair. There was a meeting in Washington this weekend, organized by the IMF, during which all kinds of economists discussed how to squeeze more and faster growth out of the world, and it people. Because, as all economists have learned, and just about everyone else believes,
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Well, stocks are down substantially over the past few days, with internet and biotech taking big hits, and we see people like Marc Faber and Dennis Gartman urging people to get out of stocks. Something’s definitely going on. Time for a bunch of charts. And let’s start with a few of the comparison ones that everybody loves to hate, where you overlay when time period on another, and suggest similarities between both periods. This first one was used by Tyler
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