Barbara Wright Fruit, flowers and veg stall, Knoxville, Tenn. 1941 It looks like we’ll have a few more days to watch this thing, this alleged market, until on Thursday Mario Draghi launches his modern day version of Greenspan’s oracle years and on Friday the BLS, which can rival any oracle when it comes to confusing utterances, has the US employment numbers. There seem to be people who think those numbers might be quite good, though that might be hard to
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Library of Congress Maya Angelou, Caribbean Calypso Festival, New York 1957 In a recent article, the Wall Street Journal uncovers a big problem in the US housing market, albeit, curiously, without necessarily identifying it as a problem. It would be nice if Americans could trust their once most trusted media to give them the best possible covering of a topic, but the Wall Street Journal apparently prefers to pick the side of, well, Wall Street. The problem not presented as
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Dorothea Lange Broke, baby sick, car trouble, Missouri family, Highway 99, CA February 1937 There’s a persistent story that says (though I don’t think I can confirm it) that a pretty girl prefers to surround herself with less pretty girls – all in the eye of the beholder – in order to look prettier. After seeing yesterday’s -1% (-2% if you include Obamacare) US GDP ungrowth number, a fair segment of the financial press and punditry took a page out
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Arthur Rothstein President Roosevelt tours drought area, Bismarck, North Dakota August 1936 No, the nonsense will not stop, and neither will the torture. At least 5 years into the alleged recovery, US GDP contracted by -1% in Q1 2014, down from last month’s estimate of a 0.1% growth. Why? It’s still the weather, say the “experts”. But worry not, because now the sun will shine and we will reach the promised land our deity and his high priests laid out
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Esther Bubley Soldier treats his date to a coke, Idaho Hall, Arlington Farms, VA June 1943 Let’s take another look at debt. We’ve probably all gotten so used to huge debt numbers that we’re losing sight of what they actually mean. In the following article, Tyler Durden made me rethink both the debt issue and the perverse consequences of 7 years of zero interest policies (ZIRP) and/or ultra low interest rates. The destruction to society is far greater than anyone
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Timothy H. O’Sullivan Gettysburg Campaign Army of the Potomac at Fairfax Court House, Virginia June 1863 Ukraine has a new president, or at least someone, Petro Poroshenko, who claims to be. One of the first things to come out of his mouth was that he doesn’t recognize Crimea as being a part of Russia. Still, the good listener knows there were no Ukraine presidential elections in Crimea either on Sunday. So Crimea is supposedly still a part of Ukraine, despite
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Arthur Rothstein Texas Panhandle dust bowl Summer 1936 The headlines speak of an earthquake. But just about absolutely everyone who’s been shaken manages to declare victory, including incumbents who have lost, which is the majority of them, in some cases painfully. And European stocks are rising too, in some cases to all time highs. It all adds up to a perfect illustration of the absurd bizarro Europe has become. Despite the huge surge in anti-EU sentiments, Brussels claims that because
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Marion Post Wolcott Farmer’s son making sorghum molasses, Racine, West Virginia Sep 1938 Yesterday, we saw that despite a tepid rebound in new home sales, the underlying numbers are far from promising. In particular, prices, which had been holding up despite sagging sales, are down YoY. We also saw that some big investors are now -openly – betting against housing. We saw that the Fed is as a rule so far off in its official forecasts that one needs to
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Arthur Rothstein Mooo, Ropesville Farms, Texas April 1936 We’re going into another weekend, and this one’s Memorial. It may also be memorable, since there are elections in both the EU and Ukraine. And fireworks may well be part of both, during and after. In the Netherlands, where they were early, just 35% of people voted, which makes you want to look up the word democracy in the thesaurus, while in also-early-ran Britain UKIP won big. Nobody cares about Europe, or
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Dorothea Lange Sons of Negro tenant farmer, Granville County, North Carolina July 1939 This is the second installment of Nicole’s series on food security. Nicole Foss: In part one of this series, we looked at finance as a major causal factor in the development of food insecurity. The boom and bust cycles that result from over-financialization are, however, only one aspect of a food crisis already present for many, and looming for many more in the years to come. Finance
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