All Clowns Report to the Circus

'Tis the Season for Willful Self-bankruptcy, in God's name. Amen

Consumption Sentimentality

Black Swan Tracker

Globalization Doesn't Do Sanctions

Apparently we didn't learn that from Cyprus last year, a country of 1 million people, holding the global financial system hostage

A Run on the Bank
Russia is the 8th largest global economy by GDP
Bond Yields:

Made in the U.S.A: A Stock Market Without An Economy

The Dow Casino IS the economy, until the Idiocracy wakes up from its stoned coma

Econo-dunces assure us that a lot of people "retired" in 2008:

Tools and Fools
For those reading this deep into the future you will not believe that even now there is literally no widespread acknowledgement that this has happened. The Dow Casino has become the Idiocracy's economy (until it collapses). No, I'm serious. Yes, really. It's true. Believe me:

...#400: "Dude, where's the economy?"

The Countdown to "Recovery" is back by popular demand:

Deflationary Body Count

Slowly at first, then goodbye to all that...

These remaining sectors are all 100% correlated due to HFT, so they'll all go at the same time. Then blogging time will be over, because we'll all be on the same page finally.

An Historic Moment: Seattle 2014

We are witnessing the collapse of the Corporate Globalized Empire in real time

  
"These jobs are going boys and they ain't coming back" 

- Bruce Springsteen, My Hometown, Born in the USA [1984]

Having roamed abroad for years and decades, wreaking havoc upon one developing nation after another - laying them asunder to ponzi capitalism - the frankenmonster finally came home hungry. Now, amid record wealth, poverty, billionaires, debt, child homelessness, bankruptcies, lies, bullshit, school shootings, global warming, drone attacks, diabesity, foreign occupations, wealth inequality etc. etc., the once great corporate empire is staggering under the weight of its own accumulated excess.

1991 was the seminal moment - the fall of the Soviet Union. Vindication for decades of Cold War and Third World "intervention" - support for literally every fascist dictator on the entire planet. That pyrrhic "victory" inspired Fukuyama's NeoCon fantasy, "The End of History":

"What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."

Reading through the lines, it was a capitalist paradise consisting of unhindered labour exploitation and resource extraction, unfettered by socialists, unions or even real people for that matter. Fast forward and the Roaring 1990s only reinforced this view that Ponzi Capitalism had "won" and would never be rolled back. 

Then came Seattle 1999:

The Atlantic, Jan. 6th, 2014

The Dark Side of Globalization: Why Seattle's 1999 Protesters Were Right

"The WTO demonstrators were the "Occupy" movement of the late-20th century—mocked, maligned, and mostly right"

"Economists Michael Elsby, Bart Hobijn, and Aysegul Sahin found that competition from developing countries—not the decline of unions or the rise of automation—has been responsible for the bulk of the recent decline in labor’s share of income in the United States.

Chinese imports have lowered prices for consumers and raised the income of capital owners, but those benefits are either spread very thinly over a large number of people, or concentrated among the rich. The American workers who have been hurt by globalization have been hurt very badly, and America has no system in place to compensate them for that loss. China’s accession to the WTO in 2000, following the 1999 meeting, accelerated its rise as an export powerhouse."

Note the de rigueur Ponzinomic reference to "lowered prices for (jobless) consumers". 

It's unbelievable that the Seattle protesters 15 years ago, were only ten times smarter than the abject dumbfucks who run the global economy today. And yet there is literally almost no commentary on Globalization now amidst today's wholly shrink-wrapped Walmartized Idiocracy.

That was the 2000s in a nutshell - total capitulation to Globalization. Post-9/11 Shock Doctrine.

And then of course, DotCom bubble and bust, followed by housing/subprime bubble and bust. Each time, Globalization tightened its grip on the developed world while the Third World's unlimited labour supply was opened wide to the Multinational industrial arbitrageurs. Buying in one locale and selling in another, financing the growing unemployment with debt.

And suffice to say that Fukuyama and the other NeoCon artists didn't foresee Bin Laden & Company creating their own "protest" movement against the global empire. Nothing like turning Globalization's energy source into history's largest guerrilla warfare zone.   

From 1% interest rates to 0% interest rates: "This one Goes to 11"

Globalization peaked in 2007 by all honest accounts - Peak prosperity for the BRIC all-stars of ponzi capitalism: Brazil, Russia, China, India. Therefore, this post-2008 is merely a Dow-at-all-costs smoke and mirrors show for massively corrupt geriatrics, who've thrown every other generation under the bus. It's one last all-in attempt to keep the Globalized Ponzi Scheme from collapsing i.e. by making it far larger and more lethal. Financialization on steroids.  

We've had plenty of warning. We are not "owed" anything more.

The 2011 Occupy protesters were right too of course, but fortunately they were ignored by this corrupt and stoned Idiocracy. This time there will be nothing left to save.

"Dude, Where's the Economy?"

A Toast to Third World Convergence:

America: Love It or Get Bombed Into Fucking Oblivion (Choose Carefully)

And on the 8th Day, God created the United States to make the world safe for junk food and junk culture

Except when corporate profits are at risk, then there's never an excuse not to use violence...

Occupy Self-Implosion

CNBC Dec. 2nd, 2014

1,000 Hedge Funds Obliterated in 2014

Singularity. A necessary and sufficient condition to implode Wall Street

The Bataan Death March towards singularity.:

% Bearish
24 months moving average

A few people already noticed that they're names are on the lunch menu
Index put/call 10 day moving average
Yesterday's single day reading of 1.80 is the highest in two and a half years

Skynet won. Artificial intelligence is ubiquitous.

Extend and Pretend Society

Arbitraging the economy for cheap consumption debt

The Third World is dragging developed nations into the deflationary abyss

Barchart/Seeking Alpha. Dec. 3rd, 2014: 

"The Race to 0%: Plunging Yields Across the Globe"

"What do each of these countries have in common? Slow to negative economic and wage growth and extreme deflationary pressures" [And massive Ponzi debts]

"...we have become conditioned to believe weaker growth is a good thing. Why? Because it means more central bank "action" to prop of stock markets in the near-term."

"Their [Central Bank] goal is simple: drive the expected future return on all asset classes to 0% or even negative levels. This in turn will enable governments to continue to borrow beyond their means and convince the masses that things are great and they should spend what little money they have saved because stock prices are going up. In short, it is a policy of borrowing from the future to satisfy the whims of today"

1.85% 
Spanish bond yields are now below 2%, lower than the United States (2.20%):

Sure, whatever:

Central bank monetary expansion doesn't drive inflation to zero, quite the opposite - only corporations importing wage deflation from the Third World can do that. But as always, the country club needs to blame someone else for the frankenmonster they created. 

A Corporate Society Has No Humanity

The Idiocracy Has Reduced the Future to "Now"

Sydney Australian police consider 'baby hatches' after second dumped baby found in one week

Two boys found a dead baby while digging at the beach on Sunday.

"We" thought that shopping malls, skyscrapers and corporate "careers" could replace communities and social cohesion, but that was very wrong. The latent mental illness that accompanies dopamine addiction has merely been painted over by debt-sponsored consumption binges and massive doses of psychotic-inducing chemicals washed down with junk food. God gave us everything we needed, so we threw it in the landfill. No humanity. No humility.

ISIS & Company have found their own response to all of this, by rewinding the Middle East back several hundred years to a point in time when all religions were barbarous yet also highly functional and cohesive. They've realized that the nihilistic consumption-oriented society is a dead end. And clearly they needn't do anything to collapse the "infidels" other than wait. There is nothing that they can do to the attention deficit Idiocracy that the self-congratulating "developed" nations - which turned their back on half of humanity - are not already doing to themselves.

I didn't say that religion was THE answer, only that it has always been the primary recourse to the spiritual void created by decadent nihilism. Nuclear weapons and Stone Age brinksmanship are undeniably a bad combination, as will become self-evident in due course.

Tolerance, compassion, humility. 

Without those things, there is literally no future for the hairless monkeys, in any direction. But, it was a good run, no question.

"It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity."
- Albert Einstein