Debt Rattle February 16 2019

 

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  • #45426

    Marcel Duchamp The king and queen surrounded by swift nudes 1912   • Over 60% Of All New Debt Created Globally In Past Decade Was In China (NYFed
    [See the full post at: Debt Rattle February 16 2019]

    #45427
    V. Arnold
    Participant

    I so look forward to your threads Ilargi.
    Such a compilation of the economics of the moment. Wonderful. And nowhere else available in such detail with such a critical eye.
    Keep on keeping on…

    #45428

    Thank you, V. Arnold. It seems to go more and more beyond economics though, and into some bizarro political theater. Every party everywhere, and every politician, have just one goal in mind: how to make their economy look good, no matter how it’s really doing. Nobody cares what the markets are doing, because there’s no way left to see that; today it’s all about what the Fed is doing, not how the markets are doing. So what do you write about that? China may be a step ahead, whatever the PBOC does, people buy far fewer cars and even less gas. And that’s with the central bank that even less free than the Fed or ECB. We’re just waiting for the moment when Draghi and Jay Powell give up, which will happen when all their rich friends and masters don’t expect any more profits from taxpayer hand-outs. Then we’ll be able to report on economics again, but the only story will be misery first, and then pitchforks down the line.

    #45429
    Charles Alban
    Participant

    hi Raul. great post today. i forwarded many of these. and the pic is pretty cool too but I couldn’t identify the swift nudes.

    #45430
    Dr. D
    Participant

    Some of these stories are deeper than they might appear. CounterPunch gives the sordid history of capitalism, but really is a list of things in the history if America instead, as America was Capitalist until WWI or WWII, (or the Civil War, depending how you count it) but definitively not now. So is that really “capitalism,” or just history? But then when we say 300M died of communism, is that not also history of (many) nations glommed into one and not “communism”? Besides, is it not also as CS Lewis said of WWII, it wasn’t that MORE people died in WWII, but that they were all men are born to die, but died slightly earlier? So IF capitalism killed 100 million but saved 50 million with supplying food and medicine, how do we tell who would-have-otherwise-died? As with communism, if 25 million Russian peasants lived in cold austerity but did indeed live steadily, honestly with protection of the state, is that good or bad? Were they saved or killed? How could you tell, comparatively, and to what? A true Utopia? A nation where no one is greedy and no mistakes are made? And is that personal to the individuals, or can you even blame the “culture” or “money” or “religion” in general, where nobody goes to jail against a future we can imagine but has never been?

    The Green New Deal has a lot of press, and although I certainly could refute it all day, there’s a lot in it which isn’t crazy or is being actively misrepresented. Main is the 70% over $10M which is called 70%. Now while no doubt like our present income tax EVENTUALLY it will be extended to everyone (the original 1913 tax was installed as billionaires-only) it’s provably false it would be for the 99% today. At the same time, claiming the tax would be relevant at all is itself false: anyone who talks for 10 minutes would show that the wealthy NEVER TAKE INCOME, so like GE and Amazon, pay no tax but in fact get tax rebates. From me. Which I pay to Jeff Bezos. The wealthy take capital gains, if anything, but further, don’t OWN anything anyway, houses, hotels, condos, boats: their shell corporations do. Which is another whole argument that doesn’t fit on Twitter. Point is, if only anyone could be honest for a continuous 30-second period. Green New Deal also ATTEMPTS to get something off the ground, and ATTEMPTS to employ people with our massive deficit spending instead of blowing them up. Now it won’t work because it doesn’t follow the law of thermodynamics, there’s no energy gain, and Solyndra and Tesla prove that it’s just a trillion dollar insider tax-and-theft boondoggle. BUT it’s still disingenuine to say we can’t do anything Green because a) money b) people c) previous failures. Really this could be its whole article but we can just summarize G.N.D., Twitter, Media, and American thought in general by repeating, “if only anyone could be honest for a continuous 30-second period.”

    With thinking like this, who needs enemies? We’re so helpless worldwide, but also insane, I couldn’t be shocked if Russia nukes us for the safety of the planet. …Which will then happen because we have a President who is a Russian stooge, obviously. Oh well, let’s go do something useful instead, like remodel walls with my forehead.

    #45431
    zerosum
    Participant


    SEE! Its a new kind of warfare.

    SEE!
    an attempted coup d’état

    • Worms Turning (Jim Kunstler)

    The heat from these future events may be so intense and disruptive that it will interfere with the 2020 election.

    • Mueller Discloses Evidence Roger Stone Communicated With Wikileaks (G.)

    Answer:

    Aaron Maté tweeted about this article: “LOL. The “communications of Roger Stone with Wikileaks” were revealed a year ago. They show WL urging Stone to stop making “false claims of association” between them.”
    ————-

    The Green New Deal, Capitalism and the State

    The circular process at work here— public money builds private fortunes that are then used through campaign contributions to garner more public money to build larger private fortunes, creates a chicken-or-egg problem for political resolution.
    With a body count of at least one-hundred million human beings— including genocide against the indigenous population, murdered slaves, coal miners in Appalachia who died from black lung disease, mill workers in Massachusetts and North and South Carolina who died from inhaling cotton fibers, and those killed in American wars for resources, the human toll of American capitalism is staggering.

    Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves in the world (chart below). The U.S. is using state power to ‘liberate’ this oil for the benefit of nominally private multinational oil corporations. The American plan is to burn the oil. All of it.

    Another view/explanation of the modern battles.
    • When The Swabian Hausfrau Saves (Steve Keen)

    Neoclassical economic model of banking is dangerously misleading as a guide to how a capitalist economy actually works and was thus incapable of predicting the Great Financial Crisis of 2007.

    —–
    The elites are also waging another hidden war.
    Inflation
    I don’t know who gains from inflation.
    If you are a wage earner you do not control your cash flow, (income).
    If you cannot increase you cash flow then you are a victim of inflation.

    The printing press is only constraint by inflation

    #45432
    seychelles
    Participant

    “The specter of Mr. Trump entrained by the nuclear “football” — the briefcase with launch codes for World War Three — gave US Intel communitarians such a case of the heebie-jeebies that they first sought desperately to impede his election by unlawful means and, failing in that, concocted a fog of Russian collusion conspiracy to cover up all that and much more nastiness emanating from the Hillary Clinton orbit.” J. Kunstler

    What Trump probably doesn’t know is that the nuclear “football” has been engineered by the secret state to go through their review before it can be functional and that they can bypass his approval for activation. It’s likely gotten that bad, folks.

    #45433
    zerosum
    Participant

    When will the wall be built?
    How long will it take to spend $1.3 Billion?

    To build a wal you first got to build the road.

    How Much Does It Cost to Build a Mile of Road?

    The Soft Figures
    Nonetheless, here are the daunting numbers: constructing a two-lane, undivided road in a rural locale will set you back somewhere between $2 and $3 million per mile

    55 miles of road is 55 x $3 million = $ 165 million.

    https://money.cnn.com/2017/01/25/news/economy/trump-mexico-border-wall-cost/index.html
    by Chris Isidore and Jeanne Sahadi @CNNMoney
    January 26, 2017
    By comparison it only costs about $3 million to build a mile of a typical two-lane road. So for $10 billion you could build a road roughly from Seattle to Miami.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/trump-border-wall-could-bypass-competitive-bids-under-emergency-declaration-experts-say/2019/02/15/64a42aae-3157-11e9-86ab-5d02109aeb01_story.html?utm_term=.5fd0d2d2e0e5

    The six companies creating prototype walls were compensated between $365,000 and $664,000 for their designs, according to a database of federal contractors. Most have been marked for $300 million in potential total value in future wall contracts, according to a Washington Post analysis of data from the Federal Procurement Data System.
    David Houseman, president of Houseman & Associates, a consulting firm focused on government acquisitions, said he does not expect the government to completely bypass competitive bidding under an emergency declaration.
    It remains unclear whether any of the 10 contractors would receive priority under Trump’s emergency declaration for the next construction phase.
    The government can tap existing border wall contractors and place additional “task orders” for new wall construction — jobs the contractors would then compete for, Houseman said.

    Therefore, without any further analysist, Trump will not be the president that will see $1.3 Billion spent on the wall.

    #45434
    kultsommer
    Participant

    Great batch today.
    Enjoyed Steve Keen’s explanation of fine levers of this “ism”.
    Is it fair to say that Amazon checks every virtue box of capitalism ? I mean, humble beginning where he put big chunk his parent’s wealth on absolutely no guarantee outcome – check. Best, fast, reliable and the least (or reasonable) priced service in the industry – check, check, check and check. Extremely profitable for shareholders – check.
    Now that he had grown from garage band foreman to a rock star and likes to demolish every hotel on his tours is somehow viewed as some glitch or misunderstanding in otherwise perfect system. The same proponents of that thinking like not to acknowledge that oil soaked Shorpy had ever existed, or that behind every XIX century “endowment” that we enjoy today there are. aside from hundreds broken competitor’s knee caps, barely teen kids worked to exhaustion. Amazon warehouse slaves is a wet dream of every corporation as an ultimate goal.
    Duchamp’s ready made objects have weight and can be contemplated only because of existence of his other body of work such as this painting.

    #45435
    VietnamVet
    Participant

    The one clear thing is that the world is in turmoil and run by political idiots. These posts are about as close to the truth as we are can get through the overwhelming media propaganda. The world has gone into to debt. China used debt to modernize. The West generated trillions of digital Dollars and Euros so the rich got richer. America’s poor die earlier with a $15,000 debt. The West is left with only war and exploitation. This will destroy the earth in the end. The only way out is cooperation, peace and a debt write off.

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