We review the year that was Donald Trump as markets rally the most since Herbert Hoover in 1928 but is a 1929 like crash in the cards? In the second half, Max interviews Karl Denninger of Market-Ticker.org about whether or not Trump is, indeed, ‘draining the swamp?’ Or is he repopulating it with bigger, more terrifying swamp creatures?
From a pedal trolley in Pensacola, Florida, Max and Stacy ask what ‘foreigners dumping Treasurys’ means for local businesses. We also discuss Trump’s argument that Americans should bulk buy and get a discount on their pharmaceuticals. In the second half Max continues his interview with Paul Craig Roberts about Trump’s economic policies.
Why am I hopeful? the Status Quo is devolving, and a better way of living lies just beyond the corrupt, wasteful, ruinous consumerist debt/financial tyranny we now inhabit.
Readers often ask me to post something hopeful, and I understand why: doom-and-gloom gets tiresome. Human beings need hope just as they need oxygen, and the destruction of the Status Quo via over-reach and internal contradictions doesn’t leave much to be happy about.
The most hopeful thing in my mind is that the Status Quo is devolving from its internal contradictions and excesses. It is a perverse, intensely destructive system with horrific incentives for predation, exploitation, fraud and complicity and few disincentives.
A more human world lies just beyond the edge of the Status Quo.
Allow me to connect two apparently unconnected dots. Dot #1: The last sugar plantation in Hawaii is closing down, ending more than a century of plantation life in the 50th state.
Dot #2: a new study found that Nearly 95% of all new jobs during Obama era were part-time, or contract.
The research by economists Lawrence Katz of Harvard University and Alan Krueger at Princeton University shows that the proportion of workers throughout the U.S., during the Obama era, who were working in these kinds of temporary jobs, increased from 10.7% of the population to 15.8%. Krueger, a former chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, was surprised by the finding. The disappearance of conventional full-time work, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. work, has hit every demographic. “Workers seeking full-time, steady work have lost,” said Krueger.
While it’s tempting to dismiss the plantation economy as corporate exploitation–a blatant reality in the early decades–once the I.L.W.U. represented the labor force, a more benign version emerged.
Indeed, what is striking is the nostalgia of the workers and residents for the orderly, secure life of the plantations. I attended high school in a classic plantation town in 1969-70, Lanai City, owned by Dole Pineapple, my summer employer.
Housing was cheap, work was plentiful and secure, and any married couple with plantation jobs could save enough to send their kids to college: my classmates are living proof of this.
The plantation town was not just a work place–it was a community. In the old days, bathrooms and showers were communal in sugar camps. You didn’t just wave to your neighbor from your car–you shared the communal bath house.
People were poor by today’s standards, so why do people remember the plantation life fondly?
GBTC has titled auditable ownership through a traditional investment vehicle and Bitcoin IRA just has real bitcoin. Read More
Gold Mining Companies Are Running Out of Gold: Five Must See Charts
The reality of peak gold production has recently been acknowledged by Bloomberg and some of the financial media. Yet the mainstream, non specialist financial media has yet to cover this important topic with obvious ramifications for the gold market and the gold price in the medium and long term.
Peak gold production is happening globally which is very positive for gold and gold mining shares. Bloomberg have again covered this important fundamental factor in the market and have done so with an article and five must see gold charts:
“Gold’s had a roller-coaster year, surging as much as 30 percent before giving up the bulk of those gains. But one trend has been consistent: mining companies are finding it harder to dig up more of the precious metal.
The following charts show why, and what that means for the industry:”
It has been called “a bigger risk than Brexit”– the Italian banking crisis that could take down the eurozone. Handwringing officials say “there is no free lunch” and “no magic bullet.” But UK Prof. Richard Werner says the magic bullet is just being ignored.
On December 4, 2016, Italian voters rejected a referendum to amend their constitution to give the government more power, and the Italian prime minister resigned. The resulting chaos has pushed Italy’s already-troubled banks into bankruptcy. First on the chopping block is the 500 year old Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena SpA (BMP), the oldest surviving bank in the world and the third largest bank in Italy. The concern is that its loss could trigger the collapse of other banks and even of the eurozone itself.
There seems little doubt that BMP and other insolvent banks will be rescued. The biggest banks are always rescued, no matter how negligent or corrupt, because in our existing system, banks create the money we use in trade. Virtually the entire money supply is now created by banks when they make loans, as the Bank of England has acknowledged. When the banks collapse, economies collapse, because bank-created money is the grease that oils the wheels of production.
So the Italian banks will no doubt be rescued. The question is, how? Read more ›
There are numerous debates about money: what it is, how we measure it, and so on. In recognition of these debates, I’m referring to “money” in quotes to designate that I’m using the Federal Reserve’s measure of money stock (MZM).
Nowadays, “money” is often credit. We buy stuff not with currency/ cash, but with credit extended by lenders. The government pays for its programs with borrowed money as well, by selling sovereign bonds and spending the proceeds.
So to get a rough measure of the expansion of “money,” we look at money stock and total credit.
There’s a third measure: GDP, or gross domestic product. As money and credit expanded, did GDP go up, too? By how much?
GDP is also a flawed measure of value and activity, but once again we’ll use it as the conventional measure of economic “growth.”
When we glance at money, credit and GDP, we are immediately struck by the disconnect between expansion of money/credit and GDP growth. A relatively modest expansion of money stock and credit was sufficient to fuel a powerful expansion of GDP during the 1995-2000 Internet boom.
The next expansion of GDP–Housing Bubble #1–required an enormous expansion of credit and about double the growth in money stock as the Internet boom.
The current “recovery”–what I term the central bank credit bubble–has required a monumental increase in money stock and a non-trivial expansion of credit.
This is the very definition of diminishing returns:
Royal Mint And CME Make A Mint On The Blockchain?
The last fortnight has been an exciting one in the gold and blockchain space. Earlier this week Euroclear and Paxos announced that a group which included Société Générale, Citi, Scotiabank had completed the first pilot of the blockchain-based gold trading platform as being developed by Euroclear. In Canada, the Royal Canadian Mint became the latest sovereign mint to announce a blockchain product with GoldMoney.
Royal Mint Gold Sovereigns 2017
The Royal Mint in the UK had beaten the Royal Canadian Mint and GoldMoney to it by announcing at the end of November that they were launching a blockchain project, one which will be in direct competition with the Euroclear project.
We will be looking at this week’s development in more detail shortly but today focus on the UK Royal Mint announcement and ask what this means for the 1,000 year old institution, the gold market and blockchain technology.
China Gold and Precious Metals Summit 2016 – GoldCore Presentation
The China Gold and Precious Metals Summit 2016, the 11th Summit convened by the China Gold Association and the Shanghai Gold Exchange took place on December 7th and 8th and GoldCore presented at the event and moderated an expert panel discussion.
China Gold and Precious Metals Summit 2016 – Panel Discussion with Stephen Flood
China’s leading gold conference was attended by over 250 gold industry professionals from across the value chain including mining companies, refiners & fabricators, bullion dealers, government and private mints, exchanges, investment & bullion banks, brokerage firms, money managers, trading houses, jewelers, consultancies, service providers, policymakers and central banks.
The conference highlighted innovation in the gold industry and market, the opening-up of China’s gold market, the implications for China’s gold industry from the country’s Belt and Road Initiative and RMB internationalization strategy, price trends and supply & demand outlook for gold, silver and platinum group metals amidst growing uncertainty sweeping wider financial markets, a scaling back of expectations for further rate hikes from the Fed and rising concerns over moves towards negative interest rates.
