Apple plans to spend $ 100 billion over the next two-and-a-half years to ease investor concerns over the company’s shifting share prices.
Earnings season continues on Wall Street with Procter & Gamble, Ford, Boeing, Qualcomm, and Eli Lilly & Co. all reporting today.
Walmart is losing its image man. Leslie Dach, executive vice president of corporate affairs at Walmart, will be stepping down this summer after seven years on the job.
Correlation is not causation; but coincidence means you’re on the right path. Looking at the charts of Stocks, Commodities, and Precious Metals, we wonder just what it was that President Obama said at his 11am ET White House meeting last Thursday…
Equity markets soared out of the gate on the 11th. Jobless claims beat expectations handily (shaking off the previous week’s concerns) and all was well in the world… until just after 11am ET (when the CEOs of Wall Street’s big banks – for no apparent reason – met with President Obama)… and this happened…
Gold also peaked at just after 11am ET…
as did Crude oil…
So what did Obama tell them?
Charts: Bloomberg
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When I heard that there were homeless people living in a network of underground tunnels beneath the streets of Kansas City, I was absolutely stunned. I have relatives that live in that area. I never thought of Kansas City as one of the more troubled cities in the United States.
But according to the Daily Mail, police recently discovered a network of tunnels under the city that people had been living in…
Below the streets of Kansas City, there are deep underground tunnels where a group of vagrant homeless people lived in camps.
These so-called homeless camps have now been uncovered by the Kansas City Police, who then evicted the residents because of the unsafe environment.
Authorities said these people were living in squalor, with piles of garbage and dirty diapers left around wooded areas.
The saddest part is the fact that authorities found dirty diapers in the areas near these tunnels. That must mean that babies were being raised in that kind of an environment.
Unfortunately, this kind of thing is happening all over the nation. In recent years, the tunnel people of Las Vegas have received quite a bit of publicity all over the world. It has been estimated that more than 1,000 people live in the massive network of flood tunnels under the city…
Deep beneath Vegas’s glittering lights lies a sinister labyrinth inhabited by poisonous spiders and a man nicknamed The Troll who wields an iron bar.
But astonishingly, the 200 miles of flood tunnels are also home to 1,000 people who eke out a living in the strip’s dark underbelly.
Some, like Steven and his girlfriend Kathryn, have furnished their home with considerable care – their 400sq ft ‘bungalow’ boasts a double bed, a wardrobe and even a bookshelf.
Could you imagine living like that? Sadly, for an increasing number of Americans a “normal lifestyle” is no longer an option. Either they have to go to the homeless shelters or they have to try to eke out an existence on their own any way that they can.
In New York City, authorities are constantly trying to root out the people that live in the tunnels under the city and yet they never seem to be able to find them all. The following is from a New York Post article about the “Mole People” that live underneath New York City…
The homeless people who live down here are called Mole People. They do not, as many believe, exist in a separate, organized underground society. It’s more of a solitary existence and loose-knit community of secretive, hard-luck individuals.
The New York Post followed one homeless man known as “John Travolta” on a tour through the underground world. What they discovered was a world that is very much different from what most New Yorkers experience…
In the tunnels, their world is one of malt liquor, tight spaces, schizophrenic neighbors, hunger and spells of heat and cold. Travolta and the others eat fairly well, living on a regimented schedule of restaurant leftovers, dumped each night at different times around the neighborhood above his foreboding home.
Even as the Dow hits record high after record high, poverty in New York City continues to rise at a very frightening pace. Incredibly, the number of homeless people sleeping in the homeless shelters of New York City has increased by a whopping 19 percent over the past year.
In many of our major cities, the homeless shelters are already at maximum capacity and are absolutely packed night after night. Large numbers of homeless people are often left to fend for themselves.
That is one reason why we have seen the rise of so many tent cities.
Yes, the tent cities are still there, they just aren’t getting as much attention these days because they do not fit in with the “economic recovery” narrative that the mainstream media is currently pushing.
In fact, many of the tent cities are larger than ever. For example, you can check out a Reuters video about a growing tent city in New Jersey that was posted on YouTube at the end of March right here. A lot of these tent cities have now become permanent fixtures, and unfortunately they will probably become much larger when the next major economic crisis strikes.
But perhaps the saddest part of all of this is the massive number of children that are suffering night after night.
For the first time ever, more than a million public school children in the United States are homeless. That number has risen by 57 percent since the 2006-2007 school year.
So if things are really “getting better”, then why in the world do we have more than a million public school children without homes?
These days a lot of families that have lost their homes have ended up living in their vehicles. The following is an excerpt from a 60 Minutes interview with one family that is living in their truck…
This is the home of the Metzger family. Arielle,15. Her brother Austin, 13. Their mother died when they were very young. Their dad, Tom, is a carpenter. And, he’s been looking for work ever since Florida’s construction industry collapsed. When foreclosure took their house, he bought the truck on Craigslist with his last thousand dollars. Tom’s a little camera shy – thought we ought to talk to the kids – and it didn’t take long to see why.
Pelley: How long have you been living in this truck?
Arielle Metzger: About five months.
Pelley: What’s that like?
Arielle Metzger: It’s an adventure.
Austin Metzger: That’s how we see it.
Pelley: When kids at school ask you where you live, what do you tell ‘em?
Austin Metzger: When they see the truck they ask me if I live in it, and when I hesitate they kinda realize. And they say they won’t tell anybody.
Arielle Metzger: Yeah it’s not really that much an embarrassment. I mean, it’s only life. You do what you need to do, right?
But after watching a news report or reading something on the Internet about these people we rapidly forget about them because they are not a part of “our world”.
Another place where a lot of poor people end up is in prison. In a previous article, I detailed how the prison population in the United States has been booming in recent years. If you can believe it, the United States now has approximately 25 percent of the entire global prison population even though it only has about 5 percent of the total global population.
And these days it is not just violent criminals that get thrown into prison. If you lose your job and get behind on your bills, you could be thrown into prison as well. The following is from a recent CBS News article…
Roughly a third of U.S. states today jail people for not paying off their debts, from court-related fines and fees to credit card and car loans, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. Such practices contravene a 1983 United States Supreme Court ruling that they violate the Constitutions’s Equal Protection Clause.
Some states apply “poverty penalties,” such as late fees, payment plan fees and interest, when people are unable to pay all their debts at once. Alabama charges a 30 percent collection fee, for instance, while Florida allows private debt collectors to add a 40 percent surcharge on the original debt. Some Florida counties also use so-called collection courts, where debtors can be jailed but have no right to a public defender. In North Carolina, people are charged for using a public defender, so poor defendants who can’t afford such costs may be forced to forgo legal counsel.
The high rates of unemployment and government fiscal shortfalls that followed the housing crash have increased the use of debtors’ prisons, as states look for ways to replenish their coffers. Said Chettiar, “It’s like drawing blood from a stone. States are trying to increase their revenue on the backs of the poor.”
If you are poor, the United States can be an incredibly cold and cruel place. Mercy and compassion are in very short supply.
The middle class continues to shrink and poverty continues to grow with each passing year. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, approximately one out of every six Americans is now living in poverty. And if you throw in those that are considered to be “near poverty”, that number becomes much larger. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, more than 146 million Americans are either “poor” or “low income”.
For many more facts about the rapid increase of poverty in this country, please see my previous article entitled “21 Statistics About The Explosive Growth Of Poverty In America That Everyone Should Know“.
But even as poverty grows, it seems like the hearts of those that still do have money are getting colder. Just check out what happened recently at a grocery store that was in the process of closing down in Augusta, Georgia…
Residents filled the parking lot with bags and baskets hoping to get some of the baby food, canned goods, noodles and other non-perishables. But a local church never came to pick up the food, as the storeowner prior to the eviction said they had arranged. By the time the people showed up for the food, what was left inside the premises—as with any eviction—came into the ownership of the property holder, SunTrust Bank.
The bank ordered the food to be loaded into dumpsters and hauled to a landfill instead of distributed. The people that gathered had to be restrained by police as they saw perfectly good food destroyed. Local Sheriff Richard Roundtree told the news “a potential for a riot was extremely high.”
Can you imagine watching that happen?
But of course handouts and charity are only temporary solutions. What the poor in this country really need are jobs, and unfortunately there has not been a jobs recovery in the United States since the recession ended.
In fact, the employment crisis looks like it is starting to take another turn for the worse. The number of layoffs in the month of March was 30 percent higher than the same time a year ago.
Meanwhile, small businesses are indicating that hiring is about to slow down significantly. According to a recent survey by the National Federation of Independent Businesses, small businesses in the United States are extremely pessimistic right now. The following is what Goldman Sachs had to say about this survey…
Components of the survey were consistent with the decline in headline optimism, as the net percent of respondents planning to hire fell to 0% (from +4%), those expecting higher sales fell to -4% (from +1%), and those reporting that it is a good time to expand ticked down to +4% (from +5%). The net percent of respondents expecting the economy to improve was unchanged at -28%, a very depressed level. However, on the positive side, +25% of respondents plan increased capital spending [ZH: With Alcoa CapEx spending at a 2 year low]. Small business owners continue to place poor sales, taxes, and red tape at the top of their list of business problems, as they have for the past several years.
So why aren’t our politicians doing anything to fix this?
For example, why in the world don’t they stop millions of our jobs from being sent out of the country?
Well, the truth is that they don’t think we have a problem. In fact, U.S. Senator Ron Johnson recently said that U.S. trade deficits “don’t matter”.
He apparently does not seem alarmed that more than 56,000 manufacturing facilities have been shut down in the United States since 2001.
And since the last election, the White House has seemed to have gone into permanent party mode.
On Tuesday, another extravagant party will be held at the White House. It is being called “In Performance at the White House: Memphis Soul”, and it is going to include some of the biggest names in the music industry…
As the White House has previously announced, Justin Timberlake (who will be making his White House debut), Al Green, Ben Harper, Queen Latifah, Cyndi Lauper, Joshua Ledet, Sam Moore, Charlie Musselwhite, Mavis Staples, and others will be performing at the exclusive event.
And so who will be paying for all of this?
You and I will be. Even as the Obamas cry about all of the other “spending cuts” that are happening, they continue to blow millions of taxpayer dollars on wildly extravagant parties and vacations.
Overall, U.S. taxpayers will spend well over a billion dollars on the Obamas this year.
I wonder what the tunnel people that live under the streets of America think about that.
The wave of social unrest that rumbled across Europe between 2008 and 2011 has become less intense. This has come as a cause for relief in financial markets, as it has helped to underpin the marginalization of ‘tail risk’ already addressed by the ECB and the Greek debt restructuring. And yet the latest crisis over the Cyprus bail-out/bail-in not only shoots an arrow into the heart of the principles of an acceptable banking union arrangement, if it could ever be agreed, but also signifies the deep malaise in the complex and fragile trust relationships between European citizens and their governments and institutions. Some people argue that protest, nationalist and separatist movements are just ‘noise’, that the business of ‘fixing Europe’ is proceeding regardless, and that citizens are resigned to the pain of keeping the Euro system together. UBS’ George Magnus is not convinced, even if public anger is less acute now than in the past, it is far from dormant, and its expression is mostly unpredictable. So is the current lull in social unrest a signal that the social fabric of Europe is more robust than we thought, or (as we suggested 14 months ago) is the calm deceptive?
Another systemic problem
Social unrest is a systemic phenomenon, which, according to an OECD report, meets two principal criteria. It is highly uncertain, complex and ambiguous; and it is highly likely to generate ripple effects into other sectors of the economy and society, possibly leading to the toppling of governments, or even political systems. Although European social unrest since the crisis in Greece began has claimed a small number of fatalities and considerable damage to property, it has been notable more for the public expression of lack of trust in the institutions of government, including in Brussels. If a rising number of people give up on the willingness and ability of their institutions to address grievances, then the lull is most likely deceptive.
We have been here before. The economic and political context of the 1930s was, of course, different. Then there was much historical and unresolved geo-political baggage, and a rupture of the political centre as two radically different ideological veins erupted from the backlash against free trade and the gold standard. One championed radical social reform, the other what may be euphemistically called ‘nation-building’ 5 . And there was no EU. But the problem today, as then, is the same, namely the inadequacy of mainstream, political channels to address rising public concern about the loss of economic security, social stability and, yes, cultural identity6. How else to explain both the rise of Spain’s indignados, and other similar national protest movements in Europe, and the increase in nationalist, populist and separatist sentiment, and representation in national parliaments from Greece, France, and Spain to Finland and the Netherlands, and now Italy?
Via George Magnus, UBS:
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Still an austerity zone
Even though the financial crisis in Europe has faded, for the time being at least, the economic stress nurturing protest movements hasn’t. The best that can be said is that the incidence of austerity may not be as significant as it was in 2010-11
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Backlash link to austerity
Let’s assume nothing changes, and that while European elites debate how – or if – they can build strong European banking, fiscal and economic institutions, with the required transfer mechanisms between creditors and debtors, the economic lot of European citizens, an unhappy one for five years now, shows no improvement. This seems a decent assumption.
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The principal economic lesson is that an austerity regime with recurring reductions in public outlays won’t work a) when the private sector is trying to delever and shrink liabilities at the same time b) when it is a generic phenomenon and c) when its principal impact is to depress the level of money GDP and sustain the economy in a liquidity trap. But thanks to some interesting empirical work, another lesson concerns the corrosive and dangerous effects of large and sustained austerity in creating a social backlash that results in greater uncertainty, and therefore inertia, when it comes to corporate hiring and capital spending. As a result, output and public sector tax revenues suffer, reinforcing the negative dynamic between debt and the economy.
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when expenditure cuts, specifically, rise to more than 2% of GDP, and particularly when they rise towards or over 5% of GDP, the number and the severity of incidents of unrest rise sharply.
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Self-evidently, there have been heightened levels of social unrest and shocks to the political system in Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy, but not in the UK or Ireland, or in the US, for that matter, though neither the US nor the UK, for example, have been immune to social unrest, sometimes requiring the force of the state to suppress it.12. But the main difference between many incidents of social unrest and the ones that damage the social fabric and the economic environment is the impact (sometimes more perceived than real, perhaps) of highly restrictive budgetary measures. Some governments may be better able to implement and absorb them, and sustain the trust or belief in citizens in perseverance. Mostly, this comes down to the robustness of local institutions, and the performance of leaders, as well as culture and history.
The most fundamental manifestation of this damage is, of course, unemployment. But this is only the most visible sign of the upheaval in Europe’s famed social model, and overlooks other important social and economic fault lines, including stagnant or declining real wages, rising income inequality, levels of youth unemployment of between 25% and 50%, and the rise in the numbers of long-term unemployed.
These phenomena didn’t begin with the financial and Euro crises, of course, but they have certainly been exacerbated by it and by the response of governments, and citizens are certainly making the connection, regardless.
So why are the streets relatively quiet?
The short answer is we don’t know. None of the reasons we can think of add up to much, but judge for yourself. It could have something to do with Europe’s rapid ageing demographic transition. The proportion of young adults, aged 15-24 has already been falling from peak levels seen in the mid 1980s, and is on track to decline further in the next 20 years. The proportion of 15-59 year olds, or what we might imagine as the part of the population most likely to express non-voting anger, is peaking now, but a significant decline is predicted. Perhaps the baby boomers have expended their protest energy!
Rapid growth in, and a rising proportion of, the numbers of young people, say aged 15-29, certainly feed the potential for social protest and upheaval. But they also need a catalyst, which could be the emergence of high inflation.
Empirically, there is an unequivocal association, but this is best applied, in contemporary times at least, to the experience of emerging and developing countries, for example, as in the Arab Spring. Although the European upheavals in the 1960s and 1970s were set against a backdrop of rising inflation, those in the 1930s and today are the product of depression and awkward questions of self-determination, not inflation.
Perhaps the relative calm in Europe has something to do with European family structures. The Bank Credit Analyst recently published a chart, emphasizing the role of the family as a shock absorber. The authors suggest that the countries with the highest youth unemployment rates are also those with the highest proportion of young adults living with their parents, who fulfill the role of effecting transfers and economic and social support.
We are not sure about this one either, although having an extended family structure on which to rely is clearly a mitigating factor against poverty and social exclusion. But the two variables may simply be spuriously correlated since both represent symptoms of a depressed economy. In any event, those countries with the highest youth unemployment and numbers living at home have already claimed the bragging rights for anti-austerity protest, while six of the other eight countries have been characterized by fallen or weakened governments, and the rise of nationalist and anti-immigrant political parties and policies.
A conclusion to this discussion is not possible.
In a benign outcome, the potential for social disorder will be defused by a new approach to economic burden-sharing, a re-sequencing of the pursuit of austerity and growth objectives, and steady progress towards the establishment of credible and trusted European banking, economic and political institutions, including financial transfer mechanisms. Motherhood, to be sure, and this has at least two vital caveats, namely the willingness of Germany and other northern European countries to accept significant sovereignty compromises, and the implications for the EU project, if this level of integration proves a bridge too far for UK voters in the promised 2017 referendum.
Social and political upheavals would doubtless haunt the worst-case outcome, where muddling through leads nevertheless to a fragmentation of the Eurozone, or, in extremis, a collapse, in spite of OMTs and the like. The possible consequences, including for the social fabric of Europe, have been well aired in the last couple of years.
The middle way, so to speak, is a muddling through that never scales the successful outcome hurdles, but carries on regardless. Political bonds, maybe fear, sustain the Euro system, but European leaders are unable to reach an agreed and acceptable framework for durable economic recovery and full integration. This outcome describes the status quo, and is the base case for most people. But it is also about stagnant, low growth, persistent high unemployment, retreating targets for debt sustainability, more bail-outs and bail-ins, latent financial instability, and likely sovereign default. The current Eurozone news could not be more apt, and doesn’t seem like the ideal scenario in which to expect European social unrest and political turbulence to fade away.
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