Steve Bull's Blog, page 1210
January 26, 2018
Flying Blind, Part 2: The Destruction Of Honest Price Discovery And Its Consequences
In Part 1 we noted that the real evil of Bubble Finance is not merely that it leads to bubble crashes, of which there is surely a doozy just around the bend; or that speculators get the painful deserts they fully deserve, which is coming big time, too; or even that the retail homegamers are always drawn into the slaughter at the very end, as is playing out in spades once again. Daily.
Given enough time, in fact, markets do bounce back because capitalism has a inherent urge to grow, thereby generating higher output, incomes, profits, wealth and stock indices. That means, in turn, investors eventually do recover from bubble crashes—notwithstanding the tendency of homegamers and professional speculators alike to sell at panic lows and jump back in after most of the profits have been made—or even at panic highs like the present.
Instead, the real economic iniquity of central bank driven Bubble Finance is that it destroys all the pricing signals that are essential to financial discipline on both ends of the Acela Corridor. And as quaint at it may sound, discipline is the sine qua non of long-term stability and sustainable gains in productivity, living standards and real wealth.
The pols of the Imperial City should be petrified, therefore, by the prospect of borrowing $1.2 trillion during the upcoming fiscal year (FY 2019) at a rate of 6.o% of GDP during month #111 through month #123 of the business expansion; and doing so at the very time the central bank is pivoting to an unprecedented spell of QT (quantitative tightening), involving the disgorgement of up to $2 trillion of its elephantine balance sheet back into the bond market.
Even as a matter of economics 101, the forthcoming $1.8 trillion of combined bond supply from the sales of the US Treasury ($1.2 trillion) and the QT-disgorgement of the Fed ($600 billion) is self-evidently enough to monkey-hammer the existing supply/demand balances, and thereby send yields soaring.
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Explosive Allegation: Israel Planned To Blow Up Passenger Plane In Arafat Assassination Plot
For years, many had speculated – for which they were promptly cast as tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists – that when it comes to achieving illegal goals, including but not limited to creating “false flag” terrorism and political assassinations, few are as skilled and industrious as the CIA and Mossad. Especially Mossad.
Only, as so often happens, most (if not all) such “conspiracy theories” turn out to be truth, in this case exposed thanks to the work of Israeli investigative journalist Ronen Bergman, whose just published explosive book “‘Rise and Kill First: The secret history of Israel’s targeted killings” details such Israeli plans as the assassination of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat which included a plot to blow up passenger planes and football stadiums.
Ronen Bergman, the intelligence correspondent for Yediot Aharonot newspaper, persuaded many agents of Mossad, Shin Bet and the military to tell their stories, some using their real names.
The result is the first comprehensive look at Israel’s use of state-sponsored killings.
An excerpt from the book published in the NYT , details how when former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was defense minister, he ordered the Israeli army to shoot down a passenger plane carrying hundreds of innocent people Arafat was thought to be on. Arafat was chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization at the time. Although the plan was eventually called off, it was allegedly one of a list of plans to to assassinate the Palestinian leader.
Bergman spoke to hundreds of intelligence and defense officials and studied classified documents which have revealed a “hidden history, surprising even in the context of Israel’s already fierce reputation.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Climate Bellwether? With Cape Town Almost Out of Water, “Day Zero” Looms
In less than three months, residents in South African city could be lining up for rationed water under armed guards. “Is this the new normal?”
Tree trunks stand in the critically low Theewaterskloof Dam in Villiersdorp, South Africa, Jan. 23, 2018. (Photo: Reuters)
For residents of Cape Town, “Day Zero” is getting closer.
That’s the day when taps in the drought-stricken coastal South African city are projected run dry, and its residents would be forced to head to police-guarded distribution sites to obtain their daily ration of water.
“Anyone who works in climate change knows that we’ve given lots of quite doomsday-esque scenarios in the last two decades. This is the first one which I’ve really seen come true.”
—climatologist Simon GearThe city warned last week that the day was “now likely to happen.” And on Monday, the city, citing a drop in dam levels, moved the projected day up from April 22 to April 12.
“We have reached a point of no return,” Cape Town Mayor Patricia de Lille said last week announcing tightened water restrictions for the city’s 4 million residents. Starting Feb. 1, residents face a 50 liter per day limit (13.2 gallons). [For comparison, Americans’ daily home use is 88 gallons of water, the EPA says.]
When Day Zero hits, the limit will be 25 liters per day, to be collected at one of 200 water collection points. Agence France-Presse reports: “With about 5,000 families for each water collection point, the police and army are ready to be deployed to prevent unrest in the lines.”
USA Today, however, reported that “Each collection point will accommodate around 20,000 people per day.”
Cape Town is being described as the first major city in the developed world that would run out of water.
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Energy, Money and Technology–From the Lens of the Superorganism
During Nate Hagens’ #WEP2018 keynote, he discussed how all of our lives will be influenced by how we react to the coming era of harder to extract and more costly fossil fuels that will be combined with cleaner but more stochastic energy types.
Ed. note: The video starts in the middle of the presentation. You will need to adjust the player to go back to the beginning of the talk.
January 25, 2018
“The collapse of our civilization is not a political issue.” Really??
The cover article of New Scientist this week asks “Is Western civilization on the brink of collapse?” I’m glad they’re raising this question, but their discussion was extremely disappointing.
First, as George Monbiot points out in a follow-up article, the article fails to distinguish between Western and global civilization, conflating two very different issues: 1.) the recent historical dominance of the West over the rest of the world, and 2.) the unsustainable dynamics of our global civilization.
Worse, in their editorial, they argue that on the issues of climate breakdown and environmental collapse, those raising the alarm have “prematurely politicised the science and hence provoked pushback from people on the other side of the fence.” To me, that reads like saying that those who argue that the Earth orbits the Sun have prematurely provoked pushback from the Flat Earth Society by emphasizing the role of gravity. It’s the kind of thinking that grants false equivalency to climate deniers and leads to pseudo-scientists funded by the Koch brothers getting equal television time to real scientists representing 98% of scientific opinion.
Arguing against “politicizing” civilizational collapse is the same mindset that leads to offering equal TV time to pseudo-scientific climate deniersAs I describe in my recent article, “What Will It Really Take to Avoid Collapse?“, the underlying drivers impelling our global civilization to the precipice are the economic structures of a global capitalist growth-based system driven by massive transnational corporations that are more powerful than individual nations. Since politics is, by definition, about the dynamics of power and governance, how is it possible either to diagnose the problem or suggest solutions without it being political?
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Things Are Getting Worse, Not Better: Round Ups, Checkpoints and National ID Cards [SHORT]
Here in Amerika, things are getting worse—not better—as the nation inches ever closer towards totalitarianism, that goose-stepping form of tyranny in which the government has all of the power and “we the people” have none.
Take what happened recently in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
On Friday, Jan. 19, 2018, immigration agents boarded a Greyhound bus heading to downtown Miami from Orlando and demanded that all passengers provide proof of residence or citizenship. One grandmother, traveling by bus to meet her granddaughter for the first time, was arrested and taken off the bus when she couldn’t provide proof of residency.
This isn’t is a new occurrence.
A year ago, passengers arriving in New York’s JFK Airport on a domestic flight from San Francisco were ordered to show their “documents” to border patrol agents in order to get off the plane.
With the government empowered to carry out transportation checks to question people about their immigration status within a 100-mile border zone that wraps around the country, you’re going to see a rise in these “show your papers” incidents.
That’s a problem, and I’ll tell you why.
We are not supposed to be living in a “show me your papers” society.
Despite this, the U.S. government has recently introduced measures allowing police and other law enforcement officials to stop individuals (citizens and noncitizens alike), demand they identify themselves, and subject them to patdowns, warrantless searches, and interrogations.
These actions fly in the face of longstanding constitutional safeguards forbidding such police state tactics.
Set aside the debate over illegal immigration for a moment and think long and hard about what it means when government agents start demanding that people show their papers on penalty of arrest.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The tricks propagandists use to beat science
A model of the way opinions spread reveals how propagandists use the scientific process against itself to secretly influence policy makers.
Photo: Gilles Mingasson/Getty Images
Back in the 1950s, health professionals became concerned that smoking was causing cancer. Then, in 1952, the popular magazine Reader’s Digestpublished “Cancer by the Carton,” an article about the increasing body of evidence that proved it. The article caused widespread shock and media coverage. Today the health dangers of smoking are clear and unambiguous.
And yet smoking bans have been slow to come into force, most having appeared some 40 years or more after the Reader’s Digest article.
The reason for this sluggishness is easy to see in hindsight and described in detail by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway in their 2010 book Merchants of Doubt. Here the authors explain how the tobacco industry hired a public relations firm to manufacture controversy surrounding the evidence and cast doubt on its veracity.
Together, tobacco companies and the PR firm created and funded an organization called the Tobacco Industry Research Committee to produce results and opinions that contradicted the view that smoking kills. This led to a false sense of uncertainty and delayed policy changes that would otherwise have restricted sales.
The approach was hugely successful for the tobacco industry at the time. In the same book, Oreskes and Conway show how a similar approach has influenced the climate change debate. Again, the scientific consensus is clear and unambiguous but the public debate has been deliberately muddied to create a sense of uncertainty. Indeed, Oreskes and Conway say that some of the same people who dreamt up the tobacco strategy also worked on undermining the climate change debate.
That raises an important question: How easy is it for malicious actors to distort the public perception of science?
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Who Is Deliberately Killing the Bees?
Last night, my husband attended our beekeeping association meeting. He was looking forward to it all day. Talking with other “bee people” is exciting, chatting about the upcoming spring, opening up the hives after winter, installing new bees, etc. I couldn’t wait for him to come home to with new beekeeping ideas and to see his face light up as he waxed poetic about beekeeping.
Only, that didn’t happen. Instead, he brought back a story that chilled me to my bones about someone deliberately killing the bees just a few towns away from us in Rehoboth, MA.
Just Another Accidental Spraying?
We read about the bee deaths when it happened. Early reports seemed to suggest this was yet another case of farmers in the vicinity being irresponsible with chemicals. That may have been what investigators originally suspected, as hypothesized by Eric Pilotte, the president of the Bristol County Beekeepers Association. In this interview, Pilotte spoke of how bees can forage up to three miles away and may have brought back poisoned pollen and nectar to the hive.
“All indications are it was some type of pesticide or insecticide that’s the culprit,” Pilotte said. “In this case, they were able to bring back some of those contaminants and I think that’s what spread like wildfire through the hive.”
Fellow association member, entomologist and retired superintendent of the Bristol County Mosquito Control Project, Wayne Andrews, thought it had to have happened “closer to home“.
Andrews said bees can fly as far as three or four miles in search of food and water but he suspects the Rehoboth bees consumed the poison closer to home, likely no more than a mile away.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
A Modest Plan
Rembrandt van Rijn The Storm on the Sea of Galilee 1633
On March 18, 1990, the painting was stolen by thieves disguised as police officers. They broke into the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum in Boston, MA, and stole this painting, along with 12 other works. The paintings have never been recovered, and it is considered the biggest art theft in history. The empty frames still hang in their original location.
This is an article written by Dr. D, who last month wrote a series at the Automatic Earth entitled Bitcoin Doesn’t Exist.It shouldn’t surprise you that bitcoin plays a cameo in his Modest -but actually quite grand- Plan as well.
Dr. D: With all the talk about the bubble market, people are once again saying Donald Trump is a fool, he should never have taken credit for a Dow that’s about to collapse. In addition, how does he think he can get away with claiming we have a great economy made greater? He said in the election the economy was terrible and the Dow was a bubble, that’s why he won.
But hold on: you have to remember, they’re politicians; they may be dishonest but they’re not stupid. Let’s try a scenario to see what they’re thinking:
We have a situation in the U.S. where 100 million people are out of the workforce, the real economy is on life-support, debt is crushing, and monetary velocity is at an all-time low. The Fed’s every effort at market-rigging, lowering rates and pumping in money, bailing out the banks and giving unearned interest for Fed deposits have run up both the housing market and the stock market, neither of which is their legal mandate. If either one goes higher, they’ll pop as workers, particularly millennials, have no income to buy houses, and stocks are levitating on just 5 insider-paid FAANG stocks.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
In less than 3 months, a major international city will likely run out of water
(CNN)In Cape Town, South Africa, they’re calling it “Day Zero” — the day when the taps run dry.
A few days ago, city officials had said that day will come on April 22. This week, they moved up the date to April 12.
Cape Town is South Africa’s second-largest city and a top international tourist draw. Now, residents play a new and delicate game of water math each day.
They’re recycling bath water to help flush toilets. They’re being told to limit showers to 90 seconds. And hand sanitizer, once somewhat of an afterthought, is now a big seller.
“Unwashed hair is now a sign of social responsibility,” resident Darryn Ten told CNN.
People collect drinking water from pipes fed by an underground spring in St. James, about 25 kilometers from the city center of Cape Town.
The genesis of the crisis
So how did this happen? How does a major city in the developed world just run dry?
It’s been a slow-motion crisis, exacerbated by three factors conspiring together:
The worst drought in over a century, which has pushed Cape Town’s water scarcity into a potentially deadly horizon
Its population, which is 4 million and growing quickly
A rapidly changing climate
Even with the predicament they find themselves in, residents haven’t dropped their water use significantly, said Patricia De Lille, Cape Town’s mayor.
The city has lowered the water pressure in their mains to help stretch the water supply. But usage is still 86 million liters above its target goal.
“It is quite unbelievable that a majority of people do not seem to care and are sending all of us headlong towards Day Zero,” a statement from the mayor’s office said. “We can no longer ask people to stop wasting water. We must force them.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
