Oct 312013
 
 October 31, 2013  Posted by at 9:47 am Finance 9 Responses »
How Can We Have Record Bad Loans And Record Excess Liquidity At The Same Time?

Dorothea Lange Trunk Show February 1936 “Dust Bowl drought refugees in California”We can read these days that Spain has come out of its recession. The Bank of Spain reported last week that GDP expanded by 0.1% in Q3. But in a country with 26% unemployment and 55% youth unemployment, such statements are devoid of any real meaning. They’re mere technicality niceties. Because if anything screams recession, it’s those kinds of unemployment numbers. Moreover, where do you think that 0.1%, even

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Oct 302013
 
 October 30, 2013  Posted by at 10:17 am Finance 12 Responses »
Still Feel Confident About Collecting Your Pension After This?

If your answer to that question is affirmative, I suggest you take a good hard look at what’s coming out of Detroit these days. Why don’t we just call it a bail-in model, not unlike Cyprus, where the waters are tested for forcing parties who historically thought they were safe from cuts, find they no longer are. And if you think Detroit is the only American city that has these kinds of problems, think again. It’s merely the first, count

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Oct 292013
 
 October 29, 2013  Posted by at 10:15 am Energy 5 Responses »
Energy Is A Power Game - 3 (They Cheat And They Lie)

My personal view of how communities should manage the production and distribution of their basic necessities is very different from what has become the accepted model in the western world. The running mantra says that private industries are better at anything and everything than governments are, and hence, than communities are. What I think is that even if that were true, and from what I see it’s much more of an ideology than a proven fact, even if it were

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Oct 252013
 
 October 25, 2013  Posted by at 9:45 am Energy 2 Responses »
Energy Is A Power Game - 2 (Britain Is Losing)

Esther Bubley “BusStop” September 1943 “Idlers in front of the Greyhound bus stop between Memphis and Chattanooga”In the first part of this series,, I talked about rising energy prices in the UK, and the government’s plans to increase supply with yet to be built nuclear plants, for which deals are in the process of concluding with construction largely to be done by a French consortium led by EDF, and financing coming from a range of Chinese investors, who will, if

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Oct 232013
 
 October 23, 2013  Posted by at 10:13 am Energy 14 Responses »
Energy Is A Power Game - 1

Lately, after I’ve written yet another article that focuses on Britain, I pledge to myself that it’ll be the last one for a long while. Only to find that I need to do more, simply because what comes out of Albion is both so nuts and so indicative of what will soon happen in many other places that I can’t afford to not use it as a cautionary tale for people presently living in these ‘other places’. It’s simply about

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Oct 182013
 
 October 18, 2013  Posted by at 9:41 am Finance 14 Responses »
Winter In America Gets Colder : Why We Choose Poverty

Lewis Wickes Hine “Tough Los Angeles newsboys” May 1915 “Nine-year-old newsie and his 7-year-old brother ‘Red’” Broadly speaking, if we look at what has happened to the world’s rich economies from 1945 to today, we can say that in the first 30 years, 1945-1975, real wealth – as expressed in standard of living – across the board, for the vast majority of people, increased. Over the next 30 years, 1975-2005, the standard of living still seemed to rise, but if

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Oct 152013
 
 October 15, 2013  Posted by at 9:40 am Finance Comments Off on Nobel Winner Robert Shiller Demolishes UK’s Help-To-Buy Scheme
Nobel Winner Robert Shiller Demolishes UK's Help-To-Buy Scheme

Russell Lee Humble Abode 1938 “Shack of day laborer near New Iberia” UPDATED: It’s always amusing to peruse the press and find stuff that just doesn’t hold up. Not for a big analysis, just a chuckle, albeit with a serious undercurrent. I’ve explained a hundred times that the prize Bob Shiller was awarded on Monday is not a Nobel prize, but a cheap fake, and I’ve looked for the correct name for it, Notbel, NoNobel, Fauxbel, but that ground has

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Oct 132013
 
 October 13, 2013  Posted by at 10:12 am Finance 2 Responses »
880,000 People In Europe Are Slave Laborers

German magazine Der Spiegel managed to get an exclusive peek into a forthcoming report from a European Parliament special committee. While there’s always a risk that such reports will be used to serve primarily as a blunt tool to intensify political, legal and – increasingly cross-border – police control of Europe’s sovereign nations, it’s nevertheless also simply shocking in its findings. It will receive a lot more attention in the near future, especially when the European Parliament is set to

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Oct 122013
 
 October 12, 2013  Posted by at 10:10 am Finance 5 Responses »
The IMF Proposes A 10% Supertax On All Eurozone Household Savings

This is a story that should raise an eyebrow or two on every single face in Europe, and beyond. I saw the first bits of it on a Belgian site named Express.be, whose writers in turn had stumbled upon an article in French newspaper Le Figaro, whose writer Jean-Pierre Robin had leafed through a brand new IMF report (yes, there are certain linguistic advantages in being Dutch, Canadian AND Québecois). In the report, the IMF talks about a proposal to

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Oct 082013
 
 October 8, 2013  Posted by at 9:38 am Finance 13 Responses »
Gordon Gecko Moved To London To Finish Where He Left Off

Howard Hollem Sears Gasoline June 1943 “Virginia Lively, beauty operator, now works at filling station, Louisville, Kentucky” Last week I saw a headline in the Daily Telegraph that got me thinking. It encapsulates a lot of what poses as philosophy in our world today, as a valid way of thinking and a relevant approach to all the crises we live through simultaneously at the moment. One which, when you look longer and closer, appears at least at first glance to

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