Archives
The Odds of a Global Food Crisis Are Rising
August 22nd, 2016
The vulnerability of global food production to extremes of weather is a profound reality that few grasp. Given the current abundance of food globally, confidence in permanent food surpluses and low grain prices is high. Few worry that the ...
Globalization’s Few Winners and Many Losers
July 21st, 2016
Quality, quality of life, and well-being are not easily quantified, so they are ignored. I often write about the Tyranny of Price, the rarely examined assumption that lower prices are all that matters. Thanks to the Tyranny of Price, ...
We’ve Entered an Era of Rising Instability and Uncertainty
July 19th, 2016
And there you have our future, visible in the 13th, 16th and 18th century price-revolution waves which preceded ours. That we have entered an era of rising instability and uncertainty is self-evident.There will always be areas of instability in ...
Risk On/Risk Off: What Schizophrenic Markets Are Telling Us
July 11th, 2016
These trends cannot be reversed with yet another rate cut or another “whatever it takes” announcement. In the conventional investment perspective, risk-on assets (i.e. investments with higher risks and higher potential returns) such as stocks are on a see-saw ...
Brexit, the E.U. and the “Special Relationship” of the U.S./U.K.
June 30th, 2016
Any clique in the E.U. that thinks the U.S. will sit idly by while they “punish” the U.K. had better recalibrate their core interests and the potential for blowback. One constant in a fast-shifting global chess board is the ...
An Everyman’s Guide To Understanding Cryptocurrencies
June 13th, 2016
Cryptocurrencies have a role that could increase as global currencies are devalued. When an asset rises by almost 30% in a few weeks, it tends to attract attention. Recently, that asset was bitcoin (BTC). The price of BTC in ...
Good News for Bulls: All Those Open Gaps Below Will Never Get Filled
June 8th, 2016
By making the stock market the only game in town, the Powers That Be can no longer afford to let it decline for any reason. Market technicians have long observed that the holes in charts left when markets gap ...
Flexible Labor Is the Future
June 2nd, 2016
Flexible labor is the future for the basic reason that it is the only viable model going forward. If we can’t go forward, then let’s go back: this is the guiding philosophy of the labor movement that seeks security ...
Lessons from Japan: Decades of Decay, Unavoidable Collapse
April 27th, 2016
Japan has proven that decay can be stretched into decades, but it has yet to prove that gravity can be revoked by central bank monetary games. Japan’s fiscal and monetary extremes are in the news again: this time it’s ...
The Panama Papers: This Is the Consequence of Centralized Money and Power
April 11th, 2016
Technologies such as the blockchain are enabling alternative ways of creating and distributing money outside central banks and states. If we don’t change the way money is created and distributed, we will never change anything. This is the core ...