Russell Lee Sign near Weslaco, Texas January 1939 Financial risk is springing up from so many sides and nooks and angles and crannies by now that the overall picture has become chaotic. And needless to say, anyone invested in anything detests chaos; it instills fear. If you can no longer oversee from which angle which risk might pop up, selling looks like a good move, and that’s what we see happening. The Nikkei closed down again earlier today, and European
Read More...
Arnold Genthe “Unidentified buildings, possibly movie set” 1920 As events continue and broaden in markets connected in any which way to emerging markets and central bank largesse, there comes a time when we need to consider that at some point it becomes inevitable that all sorts of leveraged bubbles start popping, leaving behind in their wake pools of vanishing virtual turned non-existent leveraged “assets”. The popping bubbles are not the beginning of the process, they’re merely the ingredients that make
Read More...
National Photo Co. “City Market. Washington, D.C.” 1917 Our very very sweet and dear friend Shani in Fremantle, Western Australia – love ya, girl – talks about how she and her main man “Tell ’em he’s dreaming” Tim took their plain old suburban street and metamorphosed it into something much more and much bigger, step by step and neighbor by neighbor. And about how you can do that too. Shani’s quite brilliant at telling her story in just 20 minutes.
Read More...
Arnold Genthe. Street scene with horse and wagon, Charleston, South Carolina 1920 On the political front, there are three clear battlegrounds in the world today. In Thailand, Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra has found out that being pretty isn’t enough. In the run-up to an election this Sunday, which she forced through in spite of calls for a delay because she thinks she’ll win, bombs are going off on a regular basis, planted by protesters who want her corrupt clan to
Read More...
Alexander Gardner Lincoln dedicates Gettysburg Monument November 19 1863 The only thing that irks me more than the present US government is the realization that the chances of getting a better one next time around is so close to zero it might as well be frozen solid. And I can’t even vote. I can only imagine what it must feel like to those who can. The entire system has been boxed in so thoroughly it’s a really bad idea to
Read More...
Gordon Parks “Mr and Mrs Joseph Lopez, Gloucester, Mass. 2 boys in the armed forces” June 1943 I guess I may be getting myself in a bit of a jam here, since I posted no Debt Rattle yesterday, but did do the Daily Links, and I do have things to say about some of those. For instance, I think it’s a big piece of news to see Stephen Hawking say black holes don’t exist, and I also think that Mish’s
Read More...
Carl Mydans For many, only source of water supply in Washington, D.C July 1935 I’ve told you that I intend to re-run pieces from the TAE archive from time to time. Today’s is from Nicole Foss, dated September 7, 2010. If possible, it’s only gained in relevance. Credit and debt are not just issues in the US, and not just at the present time either. History is full of credit/debt crises (1294 comes to mind), and so is the world
Read More...
Lewis Wickes Hine for National Child Labor Committee Doffers in Pell City Cotton Mill Nov. 1910 It seems to come as a surprise to some, but when you think about it, it seems obvious that it only makes sense that if you try to hide a crisis behind huge amounts of money and credit leaked into global financial markets, those markets become addicted to credit injections faster than you can say taperworm. There may be something to say for stimulus
Read More...
Arnold Genthe Ice wagon horse wearing a hat in New Orleans 1923 Argentina is once again in very bad shape. It rose out of the ashes of its 2002 crisis, when it went through presidents like they were popsicles, and large swaths of the middle class ended up living in Villa Miseria shanty towns around Buenos Aires, but it did so through issuing debt. So there we go again. The no. 1 problem, again, is the lack of foreign reserves.
Read More...
Jack Delano “FOR THEM, BOMBS : Chicago, Union Station” January 1943 Does the Chinese alphabet have a question mark? If not, this would be a good time to get one. After writing again yesterday about the enormous amounts of leveraged debt in the country, that threaten to bring down investment products closely linked to the shadow banking system, which at the same time is fast becoming a huge political force just through its sheer size, here’s another question about China.
Read More...