Thursday, January 14, 2021

Musical Interlude: Tom Clay, "What The World Needs Now"

"In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. You can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarization and filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love. What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black." 
- Robert F. Kennedy on the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

"What The World Needs Now"
by Tom Clay
"Detroit DJ brought this out early in 1973 and it was seen as 
a celebration of the message behind that spread
by John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy."

Wednesday, January 13, 2021

Must Watch! “Brace Yourself For The New Great Depression; U.S. Facing Income Crisis; Gold/Silver - You Need Them”

Jeremiah Babe,
“Brace Yourself For The New Great Depression; 
U.S. Facing Income Crisis; Gold/Silver - You Need Them”

Musical Interlude: Moby, "Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad?"

Original: 
Moby, "Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad?"
"He'll open doors..."
Moby, "Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad (Ben-E.dit)"
Full screen highly recommended.

"A Look to the Heavens"

“M13 is one of the most prominent and best known globular clusters. Visible with binoculars in the constellation of Hercules, M13 is frequently one of the first objects found by curious sky gazers seeking celestials wonders beyond normal human vision. 
M13 is a colossal home to over 100,000 stars, spans over 150 light years across, lies over 20,000 light years distant, and is over 12 billion years old. At the 1974 dedication of Arecibo Observatory, a radio message about Earth was sent in the direction of M13. The featured image in HDR, taken through a small telescope, spans an angular size just larger than a full Moon, whereas the inset image, taken by Hubble Space Telescope, zooms in on the central 0.04 degrees.”

"At This Point..."

“At this point I reveal myself in my true colors, as a stick-in-the-mud. I hold a number of beliefs that have been repudiated by the liveliest intellects of our time. I believe order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology. I believe that in spite of the recent triumphs of science, men haven’t changed much in the last two thousand years; and in consequence we must try to learn from history. History is ourselves.

I believe in courtesy, the ritual by which we avoid hurting other people’s feelings, by satisfying our own egos. And I think we should remember that we are all part of a great whole, which for convenience we call nature. All living things are our brothers and sisters.”
- Kenneth Clark, “Civilization”

"What We Really Want..."

"Our dilemma is that we hate change and love it at the same time; 
what we really want is for things to remain the same but get better."
- Sydney J. Harris

"Here Comes the Pin"

"Here Comes the Pin"
by Brian Maher

"IT is drifting into view. Its outline is beginning to take shape... Yes, we can see it now, sharp and shiny - a pin - on a collision course with a bubble...The stock market bubble. What is propelling this pointy menace? When might it impact? Answers to follow. Let us first glance at the expanding blister it is bearing in on…

The day counted plus and minus - plus for the S&P and Nasdaq - minus for The Dow Jones. The S&P gained eight points. The Dow Jones lost eight points, washing away the S&P’s gain. But the Nasdaq tipped the board with a 56-point boost. And so there is somewhat more joy in heaven today. Gold, meantime, scratched out a gain of $3 and change. So much for today. Let us now train our vision on the approaching pin…

Euphoria: Citi’s “Panic/Euphoria” index has struck a record high. That is, market euphoria has struck a record high. Investors are dumbstruck and delirious, dizzied by trillions in Federal Reserve liquidity. Trees can indeed scrape the sky, growing under the nurturing influence of Jerome Powell’s hoses.

Dow 30,000? Why not. On to Dow 40,000. On to Dow 50,000. As a percentage of assets, investor equity holdings approach record heights. Meantime, our minions inform us these investors are buying up call options at record rates - that is, wagering on higher stock prices ahead. Pay no mind to today’s stratospheric valuations, they say. It is true, valuations approach those of the late 1990s — shortly before another pin found its mark.

The S&P’s price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio presently reads roughly 30... nearly double its historical average. hat is, history argues stocks are extravagant. But this time is different... shout the dumbstruck, delirious and dizzied...

Today’s ground-level interest rates justify today’s stratospheric valuations… and today’s skyscraping stock prices. Goldman - for example - claims stocks are no more expensive than 15 years ago. That is, stocks are no more expensive than in 2006. The bubble is a mirage, it concludes. Just so. But we would remind Goldman that a bubble was inflating in 2006. We would also remind Goldman that the market is not a study in mathematics. It cannot be captured in lines, bars or graphs.

The Elusive Markets: How do you represent fear on a chalkboard? Or greed? Markets are a study of psyches. Of emotions. And passions. They will not be reduced to numbers. As well attempt to reduce love to numbers... to translate Romeo and Juliet into a mathematics textbook... Or to plot a sonnet along an ‘x’ and ‘y’ axis... Or to express Nancy Pelosi’s hatred for Donald Trump through quadratic equations. It cannot be done.

Do you wish to comprehend markets? Look to the head, look to the heart, look to the glands. The head shrinker and the romance scribbler hold out far greater promise than the number cruncher. The head shrinker in particular has an easy diagnosis at present...

It’s Different This Time: Mr. Lance Roberts of Real Investment Advice: "One does not have to dig too deeply to find evidence of the “psychology” driving the current stock market bubble. Speak with almost any retail investor, and you will hear a common refrain from “the Fed won’t like markets decline” to common justification catch-phrases like the “Fear Of Missing Out (F.O.M.O)” or “There Is No Alternative (T.I.N.A.)”...

Concludes Roberts: "It is all reminiscent of the market peak of 1929 when Dr. Irving Fisher uttered his now-famous words: “Stocks have now reached a permanently high plateau.” This “time IS different.” However, “this time” is only different from the standpoint the variables are not the same as they have been previously. The variables never are. But the outcome is always the same. We must agree. The outcome is always the same. Only the variables differ.

So let us now turn to one variable that may “yield” the inevitable outcome - the bubble’s bursting. That is, let us identify the approaching pin…

Omens From the Bond Market: Today’s gorgeous stock prices are justified by low interest rates, say Wall Street’s drummers. They will remain justified so long as interest rates remain low. But have you glanced recently at the bond market?

10-year Treasury yields are on the jump. Below 0.90% in mid-December, yields have lurched to as of 1.18% yesterday. 1.18% is piddling by the standard of history. 10-year yields average 4.40% across time. But with markets - as with life - it is not so much where you are. It is where you are going. And yields are going up. That is largely because - we hazard - the bond market has caught a glimpse of approaching inflation... Not quantitative easing’s phantom inflation that only inflated stocks. But actual consumer price inflation.

The Kindling for an Inflationary Flame: The pandemic has turned out blizzards of spending… including the recent $900 billion “stimulus” package. The bond market spots additional spending ahead now that Democrats have seized all branches of government. The long-anticipated inflation may finally gurgle.

As we have explained prior, yields rise because inflation eats into a bond’s value as the termite eats into wood. Under inflation, a bond is a sawdust asset. Bond holders therefore demand a higher yield to compensate them for the termite’s ravages, for inflation’s ravages. Thus we have our pin: Rising interest rates.

Again, we are told today’s vanishingly small interest rates warrant today’s obscenely high stock levels. What then can you expect when interest rates rise? That is correct. You can expect stocks to plunge - at least you should expect stocks to plunge (we have cried false alarms before). But what is the interest rate that could topple the stock market? 3%... 2.5%... perhaps 2%? Recall, the 10-year Treasury presently yields 1.18%.

(How bad is the global debt problem? Holter says, “I’ll just give you just one number. Global debt is now $273 trillion. In the 2008-2009 debt crisis, global debt was about half that. (Most ominous of all are the, "best guess", $2.4 QUADRILLION in global derivatives. - CP) With that $273 trillion in debt, can interest rates ever go up? They cannot allow interest rates to ever go up. They can never taper balance sheets. They have to put their foot on the accelerator and push it through the floorboard to keep this thing alive. That debt has to be serviced.”")

When the Pin Strikes the Bubble: We turn to SocGen's Albert Edwards for the possible answer: "We all understood in 2018 (and we still know now) just how dependent this equity bull market is on low bond yields… But back then, with the S&P just shy of 3000 and much more moderate multiples than today it took a rise in 10y bond yields above 3% to ‘break’ the bull run. Now with the U.S. tech sector on a forward PE close to 30x (vs 20x back in Q4 2018), it will clearly take a lot less to break the equity market and trigger the bursting of this bubble."

What then is the bubble-popping figure? I don’t believe there is a cat in hell’s chance that... U.S. 10y yields can rise to 1.5%. The equity market bubble will burst long before we get there! 10-year Treasury yields are within range of 1.5%. That is, the stock market is presently within range of the prickly pin. When that pin strikes - if it strikes - we do not know. Again, we have yelled wolf before. But you may wish to keep a weather eye on 10-year Treasury yields..."

Gregory Mannarino, "Bitcoin Going To 50K Shortly. Stock Market To SKYROCKET. Debt To HYPER-BALLOON"

Gregory Mannarino, PM 1/13/21:
"Bitcoin Going To 50K Shortly. 
Stock Market To SKYROCKET. Debt To HYPER-BALLOON"

The Daily "Near You?"

Mustang, Oklahoma, USA. Thanks for stopping by!

The Poet: Robert Frost, "Four Preludes on Playthings of the Wind"

"Four Preludes on Playthings of the Wind"

“The past is a bucket of ashes.”

1

The Woman named To-morrow
sits with a hairpin in her teeth
and takes her time
and does her hair the way she wants it
and fastens at last the last braid and coil
and puts the hairpin where it belongs
and turns and drawls: Well, what of it?
My grandmother, Yesterday, is gone.
What of it? Let the dead be dead.

2

The doors were cedar
and the panels strips of gold
and the girls were golden girls
and the panels read and the girls chanted:
We are the greatest city,
the greatest nation:
nothing like us ever was.

The doors are twisted on broken hinges.
Sheets of rain swish through on the wind
where the golden girls ran and the panels read:
We are the greatest city,
the greatest nation,
nothing like us ever was.

3

It has happened before.
Strong men put up a city and got
a nation together,
And paid singers to sing and women
to warble: We are the greatest city,
the greatest nation,
nothing like us ever was.

And while the singers sang
and the strong men listened
and paid the singers well
and felt good about it all,
there were rats and lizards who listened
… and the only listeners left now
… are … the rats … and the lizards.

And there are black crows
crying, “Caw, caw,”
bringing mud and sticks
building a nest
over the words carved
on the doors where the panels were cedar
and the strips on the panels were gold
and the golden girls came singing:
We are the greatest city,
the greatest nation:
nothing like us ever was.

The only singers now are crows crying, “Caw, caw,”
And the sheets of rain whine in the wind and doorways.
And the only listeners now are … the rats … and the lizards.

4

The feet of the rats
scribble on the door sills;
the hieroglyphs of the rat footprints
chatter the pedigrees of the rats
and babble of the blood
and gabble of the breed
of the grandfathers and the great-grandfathers
of the rats.

And the wind shifts
and the dust on a door sill shifts
and even the writing of the rat footprints
tells us nothing, nothing at all
about the greatest city, the greatest nation
where the strong men listened
and the women warbled: Nothing like us ever was.

- Robert Frost

"Opening the Gates of Hell"

Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here

"Opening the Gates of Hell"
by Bill Bonner

"Some things are possible. Some are impossible. 
And some are just stupid."
– Bill Bonner

WEST RIVER, MARYLAND – "Somewhere in this once-great nation, a real revolutionary – young, angry, determined, and smart – practices before the mirror… searching for the right pose… looking for the right words…to express the outrage of those left behind, forgotten, dissed, and used by a corrupt elite. And sometime in the future, his hour come ’round at last, this Lenin will slouch towards Washington…But the feds… the elite… the Deep State… will be ready for him. They’ll just shut down his Facebook account!

More Stimulus: Today, we look at how distant dots connect. MarketWatch signals that more stimulus is coming: "Already spent your $600 stimulus check? Another one may soon be on its way."

The amazing thing about this “relief” program is that it already surpasses the actual damage caused in the U.S. by the coronavirus lockdowns – by as much as 10 times! The loss of GDP caused by the COVID-19 shutdowns and associated recession is said to be about 3%… or less than $600 billion. The stimulus used by the feds to offset the losses, however, has already toted to some $2 trillion for the CARES Act… and about $3 trillion in additional Federal Reserve money-printing. (There is considerable overlap in those numbers… and it’s hard to pin down the exact cost. Director of the National Economic Council Larry Kudlow said the total was $6 trillion.)

So, you have to ask yourself… how is this possible?

Something for Nothing: A woman goes to the hospital to have her appendix removed. The surgeon takes out her appendix. But then, in the spirit of generosity, he takes out her gallbladder, her left lung, and a kidney, too. You take your daughter to the pet store to buy a puppy. You come home with a puppy, a kitten, a hamster, and a boa constrictor. And now… thanks to the new Democrat leadership in Congress… they’re going to give you a pet jackass, too.

Says Joe Biden: "The debate over $2,000 isn’t some abstract debate in Washington. It’s about real lives, your lives. If you’re like millions of Americans all across this country, you need the money, you need the help, and you need it now."

Never Better: Remarkably, for a Plague Year, most American households and businesses don’t need the money more than ever before. Average family finances were never better. Americans made about $1 trillion more in 2020 than in the year before. People without jobs got state unemployment… and then a supplement from the federal government. Many ended up with more money than they made when they were on the job. Some got twice as much.

Those still collecting paychecks did well, too. Gone was the cost of commuting to work, including gas and parking fees. No more lunches at the diner. No more going out to restaurants, either. Or to the movies. Or on vacation. The cost of living, generally, went down… while income remained steady.

Pernicious Rot: To add to the financial comfort of America’s households, the Fed continued to push down interest rates. Overall, the typical family may have saved as much as $2,000 during the year… thanks to the lower borrowing costs. Mortgage interest rates, for example, fell a full 100 basis points, from 3.5% in January 2020 to barely 2.5% today. On a $200,000 mortgage, that’s a saving of about $108 per month. And recently, some companies advertised 30-year mortgages at only 2.3%.

And here, the pernicious rot sets in. The person who could previously only afford a $300,000 house is now shopping for bigger digs. And the builders are cranked up to provide it. They use up real resources – labor… copper… fuel… wood… and don’t forget the marble countertops! – building houses for people who can’t really afford them. And then, when interest rates rise… what will happen? At “normal” rates, the fellow could only afford half of the house. If rates go much higher, he won’t even be able to afford the basement. Who will take the loss? The homeowner? The mortgage finance company? Nobody?

Why Stop There? Once an economy depends on printing-press money, it is doomed. Like gangrene, the counterfeit money rots one sector after another. Yes, it could be stopped. But who wants to cut off his own hand? And today, all across the country, nostrils flare at the faint odor of another $2,000 in federal giveaways headed their way.

Only a few years ago, they would have thought it impossible. Where would the money come from? Why would the feds give it away? Aren’t they already running a deficit? The CollaborativeHouse.com explains: "People love money. And once a new kind of stimulus money is tasted it becomes a permanent feature of how every subsequent downturn is handled."

In 1930, Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon said, “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate real estate. Purge the rottenness out of the system.” In 2020, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said, “We have a lot of money. We need to get that money in Americans’ hands.”

And if the feds have so much money… why stop there? Why should we pay rents and mortgages? Surely the feds can make them go away? Why do we pay for college tuition? Why do we pay medical costs? Why do we have to work? Why don’t the feds give us a permanent stimulus… a Universal Basic Income (UBI)?

Nothing Is Impossible: History will show that it was not just the gates of the Capitol that were breached in 2021. More important, the gates in front of the “impossible” were thrown open. Now, people take for granted what they used to take for absurd.

Why should we honor the Constitution? It was written more than two centuries ago. And why should we protect private property? Is it fair that some have so much and others so little? And how come one man gets a pretty, young wife, while others suffer with old crones?

Now, a better world is possible… finally correcting the injustices, unfairnesses, and bad luck of the past. And from now on, we will all speak Swedish and wear our underwear on the outside so our rulers can see that it is clean. Once the vanguard has stormed into impossibility, a real revolution cannot be far behind."

Greg Hunter, "Expect the System to Go Down"

"Expect the System to Go Down"
By Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com

"Financial writer and precious metals expert Bill Holter says be prepared for major financial instability. Holter contends, “This is the biggest financial bubble in all of history by far, by orders of magnitude. So, it doesn’t matter who is running the show, the wheels are going to fall off. The question in my mind is whether it’s going to go down under the rule of law or not under the rule of law. Under a Left regime, there is a rule of law for everyone else and no rule of law for them.”

How bad is the global debt problem? Holter says, “I’ll just give you just one number. Global debt is now $273 trillion. (In the 2008-2009 debt crisis, global debt was about half that. Most ominous of all are the, "best guess", $2.4 QUADRILLION in global derivatives.) With that $273 trillion in debt, can interest rates ever go up? They cannot allow interest rates to ever go up. They can never taper balance sheets. They have to put their foot on the accelerator and push it through the floorboard to keep this thing alive. That debt has to be serviced.”

What’s going to happen to gold? The price is going way up. Holter says, “If you divide the U.S. national debt by the amount of ounces the U.S. Treasury says it holds, you get an astounding $100,000 per ounce price for gold.”

Holter says, “Get solar panels, generators or whatever. Put back some food. Expect the system to go down because, mathematically, it is going to go down. You also want to protect yourself financially by getting out of the system and become your own central bank. In other words, store your own savings. Don’t rely on your brokerage account. What happens when the markets don’t open? What happens when your brokerage goes out of business or goes bankrupt? Now, you are going to be tied up for three to five years. Just become as insulated as you can.”

Join Greg Hunter of USAWatchdog.com as he
 goes One-on-One with Bill Holter of JSMineset.com.

"How It Really Is"

 

"Economic Market Snapshot AM 1/13/21"

"Economic Market Snapshot AM 1/13/21"
"Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will
do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone."
- John Maynard Keynes
"Down the rabbit hole of psychopathic greed and insanity...
Only the consequences are real - to you!
Gregory Mannarino, AM 1/13/21:
IMPORTANT UPDATES:
 Bitcoin, Crypto, Stocks, Market, Debt, MORE
"The more I see of the monied classes, 
the better I understand the guillotine."
- George Bernard Shaw
MarketWatch Market Summary, Live Updates

CNN Market Data:

CNN Fear And Greed Index:

"Covid-19 Pandemic Updates 1/13/21"

"Covid-19 Pandemic Updates 1/13/21"
January 13, 2021: "Things are likely to get worse before they get better. The virus is spreading so rapidly that hospitals are struggling to keep up. About 130,000 Americans are hospitalized with Covid symptoms, more than double the number two months ago. The strain on hospitals raises the possibility that many patients will not receive the best available treatments.

Los Angeles has recently had to ration oxygen. And Esteban Trejo, an executive at a company in El Paso, Texas, that provides oxygen to temporary hospitals, told Kaiser Health News, “It’s been nuts, absolutely nuts.”

The recent data on cases and deaths is noisy, because diagnoses artificially slowed during the holidays, says Mitch Smith, a Times reporter who follows the numbers. Still, deaths have already hit a record this week - more than 3,000 a day, on average - and the recent explosion of cases suggests they may be heading to above 3,500 and perhaps to 4,000."

 Jan. 13, 2021 12:17 AM ET: 
The coronavirus pandemic has sickened more than 91,602,200 
people, according to official counts, including 22,903,333 Americans.
Globally at least 1,961,600 have died.

"The COVID Tracking Project"
Every day, our volunteers compile the latest numbers on tests, cases, 
hospitalizations, and patient outcomes from every US state and territory.
https://covidtracking.com/

“655 People have $4 Trillion in Wealth. 200 Million Can’t Cover a $1000 Expense”

“655 People have $4 Trillion in Wealth. 
200 Million Can’t Cover a $1000 Expense”
by Michael Snyder

"The COVID pandemic has caused the gap between the ultra-wealthy and the rest of us to grow larger than it ever has been before. Thanks to the hyperinflationary policies of the Federal Reserve and our politicians in Washington, stock prices have soared to unprecedented heights in recent months. This pushed the wealth of the uber-rich to dizzying heights, but for the rest of the country 2020 was an unmitigated nightmare. As I have discussed previously, one survey found that 2020 was a “personal financial disaster” for 55 percent of all Americans. More than 110,000 restaurants shut down permanently last year, Americans filed more than 70 million claims for unemployment benefits, and tens of millions are potentially facing eviction in 2021. But even though we are mired in the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s, those at the very top of the economic pyramid are laughing all the way to the bank.

Earlier today, I came across a tweet from Sven Heinrich that really struck an emotional chord with me… "655 people have $4 trillion in wealth. 200 million can’t cover a $1000 expense."

I certainly don’t have any problem with people gaining wealth by working extremely hard and making society a better place in the process. But most of the people at the very top of the economic pyramid only increased their wealth in 2020 because the powers that be decided to open up the firehoses and rain obscene amounts of money on them. That isn’t right.

As a result of the deeply flawed policies that were implemented because of the COVID pandemic, the gap between “gains in financial assets and the health of the economy” was the largest ever recorded last year: "But as stock market indexes staged a huge rebound from the lows seen in March when the pandemic first hit, the gap between the wealthy and the poor extended an already widening trend to historic proportions. A report via BofA Global Research published on Friday notes that a measure of the differential between gains in financial assets and the health of the economy hit a record at 6.3X in 2020."

My regular readers are probably sick and tired of hearing me say that the stock market has become completely divorced from economic reality, and now we have a hard number which backs up what I have been saying all along. As I write this article, the Dow is sitting just above 31,000, and that is utterly absurd. If the Dow were to fall to 15,000 it would still be overvalued.

Meanwhile, a brand new survey has discovered that only 39 percent of all Americans “would be able to cover an unexpected $1,000 expense”: "Just 39% of Americans would be able to cover an unexpected $1,000 expense, according to a new report from Bankrate.com. That’s down from 2020, when 41% of people said they could cover a $1,000 cost with their savings."

If only 39 percent of Americans currently have enough money for such an unexpected expense, that means that 61 percent of Americans do not. According to Google, the current population of the U.S. is 328 million, and 61 percent of 328 million is just over 200 million. So that is where Sven Heinrich got that figure from.

200 million of us have so little money that we are just barely scraping by from month to month. And according to one of Walmart’s top executives, many of their customers do not expect “any kind of speedy recovery”: "Walmart Chief Customer Officer Janey Whiteside said Tuesday that many of its shoppers don’t expect the economy to quickly bounce back from the coronavirus pandemic. Almost half of customers surveyed in November told Walmart that they were worried about the current health of the economy, she said when speaking at the virtual National Retail Federation conference. She said 40% said they didn’t expect “any kind of speedy recovery.”

Unfortunately, those that are pessimistic about how the U.S. economy will perform in 2021 are right on target. It is going to be a very painful year.

Of course it isn’t just consumers that are concerned about the year ahead. Small business optimism is falling as well: "A popular gauge of small-business confidence in the US sank to a seven-month low in December as stricter lockdown measures and climbing daily case counts cut into economic activity. The National Federation of Independent Businesses’ index of small-business optimism fell 5.5 points last month to 95.9, according to a Tuesday release. The reading lands below the average index value since 1978 of 98 and marks the lowest level since May. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg expected the gauge to dip slightly to 100.2."

Americans generally tend to be quite optimistic about the future, but looking ahead there just aren’t any reasons to be optimistic about the U.S. economy in 2021. The COVID pandemic continues to get even worse, new lockdowns have been instituted all over the country, our federal government is in a state of chaos, and there will inevitably be more rioting, looting and civil unrest in the months ahead. Plus, there will undoubtedly be some additional unexpected surprises that most people are not anticipating.

Before I wrap up this article, there is just one more thing that I wanted to mention. A programmer in San Francisco named Stefan Thomas is the proud owner of 7,002 Bitcoin, but he can’t access his fortune because he forgot the password, and he only has two more tries before he is locked out permanently: "Take Stefan Thomas, a programmer in San Francisco, who told The New York Times that he has 7,002 Bitcoin tucked away - currently worth about $236 million, nearly a quarter billion dollars - but that he has no idea how to access it and can only guess two more passwords before being locked out forever.

Even setting aside the long term prospects for crypto, the key message of these horror stories is that taking digital finances into your own hands is a huge risk if you can’t manage your passwords. Can you imagine how you would feel if that happened to you? Sadly, it could be argued that essentially the same thing is happening to the nation as a whole. America has “forgotten the password” to what once made us so great, and we are running out of chances. Let us hope that we wake up before it is too late, because time is not on our side at this point."

Tuesday, January 12, 2021

Gerald Celente, "Trends Journal: The Divided States of America"

Gerald Celente,
 "Trends Journal: The Divided States of America"

"Jim Rickards: Biden Will Face New Depression"

"Jim Rickards: Biden Will Face New Depression"
by Epic Economist

"Best-selling author, lawyer, economist, and investment banker Jim Rickards is warning for a New Great Depression. The expert is predicting that several headwinds are about to compromise the U.S. economic growth and lead us to a much deeper and traumatic crisis than the Great Depression of the 1930s. In this video, we made an in-depth analysis of the expert's forecast and provided tangible evidence that we're approaching an economic free-fall like we’ve never witnessed before. 

According to Jim Rickards, recessions are cyclical. The recession that started at the bust of the outbreak most likely ended, and we are now living another level of economic slump that came as a consequence of the effects of the recession. Considering the GDP estimates for a third-quarter growth of 33.1%, the least we can say is that we're out of the first round of economic recession. But that doesn't mean we're headed to a recovery. In fact, in Rickards' view, we're moving towards an economic depression. 

As the official numbers for fourth-quarter growth won't be known until the end of this month, estimates for growth are in the range of 7%. Both the second-quarter meltdown and the third-quarter rebound were the highest annualized figures for decline and growth ever recorded in U.S. history. But as Rickards explains, that's exactly the problem.

That is to say, the third-quarter growth could potentially have put output up again to approximately 87% of the previous level, and a estimated fourth-quarter growth of 5% would set the annual GDP at 93% of the 2019 level. In any case, that still configures a decline of 7% in GDP for the full year 2020, the worst full-year decline in GDP since 1946 when growth collapsed by 11.6% after WW2. 

The worst full-year of the Great Depression was in 1932, when growth fell 12.9%. This indicates that the historic and dramatic collapse in growth of 2020 is at levels only seen against the backdrop of economic depressions and wartimes. That is precisely why Rickards argues that we're entering a New Great Depression. 

The strategist foresees that a new recession will be unfolded in the first quarter of 2021. At this moment, the economy is already on the path for another technical recession, which signals that we're on the verge of a double-dip recession. While last year's recession was sparked by the health crisis, this year's recession is being caused by the introduction of new strict lockdowns and stay-at-home orders in most major states of the nation.

More than 45% of GDP and 50% of all jobs are generated by small and medium-sized businesses. This is the segment of the economy that has been struggling the most because of lockdowns. A considerable part of the closings aren't temporary anymore but have become permanent as bankruptcy rates are soaring, equipments are being sold at fire-sale prices, job losses are not regained, leases are broken and empty storefronts become a sign of the times.

The latest labor market report found that for the first time since April, over 140,000 jobs were cut last month, a clear sign that the economy is stumbling amid so many restrictions and so many rounds of shutdowns. 

Consumer spending has flatlined over the past few months, giving almost no incentive for companies to hire. The economy still has 9.9 million fewer jobs than it did before the health crisis sunk us into a deep recession almost a year ago. This staggering drop in the labor force participation rate is nearing the lowest rate ever recorded, at this point, the level of long-term unemployment is so high that it is only comparable in modern history to the ranks seen during the Great Recession. 

Moreover, Rickards maintains that Biden's policies are likely to aggravate this situation even further. However, in his view, the Biden plan will not cause the recession; it’s already here, but the strategist suggests that his plans will make things even worse and possibly prolong the new recession into the second quarter as well. 

Consequently, in the short-term, deflation will be a much bigger issue than inflation. And deflation has a direct impact on growth since it increases the real value of debt. So, eventually, neither fiscal nor monetary policy will be able to generate stimulus to boost the economy. We will be facing low velocity of money, with high savings rates, high debt, high unemployment, and amid new lockdowns. 

The Fed and Congress can try, but they will never manage to stimulate the economy out of the recession. Instead, they will put us on a path for an economic free-fall of unprecedented proportions while dramatically expanding our national debt and letting us inevitably fall into a New Great Depression."

Musical Interlude: Chuck Wild, "Liquid Mind, Dream Ten”

Chuck Wild, "Liquid Mind, Dream Ten”

"Liquid Mind" (aka Chuck Wild) originally wrote this music to deal with the anxiety and stress of overwork and the serious illness of friends. The gentle ebb and flow of the music has an immediate "slowing down" effect, providing a serene escape from tension-filled days. Ideal for stress relief, falling asleep at night and to enhance meditative and therapeutic practices. There are few composers with as much love for slowness in their music as Wild. Chuck draws from classical and pop influences as varying as Beethoven and Brian Eno, Bartok and Rachmaninoff, Bach, Chopin and Fauré, Duruflé and Brahms."

"A Look to the Heavens"

“The constellation of Orion holds much more than three stars in a row. A deep exposure shows everything from dark nebula to star clusters, all embedded in an extended patch of gaseous wisps in the greater Orion Molecular Cloud Complex. The brightest three stars on the far left are indeed the famous three stars that make up the belt of Orion. Just below Alnitak, the lowest of the three belt stars, is the Flame Nebula, glowing with excited hydrogen gas and immersed in filaments of dark brown dust.
 
Below the frame center and just to the right of Alnitak lies the Horsehead Nebula, a dark indentation of dense dust that has perhaps the most recognized nebular shapes on the sky. On the upper right lies M42, the Orion Nebula, an energetic caldron of tumultuous gas, visible to the unaided eye, that is giving birth to a new open cluster of stars. Immediately to the left of M42 is a prominent bluish reflection nebula sometimes called the Running Man that houses many bright blue stars. The above image, a digitally stitched composite taken over several nights, covers an area with objects that are roughly 1,500 light years away and spans about 75 light years.”

Chet Raymo, “Very, Very, Very, Very, Very...”

“Very, Very, Very, Very, Very...”
by Chet Raymo

"In a short story that was published posthumously in the New Yorker, the inestimable Primo Levi meditated on the limits of language. The story was called “The Tranquil Star.” He writes "The star was very big and very hot, and its weight was enormous," and realizes immediately that the adjectives have failed him: “For a discussion of stars our language is inadequate and seems laughable, as if someone were trying to plow with a feather. It's a language that was born with us, suitable for describing objects more or less as large and long-lasting as we are; it has our dimensions, it's human. It doesn't go beyond what our senses tell us.

Until fairly recently in human history, there was nothing smaller than a scabies mite, writes Levi, and therefore no adjective to describe it. Nothing bigger than the sea or sky. Nothing hotter than fire. We can add modifiers: very big, very small, very hot. Or use adjectives of dubious superlativeness: enormous, colossal, extraordinary. But, really, these feeble stretchings of language don't take us very far in grasping the very, very, very extraordinarily diminutive or spectacularly colossal dimensions of atomic matter or cosmic space and time. We can overcome the limitations of language, Levi say, "only with a violent effort of the imagination."

I spent more than forty years trying to find ways to violently stretch the imaginations of my students (and myself) to accommodate the dimensions of the universe revealed by science. I would project onto a huge screen a photograph of a firestorm on the Sun, then superimpose a scale-sized Earth, which fit comfortably inside a loop of solar fire. I would take the class into the College Quad here near Boston, where I had set up a basketball to represent the Sun, then gathered 100 feet away with a pinhead Earth; we walked together with our pin in the great annual journey of the Earth, and looked through a telescope at the marble-sized Jupiter than I had previously installed at the other end of the long Quad (the next closest star system would have been a couple of basketballs in Hawaii). We walked geologic timelines that took us from one end of the campus to the other.

In one of my Globe essays I used this analogy: “Imagine the human DNA as a strand of sewing thread. On this scale, the DNA in the 23 pairs of chromosomes in a typical human cell would be about 150 miles long, with about 600 nucleotide pairs per inch. That is, the DNA in a single cell is equivalent to 1000 spools of sewing thread, representing two copies of the genetic code. Take all that thread - the 1000 spools worth - and crumple it into 46 wads (the chromosomes). Stuff the wads into a shoe box (the cell nucleus) along with - oh, say enough chicken soup to fill the box. Toss the shoe box into a steamer trunk (the cell), and fill the rest of the trunk with more soup. Take the steamer trunk with its contents and shrink it down to an invisibly small object, smaller than the point of a pin. Multiply that tiny object by a trillion and you have the trillion cells of the human body, each with its full complement of DNA.”

Or this description from 'Waking Zero': “The track of the Prime Meridian across England from Peace Haven in the south to the mouth of the River Humber in the north is nearly 200 miles. If that distance is taken to represent the 13.7 billion year history of the universe, as we understand it today, then all of recorded human history is less than a single step. The entire story I have told in this book, from the Alexandrian astronomers and geographers to the present-day astronomers who launch telescopes into space, would fit neatly into a single footprint. If the 200 miles of the meridian track is taken to represent the distance to the most distant objects we observe with our telescopes, then a couple of steps would take us across the Milky Way Galaxy. A mote of dust from my shoe is large enough to contain not only our own solar system but many neighboring stars.”


But as hard as one tries, the scale of these things escape us. If one could truly comprehend what we are seeing when we look, say, at the Hubble Ultra Deep Field Photo above, which I have done my best to convey to myself and others in a dozen ways, it would surely shake to the core some of our most cherished beliefs. Just as our language is contrived on a human scale, so too are our gods.”