Steve Bull's Blog, page 1336
August 20, 2017
NASA Unveils Plan To Stop Yellowstone “Supervolcano” Eruption, There’s Just One Catch
A NASA plan to stop the Yellowstone supervolcano from erupting, could actually cause it to blow… triggering a nuclear winter that would wipe out humanity.
As we have detailed recently, government officials have been closely monitoring the activity in the Yellowstone caldera.
However, as SHTFplan.com’s Mac Slavo details, scientists at NASA have now come up with an incredibly risky plan to save the United States from the super volcano.
A NASA scientist has spoken out about the true threat of super volcanoes and the risky methods that could be used to prevent a devastating eruption. Lying beneath the tranquil and beautiful settings of Yellowstone National Park in the US lies an enormous magma chamber, called a caldera. It’s responsible for the geysers and hot springs that define the area, but for scientists at NASA, it’s also one of the greatest natural threats to human civilization as we know it.
Brian Wilcox, a former member of the NASA Advisory Council on Planetary Defense, shared a report on the natural hazard that hadn’t been seen outside of the agency until now. Following an article published by BBC about super volcanoes last month, a group of NASA researchers got in touch with the media to share a report previously unseen outside the space agency about the threat Yellowstone poses, and what they hypothesize could possibly be done about it.
“I was a member of the NASA Advisory Council on Planetary Defense which studied ways for NASA to defend the planet from asteroids and comets,” explains Brian Wilcox of Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at the California Institute of Technology.
“I came to the conclusion during that study that the supervolcano threat is substantially greater than the asteroid or comet threat.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
August 19, 2017
The Bond Bubble
Central banks have artificially lowered interest rates, making bonds attractive. And since bonds are historically safe havens, it’s hard to even comprehend a bond bubble.
But as interest rates start to rise, the concern over bonds rises too. Adding some gasoline to the fire is the fact that the largest buyers of government bonds have been governments themselves. When they stop this buying spree, there will be more bonds than buyers.
This will likely to lead to a default or something equally painful.
Simply, US Treasuries are in a bubble.
Of course, many are confident that the US central bank, the Federal Reserve, won’t continue hiking rates much longer. That higher short-term interest rates are a short-term strategy that will be abandoned soon.
Bond markets aren’t expecting interest rates to return to normal levels. Why?
For one, the US economy is addicted to cheap credit and this has only gotten worse since the last financial crisis.
Therefore, with higher interest rates, people go bankrupt. And not just mortgage borrowers, but consumers and corporations face dire consequences if interest rates go higher.
Since the price of stocks, bonds, and real estate are all inflated to the nth degree, higher interest rates will likely correct these prices and send them downward.
Since expected future cash flows would be discounted at a higher interest rate, present values (and thus market prices) would deflate. Deflation of assets won’t change the amount of debt, but it will wipe out equity capital.
Meanwhile, the yield curve has become “flatter” recently, suggesting banks’ profit opportunities from lending are diminishing, which in turn decreases the inflow of new credit into the system.
Further declines in yield spread essentially mean a severe economic recession and most certainly a stock-market crash.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Rogoff Tells Central Banks More Negative Interest Rates Will Be Needed
Kenneth Rogoff, the Professor of Economics at Harvard University, is stuck in a time warp where he cannot think out of the box even once. He is telling the central banks that the next recession they will have to resort to negative interest rates and they should prepare now. Despite the fact that negative rates have failed to work in Europe or Japan, seems to be nothing to really consider. So what after almost 10 years of failed policies at the European Central Bank, it will eventually work maybe in 12 or 13 years? It just requires patience? Well even a broken watch is correct twice a day for a brief moment in time.
This is the problem with academics. They don’t get the calls for help. A friend in the central bank of Canada referred a major Canadian company to us. The guy called and said let me say up front, I do not respect academics. I only called because they told me to do so. When I said I am not an academic, the cloud was lifted. The academics never get called into real world problems. They have zero experience. Government calls upon them because the politicians also have no experience.
These policies of negative interest rates have created a Pension Crisis on the horizon and wiped out so many states, provinces, cities, and municipalities. This policy is one-dimensional and only looks at demand and how to force people to spend. There is no consideration of pensions or that if interest rates go negative, people withdraw from banks and hoard.
Keynes himself argued that there were times to lower taxes to stimulate. That is just never considered even once. You cannot figure out how the world economy truly functions from your home office and never stepping out into the light of the real world.
Donald Trump Finally Comes Out of the Closet
The firing of Steve Bannon is in my opinion the most significant event to happen during the Trump administration thus far. Moreover, it will have massive reverberations across the U.S. political spectrum for years and years to come. I wasn’t planning on writing today, but this news is so incredibly significant I find myself with little choice.
Taking a step back, part of the reason I was immediately able to see through the Trump con was due to my upbringing in New York City. The guy was constantly in the news my entire life, so I had a pretty decent understanding of where he was really coming from and what makes him tick. The mindset of your typical NYC-based billionaire real estate developer is filled with all sorts of perspectives and priorities, but thoughts of populism are not amongst them.
Trump used populism to get elected, and then as soon as he won, immediately appointed some of the most destructive oligarchs imaginable to run his administration. The reason I warned about this incessantly at the time, is because I learned the lesson from the Obama administration. People = policy, and the people Trump was elevating were almost unanimously awful. Irrespective of what you think of Bannon, him being out means Wall Street and the military-industrial complex is now 100% in control of the Trump administration. Prepare for an escalation of imperial war around the world and an expansion of brutal oligarchy.
The removal of Bannon is the end of even a facade of populism. This is now the Goldman Sachs Presidency with a thin-skinned, unthinking authoritarian as a figurehead. Meanwhile, guess who’s still there in addition to the Goldman executives? Weed obsessed, civil asset forfeiture supporting Jefferson Sessions. The Trump administration just bacame ten times more dangerous than it was before. With the coup successful, Trump no longer needs to be impeached.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Don’t Forget About The Red Swan
Don’t Forget About The Red Swan
[Urgent Note: The nation’s future and a massive debt ceiling hangs in the balance as Trump pushes beyond the Comey hearings. That’s why I’m on a mission to send my new book TRUMPED! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin… and How to Bring It Back to every American who responds, absolutely free. Click here for more details.]
Given the anti-Trump feeding frenzy, we continue to believe that a Swan is on its way bearing Orange. But if that’s not enough to dissuade the dip buyers, perhaps the impending arrival of the Red Swan will at least give them pause.
The chart below comprises a picture worth thousands of words. It puts the lie to the latest Wall Street belief that the global economy is accelerating and that surging corporate profits justify the market’s latest manic rip.
What is actually going on is a short-lived global credit/growth impulse emanating from China. Beijing panicked early last year and opened up the capital expenditure (CapEx) spigots at the state-owned enterprises (SOEs) out of fear that China’s great machine was heading for stall speed at exactly the wrong time.
The 19th national communist party Congress scheduled for late fall of 2017. This every five year event is the single most important happening in the Red Ponzi. This time the event is slated to be the coronation of Xi Jinping as the second coming of Mao.
Beijing was not about to risk an economy fizzling toward a flat line before the Congress. Yet that threat was clearly on the horizon as evident from the dark green line in the chart below which represents total fixed asset investment.
The latter is the spring-wheel of China’s booming economy, but it had dropped from 22% per annum growth rate when Mr. Xi took the helm in 2012 to 10% by early 2016.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
August 18, 2017
We Need A Social Revolution
wikimedia
We Need A Social Revolution
Our future depends on our willingness to fight for it
In the conventional view, there are two kinds of revolutions: political and technological. Political revolutions may be peaceful or violent, and technological revolutions may transform civilizations gradually or rather abruptly—for example, revolutionary advances in the technology of warfare.
In this view, the engines of revolution are the state—government in all its layers and manifestations—and the corporate economy.
In a political revolution, a new political party or faction gains converts to its narrative, and this new force replaces the existing political order, either via peaceful means or violent revolution.
Technological revolutions arise from many sources but end up being managed by the state and private sector, which each influence and control the other in varying degrees.
Conventional history focuses on top-down political revolutions of the violent “regime change” variety: the American Revolution (1776), the French Revolution (1789), the Russian Revolution (1917), the Chinese Revolution (1949), and so on.
Technology has its own revolutionary hierarchy; the advances of the Industrial Revolutions I, II, III and now IV, have typically originated with inventors and proto-industrialists who relied on private capital and banking to fund large-scale buildouts of new industries: rail, steel manufacturing, shipbuilding, the Internet, etc.
The state may direct and fund technological revolutions as politically motivated projects, for example the Manhattan project to develop nuclear weapons and the Space race to the Moon in the 1960s.
These revolutions share a similar structure: a small cadre leads a large-scale project based on a strict hierarchy in which the revolution is pushed down the social pyramid by the few at the top to the many below. Even when political and industrial advances are accepted voluntarily by the masses, the leadership and structure of the controlling mechanisms are hierarchical: political power, elected or not, is concentrated in the hands of a few at the top.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Items That You Can Barter When SHTF
Barter items for survival – What would you have to trade in a survival situation?
Items That You Can Barter When SHTFAny conversation about prepping first starts with the “the best survival gun” followed by “bugging out vs hunkering down” and then on to “the best retreat location” and then to “what to have on hand for barter… well today, I’m going to answer that question.
The first thing to consider is what items do people need and use every day, followed by will they need these items after a long-term disaster and if so will those items be readily available when the resupply lines are cut. If not, then would those items be easy to make from other common items?
These are the questions I asked when putting away my own barter items – those are included in the list below in no order.
1. Ammunition
While I don’t advocate bartering most ammo after a collapse simply because that ammo could be used against you. Stop and think about it, if a person needs to barter for ammo in the first weeks and months after a collapse then it’s evident that that person has not prepped and will need other stuff, stuff they figure that you now have and there is no guarantee that they won’t use the ammo that you traded them at a later date to kill you and take your preps for their own use.
The exception that I make with ammo for barter purposes is for shotgun ammo. I’ve stocked up a large amount (500 rounds) of 12 gauge bird shot in #6 and smaller shot sizes for barter purposes. Sure birdshot can kill someone, however, it’s low penetration and short range make it one of the least threatening ammo types that can be stocked up and used for barter purposes.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
So When Will China’s Debt Bubble Finally Blow Up?
The upside is fake stability. The downside is too ugly to contemplate.
Corporate debt in China has soared to $18 trillion, or 169% of GDP, the largest pile of corporate debt in the world, according to the worried Bank for International Settlements. The OECD has warned about it earlier this year. The New York Fed warned about this debt boom in February and that it could lead to a “financial crisis,” but that authorities have many tools to control it.
The IMF regularly warns about China’s corporate debt, broken-record-like, and did so again a few days ago, lambasting the authorities for their reluctance to tamp down on the growth of debt. The “current trajectory,” it said, “could eventually lead to a sharp adjustment.”
The Chinese authorities – the government and the central bank, supported by the state-owned megabanks – have allowed some bonds to default, rather than bail them out, to make some kind of theoretical point, and they have been working furiously on a balancing act, tamping down on the credit growth that fuels the economy and simultaneously stimulating the economy with more credit to keep the debt bubble from imploding. A misstep could create a global mess.
“Everyone knows there’s a credit problem in China, but I find that people often forget about the scale; it’s important in global terms,” Charlene Chu told the Financial Times. Back in 2011, when she was still a China banking analyst at Fitch Ratings, she went out on a limb with her radical estimates that there was much more debt than disclosed by the central bank, particularly in the shadow banking system, that banks were concealing risky loans in off-balance-sheet vehicles, and that this soaring opaque debt could have nasty consequences. Her outlandish views at the time have since then become the consensus.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
A Domestic Destabilization Is Underway: “The Left Is Fueling And Funding Tensions In Order To Exacerbate Them And Cause A Revolution”
Under the guise of “political correctness,” cities (such as Baltimore, MD) are removing their Confederate monuments one-by-one and under cover of darkness. Here, as reported by CBS News:
“The Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson monument at Wyman Park Dell was removed with a crowd watching. The Robert B. Taney monument in Mt. Vernon also came down. Crews are on the site of the confederate Women’s monument at University Parkway to take that one down. This comes just days after the Baltimore City Council passed a resolution Monday calling for the immediate deconstruction of these monuments.”
There it is! Straight out of the movie “The Patriot” with Mel Gibson, as with the character he played, Benjamin Martin: “An elected legislature can trample a man’s rights as easily as a king.”
Where’s the vote by the people in the city? Oh, just that the elected officials, mind you, can make such a decision…by their vote, a tyranny in itself. At the bare minimum, it should have been put to a vote.
The important thing to keep in mind is that most of these cities, city councils, and their state legislatures are being run by a pack of liberals. The “paradigm shift” is in full mode: “Democracy in America” did not mention the tyranny of the minority. In this case, a minority viewpoint, fueled by Marxists and liberals is attempting to subvert First Amendment rights under the U.S. Constitution and begin a policy of redaction to support their revisionist history.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Financial Times: “America Is Now A Dangerous Nation”
The Financial Times reminds readers of something that has occurred numerous times throughout history when leaders lose the support of their people… “The president may exploit an overseas conflict to distract from problems at home…”
Authored by Gideon Rachman via FT.com,
The claim that America is a “threat to world peace” has been a staple of Russian and Iranian propaganda for many years. For believers in the western alliance, it is painful to acknowledge that there is now some truth to this idea. Under Donald Trump, America looks like a dangerous nation. Over the past week, Mr Trump has indulged in nuclear brinkmanship in North Korea, issued vague threats of military action in Venezuela and flirted with white supremacists at home. He is offering the very opposite of the steady, predictable and calm leadership that American allies seek from Washington.
Mr Trump’s swiftly notorious threats that North Korea risks “fire and fury” from a “locked and loaded” America were particularly irresponsible. Even if the threat is a bluff, it puts American credibility on the line and risks triggering escalation from the Kim Jong Un regime, which is threatening to fire missiles near the US territory of Guam. Even more alarming, the Trump administration is openly flirting with the idea of a pre-emptive strike on North Korea — arguing that a nuclear-armed Mr Kim cannot be deterred. But if America could rely on deterrence to contain the nuclear threat from Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China — it can certainly do the same with Mr Kim’s North Korea. All previous presidents have rejected the idea of pre-emptive attacks on nuclear-armed states — for obvious reasons.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
