patrick.net

The Ballad of Cliven Bundy

sbh says

Vicente says

The Ballad of Cliven Bundy

Cliven Bundy, standing up for the idea of not paying your bills. Honestly now, is it racist all of a sudden, just to WONDER if someone is better off under slavery? This poor man is being wrongly slandered by the liberal press.

That's a good reason for a simple flat tax (with a special temporary fee on the 0.1-1% in times of crisis) because by that logic the 47% are standing up for not paying their bills either, in fact with negative effective rates a lot receive money. It's like Bundy being paid by the government for farming the land ;)

"Your proposals about the tools and seed and your maintenance are all right enough, but the land, you remember, belongs to me. You cannot expect me to give you your liberty and my own land for nothing. That would not be reasonable, would it?"

http://www.wealthandwant.com/docs/ajo_slavery.html

I propose we distribute 160 productive acres of farmland to every household in America.

There are 120M households now, so that's just 19.2 billion acres. There is 400M farmland acres in the US, so we only need to find 18.8B more, which is 30M square miles, the land area of the "lower 48" x ~10.

Well, so much for that idea! Looks like natural capital is getting pretty scarce nowadays.

Funny thing is, Japan is actually abandoning their marginal farmland now. They got pretty overcrowded last century, so it's not "easy pickings" quite yet over there, the abandoned farmland is generally pretty remote and/or hillside, terraced subsistence crash crops like mandarin oranges, konnyaku, yams, wasabi, tea -- fiddly stuff, not bulk cash crops you can collect with a combine.

Charts are showing the past but there is no historical context so they're meaningless.

In 1929 stocks were an asset bubble. Banks took depositors money and used high margin to buy stocks. Both are not possible today. Credit fueled asset bubbles can pop. Banks and many individuals were wiped out.

Houses bought with easy credit and MBS derivatives of their mortgages were both bubbles that popped. Lots of capital was lost.

Today stocks are not all speculative bubbles, although some are overvalued. Tesla, Netflix, Amazon, Facebook, and others are bubbles. But they aren't bought with credit, people buy stocks with their savings left over after taxes.

Warren Buffet didn't become super rich worrying about a crash, he ignores them and keeps seeking good stocks or companies to invest in.

There is going to be another dip in the stock market, it's inevitable. Meanwhile you can collect dividends and this will cushion the blow.

Apple is paying me every quarter to hold onto their shares and if I live long enough, they'll have paid me back every penny I ever paid for Apple stock.

Does technical analysis really work?

You can't compare 1987 and 1929 crushes. In 1929, if you were short you would have plenty of time to exit. In 1987, you could have gone long at the end of black Monday and would be sitting on profit in 3 months.

You can visit the Museum of American Finance down on Wall Street and see what causes depressions.

Everyone knows that when someone clicks on a real estate site that is counted as a closing.

HEY YOU says

Everyone knows that when someone clicks on a real estate site that is counted as a closing.

This business model works for facebook.

and 10M jobs short of "full employment" (red)

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=yOD

really amazing how the 1990s boom got us +20M jobs off of the little recession low, while the current recovery is just digging us out of a very deep hole.

160M jobs by 2020 would be an impossible steep slope up, though since max employment is going to hover over 150M for the foreseeable future (as the boomers retire) even 150M might be tough.

And if we hit a recession this decade, Down Goes Frazier again.

Many people just missed the window to stop paying and live rent free. These prudent debtors who now have lost their jobs have no choice. Others have given up on getting a modification. Others got a modification but still cannot handle their debt.

Deleveraging is not over, yet corporate (another form of private debt) is up.

We transferred a lot of private debt into public debt, yet private debt is still growing.

The solution to too much debt is DEFAULT and not refinancing.

I don't see any recessionary drivers for this decade, actually.

The 1990 recession didn't come out of nowhere, the oil patch hit rough times and there was a partial credit overextension pullback that slowed things down a bit.

The 2001 recession is harder to figure out, but there was an immense amount of pre S-O bullshit corporate shenanigans going on that over-inflated the climate, and a lot of dotcom implosion took out the wider economy.

Information employment has yet to recover:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/USINFO

The 2007-2009 recession was obvious enough in its drivers:

https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/CMDEBT

but that graph shows were only just starting to burn up the credit candle.

And Gen Y is arriving on-scene and they have relatively clean credit slates, well if you don't count the ~$30,000 of college debt half of them owe.

The more you know about this economy the less there is to like, LOL.

Stocks at an all time high.
GDP at an all time high.
Corporate profits at an all time high.
Unemployment declining.
If that's not a recovery, what is?

Call it Crazy says

Strategist says

If that's not a recovery, what is?

What's this??

*

It shows the recovery is not complete yet. That's all.
The GDP, Corporate profits, stock market, unemployment are the major indicators that count the most. The indicators you mentioned lag during a recovery.

The USA is in a jobless recovery.

2% GDP growth since Obama is anemic.

92 million people out of the workforce is pretty pathetic.

The chart civilian unemployment rate is bullshit but liberals like to use it.

The implication for investing in stocks is that interest rates will remain low and so stocks will continue to be attractive to capital worldwide.

I know a couple people on food stamps here who have iPhones, one also has HUD housing.

Oh Apple will split 7:1 plus dividends provide me with free shares, so I don't care if Uncle Obama keeps fucking up the economy.

clambo says

Oh Apple will split 7:1 plus dividends provide me with free shares

Party like it's 1999

Heraclitusstudent says

The US don't suffer from a lack of consumption. Consumption represents a large % of the economy. The US suffer from a lack of investment.

That is absolutely right. More a lack of capital formation. If you take away paper & illiquid wealth, it's not looking that "rich" anymore. Hence the desire to levitate housing and stocks and throwing the kitchen sink (print, baby, print!) at it.

But nevermind that Israel flew them in from Eithiopia, clothed, housed, and educated them.

A few Israeli rascists nullifies that Israel went out of it's way to embrace Eithiopian Jews.

There is no mountain of cash, some debt was reduced such as mortgages, but that has been taken on by the government, companies still have high debt leverage, despite of record profits, there is no safety in this. Point is, if you subtract the outstanding debt there is NO mountain of cash. That doesn't mean the stock market cannot be in a bull cycle if P/E is the driver, but it's about to end. I assumed sideways action at best for 2014 and so far that has held up. I'd be careful here.

*sigh*

The two crashes which you mention in your original post certainly followed their breakouts by four years, but I don't think you can extrapolate that to today, since the underlying conditions are different. We're in the midst of the loosest monetary policy in the history of banking, and every major world bank is doing it, not just the Fed. It's safe to say we will have a crash, but you can't just extrapolate timelines from two very different crashes of the past, though I'll grant you that the 1929 and 1987 crashes were also fallout from monetary stimulus.

We could just as well have no nominal crash, but a crash in real terms. Zimbabwe's stock market did great as its people were foraging for food. We've reached the point where market valuation and GDP are completely divorced from capital.

The future behavior of the stock market is not related to charts of the past.

Will some asset bubble form in the future? Probably yes.

If you went to the American museum of finance you would see the history of financial bubbles popping and crashing. It was easy to see in there if you didn't notice you weren't obvervant.

Stocks were a bubble in 1929 because you could buy them with margin=credit. Banks could buy them on margin with depositors money. Today the margin requirements are different, and depositors money is insured.

Assets that can be bought with credit, e.g. houses in California, can become bubbles. Some saw this and others didn't. The liar loans to strawberry pickers to buy $750K houses are what can lead to an asset bubble.

The stock market as a whole is not a bubble, capital is choosing to buy stocks rather than lend it to make a lousy 2% return.

Worldwide savings is capital seeking either income, capital appreciation or a combination of both. A rich evil robber baron in the Phillipines is still buying U.S. stocks.

My little old lady friend is richer than God from owning stocks which over this period have fluctuated down from time to time. So has Warren Buffet.

When you own stocks you own a piece of the action, sometimes you get dividends depending on the stocks.

When your dividends start adding up it really doesn't matter if you see your net worth go down a bit unless you are very strapped for cash, but since you have collected dividends you aren't.

My belief is that U.S will not become a 3rd world country. While elites have taken away quite a bit from the middle class, there's a certain level that they will not dare to cross since United States represents the capitalist power and in order for the representation to maintain the legitimacy in the eyes of americans and the rest of the world, we must maintain one of the highest standards of living in the world.

Besides, "they" have already taken enough and can't take much else. Many "jobs" now how horrendous benefits, paltry if any retirement/medical, so called flexible hours that require that people can't live on their own anymore. Ain't much more that they can do besides wrecking tech and considering the direction in which the world is trending with apps and other electronic conveniences, I can't see them doing that. So rest assured, we will not have a 1920's depression. We shall all drink a shot of vodka to that....

Since the early 1950s, The Jewish Agency has assisted more than 40,000 Ethiopians with their immigration to Israel.

The decision to appoint emissaries to Ethiopia came from The Jewish Agency management following requests from Jewish community leaders in Ethiopia. In 1953, The Jewish Agency appointed Rabbi Shmuel Be'eri as The Agency's first emissary to Ethiopia.

At the same time, the World Zionist Organization and The Jewish Agency appointed Yona Bogale as responsible for educational activity in the Diaspora. Rabbi Be'eri established the first Hebrew School for Ethiopian Jews in Asmara.

Between 1955 and 1965, approximately 27 Jewish Ethiopian teens, known as the "Kfar Batya Group," were brought to Israel where they were trained to be emissaries by The Jewish Agency, and returned to their communities as qualified and highly skilled teachers. Meanwhile, The Agency established medical clinics within these communities to serve the Jewish population, many of whom were awaiting approval for Aliyah.

1977-1987

By the end of the 1970s, Jewish immigration from Ethiopia took the form of Aliyah of Rescue. Until 1977, Jews from Ethiopia were permitted to immigrate to the Jewish State until 1977 when the dictator, Mengistu Haile Mariam, came to power.

During the decade that followed, immigration was clandestine and managed by the Government of Israel along with The Jewish Agency. Suffering persecution at the hands of Mengisto's Marxist regime for holding Jewish educational and Zionist activities, many of the Jewish villagers became refugees. The first refugees from the Tigray area walked all the way to Israel by foot with next to no aid.

Understanding the intense need, the Mossad Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations, along with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) joined with the The Jewish Agency to establish more effective procedures and improved conditions for Aliyah. The IDF and Mossad began to bring Ethiopian Jews to safety in Israel, and The Jewish Agency welcomed and absorbed the refugees, housing them in youth villages and special sites established for this purpose.

1984-1985

"Operation Moses" aided the arrival of 6,364 Jews from refugee camps in Sudan to Israel, via intermediating countries, by foot, planes, and boats.

1988-1991

Between November 1988 and May 1991, 150,000 Ethiopian Jews moved closer to Addis Ababa, the center for Aliyah activities in Ethiopia.

"Operation Solomon" was an aerial Aliyah maneuver for the rescue of Ethiopian Jewry. In May 1991, 14,000 Ethiopian Jews arrived in Israel aboard IDF, El-Al, and Ethiopian Airlines aircrafts. During the operation, the IDF, The Jewish Agency, the Joint Distribution Committee, and the Mossad joined forces. With aid of American arbitration, the Israeli government reached a settlement with Mengistu and with the rebels, allowing the rescue to take place within 34 hours.

1992-1997

From 1992-1997, the Israeli Government along with The Jewish Agency assisted Ethiopian Jews of the Qwara Province to reach the Jewish State. Since June 2008, The Jewish Agency, at the request of the Government of Israel, has continued to make Aliyah from Ethiopia possible, according to the Law of Return 1970 Amendment of "Zera Israel" from Ethiopia.

2010-2013

By government decision, immigration of "Zera Israel" continues with "Operation Dove's Wings" which commenced on October 29, 2012. This is the peak of the Aliyah process for those eligible for immigration by the Law of Return 1970 Amendment. It is the final wave of Aliyah from Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa; an operation that began in the 1950s and has come full circle thanks to the services of The Jewish Agency.