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The Most Important Number In The Entire U.S. Economy

Elite Forex Blog - Market Research & Analysis
Submitted by Michael Snyder of The Economic Collapse blog [18],
There is one vitally important number that everyone needs to be watching right now, and it doesn’t have anything to do with unemployment, inflation or housing.  If this number gets too high, it will collapse the entire U.S. financial system.  The number that I am talking about is the yield on 10 year U.S. Treasuries.
When that number goes up, long-term interest rates all across the financial system start increasing.  When long-term interest rates rise, it becomes more expensive for the federal government to borrow money, it becomes more expensive for state and local governments to borrow money, existing bonds lose value and bond investors lose a lot of money, mortgage rates go up and monthly payments on new mortgages rise, and interest rates throughout the entire economy go up and this causes economic activity to slow down. 
On top of everything else, there are more than 440 trillion dollars worth of interest rate derivatives sitting out there, and rapidly rising interest rates could cause that gigantic time bomb to go off and implode our entire financial system.  We are living in the midst of the greatest debt bubble in the history of the world [19], and the only way that the game can continue is for interest rates to stay super low.  Unfortunately, the yield on 10 year U.S. Treasuries has started to rise, and many experts are projecting that it is going to continue to rise.
On August 2nd of last year, the yield on 10 year U.S. Treasuries was just 1.48%, and our entire debt-based economy was basking in the glow of ultra-low interest rates.  But now things are rapidly changing.  On Wednesday, the yield on 10 year U.S. Treasuries hit 2.70% before falling back to 2.58% on “good news” from the Federal Reserve.
Historically speaking, rates are still super low, but what is alarming is that it looks like we hit a “bottom” last year and that interest rates are only going to go up from here.  In fact, according to CNBC [20] many experts believe that we will soon be pushing up toward the 3 percent mark…

Round numbers like 1,700 on the S&P 500 are well and good, but savvy traders have their minds on another integer: 2.75 percent

That was the high for the 10-year yield this year, and traders say yields are bound to go back to that level. The one overhanging question is how stocks will react when they see that number.

“If we start to push up to new highs on the 10-year yield so that’s the 2.75 level—I think you’d probably see a bit of anxiety creep back into the marketplace,” Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s head of global technical strategy, MacNeil Curry, told “Futures Now” on Tuesday.

And Curry sees yields getting back to that level in the short term, and then some. “In the next couple of weeks to two months or so I think we’ve got a push coming up to the 2.85, 2.95 zone,” he said.

This rise in interest rates has been expected for a very long time – it is just that nobody knew exactly when it would happen.  Now that it has begun, nobody is quite sure how high interest rates will eventually go.  For some very interesting technical analysis, I encourage everyone to check out an article by Peter Brandt that you can find right here [21].
And all of this is very bad news for stocks.  The chart below was created by Chartist Friend from Pittsburgh [22], and it shows that stock prices have generally risen as the yield on 10 year U.S. Treasuries has steadily declined over the past 30 years…
CFPGH-DJIA-20 [23]
When interest rates go down, that spurs economic activity, and that is good for stock prices.
So when interest rates start going up rapidly, that is not a good thing for the stock market at all.
The Federal Reserve [24] has tried to keep long-term interest rates down by wildly printing money and buying bonds, and even the suggestion that the Fed may eventually “taper” quantitative easing caused the yield on 10 year U.S. Treasuries to absolutely soar a few weeks ago.
So the Fed has backed off on the “taper” talk for now, but what happens if the yield on 10 year U.S. Treasuries continues to rise even with the wild money printing that the Fed has been doing?
At that point, the Fed would begin to totally lose control over the situation.  And if that happens, Bill Fleckenstein told King World News [25] the other day that he believes that we could see the stock market suddenly plunge by 25 percent…

Let’s say Ben (Bernanke) comes out tomorrow and says, ‘We are not going to taper.’ But let’s just say the bond market trades down anyway, and the next thing you know we go through the recent highs and a month from now the 10-Year is at 3%. And people start to realize they are not even tapering and the bond market is backed up…

They will say, ‘Why is this happening?’ Then they may realize the bond market is discounting the inflation we already have.

At some point the bond markets are going to say, ‘We are not comfortable with these policies.’ Obviously you can’t print money forever or no emerging country would ever have gone broke. So the bond market starts to back up and the economy gets worse than it is now because rates are rising. So the Fed says, ‘We can’t have this,’ and they decide to print more (money) and the bond market backs up (even more).

All of the sudden it becomes clear that money printing not only isn’t the solution, but it’s the problem. Well, with rates going from where they are to 3%+ on the 10-Year, one of these days the S&P futures are going to get destroyed. And if the computers ever get loose on the downside the market could break 25% in three days.

And as I have written about previously [26], we have seen a huge spike in margin debt in recent months, and this could make it even easier for a stock market collapse to happen.  A recent note from Deutsche Bank explained precisely why margin debt is so dangerous [27]…

Margin debt can be described as a tool used by stock speculators to borrow money from brokerages to buy more stock than they could otherwise afford on their own. These loans are collateralized by stock holdings, so when the market goes south, investors are either required to inject more cash/assets or become forced to sell immediately to pay off their loans – sometimes leading to mass pullouts or crashes.

But of much greater concern than a stock market crash is the 441 trillion dollar interest rate derivatives bubble [28] that could implode if interest rates continue to rise rapidly.
Deutsche Bank is the largest bank in Europe, and at this point they have 55.6 trillion euros [29] of total exposure to derivatives.
But the GDP of the entire nation of Germany is only about 2.7 trillion euros for a whole year.
We are facing a similar situation in the United States.  Our GDP for 2013 will be somewhere between 15 and 16 trillion dollars, but many of our big banks have exposure to derivatives that absolutely dwarfs our GDP.  The following numbers come from one of my previous articles entitled “The Coming Derivatives Panic That Will Destroy Global Financial Markets[30]“…

JPMorgan Chase
Total Assets: $1,812,837,000,000 (just over 1.8 trillion dollars)
Total Exposure To Derivatives: $69,238,349,000,000 (more than 69 trillion dollars)

Citibank
Total Assets: $1,347,841,000,000 (a bit more than 1.3 trillion dollars)
Total Exposure To Derivatives: $52,150,970,000,000 (more than 52 trillion dollars)

Bank Of America
Total Assets: $1,445,093,000,000 (a bit more than 1.4 trillion dollars)
Total Exposure To Derivatives: $44,405,372,000,000 (more than 44 trillion dollars)

Goldman Sachs
Total Assets: $114,693,000,000 (a bit more than 114 billion dollars – yes, you read that correctly)
Total Exposure To Derivatives: $41,580,395,000,000 (more than 41 trillion dollars)

That means that the total exposure that Goldman Sachs has to derivatives contracts is more than 362 times greater than their total assets.

And remember, the biggest chunk of those derivatives contracts is made up of interest rate derivatives.
Just imagine what would happen if a life insurance company wrote millions upon millions of life insurance contracts and then everyone suddenly died.
What would happen to that life insurance company?
It would go completely broke of course.
Well, that is what our major banks are facing today.
They have written trillions upon trillions of dollars worth of interest rate derivatives contracts, and they are betting that interest rates will not go up rapidly.
But what if they do?
And the truth is that interest rates have a whole lot of room to go up.  The chart below shows how the yield on 10 year U.S. Treasuries has moved over the past couple of decades…
10 Year Treasury Yield [31]
As you can see, the yield on 10 year U.S. Treasuries was hovering around the 6 percent mark back in the year 2000.
Back in 1990, the yield on 10 year U.S. Treasuries hovered between 8 and 9 percent.
If we return to “normal” levels, our financial system will implode.  There is no way that our debt-addicted system would be able to handle it.
So watch the yield on 10 year U.S. Treasuries very carefully.  It is the most important number in the entire U.S. economy.
If that number gets too high, the game is over.
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NSA Spying Directly Harms Internet Companies, Silicon Valley, California … And the Entire U.S. Economy

Elite Forex Blog - Market Research & Analysis
Mass surveillance by the NSA may directly harm the bottom of line of Internet companies, Silicon Valley, California … and the entire national economy.
Money News points out:
The company whose shares you own may be lying to you — while Uncle Sam looks the other way.
Let’s step through this. I think you will see the problem.
Fact 1: U.S. financial markets are the envy of the world because we have fair disclosure requirements, accounting standards and impartial courts. This is the foundation of shareholder value. The company may lose money, but they at least told you the truth.
Fact 2: We now know multiple public companies, including Microsoft (MSFT), Google (GOOG), Facebook (FB) and other, gave their user information to NSA. Forget the privacy implications for a minute. Assume for the sake of argument that everything complies with U.S. law. Even if true, the businesses may still be at risk.
Fact 3: All these companies operate globally. They get revenue from China, Japan, Russia, Germany, France and everywhere else. Did those governments consent to have their citizens monitored by the NSA? I think we can safely say no.
Politicians in Europe are especially outraged. Citizens are angry with the United States and losing faith in American brand names. Foreign companies are already using their non-American status as a competitive advantage. Some plan to redesign networks specifically to bypass U.S. companies.
By yielding to the NSA, U.S. companies likely broke laws elsewhere. They could face penalties and lose significant revenue. Right or wrong, their decisions could well have damaged the business.
Securities lawyers call this “materially adverse information” and companies are required to disclose it. But they are not. Only chief executives and a handful of technical people know when companies cooperate with the NSA. If the CEO can’t even tell his own board members he has placed the company at risk, you can bet it won’t be in the annual report.
The government also gives some executives immunity documents, according to Bloomberg. Immunity is unnecessary unless someone thinks they are breaking the law. So apparently, the regulators who ostensibly protect the public are actively helping the violators.
This is a new and different investment landscape. Public companies are hiding important facts that place their investors at risk. If you somehow find out, you will have no recourse because regulators gave the offender a “get out of jail free” card. The regulatory structure that theoretically protects you knowingly facilitates deception that may hurt you, and then silences any
witnesses.
This strikes to the very heart of the U.S. financial system. Our markets have lost any legitimate claim to “full and fair disclosure.” Every prospectus, quarterly report and news release now includes an unwritten NSA asterisk. Whenever a CEO speaks, we must assume his fingers are crossed.
***
Every individual investor or money manager now has a new risk factor to consider. Every disclosure by every company is in doubt. The rule of law that gave us the most-trusted markets in the world may be just an illusion.
In a subsequent article, Money News wrote:
Executives at publicly traded companies are lying to shareholders and probably their own boards of directors. They are exposing your investments to real, material, hard-dollar losses and not telling you.
The government that allegedly protects you, Mr. Small Investor, knows all this and actually encourages more of it.
Who lies? Ah, there’s the problem. We don’t know. Some people high in the government know. The CEOs themselves and a few of their tech people know. You and I don’t get to know. We just provide the money.
Since we don’t know which CEOs are government-approved liars, the prudent course is to assume all CEOs are government-approved liars. We can no longer give anyone the benefit of the doubt.
If you are a money manager with a fiduciary responsibility to your investors, you are hereby on notice. A CEO may sign those Securities and Exchange Commission filings where you get corporate information with his fingers crossed. Your clients pay you to know the facts and make good decisions. You’re losing that ability.
For example, consider a certain U.S. telecommunications giant with worldwide operations. It connects American businesses with customers everywhere. Fast-growing emerging markets like Brazil are very important to its future growth.
Thanks to data-sharing agreements with various phone providers in Brazil, this company has deep access to local phone calls. One day someone from NSA calls up the CEO and asks to tap into that stream. He says OK, tells his engineers to do it and moves on.
A few years later, Edward Snowden informs Brazilian media that U.S. intelligence is capturing these data. They tell the Brazilian public. It is not happy. Nor are its politicians, who are already on edge for entirely unrelated reasons.
What would you say are this company’s prospects for future business in Brazil? Your choices are “slim” and “none.” They won’t be the only ones hurt. If the U.S. government won’t identify which American company cheated its Brazilian partners, Brazil will just blame all of them. The company can kiss those growth plans good-bye.
This isn’t a fantasy. It is happening right now. The legality of cooperating with the NSA within the United States is irrelevant. Immunity letters in the United States do not protect the company from liability elsewhere.
***
Shouldn’t shareholders get to know when their company’s CEO takes these risks? Shouldn’t the directors who hire the CEO have a say in the matter? Yes, they should. We now know that they don’t.
The trust that forms the bedrock under U.S. financial markets is crumbling. [A theme we frequently explore. ] If we cannot believe CEOs when they swear to tell the truth, if companies can hide material risks, if boards cannot know what the executives they hire are actually doing, any pretense of “fair markets” is gone.
When nothing is private, people and businesses soon cease to trust each other. Without trust, modern financial markets cannot function properly.
If U.S. disclosure standards are no better than those in the third world, then every domestic stock is overvalued. Our “rule of law” premium is gone.
This means a change for stock valuations — and it won’t be bullish.
CNN reports:
Officials throughout Europe, most notably French President Francois Hollande, said that NSA spying threatens trade talks.
***
For the Internet companies named in reports on NSA surveillance, their bottom line is at risk because European markets are crucial for them. It is too early assess the impact on them, but the stakes are clearly huge. For example, Facebook has about 261 million active monthly European users, compared with about 195 million in the U.S. and Canada, and 22% of Apple’s net income came from Europe in the first quarter of 2013.
***
In June 2011, Microsoft admitted that the United States could bypass EU privacy regulations to get vast amounts of cloud data from their European customers. Six months later, BAE Systems, based in the United Kingdom, stopped using the company’s cloud services because of this issue.
***
The NSA scandal has brought tensions over spying to a boil. German prosecutors may open a criminal investigation into NSA spying. On July 3, Germany’s interior minister said that people should stop using companies like Google and Facebook if they fear the U.S. is intercepting their data. On July 4, the European Parliament condemned spying on Europeans and ordered an investigation into mass surveillance. The same day, Neelie Kroes, the EU’s chief telecom and Internet official, warned of “multi-billion euro consequences for American companies” because of U.S. spying in the cloud.
***
Transparency is an important first step. Its absence only exacerbates a trust deficit that companies already had in Europe. And trust is crucial. Google’s chief legal officer recognized this on June 19 when he said, “Our business depends on the trust of our users,” during a Web chat about the NSA scandal. Some companies have been aggressive in trying to disclose more, and others have not. But unless the U.S. government loosens strictures and allows greater disclosure, all U.S. companies are likely to suffer the backlash.
***
The Obama administration needs to recognize and mitigate the serious economic risks of spying while trying to rebuild its credibility on Internet freedom. The July 9 hearing of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board is a start, but much more is needed. More disclosure about the surveillance programs, more oversight, better laws, and a process to work with allied governments to increase privacy protections would be a start.
The European customers of Internet companies are not all al Qaeda or criminals, but that is essentially how U.S. surveillance efforts treat them. If this isn’t fixed, this may be the beginning of a very costly battle pitting U.S. surveillance against European business, trade, and human rights.
The Atlantic notes:
Most communications flow over the Internet and a very large percentage of key Internet infrastructure is in the United States. Thus, foreigners’ communications are much more likely to pass through U.S. facilities even when no U.S. person is a party to a particular message. Think about a foreigner using Gmail, or Facebook, or Twitter — billions of these communications originate elsewhere in the world but pass through, and are stored on, servers located in the U.S.
***
Foreigners … comprise a growing majority of any global company’s customers.
***
From the perspective of many foreign individuals and governments, global Internet companies headquartered in the U.S. are a security and privacy risk. And that means foreign governments offended by U.S. snooping are already looking for ways to make sure their citizens’ data never reaches the U.S. without privacy concessions. We can see the beginnings of this effort in the statement by the vice president of the European Commission, Viviane Reding, who called in her June 20 op-ed in the New York Times for new EU data protection rules to “ensure that E.U. citizens’ data are transferred to non-European law enforcement authorities only in situations that are well defined, exceptional and subject to judicial review.” While we cheer these limits on government access, the spying scandal also puts the U.S. government and American companies at a disadvantage in ongoing discussions with the EU about upcoming changes to its law enforcement and consumer-privacy-focused data directives, negotiations critical to the Internet industry’s ongoing operations in Europe.
Even more troubling, some European activists are calling for data-storage rules to thwart the U.S. government’s surveillance advantage. The best way to keep the American government from snooping is to have foreigners’ data stored locally so that local governments – and not U.S. spy agencies — get to say when and how that data may be used. And that means nations will force U.S.-based Internet giants like Google, Facebook, and Twitter, to store their user data in-country, or will redirect users to domestic businesses that are not so easily bent to the American government’s wishes.
So the first unintended consequence of mass NSA surveillance may be to diminish the power and profitability of the U.S. Internet economy. America invented the Internet, and our Internet companies are dominant around the world. The U.S. government, in its rush to spy on everybody, may end up killing our most productive golden goose.
San Diego Union-Tribune writes:
California and its businesses have a problem. It’s called the National Security Agency.
***
The problem for California is not that the feds are collecting all of our communications. It is that the feds are (totally unapologetically) doing the same to foreigners, especially in communications with the U.S. California depends for its livelihood on people overseas — as customers, trade partners, as sources of talent. Our leading industries — shipping, tourism, technology, and entertainment — could not survive, much less prosper, without the trust and goodwill of foreigners. We are home to two of the world’s busiest container ports, and we are a leading exporter of engineering, architectural, design, financial, insurance, legal, and educational services. All of our signature companies — Apple, Google, Facebook, Oracle, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Chevron, Disney — rely on sales and growth overseas. And our families and workplaces are full of foreigners; more than one in four of us were born abroad, and more than 50 countries have diaspora populations in California of more than 10,000.
***
News that our government is collecting our foreign friends’ phone records, emails, video chats, online conversations, photos, and even stored data, tarnishes the California and American brands.
***
Will tourists balk at visiting us because they fear U.S. monitoring? Will overseas business owners think twice about trading with us because they fear that their communications might be intercepted and used for commercial gain by American competitors? Most chilling of all: Will foreigners stop using the products and services of California technology and media companies — Facebook, Google, Skype, and Apple among them — that have been accomplices (they say unwillingly) to the federal surveillance?
The answer to that last question: Yes. It’s already happening. Asian governments and businesses are now moving their employees and systems off Google’s Gmail and other U.S.-based systems, according to Asian news reports. German prosecutors are investigating some of the American surveillance. The issue is becoming a stumbling block in negotiations with the European Union over a new trade agreement. Technology experts are warning of a big loss of foreign business.
John Dvorak, the PCMag.com columnist, wrote recently, “Our companies have billions and billions of dollars in overseas sales and none of the American companies can guarantee security from American spies. Does anyone but me think this is a problem for commerce?”
***
It doesn’t help when our own U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein is backing the surveillance without acknowledgment of the huge potential costs to her state.
It’s time for her and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who has been nearly as tone-deaf on this issue, to be forcefully reminded that protecting California industry, and the culture of openness and trust that is so vital to it, is at least as important as protecting massive government data-mining. Such reminders should take the force not merely of public statements but of law.
California has a robust history of going its own way — on vehicle standards, energy efficiency, immigration, marijuana. Now is the time for another departure — this one on the privacy of communications.
***
We need laws, perhaps even a state constitutional amendment, to make plain that California considers the personal data and communications of all people, be they American or foreign, to be private and worthy of protection.
And see this.
The bigger picture is that a country’s economic health is correlated with a strong rule of law more than any other factor.
Yet America has rapidly fallen into a state of lawlessness, where fundamental rights – such as protection against mass spying by the government – have been jettisoned.
The government is spying on just about everything we do.  Even the government’s attempted denials of this fact confirm it.
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The spying cheat sheet

Elite Forex Blog - Market Research & Analysis

Congress Is Holding Hearings on Government Spying … Here’s a Cheat Sheet

If you’ve been too busy to catch up on the details of the spying scandal, here’s an overview:
  • IT and security professionals are quite concerned about government spying
  • A Congressman noted that – even if a mass surveillance program is started for good purposes – it will inevitably turn into a witch hunt
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Shocking ‘extermination’ fantasies by the people running America’s Empire on full display at Aspen Summit

Elite Forex Blog - Market Research & Analysis

Max BlumenthalAlternet.orgTue, 30 Jul 2013 08:51 CDTNot “ogres”, but certainly snakes in suitsSecurity Forum participants expressed total confidence in American empire, but could not contain their panic at the mention of Snowden.Seated on a stool befor…

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What Happens When The Oil Runs Out?

Elite Forex Blog - Market Research & Analysis

Authored by Professor Chris Rhodes via OilPrice.com [14],

Summary of a lecture by Professor Chris Rhodes to the Conway Hall Ethical Society, Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London. 11.00 am, Sunday July 28th, 2013.
The world supply of crude oil isn’t going to run out any time soon, and we will be producing oil for decades to come. However, what we won’t be doing is producing crude oil – petroleum – at the present rate of around 30 billion barrels per year. For a global civilization that is based almost entirely on a plentiful supply of cheap, crude oil, this is going to present some considerable challenges. If we look over a 40 year period, from 1965 to 2005, we see that by the end of it, humanity was using two and a half times as much oil, twice as much coal and three times as much natural gas, as at the start, and overall, around three times as much energy: this for a population that had “only” doubled. Hence our individual average carbon footprint had increased substantially – not, of course, that this increase in the use of energy, and all else, was by any means equally distributed across the globe.
From the latest document that I can find – the B.P. Statistical Review – we see that the majority form of energy used by humans on earth is crude oil, accounting for 33% of our total, closely followed by coal at 30%: a figure that is rapidly catching up with oil, as coal is the principal and increasing source of energy in developing nations such as China and India. Natural gas follows in a close third place, at 24%; nuclear and hydroelectric power at 5-6% each; and the tiny fraction of our overall energy that comes from “renewables”, is just 1.6%. Thus, we are dependent on the fossil fuels for 87% of our energy. Now, such a comparison is almost misleading and naïve, because it tacitly presumes that if our oil supply becomes compromised, we can make a simple substitution for it using some other energy source.
However, this is not so readily done in practice, because oil is a particular and unique substance, having both a high energy content, and that it is readily refined into liquid fuels – effectively by distillation – to provide the petrol and diesel that runs practically all of the world’s transportation. Moreover, everything we depend upon – literally everything: food, materials, clothes, computers, mobile phones, pharmaceuticals etc. – for our daily existence is underpinned by a plentiful supply of cheap crude oil. So, the loss of this provision is going to have a profound, and shattering effect on human civilization.
In the “good old days”, e.g. the Humphrey Jones “Giant Gusher” drilled in Texas in 1922, it was necessary only to drill a hole in the ground to get oil. An oil well contains not only oil, but gas at high pressure, meaning that once the cap-rock that holds it all in place is broken, the oil is forced out in that familiar jet of black gold. The good old days indeed, because then it was necessary only to expend an amount of energy equal to that contained in one barrel of oil to recover a hundred barrels, which is like investing a pound and getting a return of a hundred pounds – a very good net profit. In 2013, the return is maybe twenty pounds or just three for extra-heavy oil, or for “oil” derived from tar sands, once it has been upgraded into liquid fuel.
Of greatest concern is how much oil is remaining. As noted, we currently use 30 billion barrels a year – 84 million barrels a day, or a thousand barrels every second. When it is trumpeted about some new and huge find of oil, e.g. the Tupi field off Brazil, thought to contain 8 billion barrels, in reality this is only enough to run the world for three months. Context should not be lost in these matters. The quality of the oil is also at issue. For example, much of the remaining oil is of the “heavy”, “sour” kind, meaning that it is not necessarily liquid at all, but bitumen, and contains relatively high levels of sulphur, necessitating complex and energy-intensive processing to get the sulphur out – which would otherwise be corrosive toward the steel used in the refinery – and to crack the heavier material into lighter fractions that can be used as fuel, or as feedstocks for industry.
So, it’s not just that we have got through much of our original bestowal of oil, but that what remains is of poorer quality – in other words, we have used-up most of the “good stuff”! Oil shale is not oil at all, but contains a material called “kerogen” which is a solid and needs to be heated to five hundred degrees Centigrade to break it down into a liquid form that in any way resembles what we normally think of as “oil”. So, when it is claimed that there are “three trillion barrels” of oil under America, really this is only to encourage voters and investors, because the actual Energy return on Energy Invested (EROEI) is so poor that there has been no serious commercial exploitation of oil shale to date, and probably there never will be.
Not only are we entirely dependent on crude oil for all our fuel and materials, but without cheap crude oil, and natural gas to make nitrogen fertilizers, we could grow no food. If we look at a field of soya beans being harvested in Brazil, we see a number of features. For one, those beans are not consumed at source, but are transported around Brazil and around the world. So, oil-derived fuels are necessary not only to run the tractors and combine harvesters, but the trucks, ships and planes to move the crop onto the world markets. In addition, we see the vast clouds of dust being thrown up behind the marching array of mighty machines – combine harvesters – which represents the loss of top-soil.
Even if we could solve all our energy problems, we are consuming the living and fragile portion of the earth’s surface that is our soil, and upon which we are utterly dependent to grow any food at all. We have “lost” around one third of our soil in the past half century – much of this through unsound and unsustainable agricultural practices – which does not bode well for the survival of a burgeoning human population. Another feature is that this land was once rain forest, which has been cleared to use the land for farming.
This is done either simply by setting fire to the forest, or by more exquisite means, such as taking a ship’s anchor chain, four hundred feet long – and if it is two inches in diameter, weighing five tonnes – then stringing it between two one hundred tonne tractors and simply driving over the terrain, so that the chain rips through everything that is there, tearing the trees out by their roots and destroying the structure of the soil in the process. The upshot is that the soil becomes unproductive within only a few years and so it is necessary to move on and do the same thing elsewhere.
In Britain we import about 40% of what we eat, and we use around 7 million tonnes of crude oil each year to fuel our food-chain. It can be said that we literally “eat oil”.
The concept of “Peak Oil” is due to Marion King Hubbert, a petroleum geologist working for the Shell Development Company in Texas, who predicted that oil production in America would peak in 1970. At that time, Texas was “awash” with oil – America being the world’s major oil-exporting nation then – and so no one took him seriously: but when in 1970, he was proved correct, Hubbert’s Peak entered the realm both of hard science and folklore. According to Hubbert, there is a 40 year lag between the year of peak discovery and that of peak production. If we apply this to the world situation, where global oil discovery peaked in 1965, we expect a global production in 2005. Indeed world production of oil has been on a flat line since 2005, and it is thought that we are at the production limit.
The price of oil has quadrupled in the past 10 years, reflecting the more strenuous efforts that are necessary to maintain production: deepwater drilling, fracking, tar sands, all of which have much lower energy returns than for conventional crude oil. Indeed, oil that is recovered from fracking costs about $105 a barrel to produce which until recently was more than it could be sold for. However, the price of oil is creeping up, and the industry is prepared to bear the loss for now, because it knows that the price of a barrel of oil will shortly rocket, and having cornered this “new” portion of the industry, will make big profits. Oil companies are not charities, after all. I emphasis the word “new” because fracking – properly called hydraulic fracturing – has been around since 1947: what is new is the combination of this technique with horizontal drilling, meaning that porous but impermeable rocks can be drilled-out laterally, then “fracked” to break them open thus releasing the oil or gas that they contain.
Fracking is a controversial matter, and there are grave concerns about groundwater contamination from the process. It is not only the fear that the chemicals that were originally present in the fracking fluid might migrate upward into the water table, but that other toxic materials, e.g. radon, that were confined safely within the natural prevailing geology, might be exhumed too. The Royal Society (U.K. equivalent of a national academy of sciences) has concluded that the procedure is safe, so long as it is strictly regulated, but how can this be guaranteed, when profits are the order of the day, and if the technology is to be employed across the world?
What too will become of the millions of gallons of contaminated water, injected under great pressure into the wells to fracture the rock, that remains? Will this be disposed of safely or simply left behind, potentially to leak into and contaminate the groundwater and the soil? This would be a tragic and cruel legacy for future generations.
Analyses made by both the International Energy Administration (IEA; effectively part of the U.S. Department of Energy) and its counterpart organisation, the Paris-based Energy Information Agency (EIA), concur that we will have lost around half our production of conventional crude oil by 2030. This is equivalent to four times the present output of Saudi Arabia, and it seems highly unlikely that this gap in supply can be filled from unconventional sources. Since we are entirely dependent on crude oil to fuel the world’s transportation, and looking at the amount of oil we are likely to be left with, we may conclude that it will be necessary to curb transportation by about 70% over the next 20 years.
This means the loss mainly of personalized transport and it is unfeasible that there will be 34 million electric cars in the U.K. (the current number of oil-fuelled cars) any time soon, and in reality, never. The only sensible means to move people around using electric power is by light rail and tramways, i.e. mass-transit systems.
If we can’t address the problem from the supply side we have to curb our demand. In the absence of cheap and widely accessible transport we will need to produce far more of our food and materials at the local level. Such a metamorphosis of human civilization from the global to the local, will be underpinned by building strong, resilient communities in which people share their skills and knowledge, to provide as much as possible at the local, grass-roots level. This is the underpinning philosophy of the growing network of Transition Towns. Frightening though all of this is, we may evolve into a happier and more fulfilling state of living than a perceived status quo, that in truth is all too rapidly running through our fingers.

http://www.zerohedge.com/print/477016

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Asia is in Collapse. The Next Fed Chairman Doesn’t Matter

Elite Forex Blog - Market Research & Analysis
The big news is what’s going on in Asia.
The US financial media continues to focus on who will be the next Fed Chairman, which is unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Greenspan created the biggest asset bubble in history. Bernanke bankrupted the republic and created an even bigger bubble trying to prove his misguided theories. Whoever takes over the reins at the Fed next will simply have the honor of being in the driver’s seat when the whole mess goes over the cliff.
Ignore the next Fed Chairman debate, the world has much bigger problems to worry about.
Let’s start with China.
China’s economy is based on fraud, not actual growth. The talking heads believe China will hit 7% GDP growth this year. Their electricity consumption is only up 2.9%. Can anyone explain how a country can be consuming electricity at 2.9% growth and hit GDP growth at 7%?
Take a look at the Chinese stock market. We’ve just taken out the “recovery” trendline going back to 2009. And we’ve done this at a time when China has just pumped $1.6 trillion in new credit (that’s 21% of GDP) into its economy in the last two quarters…
When you put an amount equal to 21% of your GDP into your banking system in six months and the stock market still falls, it’s GAME OVER.
Take a look at Japan. Abenomics (print even more money faster) was supposed to bring about growth. Instead, all it’s done is increase consumer prices. This in turn hurts incomes. And that implodes an economy (one which hasn’t seen major growth in 20+ years I might add).
The Abenomics bubble has burst. The Nikkei has failed to reclaim its trendline. This bull market is OVER.
So the second and third largest economies in the world are in collapse with stock market crashes.
What are the odds the world is somehow going to continue to grow through this? What are the odds that the next Fed Chairman will be able to manage this mess?
The Great Crisis, the one to which 2008 was just a warm up, is approaching. The time to prepare for it is BEFORE the US stock market bubble bursts.
We offer a free special report outlining how to prepare your portfolio for the coming crisis. You can pick up a copy at:
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7 Charts Of The Market’s Complete Divorce From Reality

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7 Charts Of The Market’s Complete Divorce From RealitySubmitted by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog [10],The mainstream media would have us believe that the U.S. economy must be in great shape since the stock market has been sett…

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Are We Investing Or Are We Just Dodging Thieves?

Elite Forex Blog - Market Research & Analysis

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,

The individual with complete control of all his assets is the only truly wealthy person in a kleptocracy.
 
Correspondent Jeff W. recently posed a deeply insightful question: are we investing or are we really just trying to dodge thieves?
 
This question slices right through the carefully cultivated illusion of trust and prosperity and plunges straight into the heart of our cartel-state financial system.
 
Here are Jeff’s initial thoughts on the question:
 
 
“As we try to preserve capital and earn a return on it, are we investing today or are we really just trying to dodge thieves?

First of all I question how much real investing is going on in America today. We continue to lose manufacturing in this country, so in manufacturing, disinvestment is what is going on. People speak of investing in houses, but today’s McMansions, if you look at how they are built, do not qualify as long-term investments. They are built more to allow their owners to participate in a real estate asset bubble rather than to live in and enjoy for generations (which is the purpose houses would be built for in a sane and honest world).
Investments in strip malls and big-box stores do not increase the wealth of the nation. When you have enough retailing, it is enough. You don’t need any more. Adding more retail space is malinvestment. A lot of retail space that is being added now will have to close down if The Federal Reserve ever starts tapering in a serious way.
So there is reason to suspect that not very much productive investment is really taking place in American at all. Regardless of that, investors still have to dodge the ubiquitous thieves who are swarming all over the landscape.
If you leave your money parked in cash, you will lose it to inflation. As you have pointed out, each person experiences a differing inflation rate; for some people, today’s rate could easily be 10%-15%. That’s how much they lose if they stay in cash.
If you buy commodities futures, you are at the mercy of the thieves who suppress prices with massive naked shorting. Price manipulation is a form of stealing, and many precious metal investors have been victimized lately by the thieves who do it.
If you buy bonds, you are likely buying at the top of a bubble. Running Ponzis in the form of asset bubbles is, of course, another kind of theft.
How about stocks? Looking at the disinvestment going on in the U.S., an investor might think that Chinese stocks would be the way to go. That’s where manufacturing is booming. But if an investor were to go that route in recent years, he would also have been burned. I believe that Chinese stocks, like commodity prices, have been manipulated in recent years by the Powers That Be.
Does it make sense that Chinese stocks should have lost 40% of their value since 2010 if their economy is growing 8-10% a year? Does it make sense that U.S. stocks should have gone up as they have? The whole investment environment today stinks of price manipulation.
So the skill we need today is not traditional investing skill; it is thief-dodging skill. It consists of knowing the thieves’ techniques and whom they are targeting, of knowing the bad neighborhoods to avoid, knowing how to avoid being a target, trying to stay one jump ahead of them as they target new victim groups. These are skills people had back in the Dark Ages, and as we enter a new Dark Ages, these are skills we need again.
Millions of middle class Americans are being wiped out by thieves, and millions more will be wiped out as trends continue. But those who can successfully dodge the thieves can continue to maintain some civilized standards as they hope for better days.”
 
Thank you, Jeff, for posing a thought-provoking question and commentary.

How do we avoid thieves when the financial system itself is theft? The obvious answer is to peel away from the crowd of lemmings running full tilt for the cliff edge of asset bubbles.
This requires substituting skepticism for blind faith. Please glance at this chart and ask yourself if this bubble is different and boom will not be followed by bust for the first time in human history:
The first step to avoid losing to thieves is avoid being a mark in the thieves’ game.To some degree, this may mean absorbing a smaller, known loss (inflation by holding cash) to avoid the thieves’ high-risk asset-bubble games where a potential loss of 40% of one’s capital is not just possible but the unstated purpose of the game.
Another is to remove as many assets as possible from exposure to the thieves’ systems. This means withdrawing your capital from Too Big to Fail Banks, pulling capital out of Wall Street, and limiting the amount of cash you hold in any one bank to limit losses from “bail-ins” where your cash is stolen to pay off banking-sector thieves.
The cartel-state debtocracy indentures the unwary with debt. Debt is the thieves’ poisoned-sugar method of addiction and servitude. The high from debt is like the high from crack cocaine: it seems so “cheap” at first, and then the addiction kicks in and withdrawal becomes impossibly painful.
Welcome to the Thieves’ Den of Debtocracy.
Since the system yokes those with high earned incomes into teams of tax donkeys, one way to minimize one’s time on the tax donkey team is to reduce one’s earned income, either by working less or by deploying one of the vanishingly few incontestably legal tax shelters open to the lower 99.9% (for example, socking away money for retirement).
The cartel-state Den of Thieves will naturally skim and steal what is most easily stolen, which is money and assets held in their own systems (banks, Wall Street, Treasury bonds, etc.).
This explains the popularity of the coffee-tin/glass-jar bank in kleptocracies: the cost to the authorities of trying to locate and confiscate millions of coffee-tin banks is prohibitive, and prone to marginal returns. Stealing money from depositors via a “bail-in” is effortless and essentially cost-free to the state, as is requiring all retirement funds be invested in Treasury bonds (“for your own good,” of course).
No matter how desperate the cartel-state thieves are for more cash, they know that confiscating the serfs’ tools and land without the cover of taxes and debt would trigger revolt. So assets that are physical objects or immaterial assets such as human and social capital are beyond the easy reach of the cartel-state thieves.
Taxes and debt are the two methods used for wholesale thievery via confiscation.Can’t pay your mortgage or property taxes? Oops, your assets, land and home are confiscated. The ideal situation is not have a mortgage or any other debt, as debt is what gives the thieves leverage over you. The only protection against wholesale theft via suddenly higher property taxes is a limit on annual tax increases (a.k.a. Prop 13).
Our financial system is structurally a kleptocracy. The less exposure one has to Wall Street and the financial debtocracy, the lower one’s exposure to the thieves.
It’s called opting out, or voluntary poverty. Poverty is of course a relative term. If all one’s assets are real-world possessions and immaterial assets such as skills, personal integrity and networks of trusted associates, one is indeed poor in financial assets. But if control of one’s assets is the only real measure of wealth, then the individual with complete control of all his assets is the only truly wealthy person in a kleptocracy.
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Japan: From Quagmire To Abenomics To Collapse

Elite Forex Blog - Market Research & Analysis
This blog post was originally posted at Bawerk.net [16]. You may also follow us on twitter @EBawerk [17]
Part I: Toward the abyss
Japan has been in a stable, but unsustainable, equilibrium for years. Its leaders know it is unsustainable and in their immense wisdom, decided to manage the whole system in order to achieve a sustainable development. However, this will prove fraught with danger since moving an unsustainable system away from its steady-state runs the risk of unleashing a gale wave of unintended consequences. The problem of course is that the people now in charge of moving the Japanese system from its current constellation have absolutely no idea on how to get it from where it is back on sound footing. The reason is simple, as with most policy quacks they are taught by other quacks. Some of the teachers even have Ph.D.’s.  in quackery to prove to lesser quacks who truly master the art of quacking; we call them economists.
Economists are a group of people that look upon the social structure called the economy with condescension and arrogance. They see it as their task to manipulate other people in order to build confidence. If confidence is high, then economic growth, prosperity and bliss will come automatically. The problem is that when people feel down they do not spend money. And when people do not spend money, economic growth turns into contraction and people feel even worse in what turns out to be a self-reinforcing cycle of less growth, less confidence and even less growth and so on in perpetuity.
This is basically how Prime Minister Abe and his newly installed lackeys at the Bank of Japan see as the situation in Japan today. In the early 1990s people lost confidence for some unexplained reason, and because the supposedly omniscient masters did not do enough manipulation back then, confidence was never regained; which essentially explains the predicament Japan is in now.  
The real reason is more fundamental though and we will explain what happened in Japan. Before we do so, it is of the utmost importance for the reader to know what gross domestic production, or gross domestic consumption (GDC) as we call it, really is. It is essentially the amount of money spent on goods and services over a specified period of time. In other, and more “technical terms”, we can say that GDC is comprised of the monetary base * leverage in the fractional reserve banking system * money circulation.
The central bank manufactures monetary base at its own discretion. However, the broader money supply is dependent on a solvent banking system. If banks under the jurisdiction of the central bank are insolvent they cannot increase their balance sheet, or leverage up on the base money. After a financial crisis it is therefore hard for the central bank to create inflation since legacy assets held by the banks will weigh on their ability to create additional demand deposits. In addition, as banks hold back on money creation, transactions will inevitably drop. As you can see, it is actually true that an activist monetary policy can create growth in gross domestic production, but only because the very concept measures inflation of broad money supply and nothing else. From this follows a surprisingly well hidden fact; the debt to GDC ratio is important only because it measures whether debt is created at a rate faster or slower than monetary inflation.  This is why it has become so important for the new Japanese administration to create nominal GDC growth. They are desperate to inflate away the big pile of debt they have accumulated of which there is zero chance of ever being repaid. Put bluntly, they want to default covertly through inflationary resource confiscation.
If we look at the monetary breakdown of Japanese GDC we see a negative velocity effect. That means only a fraction of existing money circulates during the period of measurement (one year). However, by raising it to something greater than one – ceterius paribus – Japan could lift its GDC from the current level of Yen500tr to Yen800tr and simultaneously reduce the debt ratio from 230 per cent to 140 per cent! Alternatively, they could double the monetary base and again – ceterius paribus – reduce the debt ratio to around 100 per cent.
Please note that none of this creates any value at all, but only help to redistribute real wealth to the government which can squander it as the ruling class see fit.
Source: Bank of Japan (BoJ), Cabinet Office (CAO), own calculations
The second thing the reader needs to know about economics is that debt can have a positive or a negative effect on wealth creation, depending on what kind of deb. If the debt is made with the intent of making a subsequent sale, id est. a business loan, it will help increase capital accumulation. However, if the debt is taken on to fund current consumption it will decumulate the capital stock and make society poorer. In our work, we usually divide between good, bad and destructive debt. Good debt consists of business loans. Bad debt is defined as household and financial sector loans while government debt fit right into our category called destructive debt. Basically, debt need to have an intrinsic yield high enough to pay back the resources it helped claim from society, plus interest, for it to be considered good. Note, debt that is dependent on others yield or production, such as taxpayers, is not self-sufficient and cannot create prosperity.  With this in mind we look at what happened to Japan before and after it crashed in the 1990s
 
Source: Bank of Japan – Flow of Funds (BoJ), own calculations
Japan in the 1980s and 1990s show a remarkable resemblance to the US during the 2000s. In the midst of bubble finance, the system funded bad debt in droves. This pulled capital out of the system without replenishing it. Conventional wisdom tells you that the 1980s was a decade of spectacular growth for Japan, but truth be told they actually got a lot poorer by consuming capital. When the Bank of Japan (BoJ) felt compelled to raise interest rates sharply from 1989 to 1990 the malinvestments could no longer be funded. The bust was inevitable.
When the bubble finally burst as a consequence of the misaligned capital structure, the government stepped in and bailed out the bad debt by adding destructive debt. Of course, this policy benefitted the corporative part of the economy, such as big banks and politically connected businesses, but at the expense of zombifying the economy. Bad investments continued to drain the system of scarce capital, while the government doubled down in a desperate attempt to kick-start money multipliers and velocity.
But money multipliers could not be expanded because the banking system was rendered unable to increase base money leverage since they continued to fund capital projects that bled the economy dry.
In a desperate attempt to rectify the lack of “private sector” initiative the Japanese leaders schooled in Keynesian multipliers knew that their wasteful spending would at one point fund itself through higher tax income. Now, that did not work out as they hoped as spending soared while income kept falling.
Source: Ministry of Finance (MoF), own calculations and projections
Note that bond issuance has been larger than tax revenues since 2009 and under very conservative assumption will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. Japan has ended up in a rather peculiar situation in which revenue abide by the” laws” of deflation while spending reflects that of a system in inflation.
Conclusion
In an attempt to bail out unsound investments, Japan cemented an economic structure that was unsustainable. This lead directly to persistent capital consumption and a “lost decade(s)”
Part II: From quagmire to Abenomics.
Unsurprisingly the policy lead to a massive increase in debt levels. In order to feed the unsustainable system, consecutive Japanese governments threw money at it with the perverted consequence of depriving corporations of capital. Government debt grew inexorably while corporations got squeezed.   
Source: Bank of Japan – Flow of Funds (BoJ), Cabinet Office (CaO), own calculations
The central bank reacted by lowering interest rates from a peak of 6 per cent in the winter of 1990/91 to a low of 0.5 per cent in 1995. In addition they expanded their balance sheet by lending to banks against legacy assets.  The insolvent banking system and the overleveraged household sector did not crave liquidity for more than refinancing outstanding bad debt, so the increased base money ended up as excessive reserves in the BoJ deposit account. Sounds familiar?
Source: Bank of Japan (BoJ)
Source: Bank of Japan – Flow of Funds (BoJ), own calculations
Now, the initial measures taken may seem tepid compared to what we have been accustomed to today, but these were dramatic and unprecedented steps back then. It is also striking to see how similar the development prior to the bust and response taken after was compared to what we see across the western world today. Needless to say, it does not bode well for the future.
As Japan moved forward in the 1990s and 2000s it became obvious, even to the policy makers, that the situation was unsustainable, with nothing less than a Greek style fiscal Armageddon on the horizon. Tax revenues were dropping and bond issuance rising. New taxes introduced to fund the rapidly growing state harmed private capital accumulation even more. The corresponding spending growth was found mostly in debt service- and social costs. Those two categories account today for more than 50 per cent of total spending, and bar a default or dramatic cut in transfers to a rapidly ageing population, will only continue to eat into the overall budget.
Source: Ministry of Finance (MoF), own calculations
For Japan is not only in a dire fiscal situation, they are also the oldest country in the world. Social spending is growing exponentially and the demographic dividend they enjoyed up to the mid-1990s is now turning against them. There will be many more dependents and far fewer breadwinners as we move forward. The demographics in Japan would overwhelm the country even if their fiscal situation was sound.
Source: US Census Bureau, own calculations
Source: Ministry of Finance (MoF), own calculations
The only thing clueless policy makers could come up with in this dire situation was even more of the same. With the election of Shinzo Abe in December 16th the people of Japan elected a man based on a promise of shake up the Bank of Japan. The resemblance to William Jennings Bryan and his famous “Cross of Gold” speech is eerie. The Japanese would not be “crucified on a cross of gold” any more. They elected a man who promised to free them of the shackles from a strong yen and save the day with creation of paper wealth. This is the perfect recipe for disaster.
 Conclusion:
Public debt is reaching ridiculous levels and spending will only grow from here. When big bulges of old people start to retire they will be dissaving and it will be impossible for the big banks to use excess deposits to roll over government debt. Collapse is at this stage inevitable.
Part III has recently been submitted to Bawerk.net [18]
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The Exquisite Art Of Marketing To Pauperized Consumers (By Hiding Inflation)

Elite Forex Blog - Market Research & Analysis
While workers in the upper income categories, those who don’t have to worry about the price of toilet paper, have seen their incomes rise sharply over the years, the rest have been in a long downward spiral. To take just one measure: median household income, adjusted for inflation, has dropped 7.8% since 2000 (chart). The drop has been steeper for the lower income categories. These are the folks who do worry about the price of toilet paper. And for them, Kimberly-Clark Corp. and other tissue makers have a special strategy: “Desheeting.”
A word that top executives of personal-care conglomerates are proudly bandying about because it speaks of their corporate spirit of relentless innovation. And it cropped up during Kimberly-Clark’s second-quarter earnings call.
CFO Mark Buthman set the scene when he extolled “organic” sales growth of a whopping 3% in the second quarter, though actual sales, at $5.267 billion, were down fractionally year over year. A continuation of a worsening trend: in 2011, sales rose 5.5%. In 2012, sales rose only 1.0%, not even keeping up with inflation – a topic that came up a lot during the earnings call. In 2013, revenues look to be even more lackadaisical.
One exasperated analyst wanted to know with regards to the healthcare division, “Why do we have four quarters in a row of negative sales growth?”
“Yes. A couple of things,” retorted CEO Tom Falk, sticking to the rule of answering hairy questions with a yes; it would bamboozle everyone into having a positive attitude about the answer. “I think everybody in the healthcare space is trying to figure that out,” he said because his company wasn’t the only one with that problem. He ascribed it to high-deductible healthcare plans that encouraged consumers to make smart decisions; and to healthcare providers that pushed for “alternate therapies” before venturing into surgery. These efforts to tamp down on ballooning healthcare costs were giving his revenue-challenged company conniptions.
Yet Kimberly-Clark continues to eke out “adjusted earnings” growth – 8% per share in the second quarter. What gives? All manner of cost cutting, product-mix changes, and that word.
“Well, we took some desheeting in the quarter,” explained Mr. Buthman. The company was reducing the sheets on each roll of toilet paper and in each box of Kleenex. He called it an “innovation” that would lead to a “more positive” price. At the same time, volume, which the company counted in thousands of sheets, would decline. “Which net net, for us, works out to be a positive,” he said.
Citing the improved Cottonelle toilet paper line, he told an analyst, “It’s a great product, great category, growing rapidly. We will have to get you some, Connie, to try it.”
His strategy: “identifying and delivering cost savings in areas that our consumers and customers don’t care about….”
Because it’s tough out there. No revenue growth. Input prices that are increasing. Customers who can’t afford price increases. “Adjusted earnings” that have to increase. Solution: desheeting – rolls and boxes with fewer sheets. Consumers “don’t care about” that because they’re not supposed to notice.
Part of the innovation is to fluff up the tissue without adding more materials – 15% “bulkier,” it said on a box of Kleenex that had 13% fewer sheets in it, the Wall Street Journal discovered. In the Cottonelle line, sheet counts dropped by 5.7% to 9.6%. Fewer but fluffed up sheets, lower input costs for the company, and consumers who “don’t care about” that. A perfect solution – and a variation on an ancient theme – for hiding hefty price increases.
Other tissue makers are doing it too. They’re cutting the number of sheets per roll or box, they cutting the size of the sheets, and they’re fluffing up sheets to give consumers, as Mr. Buthman explained so eloquently in an interview, a “better, stronger, tissue so that you need fewer sheets to get the job done.”
But the math of getting “the job done” doesn’t quite work out that way. If someone for a particular “job” normally uses two sheets, he isn’t going to suddenly use 1.95 sheets for the same job to compensate for a 5% cut in sheet count, regardless of how fluffy and improved that innovative sheet may be. He’s going to use two sheets as before, and he’s going to buy more rolls and spending more money. If Kimberly-Clark’s cost-cutting and pricing strategy is working, he’ll never notice, though he might start wondering after a while where all his money is going.
Kimberly-Clark knows where his money is going. It’s propping up “adjusted earnings.” This is the high art of marketing to consumers who have been pauperized in small, nearly unnoticeable increments by over a decade of wage increases – for the lucky ones – that haven’t kept up with what the Fed is so passionate about creating: moderate inflation.
But the Fed has a problem. Foreigners have been big buyers of Treasuries. That buying collapsed during the financial crisis. Now, worried foreigners are once again bailing out. So far, the Fed has been picking up the slack. But what if the Fed were to “taper” those purchases, and long-term rates were to jump? Read….  Rising US Interest Rates Could Create An Economic Death Cycle. So Can The Fed Actually Taper QE?
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