Tag Archives: Featured

  Stock Markets In the last week of the year, the Swiss Market Index deepened its loss for the year as banks continued lower on low trading volumes. The SMI is set to end 2016 with an annual loss of 6.8% as banking and pharmaceutical giants pulled the index down in a year of turbulent trading. A volatile 2016 started with a brutal equity sell off as investors dumped global stocks on fears of an accelerating economic slowdown in China and the slumping price of oil.  The...

Swiss Franc Currency Index With last Friday’s break-down of the dollar, the Swiss Franc index could recover a bit. Its loss over December is now 1%. But the dollar index had a gain of 2%. Trade-weighted index Swiss Franc, December 30(see more posts on Swiss Franc Index, ) Source: FT.com - Click to enlarge   Swiss Franc Currency Index (3 years) The Swiss Franc index is the trade-weighted currency...

Why am I hopeful? the Status Quo is devolving, and a better way of living lies just beyond the corrupt, wasteful, ruinous consumerist debt/financial tyranny we now inhabit. Readers often ask me to post something hopeful, and I understand why: doom-and-gloom gets tiresome. Human beings need hope just as they need oxygen, and the destruction of the Status Quo via over-reach and internal contradictions doesn’t leave much...

India’s Currency Ban – Part VIII India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, announced on 8th November 2016 that Rs 500 (~$7.50) and Rs 1,000 (~$15) banknotes would no longer be legal tender. Linked are Part-I, Part-II, Part-III, Part-IV, Part-V, Part-VI and Part-VII, which provide updates on the demonetization saga and how Modi is acting as a catalyst to hasten the rapid degradation of India and what remains of its...

Conjuring Up Visions Today’s a day for considering new hopes, new dreams, and new hallucinations.  The New Year is here, after all.  Now is the time to turn over a new leaf and start afresh. Naturally, 2017 will be the year you get exactly what’s coming to you. Both good and bad.  But what else will happen? Here we begin by closing our eyes and slowing our breath.  We let our mind role back into the gray matter of our...

  What Have You Done for Me Lately? Swing voters are a fickle bunch.  One election they vote Democrat.  The next they vote Republican. For they have no particular ideology or political philosophy to base their judgment upon. Swing VotersSwing Voters - Click to enlarge Humphrey-Hawkins Act: Fed’s Dual Mandate The Humphrey-Hawkins Act of 1978 expanded the Fed’s job, charging it with maintaining full employment, too....

Not only will Fed policy not fix what’s broken, it will actively make the structural problems worse. Yesterday I described the conditions that render the U.S. ungovernable. Here is a chart of why the U.S. economy will also be ungovernable. Longtime readers are acquainted with the S-curve model of expansion, maturity, stagnation and decline. This is why the economy will be ungovernable: all the financial gambits that...

A variety of forces will disrupt or obsolete existing modes of production and the social order. Though no one can foretell the future, it is self-evident that the status quo—dependent as it is on cheap oil and fast-expanding debt—is unsustainable. So what will trigger the collapse of the status quo, and what lies beyond when the current arrangements break down?  Can we predict how-when-where with any accuracy? All...

Charles Hugh Smith combines the best graphs on the declining wage share of GDP in this post. He answers the question if the tax cuts and more federal borrowing and spending can solve what is broken in the U.S. economy. Solutions abound, but not within our centralized state-cartel neofeudal system. Not to rain on the new administration’s parade, but one question needs to be asked of any new administration: will tax...

  Trump Bump BALTIMORE – Who’s the biggest winner so far? “Government Sachs!” Fortune magazine reports that the winningest person since Trump’s election is Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein. Goldman’s stock price is back to where it was just before the last crash in 2008. And Blankfein is back in high cotton, too; his holdings in the firm have gained $140 million in the last four weeks. Donald Trump pledged to take the...