Russell Lee Fun with fountain at 4th of July picnic, Vale, OR July 1941 There is not one single person I’ve learned more from than Jay Hanson, back when I was even younger than I am now. Jay is not the greatest writer in the world, his talent is that he has the right kind of unrelenting curiosity, needed to dig deep into the reasons we put ourselves where we do (it’s hardwired). This curiosity made put together the best
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DPC REO Mountaineer, New York to San Francisco and back, 10 months June 1906 We hugely underestimate what it means not to have a functioning financial system and economy. It even feels sort of fine for a while, both to the richer part of our population who get richer, and to the rest who fall for the dream that things in their lives will get better again soon. But there is still a big difference between what things look like,
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Harris & Ewing Second look at Crescent Limited train wreck near Kenilworth, DC August 1933 The global financial system owns our societies, banks, politicians, the whole lot. It therefore owns us too, which includes you, and it’s very counterproductive to deny that. It can do what it wants and what it pleases with impunity. It took the finance wizards surprisingly long to figure that out, but they have. This has enabled them to buy everything and everyone they wanted to
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Harris & Ewing Crescent Limited train wreck near Kenilworth, DC August 1933 First, let me take a second to get back to my article yesterday, Optimism Bias Squared , because I got a mail from someone at the IMF (who requests anonymity), which refers to a working paper that was released by the IMF at the same time I wrote my article: Howdy, long-time [Automatic Earth] reader (and listener and note-taker) here, just wanted to share a serendipitous artifact: Growth:
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Marion Post Wolcott Main street of old mining town Leadville, Colorado. Sep 1941 Oh yeah, sure, optimism is oozing from every single one of America’s pores. Or so they’ll have you believe. 281,000 new jobs says the ADP report, most since December 2012. Of which small business added 117,000 and medium sized business 115,000. And the media are just besides themselves with joy. Shame that the markets react lukewarm at best. Then again, they do better the worse the news
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G. G. Bain Gloria Swanson in New York Sep 4, 1924 We all know that interest rates are at an ultra low level, whether it’s the rate on our savings accounts, our mortgages (though those are quite a bit higher, quelle surprise), central bank rates or yields on government bonds. All this, plus a watershed of global QEs, have led to stock exchanges at highs that have nothing at all to do anymore with the performance of the real economies
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