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To simple people it is indubitable that the nearest cause of the enslavement of one class of men by another is money. They know that it is possible to cause more trouble with a rouble than with a club; it is only political economy that does not want to know it. — Leo Tolstoy, What Shall We Do Then? (1886) The financial sector has the same objective as military conquest: to gain control of land and basic infrastructure, and collect tribute. To update von Clausewitz, finance has become war...

from David Ruccio Eduardo Porter is right: the “long, painful slog out of the Great Recession” hasn’t been accompanied by any kind of shared prosperity. As the chart above reveals, the share of income going to the bottom 90 percent of U.S. households has actually fallen since 2007 (from 50.3 percent to 49.5 percent)—and, in recent years, remains far below what it was (67.4 percent) in 1970. In other words, the so-called recovery looks a lot like the unequalizing dynamic of...

As previously discussed, jobless claims are down largely because they are a lot harder to get:https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-11-02/the-good-news-on-jobs-isn-t-all-that-good And now they are going up a bit, though still very low historically: Highlights Jobless claims are holding at or near record lows, with initial claims up only 7,000 in the October 29 week and continuing claims down 14,000 in the October 22 week. The 4-week average for initial claims, now at...

The Fed is looking for ‘some improvement’ Let me know if you see any! ;) Sideways at best as this prior source of growth is no longer contributing:After just one day it’s come down a bunch: United States ISM New York Index The ISM NY Current Business Conditions Index fell to 49.2 in October 2016 from 49.6 in September. Volume of purchases continued to fall (44.3 from 47.1 the previous month) and current revenues went up at a slower pace (51.4 from 51.6). By contrast,...

Gotta like the headlines. The growth rate remains below where it was during the beginning of the last recession… That is, we could already be well into recession: Adjusted for inflation, also below prior recession levels: And it doesn’t seem like building $600 billion of reserves, buying US stocks, and a negative rate policy have done much for the Swiss consumer: Not even a hint of improvement here: As previously discussed, manufacturing seems to be leveling off at reduced...

Weakening further ever since the collapse in oil capex: speaks for itself:

During the first Putin presidency, the Russian government gave a very high priority to paying back Russian international debt and used quite a lot of  the income from oil to do this. Jeffrey Sachs answers why (also read the last paragraph): The lack of Western assistance The lack of Western assistance was grim and was my greatest frustration[32] during late 1991 and 1992.  The early days were inauspicious to say the least.  When the G-7 deputies came to Moscow in late November 1991, just...

For a kind of prediction of the 1947 mortality crisis you will find a march 1947 article by Ernest Germain published by the fourth international here (I love the internet). Basically, the exhaustion of war time stocks (during the war partly provided by the 1943 United Nations Relief and Rehabiliation Administration), the horrible losses of people manpower suffered during the war, the dislocation and loss of production capacity caused by the war and a terrible drought in 1946 caused a...

The population of Russia is growing again – because Russia accepts millions of Ukrainian refugees. Russia is supposed to be a world-class bully again – but if so (and it is indeed making things in Syria even more vicious than ‘we’ already did…) it is clearly playing outside its league. It is a country with a dwindling population and a dwindling GDP. But while preparing the graph above, I wondered why, after the post 1990 demographic catastrophe (look here  for a The Lancet article about...