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With Prime Minister Yatsenyuk putting his foot down and squeezing the central bank to lift capital controls, Ukraine's currency is totally collapsing this morning. Up over 5 handles to a fresh record low of 33.75/USD, we suspect currency trading will be halted any minute. While we discussed the endgame for Ukraine last night, on the street, things are dire with ATM lines, shelves emptied, and local currency exchanges marking up levels dramatically more than the 'official' rates... The 'independent' Central Bank halted currency trading, and then the government screamed... "I learned this morning on the Internet that the National Bank...

US Macro Collapses To 11-Month Lows, 88% Of Data Has Missed In February Despite the total and utter cognitive dissonance of talking-heads on mainstream media channels, the US economic data is not 'strong', is not 'goldilocks', is not 'decoupled', is not 'solid'. In fact, it's absolutely terrible. Bloomberg's US Macro data indicator which tracks both beats-and-misses and improvement/deterioration in data - is at 11-month lows. February alone has seen 29 data items miss expectations (from retail sales to industrial production)with only 4 data points beating expectations (including the constantly revised nonfarm payrolls data which so many hang their hat on)....

The Case Against Imminent Economic Collapse: “They Can Keep Bailing Things Out for Several More Years Without Fear of Collapse” Joel Skousen February 16th, 2015 Editor’s Note: The following commentary comes to us from Joel Skousen, a well respected geopolitical analyst and Strategic Relocation expert. We see evidence of an impending collapse of the global financial and economic systems on an almost daily basis. From falsified statistics to an almost unfathomable series of never-ending monetary machinations, all signs point to something being horrifically wrong, not just with the economy but the entire global paradigm as it exists today. By all...

The stock market continues to flirt with new record highs, but the signs that we could be on the precipice of the next major financial crisis continue to mount. A couple of days ago, I discussed the fact that the U.S. dollar is experiencing a tremendous surge in value just like it did in the months prior to the financial crisis of 2008. And previously, I have detailed how the price of oil has collapsed, prices for industrial commodities are tanking and market behavior is becoming extremely choppy. All of these are things that we witnessed just before the last...

Teacher pensions are a huge and growing crisis waiting to explode without major reforms, warns a new report released Tuesday by an educational think tank.“Do the math on teacher pensions and it just doesn’t add up,� argues the National Council on Teacher Quality in its report, Doing the Math on Teacher Pensions. Total unfunded teacher pension liabilities in 2014 were a whopping $499 billion dollars, the group found. That amount is surging rapidly; in 2012, the total was just $394 billion, meaning that pension debt is growing by over $50 billion a year.Some states are in a particularly huge hole....

The Collapse of Europe? The European Union May Be on the Verge of Regime Collapse Europe won the Cold War. Not long after the Berlin Wall fell a quarter of a century ago, the Soviet Union collapsed, the United States squandered its peace dividend in an attempt to maintain global dominance, and Europe quietly became more prosperous, more integrated, and more of a player in international affairs. Between 1989 and 2014, the European Union (EU) practically doubled its membership and catapulted into third place in population behind China and India. It currently boasts the world’s largest economy and also heads...

The "Deflationary Vortex": Global Dollar Economy Suffers Biggest Plunge Since Lehman, Down $4 Trillion One of the macroeconomic observations that has gotten absolutely no mention in recent months is the curious fact that while global economic growth has not imploded in recent quarters, it is because GDP has been represented, as is customary, in local currency terms. Of course, this comes as a time when local currencies (at least those which are not the USD) have been plunging against the greenback on the back of the expectations that the Fed will hike rates some time in the summer or later...

<p>Collapsing oil prices have a turned a difficult economic situation into a dire one. Oil exports brought in 60% of the country's revenue.</p> <p>Wall Street is watching and waiting, which is why the spread on Venezuela's 5 year credit default swap — basically debt insurance — has spiked. You just don't see charts like this everyday people.</p>

Stripping all the political correctness, what Goldman said is that unless Greece quickly folds back in line and does as unelected Brussels eurocrats demand, there may well be a Cyprus-style bank closure coupled with preemptied bank runs. Oops. Because if that was the doubled-down bluff, then Greece just called it, and the "downside scenario" is now in play. Which means Greece now has to scramble to avoid precisely what Goldman warned would happen if the Greeks dared to put their (meagre) savings at risk. And, case in point, here is the Greek finance minister rushing to squash the next steps,...

"... if you had a big derivatives bust that brought down JP Morgan or Bank of America, there is no way there is going to be collateral left for the FDIC or for the secured depositors. This would include state and local governments. They all put their money in these big banks. So, even though we are protected by the FDIC, the FDIC is not going to have the money. . . . This makes it legal for these big 30 banks to take our money when they become insolvent. They are too-big-to-fail. This was supposed to avoid too-big-to-fail, but...

I don't know too much about Jim Rickards, just found this to be an interesting video about the overall economy and some tidbits about what our government agencies are up to. The video is a 45 minutes long interview of sorts and discussion. Just posting in the event other are interested.

Mac Slavo November 16th, 2014 There are few events that could lead to a truly cataclysmic upheaval of the global order. Right now, half a world away and out of the view of most Americans, exactly such developments have been set into motion. These events are so significant that they promise to shape the geopolitical landscape for decades to come. And, should the trend continue unabated it is only a matter of time before the American way of life as we have come to know it is no more. So says Casey Research Chief Global Strategist Marin Katusa in his...

Tyler Durden 11/11/2014 A funny thing happened on the way to the ‘end’ of the multi-trillion dollar bond buying program known as QE - the Fed chronicles. Aside from the shift to a globalization of QE via the European Central Bank (ECB) and Bank of Japan (BOJ) as I wrote about earlier, what lingers in the air of “post-taper” time is an absence of absence. For QE is not over. Instead, in the United States, the process has simply morphed from being predominantly executed by the Federal Reserve (Fed) to being executed by its major private bank members. Fed Chair,...

Throughout history, in most cases of economic collapse the societies in question believed they were financially invincible just before their disastrous fall. Rarely does anyone see the edge of the cliff or even the bottom of the abyss before it has swallowed a nation whole. This lack of foresight, however, is usually not the fault of the public. It is, rather, a consequence caused by the manipulation of the fundamental information available to the public by governments and social gatekeepers. In the years leading up to the Great Depression, numerous mainstream “experts” and politicians were quick to discount the idea...

Paul Joseph Watson November 7th, 2014 Economist Martin Armstrong is predicting that rising resentment against the status quo as a result of economic inequality is likely to cause a serious political uprising before 2016. “It looks more and more like a serious political uprising will erupt by 2016 once the economy turns down. That is the magic ingredient. Turn the economy down and you get civil unrest and revolution,” writes Armstrong. In making the forecast, the economist cites the case of 90-year-old World War 2 veteran Arnold Abbott, who is being targeted by authorities in Fort Lauderdale for defying a...

Everyone has it wrong. Americans are frightened to death of the medical implications of Ebola- as well they should be. I’ve never in my lifetime seen a disease that has infected and killed so many healthcare professionals.Unfortunately I might have also been the first American to experience damage from Ebola to my “personal economy” 2 weeks ago. As a branding expert, I speak at business conventions and conferences all over the world. I had already been booked for weeks as the keynote speaker for an event in Dallas in early November. Then came the announcement that Thomas Duncan was being...

+50 GOP seats in the House - 'Armageddon' in the Senate A demoralized contributor to the Daily Kos has laid-out the cold, hard truth for any residual hopenchangey-types out there harboring dreams of Obama's ceaseless fundraising somehow riding in and saving-the-day...  That ain't gonna happen: rather, expect for the Democratic party -decimated perhaps now for years by the failed/nutty Obama agenda- to get their butts kicked all up-and-down the field in midterms just two weeks from today. And the wiser minds on the other side have sussed this by now- Dear Leader's approval is bouncing on a floor of all-time-lows, disillusioned...

Europe faces yet another recession, and the prospect is shaking global financial markets. To eliminate the persistent threat of collapse, Europe must drop the euro, and Germany must abandon mercantilism. When the euro was adopted in 1999, domestic prices -- the face values for bonds and loans -- and bank accounts were translated into euros according to prevailing exchange rates for national currencies at the time. Initially, the single currency posed few significant problems. Over time, however, differences in labor market policies and geographic conditions that are difficult for governments to alter caused productivity to grow more rapidly in Germany...

Steep stock market corrections often create shrouds of pessimism that do bad things to people’s brainpower. And one of the absolutely stupidest things I have heard in recent weeks is that the recent drop in oil prices is bad. You heard me right. Serious people on financial television are saying lower oil prices are a signal of worldwide economic collapse. Here at home that translates to recession, deflation, a profits collapse and rising unemployment. I’ve been around for a while, and I’ve seldom heard such gibberish. The latest stock market scare stems from a bunch of fears — such as...

Oct 10 (Reuters) - Regulators from the United States and the United Kingdom will get together in a war room next week to see if they can cope with any possible fall-out when the next big bank topples over, the two countries said on Friday. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew and the UK's Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, on Monday will run a joint exercise simulating how they would prop up a large bank with operations in both countries that has landed in trouble. Also taking part are Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen and Bank of England Governor Mark Carney,...

There was, however, a big problem. Because while according to the BLS survey employers have almost never had more open positions, they have also decided to put an abrupt stop to hiring, something which certainly points to a major disconnect in the US labor market.

On October 3, on the Fox News program Outnumbered, Kirsten Powers said she was very surprised that the vomitus and feces of Liberian national Thomas Duncan were not immediately cleaned up, but remained in an apartment complex in the Dallas area for about 10 days. She said, in effect, surely there are people standing ready in the United States to clean up immigrants’ lethal bodily fluids. Thomas Duncan is not to blame for the crisis of viruses popping up across the United States – the politics of Kirsten Powers are to blame. In her widely read articles and statements, Ms....

I'm surprised that I haven't seen any wargaming thoughts on how Ebola Virus is going to play-out in the US in the coming weeks, months and years. Watching how Duncan was managed in Texas does not give me any confidence that the feds or state health authorities have a clue what to do and are totally disorganized and unprepared. This is surprising given the fact we've had almost 40 years of knowledge of and experience with hemorrhagic viruses from Central Africa including Marburg, Lassa, and Ebola. You'd think that every health agency in the country would have figured out how...

By Michael Snyder, on September 16th, 2014Volcanic Eruption The number of volcanoes that are erupting continues to rise, and scientists cannot seem to explain why this is happening. In 2013, we witnessed the most volcanic eruptions worldwide that we have ever seen in a single year, and this increased activity has carried over into 2014. In recent months, we have seen major volcanoes roar to life in Russia, Peru, Hawaii, Reunion Island, Indonesia, and all over Alaska. It is highly unusual for so many volcanoes to all be erupting at the same time. According to Volcano Discovery, a whopping 34...

I am a Chinese working as a China analyst at a think tank. It is becoming more and more apparent to many people, that the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) knows it is on its last straw of survival. The party is facing severe and endlessly increasing systematic stress on all fronts: 1. Increasing external oppositions from all other countries in the world including all of China's neighbours. They are forming more and more alliances and becoming more outspoken with rising strengths against China, in addition to increasing anti-China sentiment from people in all other countries. Many countries including Canada...

What is driving the mad march toward World War III? Gerald Celente and Rick discuss the question.

Tyler Durden 08/26/2014 After spending time in Argentina, BofA's Marcos Buscaglia is concerned... The perception of many locals is that the risks of an economic/currency crisis before year-end have increased significantly. This compares to a view they had before of a muddle-through till the 2015 presidential elections. Policy decision-making is ever more concentrated, and the administration has radicalized, but the severe economic downturn will change political incentives in 2015, in BofA's view. With the official peso rate at record lows once again, the black-market Dolar-Blue tumbled to over 14/USD - a record low indicating dramatic devaluation ahead (which of course,...

So what’s really going on? We are in a structural depression that began in 2007 and will continue indefinitely. A lot of people don’t understand the definition of an economic depression. They believe that it means a continuous decline in GDP. Put differently: If two quarters of declining GDP mark a recession than a depression must be a long string of declining GDP. But that’s not the definition. A depression does not mean that you have no growth. You can have growth in a depression, it just means the growth is below trend. But all the policy makers think we’re...

August 24, 2014 By: Money_Morning Shah Gilani writes: This is a warning. I’m not kidding.I heard something yesterday that blew me away. My friends know I like to target shoot. I don’t hunt, because I can’t kill anything living, but I like guns. Maybe it has something to do with wanting to be James Bond when I was a kid… OK, I still want to be 007. As other target shooters know, it’s gotten harder and harder to get ammunition. Fo a few years now, all kinds of stuff have been going around on the Internet about why ammunition is...

When a senior Obama member allegedly told Kyle Bass, the founder and principal of the $2 billion hedge fund, Hayman Capital Management, “We’re just going to kill the dollar,” during a discussion about fixing the trade deficit and economy, was that Obama official joking or serious? I set out to find out and contacted the White House, Treasury Department and Department of Justice (DoJ). Kill the dollar. Kill a nation. Live in denial and be blindsided if what the senior Obama member allegedly said to Bass was true. Ask the Russians what life was like in the former Soviet Union...

Billionaire investor George Soros has increased his financial bet that U.S. stocks will collapse to more than $2 billion. The legendary hedge fund manager has been raising his negative bet on the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index since late last year. The latest 13-F filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission shows that Soros Fund Management increased its position in “puts” on the SPDR S&P 500 exchange-traded fund by a staggering amount in the second quarter from the first. …

The heartbreaking images are forever engrained in many of our minds. Friday marks the seventh anniversary of when the 35W Bridge came crashing down during the evening rush hour in 2007. A total of 13 people were killed and 145 were hurt. Ana Vences was one of 52 children on a school bus coming home from a field trip when the bridge collapsed. " I saw dust out of nowhere, then I feel like we flew and we all hit the ceiling of the bus and then we collapsed and landed somewhere." said Ana Vences. Every one of the children...

he collapse of talks with U.S. creditors sent Argentina into its second debt default in 13 years and raised questions about what comes next for financial markets and the South American nation's staggering economy.

July 29, 2014 Harry Dent Harry Dent writes: Central bankers think they can keep their economy going by artificial stimulus until they hit escape velocity and grow at normal rates again — but they’re wrong. Here at Dent Research we hold a different view to what drives the economy. And central bankers are in for three big surprises ahead. Their economies are NOT going to grow the way they’re hoping, at least not until the early 2020s, thanks to declining demographic cycles and unprecedented debt ratios. But the surprises I’m talking about are going to come out of left field...

We are now in a situation where every major economy in the world is in a total mess.” Greyerz goes on to explain, “Japan’s economy is going to disappear into the Pacific. China is having its problems. Europe has problems. The EU will never work and was not supposed to work. The euro is an artificial currency and, in the long run, will not survive. The U.S. stock market is at an all-time high, but that has nothing to do with the real economy which is an absolute mess. So, the world has never been in a situation where all...

On October, 2011, amid a lethargic economic recovery, President Barack Obama – a man who prided himself on ending wars, not starting them – touted his foreign policy successes. Beyond the successful raid that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden, Obama noted that he had successfully solved two thorny international puzzles; ending the war in Iraq and successfully prosecuting a brief campaign to stem the violence in Libya. In a speech in the White House, the president made the case for his own competency within an announcement regarding the beginning of the full withdrawal of American troops...

Ever wake up somedays and wonder why you work and put in the effort for others to leech off your hard work, especially those who are not even citizens. Ever just think about just throwing your arms up in the air and saying to hell with it and quitting your job or shutting down your business and becomming a deadbeat like the other people that some of your hard earned tax money goes to. Ever just wonder if we will never wake up again as country if you keep working hard to prop stuff up. Realizing that the only way...

Is this the reason for the blowout, on the surface, payroll number? In June the BLS reports that the number of full-time jobs tumbled by 523K to 118.2 million while part-time jobs soared by 799K to over 28 million!

June 27, 2014 Raul Meijer Oh Japan, what are you doing, where are you going? As Japanese consumer prices rose 3.4% in May (and I do wish people would stop calling this inflation, it is not and never will be), consumer spending was down -8.9% That is from a year earlier, so it has nothing to do with the April 1 tax hike! It’s an insane number when you think about it, and it’s the direct result of Abenomics tightening the thumb screws. With the population having seen their savings collapse, their wages move way down, and now rising prices...

For months the administration, financial pundits and Wall Street analysts made it a point to inform Americans about the healthy state of our economy. One of the key metrics they’ve used as proof of recovery was the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) which measures the productive output of the U.S. economy as a whole. Earlier this year the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis noted that this measure was showing positive growth. But now, after a second official revision, all of that purported growth used to goad consumers into spending more money on homes, cars and other goods has been revealed to...

In terms of giving insight into the current battles raging within the PC (USA) and the exodus of evangelical churches, the report is quite helpful. Consider the following statement: “only followers of Jesus Christ can be saved.” Among pastors, 45% disagreed or strongly disagreed. 41% agreed or strongly agreed. Among our clergy, there is a clearly demonstrable variance about a fundamental tenet of Christian belief that is central to the mission of the church—the proclamation of the Gospel. The Presbyterian Church (USA) recently released the findings of its “Religious and Demographic Profile of Presbyterians 2011” (the report). More than 6,000...

Does the economy move in predictable waves, cycles or patterns? There are many economists that believe that it does, and if their projections are correct, the rest of this decade is going to be pure hell for the United States. Many mainstream economists want nothing to do with economic cycle theorists, but it should be noted that economic cycle theories have enabled some analysts to correctly predict the timing of recessions, stock market peaks and stock market crashes over the past couple of decades. Of course none of the theories discussed below is perfect, but it is very interesting to...

Here Comes Congress' Next Big Economic Crisis, And It Could Be Even Worse Than The Fiscal Cliff Brett LoGiuratoMay 15, 2014, 10:51 AM We survived the fiscal cliff and the government shutdown. But there's another big battle brewing this summer between Congress and the Obama administration with dire economic consequences that could cost the country hundreds of thousands of jobs. And even though politicians on both sides of the aisle agree this disaster is "completely avoidable," all signs indicate we're on a collision course with crisis. On Wednesday, President Barack Obama gave his first formal warning about this impending self-inflicted...

SEOUL, May 18 (Yonhap) -- An apartment building under construction in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang has collapsed, causing an unspecified number of casualties, the state media reported Sunday. The North's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said the accident occurred in the Pyongchon District on May 13 as "the construction of an apartment house was not done properly, and officials supervised and controlled it in an irresponsible manner." The KCNA reported that a "state emergency mechanism" was formed to rescue survivors and treat the wounded, and senior officials met with bereaved families and citizens in the district to express...

Gerald Celente Finally Gives a Date for U.S. Economic Collapse Economics / US Economy May 03, 2014 - 07:54 AM GMTNadeem Walayat Gerald Celente, a popular gloom and doom blogger and publisher of the TR Journal finally gives a date for the always coming economic collapse that I must have been hearing about for 5 years now. WLW Radio - 30th April 2014 "Your predicting an economic collapse, when do you think that is going to happen Gerald?" "I am going to say by the end of the second quarter." - Gerald Celente Apparently the straw that broke the camels...

US Housing Market Is Down For The CountHousing-Market / US Housing Apr 27, 2014 - 10:55 PM GMTRaul I Meijer Recent news, graphs and data confirm what we have long said would inevitably become clear: the entire global economy appears to have “functioned” through an orgy of refinancing, LBO and M&A lately. That is to say, zombie money has been enthusiastically slushed and re-slushed around to provide commissions, bonuses etc. to bankers and brokers, a process enabled by central bank and government policies in which large amounts of credit were thrown against the wall like so much Jello, hoping –...

Write Down This Date: July 1st, 2014 On this date, U.S. House of Representatives Bill "H.R. 2847" goes into effect. It will usher in the true collapse of the U.S. dollar, and will make millions of Americans poorer, overnight. You now have just several months to prepare ... Snopes Opinion: Mixture of Truth & NonTruth Origins: This item about the passage of H.R. 2847 causing the U.S. dollar to collapse as of 1 July 2014 is another example financial scarelore put out in conjunction with an investment come-on, in this case an ominous sales pitch put out by the folks...

Spanish-Style Riots Coming To A Country Near YouJames GuzmanDollar Vigilante BlogApril 15, 2014 Screams and sirens pierce the air as rocks, firecrackers, and sharp glass go flying in every direction. Police try to beat back the hordes of protesters by smashing indiscriminately into the crowd with their billy clubs. This was the scene recently in Madrid, Spain, as tens of thousands of people took to the streets to fight against the budget cuts and tax increases put into place by Mariano Rajoy, the current Prime Minister of Spain. The protesters chanted “no more cuts” as they demolished storefronts and threw...

Recent weeks have led to a fairly significant drop in stock valuations, with many expert analysts struggling to figure out exactly why it’s happening. You’ll hear them cite the weather, or market overreaction, or any number of reasons for why stocks have seen their share prices reduced and why they’ll be rebounding in the near-term. What they won’t show you on mainstream financial channels is what’s really happening behind the scenes. Forget about all the minute-by-minute noise for a moment and take a look at the following chart. It gives a very simple overview of earnings growth trends for stocks...

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) said today that Americans need to stand up to "a deliberate plan by the president of the United States" to collapse the nation's law enforcement system regarding illegal immigration.