Debt Rattle January 19 2018
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Vincent van Gogh Red Vineyards at Arles 1888 • The Most Sustainable Stock Market Bubble Ever (MW) • Global Debt Growing Three Times Faster than
[See the full post at: Debt Rattle January 19 2018]Globilisation has been a resounding success; the global poor have reached parity; plus or minus.
Ain’t it grand?
The global rich have also reached parity; hoarding 99% of the wealth/money.
And crypto? Wow, just wow. A whole new distraction to divert our gaze from what’s really important.
Crypto is just another iteration of the shiny. Does Edward Bernays ring a bell? It should.
The thing is; the thing is that the global economy is totally corrupt and your job is to figure out how to circumvent it!
Mostly, we here at the Hermitage have; but, I cannot publicly say exactly how; me being a Usian…
If, and that’s a big if; you can figure out how to operate below the radar; then you can live a comfortable life. Not totally free from worry (due to US spying), but pretty damned close.My appologies for mostly being the first to post; it’s a matter of geography and time zones.
Ilargi normally posts at 10 am (plus or minus) his time, which is 5 pm here.
Works for me as it’s a convenient time of my day. 😉“The U.S. securities regulator on Thursday raised alarm about the safety of bitcoin”
Is this the same SEC who for years oversaw a literal, honest-to-God Ponzi scheme by Bernie Madoff, who had only one bank, JP Morgan with all transactions directly approved by the Board of Directors? You know, the SEC that ignored the Markopolos debriefing of the exact crime and methods? The one that every day approves the HFT front-running of customers in every exchange? The one that thought a trader living in his mother’s London basement was the sole cause of the flash crash? You know, the one that looked into the AAA rating of CCC mortgages and saw nothing? The ones who were caught surfing pron all day and not fired?
You mean those guys are going to regulate and protect us? From honest-to-God Ponzi schemes in the token space? Okay, pull the other one. The only thing these guys protect is the mountain of systemic fraud.
Is it possible to truly ‘steal’ Bitcoins?
Every Bitcoin has a complete record of previous owners, so for Mt Gox for example it should be possible to find out which accounts the Bitcoins were switched to. While it may not be possible to retrieve them at least those accounts could be blocked and so make any ‘theft’ pointless.
_________________It is surprising how many countries are saying they MIGHT block Bitcoin trading. Anyone who took out Bitcoin shorts on the futures market must be making a fortune. I wonder if they are related?!
__________________Selling Bitcoins twice.
This should not be possible. Any distributed system requires a 2-phase system to prevent this from happening. Phase one is notifying servers that a particular Bitcoin might be sold, and the servers should block it from any other transaction. Phase two is confirmation that the transaction is complete [or abandoned].
A similar procedure should be in place for online buying to cover the time between someone ordering an item and actually paying for it or cancelling it.
The first article in today’s post coupling “sustainable!?” to the latest stock market bubble and the second that looks at the increase in global debt, when taken together, reflect the dire state of most developed nations.
Tim Morgan (Surplus Energy Economics) using the US as an example, demonstrates just how empty claims based on “apparent” GDP growth are, in his latest article entitled Candyfloss economics, a situation that applies to many western nations. In the context of the US, the following extract reveals the paucity of genuine wealth creation based on claimed GDP growth, a situation that can be applied to most developed nations, especially the UK.
As we’ve seen, then, almost all (93%) of growth in the GDP of the United States over the last decade has come from services which Americans can sell only to each other. It must be stressed that the US is by no means unique in this. Rather, America has been used here as an example, because of the importance of its economy, and because of the exceptional availability of economic data.
The picture in other developed economies is pretty similar, with ICS activities (such as finance, real estate and government) contributing even more to growth in Britain, where manufacturing output is barely 9% of output, compared with 12% in the United States, and almost 18% in the Euro area.
What emerges is an economy which produces very little that can be offered to overseas customers at world market prices. The bulk of the economy – in the United States, 80% – consists of services which people provide to each other, either privately or through the government. Within this ICS component there are further question-marks, most notably over “imputed” output dreamed up by statisticians, and over financial and real estate services which, whilst dwarfing activities like manufacturing, are of limited value-adding capability.Together with this goes the important observation that there are two distinctive pricing mechanisms at work. One-fifth of American output is “hard” priced by international markets, whilst the remaining four-fifths are priced locally, in a way that is both “soft” and residual. In an era of ultra-cheap money, we are entitled to question the relationship between hard and soft pricing.
All of this, of course, is on top of our understanding that “growth” is being created by spending borrowed money, and by unwinding (through ZIRP) collective provision for the future.
We can summarise the situation like this. Essentially, we in the West are deluding ourselves about how much value our economies are really adding, because much of what we do is residual activity, delivering output that cannot be marketed at prices set by world markets.
Even as they grow – courtesy of mortgaging the future – Western economies are taking themselves ever further down the gradient of added value.
You might think, considering this, that we are in a self-delusional state that isn’t sustainable. If you did think that, you’d be right.
I suspect Donald Trump will come to regret his boast the US economy is doing well under his Presidency, when this latest Ponzi debt driven bubble finally bursts.
Sustainable bubble? Hadn’t thought of that oxymoron before.
So…is that the new term for escape velocity now??
Oh..and V. Arnold, don’t you worry about it. You have wise things to say.
anticlimactic, blockchain is the source of truth. Once a transaction is recorded there you can scream on every corner that it wasn’t you who spent your bitcoin, but someone who stole your private key – it wouldn’t matter. If it’s your word against “proof of work” you word loses every time. And don’t even bring up exchanges. The moment someone but you knows your private key, even if it’s your online wallet – you are fucked.
And on double spending… You’d think it’s simple to avoid, but read about consensus in distributed computing. In two words – not easy 🙂Sustainable bubble? Hadn’t thought of that oxymoron before.
People find it difficult to accept they can’t know some things. Smart people even more so. We all know this party will end, but since we cannot reliably pinpoint the date we are tempted to think that maybe the date doesn’t exist.
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