the trader
FX Technical Outlook: Yen and Dollar Weakness Set to Continue
FX Technicals by Marc Chandler of Marc to Market,
Japan’s Adult Diaper Boom
Guest post by Azizonomics.
Japan’s population has gotten so old that diaper manufacturers are selling more adult diapers for incontinent seniors than they are baby diapers. According to Bloomberg:
Unicharm Corp’s sales of adult diapers in Japan exceeded those for babies for the first time last year.
This is because Japan’s population is getting older and older:
Dumb Troika Plans for Greece
All basic math seems to have been forgotten in Greece. Whatever the Troika is trying to do, it lives in some world devoid of reality. Here, to the best of my knowledge is where the Greek government creditor payments go over the next 10 years (ignoring rollovers, etc.).
Who Should Be Giving Thanks This Thanksgiving?
Guest post by Azizonomics.
Our financial system is broken. Our political system is broken. Oligarchs and their cronies reap easy rewards — bailouts, crony capitalism, corporate handouts, liquidity injections, favourable “regulation” (that puts oligarchs’ competition out of a business) — while taxpayers pay the bill.
But nothing lasts forever.
Thanksgiving is very much the day of the black swan. Nassim Taleb used the example of a turkey fattened up for Thanksgiving as an example of a black swan phenomenon. The turkey sees itself being fed every day by the turkey farmer and assumes based on past behaviour that this will continued indefinitely until the day comes when the farmer kills the turkey. Nothing in the turkey’s limited experiential dataset suggested such an event.
Recovering from the 2011 shock is proving difficult for hedge funds
Guest post by Sober Look.
Some may find this a bit surprising. The magnitude of losses experienced by hedge funds on average during the height of the Eurozone crisis in 2011 was as large as the losses the industry witnessed during the financial crisis in 2008.
Little Dutch Boy
Guest post by Hussman Funds.
In the Mary Mapes Dodge book titled Hans Brinker, there is a fictional story within the story of a little Dutch boy who, on his way to school, notices a hole in the dyke. Having nothing else to fix the leak, he plugs the hole with his finger and stays there through the night until workers come to repair it. We are now into the fourth year of efforts to print trillions of little Dutch boys out of dollars and euros in order to stop a tide from crashing through a fundamentally damaged dyke. All of this has bought time, but no workers have arrived, and no real repairs have been done.
The holes seem only loosely related: non-performing mortgages, widespread unemployment, massive U.S. budget deficits, a “fiscal cliff” sideshow, inadequate European bank capital, European currency strains, a surge of non-performing loans in China, and unexpected economic softness in Asia and global trade more generally. All of this gives the impression that these problems can simply be addressed one-by-one. The truth is that they are all intimately related to a single central issue, which is the utter unwillingness of politicians around the globe to accept and proceed with the inevitable restructuring of bad debt, and their preference to defend the bondholders of a fundamentally rotted financial system.
Spain in Pain
A few links via El Pais.
Fiscal Cliff Should Be About Cutting Government, Not Tax Fairness
A few Thanksgiving reflections by Biderman.
As we get ready for Thanksgiving, I have a great deal to be thankful for in my personal life. But as to the world, particularly the global economy, there does not appear to be much to look forward to as we approach year end.
Before I talk about our fiscal cliff, the rest of the world seems like bad news. It looks to me as if Iran is hell bent upon creating a war between Hamas and Israel that takes attention away from Persian nuclear weapon building. Greece and Spain are going no where fast. And Japan is now committed to destroying what is left of its economy by undertaking even more massive money printing.
Video below.
Kyle Bass Interview
Must watch video with Kyle Bass.
2012 Is The Tipping Point – Results Are In, Bankers Lost
Guest post via Gold Silver Worlds.
It is highly unlikely the Mayan predictions of the end of the world referred to the bankers’ world of credit and debt. Nonetheless, with only one month remaining until December 21, 2012—the end date of the Mayan 5,125 year Mesoamerican calendar—the concomitant end of the bankers’ 300 year ponzi-scheme of credit and debt should not be dismissed as mere coincidence.
The world has entered a paradigm shift of immense proportions; and the collapse of the bankers’ economic world is a part of that shift. The bankers’ credit fueled a 300-year global expansion which transformed the world. The bankers’ credit, however, has now become debt which increasingly cannot be repaid.
Economics is not rocket science although the arcane algorithms used by Wall Street banks to predict capital markets imply that intended conclusion. Modern economics, i.e. capitalism, is merely the current iteration of the supply and demand dynamic distorted by 300 years of credit and debt—a distortion that’s now about to end.
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