The Real Unemployment Rate: In 20% Of American Families, EVERYONE Is Unemployed

According to shocking new numbers that were just released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 20 percent of American families do not have a single person that is working.  So when someone tries to tell you that the unemployment rate in the United States is about 7 percent, you should just laugh.  One-fifth of the families in the entire country do not have a single member with a job.  That is absolutely astonishing.  How can a family survive if nobody is making any money?  Well, the answer to that question is actually quite easy.  There is a reason why government dependence has reached epidemic levels in the United States.  Without enough jobs, tens of millions of additional Americans have been forced to reach out to the government for help.  At this point, if you can believe it, the number of Americans getting money or benefits from the federal government each month exceeds the number of full-time workers in the private sector by more than 60 million.

When I was growing up, it seemed like anyone that was willing to work hard could find a good paying job.  But now that has all changed.  At this point, 20 percent of all the families in the entire country do not have a single member that has a job.  That includes fathers, mothers and children.  The following is how CNSNews.com broke down the numbers…
A family, as defined by the BLS, is a group of two or more people who live together and who are related by birth, adoption or marriage. In 2013, there were 80,445,000 families in the United States and in 16,127,000—or 20 percent–no one had a job.
To be honest, these really are Great Depression-type numbers.  But over the years “unemployment” has been redefined so many times that it doesn’t mean the same thing that it once did.  The government tells us that the official unemployment rate is about 7 percent, but that number is almost meaningless at this point.

A number that I find much more useful is the employment-population ratio.  According to the employment-population ratio, the percentage of working age Americans that actually have a job has been below 59 percent for more than four years in a row…


That means that more than 41 percent of all working age Americans do not have a job.
When people can’t take care of themselves, it becomes necessary for the government to take care of them.  And what we have seen in recent years is government dependence soar to unprecedented levels.  In fact, welfare spending and entitlement payments now make up 69 percent of the entire federal budget.  For much more on this, please see my previous article entitled “18 Stats That Prove That Government Dependence Has Reached Epidemic Levels“.

And what is even more frightening is that more families are falling out of the middle class every single day.  As a recent CNN article explained, approximately one-third of all U.S. households are living “hand-to-mouth”.  In other words, they are constantly living on the edge of financial disaster…
About one-third of American households live “hand-to-mouth,” meaning that they spend all their paychecks. But what surprised the study authors is that 66% of these families are middle class, with a median income of $41,000. While they don’t have liquid assets, such as savings accounts or mutual fund holdings, they do have homes and retirement accounts, with a median net worth of $41,000.
“We don’t expect them to be living paycheck to paycheck,” said Greg Kaplan, study co-author and assistant professor of economics at Princeton University.
The American Dream is rapidly becoming an American nightmare.

When I was growing up, I lived in a pretty typical middle class neighborhood.  Everyone had a nice home, a couple of cars and could go on vacation during the summer.  I don’t remember ever hearing of anyone using food stamps or going to a food bank.  In fact, I can’t even remember anyone having a parent that was unemployed.  If someone did leave a job, it was usually quite easy to find another one.

But today, the middle class is being ripped to shreds and according to one new report there are 49 million Americans that are dealing with food insecurity in 2014.

How can anyone not see what is happening to us?  America is in the midst of a long-term economic decline, but the mainstream media and most of our politicians seem to think that things are better than ever.  They continue to try to convince us that “business as usual” is the right path to take.

But one-fifth of the families in the entire nation are already totally unemployed.

At what point will we finally admit that what we are doing right now is simply not working?

30 percent of all families unemployed?

40 percent?

50 percent?

If we stay on the road that we are on now, things are going to continue to get worse.  Millions more jobs will be shipped overseas, millions more jobs will be replaced by technology and crippling government regulations will kill millions more jobs.  The middle class will continue to shrink and government dependence will continue to rise.

Most people just want to work hard, put food on the table, pay their mortgages and provide a nice life for their families.

But the percentage of Americans that are successfully able to do that just keeps getting smaller.
Wake up America.

Your middle class is dying.

Suspicious Deaths Of Bankers Are Now Classified As "Trade Secrets" By Federal Regulator

It doesn’t get any more Orwellian than this: Wall Street mega banks crash the U.S. financial system in 2008. Hundreds of thousands of financial industry workers lose their jobs. Then, beginning late last year, a rash of suspicious deaths start to occur among current and former bank employees.  Next we learn that four of the Wall Street mega banks likely hold over $680 billion face amount of life insurance on their workers, payable to the banks, not the families. We ask their Federal regulator for the details of this life insurance under a Freedom of Information Act request and we’re told the information constitutes “trade secrets.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the life expectancy of a 25 year old male with a Bachelor’s degree or higher as of 2006 was 81 years of age. But in the past five months, five highly educated JPMorgan male employees in their 30s and one former employee aged 28, have died under suspicious circumstances, including three of whom allegedly leaped off buildings – a statistical rarity even during the height of the financial crisis in 2008.

There is one other major obstacle to brushing away these deaths as random occurrences – they are not happening at JPMorgan’s closest peer bank – Citigroup. Both JPMorgan and Citigroup are global financial institutions with both commercial banking and investment banking operations. Their employee counts are similar – 260,000 employees for JPMorgan versus 251,000 for Citigroup.

Both JPMorgan and Citigroup also own massive amounts of bank-owned life insurance (BOLI), a controversial practice that pays the corporation when a current or former employee dies. (In the case of former employees, the banks conduct regular “death sweeps” of public records using former employees’ Social Security numbers to learn if a former employee has died and then submits a request for payment of the death benefit to the insurance company.)

Wall Street On Parade carefully researched public death announcements over the past 12 months which named the decedent as a current or former employee of Citigroup or its commercial banking unit, Citibank. We found no data suggesting Citigroup was experiencing the same rash of deaths of young men in their 30s as JPMorgan Chase. Nor did we discover any press reports of leaps from buildings among Citigroup’s workers.

Given the above set of facts, on March 21 of this year, we wrote to the regulator of national banks, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), seeking the following information under the Freedom of Information Act (See OCC Response to Wall Street On Parade’s Request for Banker Death Information):

The number of deaths from 2008 through March 21, 2014 on which JPMorgan Chase collected death benefits; the total face amount of BOLI life insurance in force at JPMorgan; the total number of former and current employees of JPMorgan Chase who are insured under these policies; any peer studies showing the same data comparing JPMorgan Chase with Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Citigroup.

The OCC responded politely by letter dated April 18, after first calling a few days earlier to inform us that we would be getting nothing under the sunshine law request. (On Wall Street, sunshine routinely means dark curtain.) The OCC letter advised that documents relevant to our request were being withheld on the basis that they are “privileged or contains trade secrets, or commercial or financial information, furnished in confidence, that relates to the business, personal, or financial affairs of any person,” or  relate to “a record contained in or related to an examination.”

The ironic reality is that the documents do not pertain to the personal financial affairs of individuals who have a privacy right. Individuals are not going to receive the proceeds of this life insurance for the most part. In many cases, they do not even know that multi-million dollar policies that pay upon their death have been taken out by their employer or former employer. Equally important, JPMorgan is a publicly traded company whose shareholders have a right under securities laws to understand the quality of its earnings – are those earnings coming from traditional banking and investment banking operations or is this ghoulish practice of profiting from the death of workers now a major contributor to profits on Wall Street?

As it turns out, one aspect of the information cavalierly denied to us by the OCC is publicly available to those willing to hunt for it. On March 24 of this year, we reported that JPMorgan Chase held $10.4 billion in BOLI assets at its insured depository bank as of December 31, 2013.

We reached out to BOLI expert, Michael D. Myers, to understand what JPMorgan’s $10.4 billion in BOLI assets at its commercial bank might represent in terms of face amount of life insurance on its workers. Myers said: “Without knowing the length of the investment or its rate of return, it is difficult to estimate the face amount of the insurance coverage.  However, a cash value of $10.4 billion could easily translate into more than $100 billion in actual insurance coverage and possibly two or three times that amount” said Myers, a partner in the Houston, Texas law firm McClanahan Myers Espey, L.L.P.

Myers’ and his firm have represented the families of deceased employees for almost two decades in cases involving corporate-owned life insurance against employers such as Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., Fina Oil and Chemical Co., and American Greetings Corp. (Families may be entitled to the proceeds of these policies if employee consent was required under State law and was never given and/or if the corporation cannot show it had an “insurable interest” in the employee — a tough test to meet if it’s a non key employee or if the employee has left the firm.)

As it turns out, the $10.4 billion significantly understates the amount of money JPMorgan has tied up in seeking to profit from workers’ deaths. Since Wall Street banks are structured as holding companies, we decided to see what type of financial information might be available at the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC), a federal interagency that promotes uniform reporting standards among banking regulators.

The FFIEC’s web site provided access to the consolidated financial statements of the bank holding companies of not just JPMorgan Chase but all of the largest Wall Street banks. We conducted our own peer review study with the information that was available.

Four of Wall Street’s largest banks hold a total of $68.1 billion in BOLI assets. Using Michael Myers’ approximate 10 to 1 ratio, that would mean that over time, just these four banks could potentially collect upwards of $681 billion in tax free income from life insurance proceeds on their current and former workers. (Death benefits are received tax free as is the buildup in cash value in the policies.) The breakdown in BOLI assets is as follows as of December 31, 2013:

Bank of America    $22.7 billion
Wells Fargo             18.7 billion
JPMorgan Chase      17.9 billion
Citigroup                   8.8 billion

In addition to specifics on the BOLI assets, the consolidated financial statements also showed what each bank was reporting as “Earnings on/increase in value of cash surrender value of life insurance” as of December 31, 2013. Those amounts are as follows:

Bank of America   $625 million
Wells Fargo           566 million
JPMorgan Chase    686 million
Citigroup                     0

Given the size of these numbers, there is another aspect to BOLI that should raise alarm bells among both regulators and shareholders. The Wall Street banks are using a process called “separate accounts” for large amounts of their BOLI assets with reports of some funds never actually leaving the bank and/or being invested in hedge funds, suggesting lessons from the past have not been learned.

On May 20, 2008, Bloomberg News reported that Wachovia Corp. (now owned by Wells Fargo) and Fifth Third Bancorp reported major losses on failed gambles with BOLI assets. “Wachovia reported a $315 million first-quarter loss in its bank-owned life insurance program, known as BOLI, because of investments in hedge funds managed by Citigroup Inc. Fifth Third said in a lawsuit filed last month that it had losses of $323 million from Citigroup’s Falcon funds, which slumped more than 50 percent in the past year as the subprime market collapsed.” Citigroup’s Falcon Strategies hedge fund had lost as much as 75 percent of its value by May 2008.

Following are the names and circumstances of the five young men in their 30s employed by JPMorgan who experienced sudden deaths since December along with the one former employee.

Joseph M. Ambrosio, age 34, of Sayreville, New Jersey, passed away on December 7, 2013 at Raritan Bay Medical Center, Perth Amboy, New Jersey. He was employed as a Financial Analyst for J.P. Morgan Chase in Menlo Park. On March 18, 2014, Wall Street On Parade learned from an immediate member of the family that Joseph M. Ambrosio died suddenly from Acute Respiratory Syndrome.

Jason Alan Salais, 34 years old, died December 15, 2013 outside a Walgreens inPearland, Texas. A family member confirmed that the cause of death was a heart attack. According to the LinkedIn profile for Salais, he was engaged in Client Technology Service “L3 Operate Support” and previously “FXO Operate L2 Support” at JPMorgan. Prior to joining JPMorgan in 2008, Salais had worked as a Client Software Technician at SunGard and a UNIX Systems Analyst at Logix Communications.

Gabriel Magee, 39, died on the evening of January 27, 2014 or the morning of January 28, 2014. Magee was discovered at approximately 8:02 a.m. lying on a 9th level rooftop at the Canary Wharf European headquarters of JPMorgan Chase at 25 Bank Street, London. His specific area of specialty at JPMorgan was “Technical architecture oversight for planning, development, and operation of systems for fixed income securities and interest rate derivatives.” A coroner’s inquest to determine the cause of death is scheduled for May 20, 2014 in London.

Ryan Crane, age 37, died February 3, 2014, at his home in Stamford, Connecticut. The Chief Medical Examiner’s office is still in the process of determining a cause of death. Crane was an Executive Director involved in trading at JPMorgan’s New York office. Crane’s death on February 3 was not reported by any major media until February 13, ten days later, when Bloomberg News ran a brief story.

Dennis Li (Junjie), 33 years old, died February 18, 2014 as a result of a purported fall from the 30-story Chater House office building in Hong Kong where JPMorgan occupied the upper floors. Li is reported to have been an accounting major who worked in the finance department of the bank.


Kenneth Bellando, age 28, was found outside his East Side Manhattan apartment building on March 12, 2014.  The building from which Bellando allegedly jumped was only six stories – by no means ensuring that death would result. The young Bellando had previously worked for JPMorgan Chase as an analyst and was the brother of JPMorgan employee John Bellando, who was referenced in the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations’ report on how JPMorgan had hid losses and lied to regulators in the London Whale derivatives trading debacle that resulted in losses of at least $6.2 billion.

Pharma M&A Bubble Alive And Well After Pfizer Confirms AstraZeneca Bid; AZN Demands More

While the news that Pfizer has been sniffing around AstraZeneca has been around for a while, it is the confirmation this morning from Pfizer that it is considering a cash and stock offer for AZN that has been the catalyst to push futures off their early trading levels, on yet another instance of the Pharma M&A bubble which we have been chronicling here in recent weeks. Needless to say, a Pfizer-AstraZeneca combination valued at roughly $100 billion would create the largest healthcare company by revenue and likely serve as the pharma bubble "peak "indicator very much like the Blackstone IPO marked the financial top in 2007.

According to the Bloomberg bulletin summary, Pfizer says AstraZeneca shareholders would receive “a significant premium” for their AstraZeneca shares, to be paid in a combination of cash and shares in the combined entity, according to statement.
  • Pfizer “confident a combination is capable of being consummated"; two companies would be combined under a new U.K.-incorporated holding company
  • Pfizer made offer on Jan. 5 for cash and shares worth GBP46.61 per AstraZeneca share; 30% premium to AstraZeneca’s closing share price of GBP35.86 on Jan.3
  • Firm offer conditional on due diligence review, unanimous recommendation by Astra board
  • AstraZeneca spokesman said on the phone the company is in process of reviewing Pfizer statement
  • Says no immediate comment on Pfizer statement.
Pfizer said it had originally approached AstraZeneca in January about a possible merger of the two companies and they held "high-level" talks, but these were discontinued on Jan. 14. Pfizer said it made its second approach on April 26.

Pfizer's previous proposal made to the board of AstraZeneca on Jan. 5 included a combination of cash and shares in the combined entity, which represented an indicative value of £46.61 ($76.62) per AstraZeneca share and a premium of 30% to AstraZeneca's closing share price of £35.86 on Jan. 3.

The indicative price would value AstraZeneca at about £58.73 billion, or $98.68 billion.

Pfizer said that if the deal goes ahead the two companies would be combined under a new U.K.-incorporated holding company, with management in both the U.S. and U.K. It would maintain its head office in New York and list its shares on the New York Stock Exchange.

"We have great respect for AstraZeneca and its proud heritage as an innovation-driven biopharmaceutical business with a rich science-based foundation in both the United Kingdom and Sweden," said Pfizer Chief Executive Ian Reed. "In addition, the United Kingdom has created attractive incentives for companies to manufacture products and maintain and protect intellectual property, and we have seen that capital and jobs have followed these types of incentives."

"The combination of Pfizer and AstraZeneca could further enhance the ability to create value for shareholders of both companies and bring an expanded portfolio of important treatments to patients," Mr. Reed added.

Still, for now at least AstraZeneca which surged on the news earlier, appears to no have great respect for the offer, and in a statement released moments ago said that it concluded it was not appropriate to engage in talks, as the proposal significantly undervalues the company, adding it is committed to its strategy announced in March 2013 and urges shareholders not to take action. In other words, if Pfizer could please raise its offer a bit to quite a bit, that would be great.

Pettis: 11 Reasons China Can’t Escape from Its Debt Overhang

A certain amount of complacency has set in about China’s unsustainable economic model, simply because the Middle Kingdom has managed to stay a day of reckoning. I remember similar doubt fatigue setting in during the blowoff phase of the dot-com bubble. Even with more worrying sightings, such as distress in wealth management products (the riskiest part of China’s shadow banking system), many of the bearish sorts believe that China has enough control over its economy that it will engineer a soft landing. Yet it’s hard to ignore stories like these:
My last trip to Shanghai and surrounding cities and my earlier trip in November was eye opening. A couple of years before I was in Shenzhen China vising a PC Board manufacturer to discuss $160,000 in premium freight and scheduling charges which were partially our fault. In the end I recouped half which I thought was fair and made some good contacts 
On the way in and out of Shenzhen, we passed an enormous outdoor mall of acres of store fronts unoccupied. Fast forward to 2013/14 and I found the same around Shanghai in Ningbo, Shuzhou, Wuzhen, Wuxi, Nanjing, Haimen, Hangzhou, etc. I am sure you have read about China building infrastructure to keep labor busy. They built ghost towns/malls and housing which the people can not afford. China built for GDP.
Michael Pettis has pointed out more than once that China resolved its last bank crisis of 2002-2003 by having households bear the cost, which led China’s consumption share of GDP to fall. That moves it further away from adjusting from being an export-driven economy to one where internal demand plays a much bigger role. Even though China’s export share has indeed fallen, what has taken its place is not consumer demand but an unheard-of level of investment, much of it in unproductive residential real estate.

Pettis works though some of the implications of China’s high (for an emerging economy) debt levels and how they might be resolved.

Cross posted from MacroBusiness

Exclusively from Michael Pettis’ newsletter:
1. GDP growth has been implicitly increased by the amount of losses that should have been, but were not, written down. This means that China’s GDP today, compared to countries in which it is more difficult simply to roll over losses indefinitely, is overstated, and I suspect that it may be overstated by as much as 20-30%. 
2. In that case all GDP-related data is biased in a predictable way. Productivity numbers, for example, are biased upwards, and real worker’s productivity is lower than the numbers posted officially. 
3. Losses that are rolled over do not disappear. They are implicitly amortized over the period of the loan, which, assuming that loans are rolled over indefinitely, means that every year a declining portion of that loan is effectively written down. 
4. There is a lot of confusion over how the implicit amortization of unrecognized losses takes place over time. Let us assume that an investor borrows $100 to invest in a project that creates only $80 of value. The project, in other words, creates a loss of $20. If the loss is not immediately recognized, there is a gap between the true economic value of the debt servicing cost and the increase in productivity associated with the project. This gap must be covered by implicit transfers from some other part of the economy, and these transfers reduce the economic activity that would have otherwise been created. 
5. GDP growth is only artificially boosted during the period in which the total amount of losses rolled over exceeds the amount of the amortization. After that GDP growth is artificially constrained. 
6. My numbers above assume that the overstatement and understatement are symmetrical. In fact the process is not symmetrical because of the possibility of financial distress costs. The total value of overstated GDP during the period when losses are being rolled over is only equal to the total value of the subsequent amortization of those losses if there are no financial distress costs. 
7. …We must also remember that the only way debt can be resolved is by assigning the losses, either during the period in which the losses occurred or during the subsequent amortization period. There is no other way to “resolve” bad debt – the loss must be assigned, today or tomorrow, to some sector of the economy. “Socializing” the debt, or transferring the debt from one entity to another, does not change this. 
8. There are three sectors to whom the cost can be assigned: households, businesses, or the government. 
9. …To the extent that China has significant hidden losses embedded in the balance sheets of the banks and the shadow banks, over the next several years Beijing must decide how to assign the losses. If it assigns them to the household sector, it will put significant downward pressure both on household income growth (which will be less than GDP growth) and, consequently, on consumption growth. 
10. …Beijing can also assign the losses to SMEs. In effect this is what it started to do in 2010- 
11 when wages rose sharply (SMEs tend to be labor intensive). It is widely recognized that SMEs are the most efficient part of the Chinese economy, however, and that assigning the losses to them will undermine the engine of China’s future productivity growth. 
11. Finally Beijing can assign the losses to the state sector, by reforming the houkou system, land reform, interest rate and currency reform, financial sector governance reform, privatization, etc. Most of the Third Plenum reforms are simply ways of assigning the cost of rebalancing, which includes the recognition of earlier losses, to the state sector.
Source 

Groupthink Or Black Swan Rising? Not A Single 'Economist' Expects An Economic Downturn

A 100% Consensus


This doesn't happen very often.  Marketwatch reports that Jim Bianco points out in a recent market comment that the 67 economists taking part in a regular Bloomberg survey have a unanimous forecast regarding treasury bond yields: they will be higher 6 months from now. This is a truly striking result, and given the well-known propensity of mainstream economists to guess wrong (their forecasts largely consist of extrapolating the most recent short term trend), it may provide us with a few insights.

In fact, considering that there have been only a handful of instances since 2009 when a majority of the economists surveyed predicted a decline in yields, we can already state that their forecasts regarding treasuries are quite often (though obviously not always) wide of the mark. In fact, so far this year they are already wrong again – and so are fund managers, as they hold their lowest exposure to treasuries in seven years.

This is not the only thing there is complete unanimity about. Not a single economist taking part in a separate survey believes an economic downturn is possible.
“Economists are unwavering in their assessment of where yields are headed in the next half year.

Jim Bianco, of Bianco Research, points out in a market comment Tuesday that a survey of 67 economists this month shows every single one of them expects the 10-year Treasury yield to rise in the next six months.

The survey, which is done each month by Bloomberg, has been notably bearish for some time now, with nearly everyone expecting rising rates. In March, 97% expected rising rates. In February, 95% expected yields to climb. And in January, 97% held that expectation. Since the beginning of 2009, there have only been a handful of instances where less than 50% expected rates to rise.

Still, the fact that every single survey participant is bearish is striking. The last time the survey had that result was in May 2012, when benchmark yields were well below 2%.

“Literally there is maybe one economist in the United States straddling the bullish/bearish divide on interest rates. The rest are bearish,” Bianco writes.

He adds that a J.P. Morgan client survey shows that the percentage of money manager respondents who said they are underweight Treasurys is the second highest in seven years.

This is all the more surprising when we consider that investors went into 2014 thinking yields would rise significantly. Instead, the benchmark yield is lower than when the year started, as the market waded throw subpar economic data, geopolitical tensions, and uncertainty over the Federal Reserve. The 10-year note last traded at a yield of 2.72% on Tuesday, down from just over 3% on Dec. 31.

Then again, a separate poll of economists recently showed that exactly zero expect the economy to contract.

But when the entire market thinks one thing is about to happen, the opposite outcome is often in store, notes James Camp, managing director of fixed income at Eagle Asset Management. So don’t count out that result with Treasurys, he advises.

“It’s the most hated asset class,” says Camp, but Treasurys are some of the best performers year-to-date.”
(emphasis added)

Color us unsurprised regarding the fact that the 'most hated asset class' has turned out to be one of the better performing so far this year. Gold is probably hated even more, and for similar reasons. Everybody expects the weakest recovery of the entire post WW2 era to reach 'escape velocity' (whatever that is supposed to mean), even after adding almost $8 trillion to the federal debt and some $4.8 trillion to the broad true money supply since the 2008 crisis have led to such a dismal outcome (of course as card-carrying Austrians we believe this development is precisely what should have been expected). 

Likely Outcomes


While treasury bond yields have only moved down a little so far this year, one must keep in mind that they are at a historically very low level to begin with. At a yield of roughly 4%, a 50 basis points move represents 12.5% of the entire distance to zero. However, we also know that a lot more downside is possible. Yields have already been quite a bit lower on a number of occasions.

There can be little doubt that if the consensus of economists turns out to be wrong again, it will likely be wrong on both t-bond yields and the economy. As an aside, it is noteworthy that long term yields have weakened considerably even while five year yields have remained roughly unchanged and yields on the short end of the curve have actually risen slightly since the beginning of the year.

We interpret this as the market judging the Fed to be adopting a tighter monetary policy, and expecting weaker aggregate economic activity to ultimately result from this new stance. Clearly, the 'tapering' of 'QE' does represent a tightening of policy, no matter what Fed members are saying about it. It means the pace of money supply inflation is being slowed down.

Note that something similar happened in the run-up to the 2008 crisis, only in this instance the yield curve actually inverted prior to the economic downturn. One should not expect a complete yield curve inversion to warn in a timely fashion of a recession when the central bank is hell-bent on keeping its policy rate at or near zero. We know this from 'ZIRP' experiments that have been undertaken in other countries, such as e.g. Japan.

If the economy doesn't do what seemingly everybody expects it to do in the famed 'second half' (practically the entire sell-side shares the consensus of the economists surveyed by Bloomberg), then treasuries and gold should be expected to rise, while equities could end up getting hit quite badly.


30 year t-bond yield: declining since the beginning of the year – click to enlarge.

It is clear that one of the reasons why economists expect no contraction in the economy is that 'traditional' recession indicators still appear largely benign, if somewhat weaker than previously. We prefer to keep an eye on things most people don't watch, such as the ratio of capital to consumer goods production, which shows how factors of production are pulled toward the higher stages of the capital structure when monetary pumping is underway. This ratio tends to peak and reverse close to recessions. Its recent trend isn't entirely conclusive yet as it has begun to move sideways, but it clearly seems to be issuing a 'heads up' type warning signal.

Capital vs. consumer goods production – it tends to peak close to the beginning of recession periods, and declines while recessions are underway, as the production structure is temporarily shortened again – click to enlarge.

Note also that the transition from expansion to contraction is usually quite swift, and never widely expected.

Conclusion:

This is an astonishing degree of consensus thinking, but it perfectly mirrors the complacency we see in stock market sentiment and positioning data. The probability that such a unanimous view will turn out to be correct is traditionally extremely low. The economy is likely resting on a much weaker foundation than is generally believed. This is not least the result of massive monetary pumping and deficit spending, both of which tend to severely weaken the economy on a structural level, even though they can create a temporary illusion of 'growth'.

The Middle Class In Canada Is Now Doing Better Than The Middle Class In America

For most of Canada's existence, it has been regarded as the weak neighbor to the north by most Americans.  Well, that has changed dramatically over the past decade or so.  Back in the year 2000, middle class Canadians were earning much less than middle class Americans, but since then there has been a dramatic shift.  At this point, middle class Canadians are actually earning more than middle class Americans are.  The Canadian economy has been booming thanks to a rapidly growing oil industry, and meanwhile the U.S. middle class has been steadily shrinking.  If current trends continue, a whole bunch of other countries are going to start passing us too.  The era of the "great U.S. middle class" is rapidly coming to a bitter end.

In recent years, I have been up to Canada frequently, and I am always amazed at how much nicer things are up there.  The stores and streets are cleaner, the people are more polite and it seems like almost everyone that wants to work has a job.

But despite knowing all this, I was still surprised when the New York Times reported this week that middle class incomes in Canada have now surpassed middle class incomes in the United States...
After-tax middle-class incomes in Canada — substantially behind in 2000 — now appear to be higher than in the United States. The poor in much of Europe earn more than poor Americans.
And things are particularly dire for those in the U.S. on the low end of the scale...
The struggles of the poor in the United States are even starker than those of the middle class. A family at the 20th percentile of the income distribution in this country makes significantly less money than a similar family in Canada, Sweden, Norway, Finland or the Netherlands. Thirty-five years ago, the reverse was true.
Even while our politicians and the media continue to proclaim that everything is "just fine", the U.S. middle class continues to slide toward oblivion.

The biggest reason for this is the lack of middle class jobs.  Millions of good jobs have been shipped overseas, and millions of other good jobs have been replaced by technology.

The value of our labor is declining with each passing day, and this has forced millions upon millions of very qualified Americans to take whatever they can get.  As NBC News recently noted, this is a big reason why the temp industry has been booming...
For Americans who can't find jobs, the booming demand for temp workers has been a path out of unemployment, but now many fear it's a dead-end route. 
With full-time work hard to find, these workers have built temping into a de facto career, minus vacation, sick days or insurance. The assignments might be temporary — a few months here, a year there — but labor economists warn that companies' growing hunger for a workforce they can switch on and off could do permanent damage to these workers' career trajectories and retirement plans. 
"It seems to be the new norm in the working world," said Kelly Sibla, 54. The computer systems engineer has been looking for a full-time job for four years now, but the Amherst, Ohio, resident said she has to take whatever she can find.
It has been estimated that one out of every ten jobs is now filled by a temp agency.  I have worked for temp agencies myself in the past.  Big companies like the idea of having "disposable workers", and this is a trend that is likely to only grow in the years ahead.

But temp jobs and part-time jobs don't pay as well as normal jobs.  And those kinds of jobs generally cannot support middle class families.

At this point, nine out of the top ten occupations in the United States pay an average wage of less than $35,000 a year.

That is absolutely stunning.

These days most families are barely scraping by, and they don't have much extra money to go shopping with.

This is a big reason for the "retail apocalypse" that we are now witnessing.  This week we learned that retail stores in the United States are closing at the fastest pace that we have seen since the collapse of Lehman Brothers.  But you won't hear much about that on the mainstream news.

You can find lots of "space available" signs and empty buildings in formerly middle class neighborhoods all over the country.  For example, one of my readers recently shot the following YouTube video in Scottsdale, Arizona.  As you can see, empty commercial buildings are all over the place...

As the middle class shrinks, more families are being forced to take in family members that can't find decent work.  I have written previously about the huge rise in the number of young adults that are moving back in with their parents.  But this is not just happening to young people.  As the Los Angeles Times recently detailed, the number of Americans 50 and older that are moving in with their parents has absolutely soared in recent years...
For seven years through 2012, the number of Californians aged 50 to 64 who live in their parents' homes swelled 67.6% to about 194,000, according to the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and the Insight Center for Community Economic Development. 
The jump is almost exclusively the result of financial hardship caused by the recession rather than for other reasons, such as the need to care for aging parents, said Steven P. Wallace, a UCLA professor of public health who crunched the data. 
"The numbers are pretty amazing," Wallace said. "It's an age group that you normally think of as pretty financially stable. They're mid-career. They may be thinking ahead toward retirement. They've got a nest egg going. And then all of a sudden you see this huge push back into their parents' homes."
The U.S. economy is slowly but steadily falling apart, and more people fall out of the middle class every single day.

A recent Gallup survey found that 14 percent of all Americans would experience "significant financial hardship" within one week of a job loss.

An additional 29 percent of all Americans would experience "significant financial hardship" within one month of a job loss.

That means that 43 percent of the entire country is living right on the edge.

It is no wonder why only about 30 percent of all Americans believe that we are moving in the right direction as a nation.

Most people know deep down that something is seriously wrong.  But most people can't explain exactly what that is or how to fix it.

Meanwhile, the politicians and the media keep telling us that if we just keep doing the same old things that everything will work out okay somehow.  The blind are leading the blind, and we are rapidly marching toward disaster.

Reuters Analysis: Printing Money Is More Important Than Ever for Yellen

Yellen shows her hand ... Yellen said this week that she is more worried that a shock to the economy might lead to deflation — a debilitating spiral downward in prices and demand — than rampant inflation. Those who cling to old certainties about the economic notions that dominated policy between the 1980s and late 2008 find themselves today tilting at windmills such as the likelihood of a return to high inflation. – Reuters 

Dominant Social Theme: Just print, baby. 

Free-Market Analysis: This Reuters editorial presents the reality of Yellen's upcoming Fed regime. Peter Schiff and others – including The Daily Bell – were correct. 

There is not going to be any radical tightening at the Fed. 

Supposedly, Yellen was going to cease quantitative easing. But QE is simply a strategy and whether or not it continues does not necessarily have an effect on the larger money-printing environment. 

This article tells us what is probably the truth about the Fed regime: People misinterpreted Yellen's initial remarks on the subject. Just because she is departing from Ben Bernanke's goal-based employment doesn't mean Yellen is departing from the idea of printing currency to create jobs. 

 The idea of keeping interest rates artificially low while finding ways to inject increased currency into the economy is a purely Keynesian approach to prosperity. 

When recessions are shallow, additional amounts of currency in large doses can have an economic influence. But today's Great Recession is fairly impervious to this sort of stimulation. 

That doesn't mean Yellen is stopping, however. The entire central banking paradigm is built around injecting funds into the economy. 

It's a very simple procedure, but the mainstream media makes it sound complex. 

When the economy is doing badly, money printing is on the agenda. When the economy is doing well, the wise men are apt to recommend additional money printing anyway, just to be safe. 

Central banks are therefore always printing currency in excess of what the economy needs. And really it cannot be any other way. The modern debt-based system runs on adding significant amounts of paper into circulation. 

Yellen was never going to do anything differently. Here's more from the Reuters article: 

The difference between the Federal Reserve Board of Chairwoman Janet Yellen and that of her immediate predecessor Ben Bernanke is becoming clear. No more so than in their approach to the problem of joblessness. Bernanke made clear that in the post-2008 economy, his principal goal was the creation of jobs, not curbing inflation. He settled on a figure, 6.5 percent unemployment, as the threshold that would guide his actions. ... 

Before scampering off to sell their stocks, the traders would have done well to wait to read the full Fed statement that revealed there had been a secret session of the Fed board on March 4, a week before the full session. 

The minutes of that meeting reveal the board's interest in "qualitative language" about jobs that focus "on a broader set of economic indicators" — that is, seeing the true unemployment picture beyond the bald percentages. As the minutes show, the board was concerned to avoid "uncertainty associated with defining and measuring the unemployment rate and the level of employment that would be most consistent with the Committee's maximum employment objective." 

Reiterating that policy in a speech Wednesday, Yellen declared, "there is little question that the economy has remained far from maximum employment." ... 

The ... recovery has been long, slow and sluggish. It was perhaps no more dilatory than the snails'-pace recovery of the 1930s, the last time the world economy careered off a cliff. ... 

By far the most effective way of stimulating the economy and creating new jobs, as former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers told new graduates at Smith College recently, is for the federal and state governments to spend freely on infrastructure. 

Money has never been cheaper; labor has never been cheaper; there is no risk of inflation; the new facilities, whether roads, schools, colleges, railways, power stations, airports or whatever, would help supply the economy with a well-trained workforce and a set of commonly used amenities that private enterprise desperately needs to spur growth. 

Article after article in the mainstream press confirms the relative simplicity of central banking. It doesn't work, but more of the same may somehow provide a cure, nonetheless. 

How can it work, in fact? When you print money, you distort economic growth. So this longish Reuters article/editorial ends up leaving us with what we already knew a while ago. 

The result will inevitably be booms in various asset classes, especially the stock market and then high-end real estate. Finally, multinational progress. 

All of the above is accomplished by force-feeding commercial banks. It is the top-end clients and corporations that benefit from this sort of exercise because there is no DEMAND for money from the general public. 

Even five years later, there is no surety over what companies are solvent and what companies – and entrepreneurs – are bankrupt. The "recovery" within this context is surely a phony one. 

But we can see from the Reuters article that nothing has changed. It's not complicated. Yellen will print more and supposedly – though this won't actually happen – government will "prime the pump." 

What is interesting is that this article we are commenting on today and yesterday's lead article on central banks needing to "partner" with government and business is obviously setting the stage for some sort of effort based on more aggressive FDR-style stimulation. 

It didn't work then and it won't work now. The globalists pushing these strategies along simply need a narrative of sufficient complexity. Central banking corrupts and hollows out economies. The power elite seeks as much centralization as possible. 

If Yellen ceased to print currency, then those behind her would find someone else. The strategy is necessary to achieve further centralization of money and power. In the meantime, we will have to read articles and listen to analyses explaining what is inexplicable. 

It is inexplicable because it doesn't work. It doesn't work because it is not supposed to work. It is truly a devious system. It will no doubt result in a further boom – a continued Wall Street Party, at least for a while. But not forever. 

Conclusion In the meantime, Yellen will keep dancing. And we are not surprised. 

Source

The Dow Jones Index is the Greatest of All Ponzi Schemes

The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) Index – the oldest stock exchange in the U.S. and most influential in the world – consists of 30 companies and has an extremely interesting and distressing history regarding its beginnings, transformation and structural development which has all the trappings of what is commonly referred to as pyramid or Ponzi scheme.

The Dow Index was first published in 1896 when it consisted of just 12 constituents and was a simple price average index in which the sum total value of the shares of the 12 constituents were simply divided by 12. As such those shares with the highest prices had the greatest influence on the movements of the index as a whole. In 1916 the Dow 12 became the Dow 20 with four companies being removed from the original twelve and twelve new companies being added. In October, 1928 the Dow 20 became the Dow 30 but the calculation of the index was changed to be the sum of the value of the shares of the 30 constituents divided by what is known as the Dow Divisor.

While the inclusion of the Dow Divisor may have seemed totally straightforward it was – and still is – anything but! Why so? Because every time the number of, or specific constituent, companies change in the index any comparison of the new index value with the old index value is impossible to make with any validity whatsoever. It is like comparing the taste of a cocktail of fruits when the number of different fruits and their distinctive flavours – keep changing. Let me explain the aforementioned as it relates to the Dow.

Companies Go Through 5 Transition Phases

On one hand, generally speaking, the companies that are removed from the index are in either the stabilization or degeneration transition phases of which there are five, namely:

1. the pre-development phase in which the present status does not visibly change.

2. the takeThe Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) Index – the oldest stock exchange in the U.S. and most influential in the world – consists of 30 companies and has an extremely interesting and distressing history regarding its beginnings, transformation and structural development which has all the trappings of what is commonly referred to as pyramid or Ponzi scheme.-off phase in which the process of change starts because of changes to the system.

3. the acceleration phase in which visible structural changes – social, cultural, economical, ecological, institutional – influence each other.

4. the stabilization phase in which the speed of sociological change slows down and a new dynamic is achieved through learning.

5. the degeneration phase in which costs rise because of over-capacity leading to the producing company finally withdrawing from the market.

The Dow Index is a Pyramid Scheme

On the other hand, companies in the take-off or acceleration phase are added to the index. This greatly increases the chances that the index will always continue to advance rather than decline. In fact, the manner in which the Dow index is maintained actually creates a kind of pyramid scheme! All goes well as long as companies are added that are in their take-off or acceleration phase in place of companies in their stabilization or degeneration phase.

The False Appreciation of the Dow Explained

On October 1st, 1928, when the Dow was enlarged to 30 constituents, the calculation formula for the index was changed to take into account the fact that the shares of companies in the Index split on occasion. It was determined that, to allow the value of the Index to remain constant, the sum total of the share values of the 30 constituent companies would be divided by 16.67 ( called the Dow Divisor) as opposed to the previous 30.

On October 1st, 1928 the sum value of the shares of the 30 constituents of the Dow 30 was $3,984 which was then divided by 16.67 rather than 30 thereby generating an index value of 239 (3984 divided by 16.67) instead of 132.8 (3984 divided by 30) representing an increase of 80% overnight!! This action had the affect of putting dramatically more importance on the absolute dollar changes of those shares with the greatest price changes. But it didn’t stop there!

On September, 1929 the Dow divisor was adjusted yet again. This time it was reduced even further down to 10.47 as a way of better accounting for the change in the deletion and addition of constituents back in October, 1928 which, in effect, increased the October 1st, 1928 index value to 380.5 from the original 132.8 for a paper increase of 186.5%!!! From September, 1929 onwards (at least for a while) this “adjustment” had the affect – and I repeat myself – of putting even that much more importance on the absolute dollar changes of those shares with the greatest changes.

How the Dow Divisor Contributed to the Crash of ‘29

From the above analyses/explanation it is evident that the dramatic “adjustments” to the Dow Divisor (coupled with the addition/deletion of constituent companies according to which transition phase they were in) were major contributors to the dramatic increase in the Dow from 1920 until October 1929 and the following dramatic decrease in the Dow 30 from then until 1932 notwithstanding the economic conditions of the time as well.

Exponential Rise in the Dow 30 is Revealed

The 1980s and ‘90s saw a continuation of the undermining of the true value of the Dow 30. Yes – you guessed correctly –further “adjustments” in the Dow Divisor kept coming and coming! As the set of constituents of the Dow changed over the years (almost all of them) and many shares were split the Dow Divisor kept changing. By 1985 it was only 1.116 and today it is only 0.132129493. Indeed, a rise of $1 in share value of the 30 constituents actually results in 8.446 more index points than in 1985 (1.116 divided by 0.132129493). Had it not been for this dramatic decrease in the Dow Divisor the Nov.3/10 Dow 30 index value of 12,215 (sum total of the current prices of the 30 constituent shares of $1481.85 divided by 0.132129493) would only be 1327.82 ($1481.85 divided by 1.116) in 1985 terms. Were we still using the original formula the Dow 30 would actually be only 49.395 ($1481.85 divided by 30)!

The crucial questions today are:

1. Is the current underlying economy strong enough to keep the Dow 30 at its present level?

2. Will the 30 constituents of the Dow remain robust or evolve into the stabilization and degeneration phases?

3. Will there be enough new companies to act as new “up-lifters” of the Dow?

4. When will the Dow Divisor change – yet again??

The Dow 30 is the Greatest of All Ponzi Schemes

I call on the financial community to take a critical look at the Dow Divisor. If it is retained societies will continue to be deceived with every new transition from one phase to another and the greatest of all Ponzi schemes will have major financial consequences for every investor.

It's Time To Ditch The Consumer Price Index (CPI)

So why does the government maintain such a transparently inaccurate and misleading metric? For three reasons.

That the official rate of inflation doesn't reflect reality is obvious to anyone paying college tuition and healthcare out of pocket. The debate over the accuracy of the official consumer price index (CPI) and personal consumption expenditures (PCE--the so-called core rate of inflation) has raged for years, with no resolution in sight.

The CPI calculates inflation based on the prices of a basket of goods and services that are adjusted by hedonics, i.e. improvements that are not reflected in the price of the goods. Housing costs are largely calculated on equivalent rent, i.e. what homeowners reckon they would pay if they were renting their house.


The CPI attempts to measure the relative weight of each component:



Many argue that these weightings skew the CPI lower, as do hedonic adjustments. The motivation for this skew is transparent: since the government increases Social Security benefits and Federal employees' pay annually to keep up with inflation (the cost of living allowance or COLA), a low rate of inflation keeps these increases modest.

Over time, an artificially low CPI/COLA lowers government expenditures (and deficits, provided tax revenues rise at rates above official inflation).

Those claiming the weighting is accurate face a blizzard of legitimate questions. For example, if healthcare is 18% of the U.S. GDP, i.e. 18 cents of every dollar goes to healthcare, then how can a mere 7% wedge of the CPI devoted to healthcare be remotely accurate?

In my analysis, the debate over inflation is intrinsically flawed. What really matters is not the overall rate of inflation, which can be endlessly debated, but the purchasing power of earned income, i.e. wages and the exposure to real-world costs.

In other words, those households with zero exposure to college tuition and the full costs of daycare, medical care and healthcare insurance may well experience low inflation, while the household paying the full costs of daycare, college tuition and healthcare insurance will experience soaring inflation.

Here's one example of how CPI fails to capture real-world inflation/loss of purchasing power. Let's say an employee works for a company or agency that pays his/her healthcare insurance. The monthly cost has risen from $1,000/month to $1,500/month. The employee's wage has remained stagnant but the total compensation costs paid by the employer have gone up by $500/month.

Now the employer shifts that $500/month to the employee as their share of the healthcare insurance cost. Since the average full-time worker earns around $40,000 a year, and pays around 18% in taxes, their take-home pay is around $33,000 annually.

The employee's co-pay of $6,000 a year ($500/month) represents 18% of their take-home wage. This is an 18% reduction in earnings, or the equivalent of 18% inflation (i.e. a reduction in purchasing power).
This shifting of the skyrocketing burden of healthcare costs acts the same as 20% inflation, yet it doesn't even register in the current CPI.

The geography of inflation doesn't register, either. Soaring rents in Brooklyn, NY and the San Francisco Bay Area have a profound effect on those exposed to these rapidly rising costs, yet these impacts are massaged to zero by national CPI calculations.

So once again we have a bifurcated society: those protected by the state from rising costs and those exposed to real-world reductions in purchasing power.Households that receive government subsidies and direct payments have little exposure to real-world healthcare costs, since they are covered by Medicaid, and modest exposure to housing if they receive Section 8 benefits (Section 8 recipients pay 30% of their income for rent, regardless of the market price of the rental). Retirees on Medicare also have limited exposure to the real-world costs of their care paid by the government.

If we analyze inflation by these two metrics, we find the middle class is increasingly exposed to skyrocketing real-world prices. Pundits in the top 5% have the luxury of pontificating on the accuracy of the CPI while those protected by government subsidies and coverage have the luxury of wondering what all the fuss is about. Only those 100% exposed to the real costs experience the full fury of actual inflation.

So why does the government maintain such a transparently inaccurate and misleading metric? For three reasons: 1) it is useful propaganda; 2) it suppresses the state's cost-of-living increases and 3) it lowers the government's cost of borrowing. The benefits of reducing COLA adjustments are self-evident, as is the benefit of borrowing money at low rates of interest, but the propaganda benefits are more subtle.

The key to enabling the endless printing of money that enriches the banks and the top .1% is low inflation. Asset bubbles can be inflated, ballooning the wealth of the owners of the assets, as long as inflation is near-zero.
Indeed, the Federal Reserve claims it must print money to counter low inflation.

Meanwhile, in the real economy, those exposed to the real costs of college tuition, healthcare, childcare, etc. are seeing their purchasing power evaporate like a puddle of water in Death Valley. The Fed needs low inflation to justify its continuing enrichment of the financial elite, and the Federal government needs low inflation to keep its COLAs and borrowing costs low.

There are two ways to mask real-world reductions of purchasing power: 1) skew the CPI by distorting the component percentages, hedonics and how costs are measured, and 2) protect enough of the populace from real-world increases so they no longer care. Seniors, who famously vote in droves, have no idea what their Medicare benefits actually cost. As a result, they have no experience of healthcare inflation /reduction of purchasing power.

This works in all sorts of industries. As I have often mentioned here, the F-35 Lightning fighter aircraft costs in excess of $200 million each, roughly four times the cost of the F-18F it replaces. This extraordinary inflation is not experienced directly by the taxpayer who is paying for the boondoggle, as the Federal government borrows trillions of dollars to pay for such boondoggles, effectively passing the inflated costs on to future generations.

These costs are hidden by the low cost of borrowing trillions to pay for boondoggles. If real-world inflation is (say) 5%, then interest rates would typically adjust to a few points above that rate, to compensate capital for the erosion of purchasing power. If the Treasury had to pay 7% to borrow money, the interest cost would soon cripple Federal spending. People would be forced to focus on how all those trillions of dollars are being spent, and to whose benefit.

But with borrowing costs so low, nobody cares.

The solution? One, abolish the Fed and let the market discover interest rates, and two, abandon the simplistic notion that one number of inflation has any meaning in a complex economy with numerous subsets of exposure to market costs and the loss or gain of purchasing power.

Will we muster the will to look past failed models and metrics? Sadly, the answer is no. Why?

As I noted yesterday in What's the Difference Between Fascism, Communism and Crony-Capitalism? Nothinga system set up to enrich political and financial elites is incapable of reform. the only way the CPI will ever be replaced is when the Status Quo collapses in a heap of lies and insolvency. Until then, propaganda and gaming the system to protect vested interests will rule.