Next Up For Our Chaotic World
From Mish regarding the opinions of Stanley Druckenmiller:
- “Gold is the superior asset in present part of cycle
- Fed is lost – totally lost and nothing they say match their action
- Negative interest is worst policy mistake ever
- Debt is and remains the elephant in the room”
“Stanley Druckenmiller warned on Wednesday that the Federal Reserve’s low-rate policy is creating vast long-run risks for the US economy.”
“… most of the debt today has been used for financial engineering in the form of stock buybacks and other methods that provide a boon to corporate profits…”
“I have argued that the myopic policy makers have no endgame, billionaire Stanley Druckenmiller said towards the end of a scathing twenty minute romp through all the world’s economic problems.
From The Telegraph regarding global economies:
The Washington political class always has suffered from insularity, as their surprise at the rise of Trump shows. An early version of this blindness occurred in 1816 when members of the 14th Congress voted to more than double their pay to a princely $1,500 annually, (about $25,000 in 2016 dollars), a sum much larger than the earnings of almost every voter in the country.
Lance Roberts of Real Investment Advice blog plucked this from a recent post by Daniel Thornton, a longtime economic advisor at the St. Louis Fed, and asked the question: “Is this the scariest chart out there?” Basically, it goes all the way back to 1952 to show just how out of whack household net worth has become. As you can see, the last two times there was a big trend divergence, a bust soon followed. Thornton describes it as “monetary and fiscal policy insanity,” and predicts there’s more to come when the bubble bursts — which could be as soon as this year.
The scenario presented above uses BP’s Energy Outlook 2035, published in Feb 2016. This outlook does not extend to 2040 and maximum output is 88 Mb/d in 2035 at the end of the scenario. This scenario is still optimistic, but is more reasonable than the EIA AEO 2016. Extraction rates rise to 10.6 percent and the annual decline rate rises to 2.5 percent in 2042 and is reduced to less than 2 percent by 2053.
A Blizzard of Bad News
A perfect blizzard of bad news predictions compels
me to return to the charge on the EU referendum.
First, we had David Cameron and a swarm of former US secretaries and NATO generals telling us the world will be engulfed in war and ‘terrorism’ if the UK leaves the EU.
This is straight out of the fruitcake department.
I’m surprised they didn’t invoke the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Then we had another crowd whose chief claim to fame was to miss the most catastrophic economic event since the Great Depression, the 2007/8 crash, warning of economic meltdown if we leave.
So let us set the record straight. The EU had no bearing on our sending troops to Iraq, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Mali, Libya or Syria.
Nor has it stopped us supplying weapons and equipment to Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Bahrain, the Israelis and an assortment of ‘rebel’ groups.
We also supported the overthrow of democratically elected governments in Egypt and Ukraine – and, as I write, in Brazil.
