Wake Up America?

I was recently referred to this article in an email.  It's by Gates, Bill Gates, the one we all know.  It seems it's been floating around and referred to by quite a number of publications.

Gates IS the anti-Christ right now.  He is THE DEFINITION of the problem we are in.  He is 15% of WHO budget and 85% of it's mouthpiece. He is the mouthpiece of the billionaires and his foundation has the influence of a nation.  He is one of the most frightening people alive!

 

This is the biggest piece of PR I have ever seen coming from Gates.  He knows he is the MAN NUMBER ONE in the drive to shut down the world and this is his "excuse / justification" letter to the world to cover his ass.   I don't even have to pick it apart as I intended.  I can see it for what it is.

I was in Asia for 6 months from August to March.  The Chinese and other parts of  SE Asia were fighting a pig pandemic, bird pandemic and then a people pandemic.  The pig and bird ones were extremely deadly on those populations. There were quarantines all over Asia and Millions of pigs were killed in China and other countries.  It was a huge disaster (and still is).  In the Philippines there were restrictions on travel, transport etc on pigs.  Huge!  They were lucky the bird diseases were not present.  

Where is Gates in recognizing these pandemics?  Are they not relevant? Do these pandemics that massively affect food supply and need huge investment by governments to track them, cull massive herds of animals and quarantine entire regions and countries to control these pandemics not instructive of what needs to be done? Are they not exactly what we should be focused on and learning from?  Why does he not even discuss what we have learned from these other animal diseases?  OMG I am just fuming right now.

He is defending himself to the hilt in this letter!  Reading it is like a summary.  It is a waste of time.  Sorry I have been reading alot about this virus and associated situations around the world and trust me, this virus is not anything like what he is talking about.  Ebola, yea, MERS, yea, the earlier version of SARS, yea, HIV, yea... This NO WAY.  They missed it.  Sorry, this was a huge mistake and he is trying to justify his panic and destruction of the global economy.

Sorry, I know enough about many of our self important billionaires and they don't often have the common sense of a doorknob. The amount of influence in the US government by billionaires and their think tanks are a direct example of how completely dysfunctional a nation can be when these idiots run it.  I don't give a damn how many billions he made by accident, luck, the network effect or whatever you want to call it.  That does not give him the right to shut down the world.  He is in his bubble and he has been instrumental in derailing the progress of 40 years of efforts by every international organization on the planet to reduce poverty.  Even though many of those efforts are blatantly fraudulent, self serving, useless and downright detrimental to the people they are supposed to serve, at least with half a century of offshoring our dirty industrial production we have managed to lift a couple billion people out of poverty (while keeping our own stagnant at best). Though with the global population exploding over that time the absolute numbers from a practical standpoint are still precarious at best.  Where is Gates in recognizing how badly he has f&*%ed things up?  There is NO RECOVERING from what he has done for tens of millions if not billions of people who tomorrow are starving, relying on menial handouts from their governments to survive! 

You know what kills more people in the world then all disease put together?  Poverty. What has Gates done?  Think about it.  More people in the Philippines will die from ulcers this year then this stupid virus.  You know why?  They are to poor to afford the medicines produced by the multinationals that have been pumping out the same medicines for years and continue to increase the prices every damn year no matter how long the technology has been around or how cheaply they can be produced.  It is about profit.  Where is Gates on talking about this?  He is in bed with big Pharma.  He is one evil billionaire bastard who we would be better off if he would just go self-quarantine for the next 10 years!  

The Medical Industrial Complex of America is near 20% of our GDP. This is up from 5% 50 years ago.  How is this even possible?  We are the most medicated people on the planet by a factor of 5x or more.  We pay 4-10x what other nations do for every damn thing we get in return for our money in medical care and there are NO statistics that show we are better for it! In fact with the opioid epidemic of the last 20 years (70,000 dead a year) we have metrics that have worsened.  Add the fact we are the guinea pigs of the world to the Industrial Agricultural Complex with the horrible health effects to show for it (digestive issues are a virtual epidemic here, along with preventable diabetes, hypertension etc.) and we are arguably the sickest population of any industrial world as well.  

Then what do you see on Mass Media?  Glorification of medical workers.  NO MENTION that its THE Medical Industrial Complex that bankrupts more people in the country then any other source, that steals billions form taxpayers by overcharging for these absolutely ridiculously useless "health plans" under the "Government Health Plans" that are nothing but massive middle man HMO's that rake billions out of the system and fuel huge profits. The billionaire CEO's, the massive buy backs, the idiots that run the FTC allowing mergers for years to the point there are just a few companies left that manage and run everything from wholesale drug sales, retail drug sales, insurance, health maintenance organizations, corporate health plans, actual medical services and hospitals; all integrated into giant oligopoly companies!  These firms will not even do business where they can't guarantee huge profits, they just walk!  Add big pharma..Don't even get me started there!  And these IDIOTS could not handle this virus!

Why has NOT ONE "reporter" called out the industry on this?  Why do you see nothing on this?  Cause the billionaires in the Medical Industrial Complex are HUGE advertisers for the oligopoly media and huge financiers of our politicians and there is NO WAY in hell either will embarrass the industry that feeds them.  Instead there are millions of dollars in PR money to fog the public and give them another round of "hero" BS to cheer on... Look back just over the last 20 years... 9/11, solders are heroes and Military Industrial Complex gets a "blank check" to invade everywhere and anywhere to "kill them terrorists"  What do we have now?  $11 trillion in debt directly attributable to their adventures around the world, drones killing indiscriminately, thousands of dead and maimed Americans and tens of thousands dead everywhere we went, almost all of that money spent killing people that literally live in mud huts!! And nobody calls them out!!! NOBODY! Then financial crises... Do we get angry and go after the criminals?  No!  Millions of dollars in PR money go in to a global campaign to glorify entrepreneurs and I could go on for pages about that distraction... Now we have this latest shit show and the PR that deflects again... Where will this BS end. When will people wake the f&%k up? 

Where is Gates in making all this obvious?  Why is the same government that says government involvement in health care is socialist taking over the procurement of necessary medical supplies?  Why are they granting billions to the industry that is stealing the life out of our people and economy and bankrupting our nation?  All this is so f&*$ed up I cannot even fathom putting it all in here!

So yea, the letter is informational and right between the lines of EXACTLY how "educated" people should be thinking (being distracted) about this shit show Gates has put on the planet cause you sure don't want people really thinking about what the f&%k is going on cause they might get right out of their chairs and away from their tiny little screens and start some kind of revolution! 

Central Banks Perpetual Crises Mindset

I ran across this article today: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-21/inside-the-global-hunt-for-a-better-way-to-measure-the-economy

It is interesting that over just the last 30 days or so there is a "buzz" around the financial community about the validity and usefulness of GDP in measuring output and of course this is another way for those who believe the Central Banks desperately need to "normalize" interest rates to get their point across.

Aside of the special interest's motivations, three of my potential thesis are being reflected in this trend, 1) I believe all measures of GDP need to be drastically revamped as traditional measures of collecting the data are vastly outdated and 2) employment numbers and productivity need drastic new looks as the dramatic declines in labor participation in the US are not consistent with consumer purchasing power / stats and 3) Economist need to broaden their measures of productivity in the new economy of Uber's and Air BnB's of the world and understand that productivity is no longer a measure of just "producers" productivity, but that now, all assets in the economy, need to be factored in.  People are renting their houses, cars, labor etc. in disruptive ways never before done and till now not accurately measured in data that are influencing the central banks policies.  These are all tied together.

This is the first article I have seen mentioning, albeit not convincingly or with any detail, some of the factors I believe need to be addressed.   So I thought I would share :-)

My latest theory is a little less tangible.  It has to do with what happens when Economist / Central Bankers themselves become victims of a kind of a perpetual lack of ability to understand they to can be influenced by "behavior patterns" and "psychological factors" so often measured by Economist on consumer behavior and their "behavior patterns" can lead to irrational decision making.  I believe they were so spooked by the global financial crises / credit freeze in 2008/9 they can no longer see clearly.  No matter what happens in the economy, they can find 2-3 "global" trends that continue to drive their thinking in a perpetual crises mindset. They simply no longer see clearly.  They have completely lost faith in the "free market" model.  They think more and more like the Chinese, where understanding of market fundamentals is translated by central planners to direct intervention in an attempt to "create" these fundamentals through "force" vs understanding that all economic theory comes from human behavior and that this behavior creates economies that in turn create observable market forces that become that theory one can study and write about.  There is no way to reverse this and force it to happen without allowing markets to determine a given outcome and or understanding markets will be severely disrupted if one attempts to do so.

To ignore economic fundamentals and market forces is leading us to the point where the destructiveness of Central Bank policies are parallel to the kind of problems that happen during traditional bubble psychology, where all "investors" act irrationally until the entire thing collapses.  In summary, the global mind think of Central Banks / Traditional Economic theorists is stuck in crises mode and their actions are leading the entire global financial system to a huge cliff.  It's time for them to look in the mirror and understand where they are headed before it's to late.

Just a small thought, and to think Market Psychology and Consumer Behavior are my two least favorite areas in Economics :-)

Finally an "Authority" Advocates Re-regulation

I was in University in the late 1980's and early 1990's studying economics at the University of Maryland when I was faced with two options, grow the company I started or pursue my masters in Economics with my thesis being the need for an international financial regulatory authority. At the time I had lofty ideas of becoming a global economic guru who would advocate the abandonment of the archaic, inefficient, unfair, and destructive way economics was dealt with on an international level. Human beings had managed to create highly sophisticated financial "systems" and global financial "markets" that were rapidly evolving but unfortunately the perspective of human beings was Neanderthalistic.

I had the benefit of studying Economics during the collapse of the S&L industry in the US along with a real estate bust, junk bond market implosion and fairly severe recession. I also was a "student" of economics and finance through real world experience and investing from 1981 which allowed me to experience the severe 1982 recession in the US, the Latin American debt crises, gold price explosion and implosion, oil price implosion and the first destructive false economic "growth" experiment of supply side economics by the Reagan Administration (accompanied by military welfare spending and enemy creation) and brilliantly orchestrated junk bond bubble and accompanying corporate buy out craze.

It was obvious to me during my studies we had a systematically flawed economic model functioning on a national and global scale and there were no way the idiots with ass backwards motivations who ran this model and all of its intuitions would be able to do anything that would be a net benefit to humanity. The same holds true today.

So I had the absolute pleasure of reading this article today on Marketwatch about what Henry Kaufman thinks of the global mess we are in.

Notably his statement:

A: The expectation certainly has to be that the banks are undercapitalized, quite a number of them. There are still probably some additional write-offs to be taken. The value of assets are not down yet to what they are supposed to be marked down to. This would seem to me to be an ongoing problem until we see some improvement in economic activity.

There are further issues facing the banking system. There will have to be a re-regulation of the financial system.

My recommendation has been the centralization of the supervision of the financial markets. Let there be one major oversight institution over markets and institutions. The head of that oversight group should sit as a vice-chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. The chairman of the Fed and the head of this oversight group [should] render an annual report to Congress showing what the financial health is of, say, the 25 largest financial institutions of the U.S. And that body should also provide a credit rating for each of those 25 institutions.

And his further remarks:

A: The Federal Reserve has admitted that the deregulation that has occurred has been a mistake. The Fed will support some re-regulation. It has not indicated what the magnitude of that re-regulation will be. Neither will the U.S. Treasury.

The Federal Reserve and the Treasury over the last two decades have let the financial markets be on a deregulated basis. We did not supervise financial institutions tightly. The assumption by the authorities, the kind of belief by the Treasury and the Federal Reserve was that those who do well will prosper in the financial markets, those who do poorly will fail. That of course was not allowed to happen because we just don't allow big institutions to fail because of the systemic risks they pose to the entire world and the system at large in the U.S.

As a result, financial markets were allowed to end up in all sorts of risky ventures, and this contributed to the mishaps that we have today.

We live in global financial markets. We have institutions that operate on a global basis. Therefore, we should have an international oversight group over major financial institutions regardless of whether they're in London, New York, Paris or Tokyo. They should come under one major supervisory authority. That authority should set requirements for capital should set rulings for types of leverage that the institution can undertake, should set training practices for the major markets.
If we do not have a unified supervision, the business will flow to those markets that are most liberal. And those markets will then create havoc for the rest of the international financial groups.

I think there's more support coming for that now than when I first wrote about this 15, 20 years ago because I see France pushing in that direction. The Europeans on the Continent are pushing in that direction. The only ones I haven't heard from on this are the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury.

Yes it pleases me greatly to know I was thinking ahead of this smart man. In fact what his article brings to mind were the few (far to few when I think back) conversations I had when I took the liberty of knocking on the door of one of my professors from time to time to ask their opinion of what was happening in the "real economic world" outside of the somewhat antiquated textbooks I had to study with.

If I had a chance to do it all over again I am still not sure I would have taken the path of furthering my economics education instead of pursuing my business. I was very turned off by the bureaucratic and pathetic "counseling" at the state university. When I initially inquired about the masters program they looked at my completed transcripts and suggested I had 2 semesters of classes that were required just to apply (I was like, why in the hell didn't you spell that out when I started my major, idiot?) and the fact that the University of Maryland for all it's efforts was basically churning out graduates to fill a cube at the Department of Labor crunching boring ass stats for yet more bureaucrats. Economics was going through it's "mathematicization" phase and I did not see the subject in the same light.

Perhaps this has something to do with the mess we are in now. Not unlike the "magic" of any idiot being able to create an impressive business plan and financial projection with the wider use of computers and the newly accessible spreadsheet programs in the 1980's that in my view had a great impression on the flow of money then, the movement of Economics by people determined to make it more of a "science" through the use of statistics, mathematics and computer models totally devalued what I saw as the beauty of economics as a social science that could have better application using some of the emerging technologies but not for those technologies to "take over" the discipline in entirety.

I strongly believe the current crises once again came greatly by application of sophisticated mathematics and technology in the creation of financial products that on paper made "investors" believe anything and any return was possible if you could "hedge", "buy protection for" and or otherwise "remove responsibility for losses" through securitization which resulted in the explosion of credit and unbelievably cheap prices.

I have been saying for more than three years now that all of this "protection" was nothing but a house of cards, not to mention the "false" profits created in the sale of the products themselves and it would not last longer than early 2008. Well here we are. We are nowhere near bottom and finally some "smart" people who did stay in the wonderful discipline of Economics, and who shared my views, are being listened to. God bless them...