Smarter than our central bankers

BEIJING (Reuters) - China’s central bank governor Yi Gang said in a signed article published on Sunday that Beijing should maintain “normal” monetary policy as long as possible since economic growth is still within a reasonable range and inflation is mild overall.
China will not resort to quantitative easing even as the monetary policies of the world’s major economies are approaching zero interest rates, People’s Bank of China Governor Yi Gang wrote in an article published by the leading Communist Party theoretical journal Qiushi.
“We should not let the money held by the Chinese people become worthless... Maintaining positive interest rates and upward-inclined yield curve is generally conducive to the economic entities, and in line with the Chinese people’s saving culture, thus beneficial to the sustainable development of the economy,” said Yi.

He reiterated the central bank will continue to implement prudent monetary policy, conduct counter-cyclical adjustments, improve monetary policy transmission and keep liquidity reasonably ample.

At least they know how to talk with sense. 

We do not even have that.  I think they have figured out sandbox.  We have a bunch of Mises folks and Keynes folks still doing a 200 year old debate about Karl. We live in the dark ages, the era of economists doing 'bleedings' it has not stopped. Our economists have not advanced an inch, the bankers clueless and Zuck should just go ahead and say, screw this crap, do a complete LIbra.

Who said SWIFT was a monopoly?

Six European Countries Join INSTEX After Violent Suppression Of Iran Protests

The same system is now available to Russia, China as well.  Bitcoin can connect to INSTEX, via Iran.

Very simply, it's a barter system created by the French, the Germans and the Brits. So in any trade, money gets paid into the home country's account, and it doesn't cross the border in or out of Iran. There's also an office in Tehran, too.So the idea is this gets around the U.S.-dominated international trading system. So companies that want to do business in Iran, they have another avenue. It took more than a year to set this thing up. Nobody's ever done it before. And it's complicated. The Europeans announced last week that Instex is up and running, and the first trade is expected soon.

It is only barter in the sense that money stays within the border, and each INTEX nation maintains security of the foreign account.  So when Finland sells Iran a machine, Iran pays into the INTEX account on its home territory. There is nothing stopping Finland from swaping their Iran money for yuan within the INSTEX account in Iran.

In effect, Iran becomes the alternative banking capital of the world but the religious psychos in Iran have few math skills and cannot see the opportunity.  It is like Zuck trying to make Libra compatible with SWIFT. Why bother? The digital system Zuck can build is much more efficient then SWIFT and Zuck can just dump SWIFT entirely, users needing only to swap into SWIFT for tax time until it is tax time.

SWIFT is and will continue to lose relative market share, Trump will freak out in panic and we get Trump Shock. But with all the alternative currency systems and the new TOE we can easily get through a Trump shock after one or two years, no problem.

Robinhood pulls bank charter application as fintechs face hurdles to disrupting financial system

Right here. Why not open a bank charter in Iran under the INSTEX system? They get all the same power without having to worry bout regulatory issues with a bankrupt American government.

Why not? Because Persian religious psychotics are dumber than shit and do not understand banking. But Robinhood should at least give it a try, test the system. I know a bunch of Persians, they are not all dumber than turnips and there is a chance a clue has arrived in Iran.

Russia has a similar problem in using INTEX, Putin and his habit of assassination as a ledger protocol, it is not compatible with accurate banking. Sort of illustrates a point, the new banking must be entirely separate from government. China has a similar problem, ultimately Commie Rats steal from the banks so transaction costs are high from the start because of Commie insurance.

The title says it all

The Swampiest Swamp in the History of Swamps

It is about Trump corruption with all the usual names. 

Change the names, change the party and the story is the same, add in our favorite economists. That is why the title says it all.

If we call Mexican cartels terrorists

then we have to stop selling them arms.

What do we do with the idiot arms sellers in Texas?  Trump is in a contradiction. 

We are down to a binary choice. We can cooperate on making our children brain damaged or send the kids Texas and Florida to be massacred by NRA nuts.  Our kids are caught between two terrorist factions, pick your method of death.

We have a third choice, shut down the Swamp until rationality prevails back there.

We are not a democracy, we are mostly a failing republic

How money laundering is poisoning American democracy Financial Times. Dan K:

Whoever Dan K is, this article should have never been published. It exposes the Financial Times to a charge of utter idiocy.

TOE

But delinquencies are a flow. Balances are removed from the delinquency basket either when the customer cures the delinquency, such as catching up with past-due payments, or when the bank “charges off” the delinquent balance against its loan loss reserves. But as these delinquent balances were taken out of the delinquency basket, even more new delinquencies fell into the basket, and the delinquency rate rose.

By Wolf Richter, editor of Wolf Street. Originally published at Wolf Street
Automated S/L will have some of this problem, though in a diminished amount. This is the scofflaw queue audit needs to be a stable queue so it may be priced accurately. The best solution is risk equalization, get the risk equalized accounts to manage both deposits and loans together, no third party credit suppliers taking excessive risks.

What about private ownership of atomic bombs?

Can I buy n atomic bomb and store it in my basement?

No regulated militia or defense department considers that a regulated ownership of arms, it fails part one.


However, me and a bunch of scientists from Redneck U should be able to acquire a small atomic bomb for a critical particle experiment, underground in an isolated desert. That should be allowed, but the US defense department will check every regulation at each step and charge us a bundle for the service.

Part one of the Second. I lets me collect artillery weapons as part of a regulated club, but my use of them must follow the same strict guidelines the military uses in their gunnery ranges. I have said this repeatedly, antique artillery guns, modern artillery guns can be part of a strictly regulated private organization, for hobby or real use by hired mercenaries. We are going to blow off our cannons, maybe with duds, but we do this on national holidays and even football games. Artillery weapons are manufactured, they start with private ownership.

Part one has everything we need.  The constitution allows federal regulation but that is restricted by illegal takings. Thus, prt two is complete horse manure, put here because of the stupids in rural American during the founding. But it was moot then, an is moot now. Supremes who try and interpret part two will be stuck making value judgements based on current cultural norms. Sorry, but like many things in the constitution, it was written to get the dummies off the founders backs..

Caplan's comic book

Caplan's argument is that increasing population yields increasing gains to scale.  More people make more good ideas which make us a more complex and robust society. More people can even coexist with a welfare state.

Problem number one, our national government does not even have constant gins to scale, irregular gains to scale are written into the constitution, and the transaction costs to fix this problem have to be negotiated first. We are barely understanding the problem but we know it to e a problem because our national government cycles on eight year boundaries.

His second problem is humans may not have unlimited ability to consistently increase gains to scale. The human is after all, finite in place and time, it has a positive and relatively fixed uncertainty in its every day activities. We can only fit so many humans in LA before we get a conflict between transportation and housing.  The new ideas we need to improve that balance has an uncertain arrival and we end up with poor people bunched on the street while we get stuck on old bottlenecks.

In the long run, evolution may make his theory correct. But even that is not guaranteed. Mass immigration results from the bunching of people in economies suffering war and poverty, sort of prima facie evidence that consistently getting increasing gains to scale via more people does not always work.

Insuring Boris get's a majority

London attacker named, was previously convicted of terrorism offenses

The only thing that prevents Boris from winning is the sudden spiritual appearance of the Mohhumer himself, declaring peace to all.

Federal scale spending driving small states to extinction

American Life Expectancy Dropping Dramatically Thanks To White Working Class Male Suicides

And the vicious cycle because voters are too deceived to elect effective senators. Step one is a sudden stop, stop Congress until the solution is found. Fuck anything else, these states are on the brink.

Why doesn't Zuck make libra into real money?

Why bothering with fiat exchange at all, let that be done by third parties.

Instead sell Libra S/L licenses world wide, along with the Zuck pay protocol?  Exactly like I discussed with BTC, except skip BTC all together.

Each Libra S/L can resolve all internal transactions in closed fashion, and make a finite Libra block chain for  interbank swaps. There is no need to maintain an infinite history, history is in the bounded market making risk accounts, everywhere bounded. Set up a trusted bank examiner system, use the existing credit systems to chase scofflaws. For merchants it is a much simpler system, faster system. Central bank volatility is gone, governments everywhere required to handle cash balances without fudging. Pure sandbox, add in FaceID,  a version of Secureid, competitive with Appleid. Bingo, done. Singularity time because micro payments value the link across any semantic network. Bearer digital cash becomes safe.

At this point the techniques are so widely spread the development time can be shortened by with fintech partnerships.  And as a side bonus, Zuck can force rationality into Congress.

GINI rises with government debt

Debt is not what we owe ourselves, debt is what poor people owe rich people.

This picture ends with what we have now, a global repudiation of the debt swindle world wide.  AOC might want to take notice before she votes for another of these primary dealer deals.

And small states might want to take notice of the toll that cash management failure has on their populations, kids and retirees abandoning the small states with federal subsidies. Next time these small states senators agree to hand their duties over to the primary dealer, they become extinct. Perhaps a clue or two is in order.

And for those who think this is normal and the rich are not that much richer, let me remind them: I have about 40 years in which the super wealthy have absconded on their central bank monopsony fees, and the debt rebels plan to collect it, with interest.

Does a network of bitcoin S/Ls reduce volatility?

Right now BTC is an FX transfer tool with automatic central bank hedges. Bitcpin is volatile because central banks are nutty.

But the bitcoin S/Ls do not need central banking fiat, they become, as a network, a decentralized miner pool. They do their  cross checking over the BTC block chain directly, no central bank anywhere. The bitcoin ledger becomes optimally congested, bitcoin S/Ls and merchants share the cost of BTC transfer across fiat currencies.

There is one difference. When a bitcoin payment and goods delivered have completely celeared the system, all the bitcoin S/ls can agree to erase the transaction history. If it was foul, then it was foul and goes under scofflaw management.  Require a 100% agreement from ll bitcoin S/Ls in the chain, then erase it, lower the cost of block chain by making it finite. Eventually the bitcoin evolves into well designed money, back by the optimum allocation of liquidity. Liquidity across the globe always allocated to the maximum accuracy available.

As long as central banks guarantee Treasury liquidity, then sandbox technology is hard for them to use as it reveals the necessary central bank arbitrage moments. So, in the USA that means the senators are in charge of liquidity management, not the primary dealers. And in the USA tht means the congressional Adjustment Act. The central banks are truly in a conundrum, and delusional economists do not help much.

All sandbox theory.

Merging the bitcoin S/L with payments system

The works like current system. The user keeps bitcoin on the bitcoin S/L and payment exchanges takes place between  the S/L pit boss and the merchant. Bitcoins are not restored or retrieved from the master block chain  except on entry and exit of accounts.

So the bitcoin S/L has all the same scofflaw issues as the current fiat S/L banker. Reserve requirements may be set, the user needs a minimal deposit balance t all times, no interest charges can deplete the deposit balance.  Their is still a probability of scofflaw, a merchant exchange may take  chunk of the users loan and the user refuses to restore the deposit balance.

Merchants can keep an account at the bitcoin S/L, make it simpler to settle and the merchant earns interest. Then we get a one stop settlement, one transaction with both merchant and customer signatures. Any party cn move part of their balances onto the main BTC chain for trade into fiat. Or the bitcoin S/L can offer a fiat exchange pit as a side service.

But scofflaw risk never goes away in  distributed economy.  Sorry about that, but money is about taking risks and it is not all ledger technology.  Scofflaws are handled in he usual way, with the support of technology in the way of credit badges. The key to scofflaws is to keep their actions measurable and priceable so the money is there to chase them down.

Banks and merchants need share the scofflaw risk, the merchant can insist on biometric ID, for example, making the culprit easier to chase. Both can pay the scofflaw insurance. And it is in the inerest of bitcoin S/L pit boss to extend workouts for bankruptcies, which will happen.

A good idea, actually.  Peter Thiel would certainly fund this if someone sharp wants to bother with the pitch. He really can't go wrong, it is the TOE after all. One plan that makes sense is to build the S/L pit boss function, then just merge that with the Coinbase exchange. Coinbase should be using sandbox matching theory by now, if they were smart. So they my have already gotten all the components in place.

Dems have grown past their Trump hysteria?

At yesterday’s Thanksgiving table, fifteen adults present, there was not one word uttered about impeachment, Russia, Ukraine, and, most notably, a certain Golden Golem of Greatness, whose arrival at the center of American life three years ago kicked off a political hysteria not witnessed across this land since southern “fire eaters” lay siege to Fort Sumter.
I wonder if some great fatigue of the mind has set in among the class of people who follow the news and especially the tortured antics of Rep. Adam Schiff’s goat rodeo in the House intel Committee the past month. I wonder what the rest of congress is detecting among its constituents back home during this holiday hiatus. I suspect it is that same eerie absence of chatter I noticed, and what it may portend about the nation’s disposition toward reality.
The dead white man Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860) famously observed that “all truth passes through three stages: first, it is ridiculed; second, it is violently opposed; and third, it is accepted as self-evident.” America has been stuck in stage two lo these thirty-six months since Mr. Trump shocked the system with his electoral victory over She-Whose-Turn-Was-Undoubted, inciting a paroxysm of rage, disbelief, and retribution that has made the Left side of the political transect ridiculous, and repeatedly, ignominiously so, as their fantasies about Russian “collusion” and sequential chimeras dissolve in official proceedings.

The Dems were the worst nightmare, three years of uselessness.  Their economists stuck in the past, unable to find a path forward without recognizing the reality.

Iranians have outgrown Santa Claus

DUBAI: Even among hard-liners in Iran, there seems to be an acknowledgment of one fact after widespread protests, violence and a security force crackdown following a spike in government-set gasoline prices: This will not be the last time demonstrators come out on the street.
As Iran struggles under crushing US sanctions following President Donald Trump’s unilateral withdrawal of America from Tehran’s nuclear deal with world powers, its elected civilian government and those in its Shiite theocracy will face ever-tougher decisions on where to cut costs.
Those cuts will more than likely target its vast system of government subsidies that make life affordable for its poor, from low-cost electricity in their homes to the bread on their plates. Any move to increase those prices will draw further protests. But the government may not have any other option.

They do not believe in rule by psychotic religious nuts.

The is like a little kid who conquers the Santa Claus myth, they make n intellectual step and begin to act upon it, a likely an effect of the new media educating people.

Oil back near $55

$55.17. 

There is no real inflation at the moment.  The five tips yield is at 10 basis points. so investors betting a continuing 1.5% inflation rate. They will be disappointed.

Bitcoin savings and loan

I put the description up on one of the pages to the left. It is the standard sandbox S/L system, I just added the member in and out to and from the master BTC block chain.  Open to free use by anyone who wants to make a bitcoin savings and loan.

Let us define a redundancy in our S/L in terms of the Walmart checkout manager.  The checkout manger sets items per basket as needed to keep the various checkout lines stable. If two different people with five items in their basket are in two different lines than that is a redundancy.  It is redundant because all baskets with five items should be interchangeable within the same line, their redundancy has been extinguished by a commutative property.

In a bank S/L the equivalent is two $300 deposits earn a different interest payment.  This is exactly the problem a Huffman encoder solves. So we have two queues, deposits and loans. If both are minimally redundant then their interest swaps should create a unique, and minimal, fit to the final S/L balance, and some linear scaling between the two results in minimal market risk.

So, if I have a 'compressed' version of a sequence then I have a distributive property going down the encoding tree.  I can balance the tree (eliminate skew)by adding entries as needed at each node. Two such trees will be co-balanced,  and the ratio of commutative entries on each node will be the same ratio as the opposite tree, I can scale one relative to the other. My scaling is such as to maximally cancel out the balancers I have put, and the resulting differences in the balancers will be minimized. That is minimizing market risk for the pit boss. Th end result should be unique, and most of these proofs are about proving uniqueness on a graph configuration.

More like a serious inconvenience

The next wave of debt monetization will be a disaster – Epoch Times

We be pretty good at it, having lots of practice.

See ya later Giuligator

Giuliani Out Soon as Trump's Lawyer, Gowdy Rises

Dropping like flies

Iraq PM Announces Resignation After 40 Protesters Killed On Single Deadliest Day

Part one is enough

Rhode Island's Stun Gun Ban Challenged in Federal Court

Rhode Island is one of only two states that still prohibit civilian stun gun and Taser ownership.

Cops need them, and cops buy them from private vendors. So already they are defacto legally owned by private actors.  The question remains, private actors will own them at some point so what are the regulations on the private actors. The regulations are imposed, also by part one under regulated militia.

Do not need part two, right to bear. Right to bear is moot, the right to bear having already been reserved by the need for regulated militia and commerce clause. The answer is, therefore, proof of regulated use which includes some knowledge and training as well as a form of command and control connected to the cops. Part one rules all the way through.

YANIS VAROUFAKIS

The remit of a central bank is to aid the government’s efforts to stabilize finance and support the economy.

More drone

Israel's drone industry becomes global force

Airport City (Israel) (AFP) - In a fierce battle for market share against world superpowers China and the United States, Israel's drone industry likes to say it has a secret weapon -- military experience.
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are used daily by Israel's military in and around its borders, whether dropping tear-gas canisters on Palestinian demonstrators, monitoring Hezbollah positions in Lebanon or striking Islamic Jihad bases in Gaza.
The senior echelons of the country's industry are populated by former military and intelligence officials, many of whom became founders or engineers in local startups.
Israel's first rudimentary drone dates back to 1969: it was a remote-controlled plane with an attached camera to spy on neighbouring rival Egypt.

Excess government debt causes deflation, government default causes hyperinflation

While governments never have to entirely pay off debt, there are debt levels that investors might perceive as unsustainable. A solution some countries with high levels of unsustainable debt have tried is printing money. In this scenario, the government borrows money by issuing bonds and then orders the central bank to buy those bonds by creating (printing) money. History has taught us, however, that this type of policy leads to extremely high rates of inflation (hyperinflation) and often ends in economic ruin.”

From a central bank research paper 

SchiffGold and the gold bugs skip one step in their analysis. The Nixon shock caused pricing chaos, mainly as the government exits the gold market, suddenly, in a large defualt in 1972. And gold spiked.

Goldbugs need to include the intermediate step.  Excess debt is deflationary on the consumer because it is a transfer of liquidity from the consumer to government, acting like a shadow income tax. Consumers have less, government gets more; the whole point is that liquidity is a conserved quantity, it cannot be conjured up.

The irony of a gold standard is that government can default easily by repricing gold which is what FDR and Nixon both did. A debt based, central banker solves the liquidity crunch differently, and we are just discovering how to do that. Clues are entering the heads of central bankers as we speak, but a partial default is on its way.

Jobs to Alabama, pension checks to Florida

Leaving Illinois for Alabama

When Paul Serwatka, the reform-oriented mayor of the small Village of Lakewood called it quits on Illinois more than a year ago, he and his family picked out the area of Huntsville, Alabama, for their new home.

“Alabama?” a couple of his Illinois neighbors asked. But Sertwatka isn’t alone in heading for Alabama. It’s attracting many Illinoisans because parts of the state are booming in jobs, investment and population. And it costs a lot less to live there. Serwatka says “we’re not looking back.”
More than 29,000 Illinoisans have moved to Alabama since 2010, according to U.S. Census data. In contrast, just 15,000 Alabamians moved to Illinois over that same time period.

And Mayor Lightfoot has a plan for that. 

More drone

'Libya is ground zero': drones on frontline in bloody civil war

The use of lethal drones was once an area dominated by the US, but has spread rapidly, drawing in new conflicts and causing more civilian casualties as warfare is revolutionised.
The principal battleground is Libya, where both sides in the ongoing civil war are trying to gain air superiority with cheap Chinese-made craft run by the United Arab Emirates on one side, and equally inexpensive Turkish-made drones on the other.

The next big Anything for All kills Wyoming and Vermont and Alaska

Battle rages over which is the 'do-nothing' party

These three states face an existential problem from the socialists in the Swamp.  

They are nearly at a stop. Obamacare damn near killed their small medical systems. Their colleges, what few they have, cannot support the economies of scale needed with national student loans which subsidize the exit of young people. The defense industry is a killer for these states, drawing young people away.

This is why Colorado insisted on having a BLM headquarters in the state.
Another:

Thanks to the highest property taxes in the nation and an unsustainable cost of living, 44% of New Jersey residents plan to leave the state in the 'no so distant future,' according to a recent survey from the Garden State Initiative (GSI) and Fairleigh Dickenson University School of Public & Global Affairs.

A  medium state of 8 million, but facing an internal existential pension crisis.   They all have to pay Florida retirement expenses.

Central banker gone bananas

Brainard: Fed should consider targeting longer rates in a future downturn

Somewhere they go off track in the math of it all and now are adding gadgets and price fixes to get around the original error.

In my opinion we have bankers frightened to death of another Nixon Shock gone bad. So they continually add fixes to the original 'This time is different'  scam. It won't work, especially for a reserve currency like ours. When the Swamp has another liquidity crisis and the primary dealers are overwhelmed, then she wants the Fred to fix bond prices to keep the Swamp liquid.

She needs sandbox clues, they are not reaching her. She is not keeping up. There is at least one central banker in the group getting clues. The ideas are supposed to spread, something is stopping them. I think it is simply Post Traumatic Nixon Shock, it has fouled their ability to think in the abstract.

China could pass their own resolution

China warns U.S. of retaliation over Hong Kong law as police enter ruined university

How about passing a resolution in support of my Constitutional Adjustment act? My proposal restores real balance in our mal-adjusted state system. China should criticize us for having such a bad distribution of voting power.

Who want to be PM of a failed state?

Lebanon's PM Hariri wishes to quit, President Aoun searches replacement

All of the candidates are just as crooked a the previous PM. In a failed state one wants to keep the stolen goods hidden and that is hard to do as PM.

Median home prices and energy costs

This chart is about the 2004-2006 housing bubble.  Was it just an effect of energy prices directly on home construction?

I start with this:

Energy costs of house construction

I add on the energy of construction by personal estimate, and get the energy input to a new home is about 30 grand.  But energy costs tripled.  In the chart above the green line is median house cost, USA, divided by 1000.  So the cost of the median home went from 200k to about 390k, but the energy cost per home went from 30k to about 80k during the same period. That alone accounts for most of the bubble.

The red line are permits for new construction. The blue line is the ten year. The collapse in housing permits was mainly the energy cost and somewhat mortgage costs.

The real problem in housing was the collapse of the construction business in California and Florida. But California was dead by that time, all the truckers stopped working. The entire episode was mainly energy costs rising, and the transportation sector did a sudden stop, mostly in California.

Clearly an oil shortage.

The final proof is the outcome. We converted from a manufacturing economy to an oil producing economy. And we has planned on staying a manufacturing economy, it is built in to the pension system. We have a problem, as serious problem.

What about the financial crisis?

So what. The impact of the evidence is that the financial system sorts out its own stuff, they got it wrong, they share the cost of misjudging.   Pensions got fouled, certainly, but that is not a problem for the average worker, that was a problem specifically for the failed states, Illinois and California.  The lay offs, by this analysis were all a direct result of oil shortages.

My home town, in the news

Our soon to be mayor:

Based Upon Information & Belief - Fresno Police Lt. JOSE MORALEZ was Murdered by Fresno Police Chief JERRY DYER and the Fresno County Sheriff - Staged a Suicide to Protect Jerry Dyer

The answer is that this would be typical behavior by our police department. They get in their share of illegal killings.

Is it true? The evidence seems very likely, as a matter of fact, I would tend to believe it. My advice to Fresno voters is get him off the ticket in any event, this guy is not suited to be mayor. If they go hunting for pensions, there is no stopping this bunch, except maybe the Feds.

An old headline about our new mayor:

Porking the teenagers.

I have dealt with the cops quite a bit.  Most of them are OK, a little dumb but OK.  Dryer is likely a nightmare, someone we do not need as mayor.

Treasury debt rising at 6.5% per year, growth at 2.3%

The federal debt has increased by $1,303,466.578.471.45 since last Thanksgiving, according to data released by the U.S. Treasury.

Every dollar of new Treasury debt generates 30 cents in new aggregate GDP. Where does the other 70% of that new debt go? It is concentrated in the hands of wealthy lenders.  They earn about 2.5% on that, a nice deal. In addition, the primary dealers front the debt planning for the wealthy and they collect extra basis points from that.

Backed by gold?

BRICS Nations Discuss Shared Crypto to Break Away From USD and SWIFT

They are trying to escape the Swift system, a ledger technology.  

But if they back their crypto up with gold then it ain't crypto, it is chunks of metal held in my safe deposit box, numb skulls. Swift usually works because it is backed by the supply and demand for liquidity and transaction costs are supposed to be low.  The problem with Swift is that transaction costs are going way up with the sanctions and the too big to fail regulations. And Swift is not backed by a perfect liquidity market, it is backed by badly designed central banking.

I have a clue. Crypto works better when it is backed by the supply and demand for liquidity because liquidity is what domestic economics parcel out with their currency. Bitcoin is the exception, it is not really a payment system,, bitcoin is an ideal FX tool.

Whew.  Talk about running in circles. The BRICs have to free the liquidity markets, otherwise their currencies are as about as worthless tomorrow as today. If each BRIC can figure out a fair traded liquidity pit, they be fine, with or without a block chain.

Do not listen to Russia, they are into the impossible trilemma, listen to me. Just define the automated, fair traded liquidity pit according to sandbox boundary conditions.  This is also called joining the shadow banking network. China, Russia, Brazil and India are going no where with their new concoction until they capitulate to the need for fair traded liquidity. Dump the trilemma crap.

What about the California cartels?"

Trump plans to designate Mexican cartels as terror groups

Talibunnies dress funny

This is a staged pic as one can see they all have the scowl.

I think something about extreme mohummerdudism is a mental defect, a desire to scare us with mean scowls. They should be assigned their own gender, do we have any initials left?

Booted from college for free speech

Indiana Wesleyan Student Kicked Out of Honors College for Questioning Cultural Appropriation

Two years ago, Micah Sample, a libertarian student at Indiana Wesleyan University, penned a rant against the campus's guidance to students to avoid offensive Halloween costumes and published it on Facebook.
The post was a tad on the trollish side: Sample referred to IWU's Halloween costume awareness checklist as "cancerous," and accused the social justice left of fetishizing victimhood.
"I'm going to culturally appropriate as much as I please, and I couldn't possibly care less about who gets offended," he wrote.
The statement was provocative, but it wasn't crude or threatening. Some of Sample's Facebook friends objected to the tone of it, and said so. That should have been the end of the entire ordeal.

We haven't booted anyone here at Redneck U.  Maybe we ain't been woke?

A steady source of corruption

The U.S. state of Texas is divided into 254 counties, more than any other U.S. state.

35 of these counties have no doctor ! 

Texas: 33 Counties With No Doctor | RealClearInvestigations

Yet the county system has been the manager of public hospitals under Obamacare.

All of them likely have a drunken, ignorant assed, corrupt sheriff.

Obamacare Taxes for All, none too popular

Washington (AFP) - Political wunderkind Pete Buttigieg rocketed into second place in the Democratic presidential nomination race, polling showed Tuesday, with support for progressive ex-frontrunner Elizabeth Warren sliding as voters sour on her universal health care proposal.
Buttigieg, the moderate millennial mayor of South Bend, Indiana, leapfrogged the race's main liberal candidates, Warren and fellow senator Bernie Sanders, to claim second behind the resilient national leader Joe Biden, according to Quinnipiac University's latest poll.

Rhode Island breaks the rule

It is a small state 30 miles from Boston and 60 miles from NYC, a city in the middle of a metropolis.

It has all the gains to scale it needs, the Constitutional Adjustment act benefits the state more than necessary.  What is the history how did it become?

Rhode Island State History. The colony of Rhode Islandbegan in 1636 when clergyman Roger Williams was exiled from Massachusetts Bay. The Puritans disagreed with Williams's religious views. He named his new settlement "Providence," claiming providence had brought him there.

A bit of religious bigotry and we get stuck with an unnecessary state.

How about Vermont?

After being defeated in 1763 in the Seven Years' War, France ceded its territory east of the Mississippi River to Great Britain. Thereafter, the nearby British colonies, especially the provinces of New Hampshire and New York, disputed the extent of the area called the New Hampshire Grants to the west of the Connecticut River, encompassing present-day Vermont. The provincial government of New York sold land grants to settlers in the region, which conflicted with earlier grants from the government of New Hampshire. The Green Mountain Boysmilitia protected the interests of the established New Hampshire land grant settlers against the newly arrived settlers with land titles granted by New York.
Ultimately, a group of settlers with New Hampshire land grant titles established the Vermont Republic in 1777 as an independent state during the American Revolutionary War. The Vermont Republic partially abolished slavery before any of the other states.

I became a state because someone enforced one set of land title over another. Otherwise it would have remained part of the New York Northern wilderness.  Delaware is another strange state.

Oh Michael?

Michael Bloomberg built a $54 billion company. For 2 decades, women who worked there have called it a toxic, sexually charged nightmare.

And

Bloomberg: US would benefit from 'an awful lot more immigrants'

Well that cost you a bunch of voters right there.

Three quarters of the way under the bus, there Rudy

Trump Denies Sending Rudy Giuliani to Ukraine for Biden Probe

Time to spill the beans.

Legally standing his ground with his AR15

Officers responding to a disturbance call early Tuesday in South Texas were “basically ambushed” by a man with a semi-automatic rifle who shot and injured one officer and two other people, the police chief said.

If cops in Texas do not being shot up go talk to that lunatic guv of yours, Abbot.  Sue his ass for getting cops shot in impossible situations with ludicrous laws.

Smaller states grabbing federal pie

Relocated BLM staff face salary cuts

Wyoming missed the opportunity but are a few hundred miles north.

It makes sense, but there is a more efficient method, the House to Senate cash swap each budget period.  This lets the smaller states determine within their state capital, the best approach to maintaining some economies of scale. We would like to avoid an accelerated earmark campaign which is coming up.

Wrong way around, Newt

Newt Gingrich: Backing Gallagher Shows Trump Values Military Over Bureaucrats

You been there, Newt, you know the issues and lying for Trump does not help.

The Military is tasked with pacification everywhere, and these kind of pardons piss the pacified off no end. Next time our soldiers are tasked, they will be facing groups who decide to shoot first and negotiate second.  Our military is well aware of the problem, we have the same problem with bad cops. Bad cops and bad soldiers get more cops and soldiers ambushed.

Trump fouled this up, blundered badly. You and all the other ass kissers only humiliate yourselves.

Tax wars on SALT

Blue states appeal ruling in lawsuit over GOP tax law deduction cap

New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Maryland on Tuesday filed a notice of appeal in an effort to further their legal challenge to the GOP tax law's cap on the state and local tax (SALT) deduction.
The appeal from the four blue states comes after a federal district judge in New York dismissed their lawsuit in September. The states are appealing the district court's ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit.
"The Trump administration's SALT policy is retribution politics - plain and simple," New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) said in a news release. "New York is already the nation's leader in sending more tax dollars to Washington than we get back every year, and we will not allow this administration to pick the pockets of hard-working New Yorkers to fund tax cuts for corporations and send even more money to red states. We will continue to fight this unconstitutional assault until it is repealed once and for all."

Small rural states did not lose, this is a tax on California and New York metropolitan wealthy. 

The courts will call it a normal tax change and Cuomo loses. Wealthy are migrating out of state, bad news for their tax base. Cuomo is a bit worried about his budget hole and he has DaBlowsio in NYC pushing even more spending. This is early stage Illinois, and Illinois is late stage Michigan.

Cuomo, like Jerry Brown, is caught in a pickle, not necessarily all of his own design. He is desperate enough to pursue an unlikely ruling.

A third world mining company

Can The U.S. Become Energy Independent By Next Year?

In a pivotal shift, the US is only months away from full energy independence. By 2030, total primary energy production will outpace primary energy demand by about 30%, according to Rystad Energy’s latest forecast.
“This milestone follows a strong period of growth in both hydrocarbon and renewable resources, and we forecast that the US will have primary energy surplus – and not a deficit – by February or March 2020, depending on the intensity of the winter season,” says Sindre Knutsson, vice president on Rystad Energy’s gas markets team.

“Going forward, the United States will be energy independent on a monthly basis, and by 2030 total primary energy production will outpace primary energy demand by about 30%,” Knutsson added.

I sure looks that way. Manufacturing is going elsewhere, even with automation.  Those Asian robots need energy, we have it. Unfortunately our future obligations were based on a manufacturing economy.

New Illinois

Ginormous budget holes look to be Andrew Cuomo’s third-term curse

Gov. Andrew Cuomo likes to boast of how he’s tamed the state budget, yet the financial-plan update he put out Friday highlights some alarming mismanagement.
Despite a strong national economy, it turns out the state faces a $4 billion Medicaid-spending gap this year and general-fund shortfalls totaling $22 billion over the next three years. (And that’s assuming the economy doesn’t slow significantly.)
Just the budget for the fiscal year that starts April 1 is now $6.1 billion in the red.
Cuomo’s update bluntly admits Medicaid has a “structural imbalance.” Absent fast action, overruns will hit $3.1 billion in fiscal 2021, $3.5 billion in ’22 and $3.9 billion in ’23.

Cuomo be fighting for taxes, right along side California and Illinois; all at the same time, during the national elections and the Swamp will be facing some financial crunch of its own.  A tax revolt will can cause sudden stop.  California and New York are the two states that turn the doldrums into a blue bar.

I have documents going back 250 years which define this as American tradition

A dozen document troves that could change the Ukraine scandal if Trump released them

Pick any president, look through the secret cables, get the witnesses and documented history, starting with Thomas Jefferson and the French. It never stopped. American politics has always been the domain of world powers, always will be.  Add in the Citizen's United decision and it all seems quite legal and quite traditional.

It might be swamp gas, consider:

Giuliani lobbied DOJ on behalf of wealthy Venezuelan who hosted him during Ukraine meeting: report

Never any attempt to find corruption. 

The intent was always to commit more corruption, Hunter Biden was an excuse. It is time to just name this stuff standard practice. If the voter is unaware, then the voter can remain ignorant, the system still kind of works.

And what is this about?

Report: Kushner Will Oversee Border Construction

This has a lot more to do with tourist hotel deals in the background. If Kushner even makes a dent in the problem it earns him financing for a Mexican hotel, not bad.

Bloomberg will get us more involved in the middle east, not less

He would certainly do a better job of it then Hillary, but I like Trump's idea, get the F out and let them squabble.

I am still with Mayor Pete.  With Mayor Pete we can get the F out and still have a sensible domestic policy.

As opposed to flying them through swarms of cheap drones

The US Navy doesn’t have enough spare parts to keep its fighter jets in the air

US fighter aircraft, and all human cockpits have a serious issue at the moment.

Garcetti got a clue about dividing into zero

Most city workers pay $0 in health plan premiums. Garcetti said he’d change that. He hasn’t

When the premium price is zero then the kitchen sink becomes a health service. Insurance companies thus have an open ended market for more medical services at market price. A  recipe for a state budget of infinity.

That is half way under the bus, there Rudy

Feds investigating Giulliani:

Subpoenas issued to people with ties to President Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, indicate a broad federal investigation into possible money laundering, obstruction of justice and campaign-finance violations and show that prosecutors are probing Mr. Giuliani’s consulting businesses and other sources of income, according to people familiar with the matter.

In recent weeks, prosecutors have sent subpoenas and other requests to potential witnesses seeking records and information related to Mr. Giuliani and two of his associates, according to the people. The investigation, led by the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, has already led to campaign-finance charges against the associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman.

So let us see half of that insurance you have tucked away.

She dresses like the Queen of Sheba

Ilhan Omar's $1 Trillion Housing Proposal Is an Expensive Joke

No one is impressed. I mean, maybe at a circus show with the Queen of Sheba, direct from, the Kingom!

But today, in front of a microphone, she is another beggar from Somalia. She needs a new design, call her agent.



She has a foreign policy:

U.S. Congresswoman Ilhan Omar was allegedly recruited and funded by a foreign government and passed sensitive information that was relayed to Iran. That is according to a sworn deposition by a Canadian businessman in a Florida court, Alaribiya reports. 

In his statement, he says he met Qatar’s Secretary to the Emir for Security Affairs Mohammad bin Ahmed bin Abdullah al-Masnad and two other senior Qatari officials.”

“The three allegedly claimed credit for the meteoric rise of Omar, saying: “If it wasn’t for our cash, Ilhan Omar would be just another black Somali refugee in America collecting welfare and serving tables on weekends,” according to Bender’s sworn deposition.”

So all the dress up is fake, she really should be wandering the streets with a hand out.  Instead she is pontificating on the government dime and funding her boyfriends from the election pot.  Sounds a bit Republican to me.

She may have boinked Erdogan:

“American and Turkish media previously reported that Omar met Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a key supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood when she was a junior state representative in Minnesota in 2017. According to Bender, Omar met Erdogan and allegedly swore allegiance to him.”

So she gets sex and money for hating on us Jews and Rednecks? 

Is she one of those Antificant Fascists?

Banning bicoin, issues

Mish giving a warning Shot on bitcoin 

This is precisely one of the things I have warned about on numerous occasions.
If and when central banks crack down on digital currencies it will be lights out.
People keep asking me what can central banks do. The question should not come up as the answer is obvious: ban transactions in Bitcoin.
If the US banned bitcoin transactions, people would still have their digital coins, but they would effectively be worthless. One could not buy anything with bitcoin other than barter transactions. There would be no way to get money in or out, at least in the US.

The central banks banning exchanges from having all access to Swift is not enough. Exchanges can move fiat accounts in a trusted transaction.  If I buy bitcoin from a counter party it is a credit card purchase for me and a merchant deposit for the counter party, and the exchange is the mediator, or simply a money transfer manager across independent accounts. The exchange need not have its own swift account.

So the exchange need never talk to a Swift bank, although many, if not most, likely use an intermediate Swift account to hold funds. But they do not need to if the the user can trust the exchange. In open banking system, a direct bank to bank Swift transfer may never know a third party is managing.

The central banks can slow the transfer way down by requiring biometrics on each account transfer across Swift banks. In his case the exchange needs an intermediate account, making the biometric independent of the bitcoin trade. Then, of course, we have over the counter trades but the central banks can also require biometrics on the cash swap and slow things way down.

These are painful trade offs for the central bank. The block chain is the smallest part of bitcoin, the block chain is surrounded by all the normal credit card digital transactions happening in the crypto exchanges.   Policing that becomes increasingly difficult as normal fiat banking, via fintech, is streamlining fiat digital liquidity. The central bank ends up acting like a forensic cop rather than a regulator since exchanges are not regulated swift banks.

Obamacare has been a disaster to Vermont

They lost a quarter of their nurses to large states.

Yet Leahy and Sanders both voted for it. If they are that stupid then why would anyone believe Obamacare Taxes for All will fix the problem? How is it that Vermont, composed of one small town, cold not figure this out?

Because one small own is not enough to gather a bit of intelligence about these things and their senators remain ignorant. Same problem with Wyoming and military spending. The residents of asper Wyoming, all 50k of them, still think the military is a cowboy cavalry. Hence the military is in a severe mess, unprepared for modern drone warfare.

Nixon Shock and price and wage controls second

Congressional Testimony on the Costs of Rapidly Growing Government Debt

Another view of the economic costs of debt is related to what is sometimes called “Modern Monetary Theory.” It is difficult to determine how this approach would work in the future, and it is frequently associated large spending programs and wage and price controls. Model simulations would be useful, but history can be a valuable guide:
In the 1970s the United States imposed wage and price controls and the Fed helped finance the federal deficit by creating money. The result was a terrible economy with unemployment and inflation both rising. This ended when money growth was reduced in the late 1970s and early 1980s. As explained in a forthcoming book by George Shultz and me, it is an example where poor economic reasoning led to poor economic policy and poor economic performance. It was reversed when good economics again prevailed, and policy changed.

Wiki:

The Nixon shock was a series of economic measures undertaken by United States President Richard Nixon in 1971, in response to increasing inflation, the most significant of which were wage and price freezes, surcharges on imports, and the unilateral cancellation of the direct international convertibility of the United States dollar to gold.[1]

Nixon's problem is that none of us wanted to pay for the worthless government crap, and it is happening again.

It wasn't good policy that saved the day, it was a 'This time is different', being following by the same old thing.  I believe that John Taylor was part of the fraud that claimed policy was finally fixed.  It is never fixed, it always imbalances between generation.

So, John, you studied the FDR shock, participated in the Nixon Shock, repeated the fake policy and got us right here, at the same spot. Why not just conclude that this is predictable, it is.  Then, like Joe Stiglitz, you can recommend another 'This time is Different' fraud.

I have a better idea.  let us pretend a 'This time is different' but really do a 'This Time is about the same as next time', just improves the cycle a bit.

Secretary of Defense covering up Trump blunders

Pentagon chief says Trump ordered him to allow accused Navy SEAL to keep elite status

His entire cabinet has that responsibility, covering up and repairing Trump blunders. 

Meanwhile the military is in distress about drones and the defense sectary is clueless. The new carriers do not work and the defense secretary is clueless.  Trump chaos is the new norm in he Swamp, and it would be more entertaining if trillions were not being poured down the drain.  The senators mostly uneducated dufas, we have a problem.

Attempts to commit the crime he is investigating Hunter for

Rudy Giuliani discussed representing a state-owned Ukrainian bank in a legal dispute over the summer even while publicly pressing Ukraine on behalf of the U.S. president.


Though he ultimately did not take on the client, the talks expose his enthusiasm for foreign business and his willingness to insert himself in matters rife with potential conflicts. In fact, the Ukrainian bank is entangled in a legal dispute with its former owner who has ties to Ukraine’s president and is the subject of a federal investigation in the U.S.

You can't make this stuff up.  Pure cognitive dissonance.

Unpleasant

A ruthless Mexican drug lord’s empire is devastating families with its grip on small-town USA

With unparalleled speed, the Cártel Jalisco Nueva Generación, or CJNG, has set up shop in cities, towns and unsuspecting communities across America.

Ciro Macias Martinez led a double life, working as a horse groomer by day and overseeing the flow of $30 million worth of drugs into Kentucky by night before being imprisoned in 2018 for meth trafficking and money laundering, federal records show.
El Mencho’s drug empire "is putting poison on the streets of the U.S.," said Chris Evans, who runs the DEA’s day-to-day global operations.
CJNG has skirted Mexican and U.S. inspections at legal border crossings by hiding drugs in semitrailers hauling tomatoes, avocados and other produce, dumping at least 5 tons of cocaine and 5 tons of meth into this country every month, according to DEA estimates.
It shows no signs of slowing down.

The bribes will be a problem.

Earmark crappola

A Call for Service

The idea of using national service programs to help rural America is gaining ground. In October, U.S. Rep. Antonio Delgado and U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, both New York Democrats, introduced the Rebuild Rural America Act, a broad measure that includes the creation of a Rural Future Corps to help rural communities improve child care, health services and job training, among other things. A bill summary says “specific efforts would be included to retain the Corps members in the rural areas after their service.”

Big state senators have missed the clue.  We cannot do these special programs, we are going the just send the Senate a wad of cash for each state.  The idea of a special service for rurals vs urbans just exacerbates the scale problem for Vermont and Wyoming.  Their only salvation is to wrap all the special earmarks into a bundle and given them cash, up front. Wyoming has to hire program managers to work at a scale much less efficient than a California. Thus there may be a better allocation of that money peculiar to Wyoming that brings great gains.

Hey, Devin Nunes

On sale now, 8.47 Jointed Cow Party Accessory

Oil almost holding a $58

About three dollars above its recently stable value at $55.

My envelope calculator calls that a spurt of inflation above 2%. The pushes up the yields on bonds, that is more than the primary dealers can manage in terms of volatility on government debt service.  Normally no problem, stocks prematurely rise while long rates are pushed down. The normal deal.  Each time is a bit of a thrill. I always wonder what happens if it doesn't work.

A compromise on data security

An NSA exception.

Qualified, and trained personal in charge of sensitive data can utilize autonomous, hand help security bots, backed by biometrics. Special purpose SecurIDt to autonomously obey security contracts on data. Each state or town can get one or more of their personnel certified, and all sensitive data is protected with two factor authentication, and logged by secure ledger.  Then the data is protected up to the counterfeiting of the device.

Most important, protected from insider cheating. The contract is proven and built underneath the counterfeit box. It holds its own keys and cannot be compromised by its user.

That is a set of data not likely to be composed of thieves, though I disagree. But it is the presumption of the system that our government units do not launder money and plan terrorism, though I disagree.

Problem solved, the technology gets developed, the NSA can go on and certify dangerous drones, and leave bearer assets out of it, for now. I mean, get the low hanging fruit, ASAP. Call these new jobs Security Officer for autonomous digital systems. They match trained people to autonomous hand held security devices.  Drone manufacturers, data security companies, and so on . They are like accountants.

The new search grammars

All sandbox.
The idea is to adapt the minimal flow semantic graph which encodes our personal choices and minimizes search grammar.  It is maintaining a distributive property, and grouping like terms for special commutativity.  But it is far from linear and requires some personalization time, it is a self sampled system. User and engine both learn a minimal common semantic tree, a decoding graph almost like a Huffman. 

The elite are scaredy pooh that large groups of us are self adapted to a common revolutionay semantic tree. The attempted censorship has the opposite effect, it spreads the illicit grammar. It is a weird system, like a new born singularity that is flexing its muscles.

Xi took my advice

One country, three systems.

It is time, it is a productivity improvement.  His commie spies read my blog, likely most of the spy networks read it. But one country three systems makes sense, in the long history it is a good enough guess.

We have an equivalent choice, the House Senate cash swap.  But it is not a guess, it is the minimal solution to a hard Constitutional bound. It is our One Country Three systems.  Almost a mathematical necessity to avoid sudden stop.

Where is the city tree trunk?

When we apply our abstract tree to the city we expect to find an Avogadro's number. The limit on N is determined by the transaction efficiency in the city center, which should be fixed and known by all the agents.

If this is a 1D + momentum makes 2D, then where is the 1D? The center bulges up, in one spot along one line. We have elevator congestion, and business is quantized in those tall building. The limit N on a human city defined by our willingness to pack into elevators for long rides. There is no miracle theory, just the common abhorrence of getting stuck in boxes.

And it should be that way, that is exactly who we are expect economic theories to work. Everyone is pained by long lines. we want personal space, and we are all about the same size. You will get an abstract tree, made in the center of town.

Economics should not be complex, we are not complex.

Sandbox is always the best known linear model, in self sampled systems. So our quantized city can be constructed backwards, start with a smooth pond of water, compress it suddenly along a concentric perfect circle. You get slosh, like in a cup off coffee, really a large echo from the water colliding without compression.  That is aliasing, Gibbs phenomena in extreme, like the squeal of a microphone.  Happens when we make a wave of higher energy then the medium can hold, it echos.

OK, assume the fluid will quantize in the center, optimally. Compute is back wards, like a pit problem. Find the generator, and you get the optimum size of your elevators. You have built fluid containers to hold units of stuff called human as a fluid. Working the problem in reverse: 2D -> 1D plus momentum. But we don't, it is easier to measure it directly by riding the things on a semi-repeatable basis, then make sight adjustments to our travel frequencies.

2D -> 1D plus momentum -> 2D is your Hamiltonian, I think.

That is a neat marketing trick

One week ago, we showed in one chart why the global economic recovery that so many expect is just a few months away, won't happen: as the chart below shows, China's credit intensity since 1994 has exploded. This means that before the Global Financial Crisis, China needed on average one unit of credit to create one unit of GDP. Since 2008, 2½ units of credit are required to create one unit of GDP. In other words, that China needs much more credit than 10 years ago to have the exact same amount of GDP. Injecting more credit in the economy is not the miracle solution it used to be, and the disadvantages of credit push tend to surpass the advantages.

Get the customer to over borrow, collect interest charges, then give him a break.  The balloon payment was up front.

Yet another 'This time is different'

Washington is in an unusually high state of chaos.

Impeachment hearings are proceeding dramatically in the House. Donald Trump has taken to tweeting videos about the purported “coup” being staged against his presidency by Democrats, complete with an ominous musical score. But from the view of Senator Josh Hawley’s office, its walls covered in tasteful kid art and a large desk offering up a mugful of crisp yellow pencils, it’s hard to tell that anything is amiss. The Missouri freshman is too busy laying out the future of the Republican Party to pay much mind to the partisan death spiral unfolding around him.

 By Hawley’s own account, some conservatives on Capitol Hill have spent the past three years with their eyes tightly shut, waiting for the Trump era to pass and everything to return to normal. “That’s not going to happen,” he told me in an interview this week. If the Republican Party returns to its pre-Trump ideological defaults—standing up for big business over the middle class, prioritizing free-market principles over social issues—“we’re not going to be a majority party, ever,” he said. “That’s just not the future.”

Senator Hawley. If you want to do a 'This time is different' , then you first have to have your Trump shock. There is an order that cannot be avoided.  I doubt you have a clue, however.

Prepare for the doldrums

The holiday season is no longer expected to pull corporate earnings out of a recession that has lasted the entire year.
Earnings in the S&P 500 index SPX, +0.22% are now projected to decline 1.51% in the fourth quarter from the year before, according to a FactSet computation of analysts’ average forecasts for individual companies. An earnings recession is defined as two quarters or more of consecutive year-over-year declines, and earnings for S&P 500 components dipped in the first two quarters of 2019 and are all but certain to do so again in the third quarter — with nearly 95% of calendar third-quarter reports posted, earnings have dropped 2.34%, the biggest decline so far this year.

A rolling recession around the economy is my guess, never meeting the blue bar criteria. But I am usually wrong.  One of the big states, Texas, California or New York could be hit worse and drag us down.

The kids win one

Hong Kong democrats romp to local election landslide after months of protests

In a rare weekend lull in the unrest that has rocked the financial hub, democratic candidates across the city of 7.4 million people secured more than half of the 452 district council seats for the first time against a strongly resourced and mobilized pro-establishment opposition.
When the results began trickling in after midnight, including upset wins for democrats against heavyweight pro-Beijing opponents, some voting centers erupted in loud cheers and chants of “Liberate Hong Kong. Revolution Now” - a slogan used by many protesters on the streets over the past six months.
Some winning candidates said the result was akin to a vote of support for the demonstrators and could raise the heat on Hong Kong’s pro-Beijing chief executive, Carrie Lam, amid the city’s worst political crisis in decades.

This victory will spread to Lebanon, then Iran.

Trump caves again

Trump draws ire after retreat on drug prices pledge

This makes about all of his campaign promises going up in smoke.

All the House needs is a majority vote

Rep. Jim Jordan: Impeachment is About Democrats Not Accepting Election Result

“They have never accepted the will of the American people.”

I doubt you have anything real to add to the debate, Jim Jordan.  It is not the will of a majority of voters, if you look at the tally, a will of the minority  Further, the House needs little excuse since the Repubs already determined extra marital sex is a cause of impeachment. 

Jim is stuck with an incompetent president who was only elected because a bunch of suicidal idiots in Wyoming, Alaska and Montana.

It was Trump who screwed this up

Navy Secretary Fired Over SEAL Controversy

We have a friggen nightmare in the White House, and now the Pentagon is about to rebel.

And this sudden war declaration, right out of the blue?

US Forces Attack Boats Caught Smuggling Oil To Syrian Government

Trump is way out of his league at the moment, so consumed with protesting his Ukrainian drug deal. He has widened the war against drones and the military is scared shitless while Trump is completely clueless. Hillary would have been worse, I agree. But it seems to me even Bloomberg is a significant improvement over the both of them, Warren not even in sight of rationality.

We have a pure nightmare, a chaotic situation.

“There’s a real risk that over the coming months, Iran does something in the Gulf or elsewhere, and you’ve had no routine deliberative process of which the president’s been a part to assess courses of action,” said Brett McGurk, who served until late 2018 as the Trump administration’s special envoy overseeing the coalition to fight ISIS. “That means a unilateral reaction, not considered policy, in moment of crisis.

Too late. Having now declared war on Syria; Iran, Syria's ally, is free to drop drone bombs on the US military in Saudi Arabia. Then drop a few pipe bombs on US carrier. The US Military is fucked, a swarm of Iranian drones can take out an F22, they can shoot down a helicopter of marine or special forces. Iran has Russian drone help if they need it, as does Syria. Too late, Trump already fucked up.