The Automatic Earth

Lee Angle Fort Worth Flood 1949 7th Street Theatre in Fort Worth Texas, corner of 7th Street and University, known locally as "Six Points" . First of all: the answer to the title question is, as far as I can see: no. But it's almost certainly a whole lot more than the $50 billion reported today, and that $36.5 trillion amount doesn’t come from thin air; it appears in a number of news articles about Sandy. All in all, the

Nicole Foss talks to Max Keiser in On The Edge at PressTV The Automatic Earth's Senior Editor Nicole Foss talks to Max Keiser again, this time on PressTV's On The Edge with Max Keiser. Nicole and Max discuss Europe's shrinking pie, Canada's bursting bubble, the ongoing global debt deflation, the eternal tug of war between greed and fear, the greater fool, and the similarities the demise of the banking system in 14th century Venice has with Washington DC today. Interestingly,

Kükator Sumo wrestlers performing dohyo-iri Wikimedia Commons Japan is not a good example of how deflation typically plays out. As Ilargi points out, they were an exporting powerhouse exporting into the biggest consumption boom the world has ever seen. They also had a very large pile of money to burn through building their four lane highways from nowhere to nowhere, since they were the world's largest creditor when their bubble burst in 1989. This is clearly not our situation. No

While everybody was asleep in a grandiose globalization and unification dream, a dream whose benefits and desirability were – and still are – hardly ever questioned if at all, separate languages and cultures simply remained what they were: separate. Now that globalization starts to show its dark and ugly flipside of economic depression, a repeal of many unifications and a split-up of larger entities, created for economic and political reasons only, into their smaller components, is inevitable. Unfortunately, the architects

ERASWK Corrosion of the Celestial Sphere Woodrow Wilson Memorial, Ariana Park, Palais des Nations, Geneva, Switzerland Wikimedia While we're all watching Spain and Greece, their alleged saviors in the rich core of the eurozone are starting to show serious signs of corrosion. This makes all the hollow words and promises coming from the world of troikas and politics sound even emptier than they already did. Not that anyone in Holland or Germany seems to even be prepared to think their