10,000 Syrians headed to America.......

How do you define a country?

Borders, language and culture.

Refugees flooding Europe,  Europe will disappear as we know it.

Why must America be invaded from within?

Met some interesting people today. It takes all kinds.

Don't judge the majority by yourself or those you associate with.

To quote Carlin, “Just think of how stupid the average person is, and then realize half of them are even stupider!” 

We didn't get to this point via an intelligent voting public.

Perfect summation of Native American higher education today............

Dr. Dean Chavers is director of Catching the Dream, a national scholarship program for Native college students. He invites students to contact him at CTD4DeanChavers@aol.com. They do not have enough applicants.

 

Indian Country, Your weekend primer on INFLATION

Happy Labor Day to one and all............

Submitted by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

In an article that first appeared in Fortune magazine on December 10, 2001, Warren Buffett penned a great letter about falling prices:

“When hamburgers go down in price, we sing the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ in the Buffett household. When hamburgers go up in price, we weep. For most people, it’s the same with everything in life they will be buying– except stocks. When stocks go down and you can get more for your money, people don’t like them anymore.”

He’s right. Any rational human being actually LIKES falling prices.

We enjoy getting a great deal, and we like it when our money goes further.

To Buffett’s point, investors are a major exception and prefer investing when prices go up, i.e. their money buys less of a high quality asset.

But there’s one more giant exception that Buffett didn’t mention: economists.

Economists quiver in fear at the prospect of falling prices.

They call it ‘deflation’, and it’s a force so dreaded that central bankers have threatened to drop bricks of cash from helicopters in order to prevent it.

Instead, economists prefer INFLATION, i.e. that the things you buy become more expensive.

We can look at official statistics to get a sense of inflation, but these numbers are totally meaningless.

When I was a kid, my father earned enough money to support his family with a single salary.

We had a house, a car, an occasional vacation, and we never missed a meal. All on one income.

But those days are long gone. Now it’s almost obligatory to live in a dual-income household just to make ends meet.

The official statistics never paint this picture.

They focus on some palatable number, telling us the inflation rate is 2%, and then adjust their computational methods to derive that figure.

In fact, the US federal government has changed the way it calculates inflation at least twenty times since the mid 1980s.

And it’s obvious that they have a huge incentive to do so.

The #1 expense of the federal government today is the mandatory entitlement programs that are paid out to seniors in the US– primarily Social Security.

It’s nearing $1 trillion annually and eats up a third of all tax revenue.

The government is required by law to increase the amount of money paid to Social Security recipients each year through what’s called a COLA, or cost of living adjustment.

Essentially they’re adjusting your monthly Social Security payment to keep up with inflation. Or at least, the inflation that they’re willing to admit.

This is where they have a huge incentive to fudge the numbers.

If the real rate of inflation is 5%, but they only give a 2% COLA, the government saves 3%. That’s almost $30 billion.

(Ironically this is 3x the size of the annual budget for the Department of Labor, which is responsible for calculating the inflation statistics.)

But by doing this the government is effectively stealing from seniors.

There’s actually been a new law proposed in Congress to prevent this from happening anymore.

It’s known as HR 3074, and it was written “for the purpose of establishing an accurate Social Security COLA. . .”

So even the government admits that their inflation numbers are a bunch of baloney.

But sadly, according to the legislative watchdog GovTrack.us, this bill has a 0% chance of being passed. So I wouldn’t expect a solution anytime soon.

In fact, this problem will likely get worse given how transfixed economists are on the deflation threat.

Their concern is that the Chinese economic slowdown and currency devaluation will cause a wave of falling prices around the world.

But there’s a very curious effect at work here that most people forget:

It’s entirely possible (and now very likely) to have BOTH inflation AND deflation. At the same time.

Assets and investments can fall, while at the same time the prices of retail goods and services rise.

In other words, the value of your investment portfolio goes down, but your grocery bill goes up.

It’s also important to point out that not all prices rise and fall equally.

Gas prices may be down from a year ago in the US. But as the recently-released Hotels.com Hotel Price Index shows, hotel prices are up sharply.

Salt Lake City: 8%. Raleigh: 5%. Portland: 9%. Washington DC: 5%. Los Angeles: 8%.

I’ve seen the effects of this dual inflation/deflation phenomenon as I’ve traveled around the world in places like Argentina, Greece, and Indonesia.

It is a very real threat. And it may now be coming to US shores.

But everyone is focused exclusively on the deflation side.

You’ll get laughed at in financial circles if you mention the word ‘inflation’ anymore. It’s being completely ignored… even denied.

They’re pretending like half the problem doesn’t even exist, which is seriously foolish.

Inflation is a long-term disease. Quarter by quarter the numbers may change. But over the long run it’s like a cancer, slowly eating away at your lifestyle.

It’s not a question of either/or. It’s not a debate over inflation VS. deflation.It’s only a matter of WHEN we’ll end up with BOTH. And how well you’re prepared for it.

U.S. Iran Treaty

The spineless gutless Senate of the United States doesn't attempt to stop this deal.

Fully bought and paid for.

100 losers. 

From Joe Saluzzi, institutional broker at THEMIS TRADING

Below is a letter that we think the stock exchanges should be sending to investors:

Dear Investors,

The last few weeks have exposed that our equity markets are not as liquid as we have long claimed mainly due to market fragmentation and the lack of diverse liquidity pools.

Mini flash crashes and larger events like the ETF flash crash of August 24th are proof that our current stock exchange model which has formed in the wake of Reg NMS has been a failure.  High speed traders have been able to game this model largely with our assistance.  We have developed a two tier market and have given special advantages to those that are willing to pay for services like colocation, private gateways and proprietary data feeds.  We have also given out billions of dollars in rebates over the past few years to entice more high speed volume.  Essentially, we have courted speed at the expense of price discovery.

The rise of dark pools is another sign that our model has failed. Institutional investors who have sought alternatives to our visible markets (which have become infested with predators looking for any signal to pick off an institutional or even retail order) have been led into a much murkier and even more predatory market.   Recent record setting, multi-million dollar fines against brokers and banks who run these dark pools have proven that they are far from the safe alternative.

The August 24th ETF flash crash was a dramatic liquidity event that shocked many investors.  Unfortunately, we’ll continue to have these type of events until regulators realize that we have a market design problem.  On August 24th, there were numerous trades which received inferior prices and were not broken.  Most likely many of these were caused by market orders that might have been activated by stop-loss orders placed by retail investors.  Since most brokers didn’t file a clearly erroneous trade report within thirty minutes of the trade, many investors were stuck with fills that were far away from the implied value of the ETF.  We didn’t break any of these trades because we didn’t know where to draw the line like we arbitrarily did after the May 6, 2010 Flash Crash. We also didn’t want to leave our market makers with a one sided position that was unhedged.  Sorry about that.

We think many of today’s market structure problems were actually caused by poorly designed regulations, most notably Reg NMS.  Prior to Reg NMS, the NYSE relied on specialists to provide a fair and orderly market in return for the right to have a franchise for a particular stock at the exchange.  Reg NMS made this model obsolete and a new competing DMM model was developed. This DMM model does not rely on customer orders and has very few obligations leaving the market vulnerable in times of stress.  To make matters worse, on the recent volatile days of the past few weeks, the NYSE has chosen to invoke Rule 48 since they do not have enough employees to effectively handle the opening process which is one of their most important functions.

Signs of stress are also building within our own stock exchange community.  Just like when the SIP crashed a few years ago, we in the exchange community are once again pointing fingers at each other.  Chris Conacannon, CEO of BATS, is not a fan of the quasi-human model that NYSE employs and told the WSJ  that “NYSE Group’s process for opening trading on stocks listed at the exchange was “broken” and that major changes needed to be made to protect investors from future problems.  He said:

“No one on the planet operates that way, and no one should operate that way,” he said in an interview, adding that he sees “very limited value” in the use of humans on the trading floor. 

NYSE shot back and reminded everybody that BATS couldn’t even trade their own IPO:

“As BATS experienced with its IPO, relying exclusively on technology for opening stocks and IPOs can have disastrous consequences,” she said, referring to BATS’ decision to cancel its IPO in 2012 because of a glitch in its trading system.”

So what do we do now?  We’re really not sure.  We’ve already tried the “Grand Bargain” but that seems to be a bust now since so many dark pools are being fined by the SEC.  We doubt the regulators are going to help much since, to borrow a phrase from Bloomberg’s Mike Regan, they are more akin to “mall cops on Segways trying to chase after high speed Maserati’s”.  We wish we could offer an alternative but our short-term, for-profit model leads us to support the status quo.

In the meantime, try not to enter any market orders and be sure to file that clearly erroneous trade report within 30 minutes of the next liquidity event.

Sincerely,

The Stock Exchanges

Gutless Republican Alert...........

You fat cats need to figure out what you're going to do about these classified Clinton emails on her private server.  Are you going to hold Clinton accountable or not? 

How are you going to explain to the public that she is above the law?

America wants to know. 

Bend Over America and Pony Up

Total Cost of Wars Since 2001

 

Every hour, taxpayers in United States are paying $8.36 million for Total Cost of Wars' Since 2001.

$1,636,507,355,079

https://www.nationalpriorities.org/cost-of/war/