Brexit, Brexit, Brexit. For more than a year now, it has been scarcely possible to think or read about anything else. Seemingly all other economic discourse has been eclipsed by this over-riding prospect.  In the circumstances, it’s an understandable obsession. Yet the fact is that far bigger challenges lie ahead for the UK economy than leaving the European Union, a point that the Governor the Bank of England, Mark Carney, seemed to acknowledge this week in admitting that Brexit was no longer the main domestic risk to financial stability. As it happens, it never was. Since the Brexit vote, the economy has continued to motor, and so far there seems to have been zero impact on financial stability...Over the last five years, the FTSE 100 has closed lower on seven of the 10 Friday 13ths.  It could be a coincidence – or is there something else at play?

On Friday 13th July 2012, China’s GDP growth dropped to a three-year low of 7.6pc, marking a new stage for the country’s economic slowdown....Superstitious beliefs run so high in the UK that some people refuse to fly on Friday 13th, stay in hotel rooms bearing the unlucky digits or buy houses that bear the number 13.  In fact, the Stress Management Center and Phobia Institute in North Carolina estimates that businesses lose up to $900m (£585m) in sales and productivity when the 13th of the month falls on a Friday as customers refrain from activities such as flying and anxious employees stay home from work.  The phenomenon even has a name: paraskavedekatriaphobia is the fear of Friday 13th, while triskaidekaphobics are scared of the number 13 more generally.  More than a quarter of Britons admit that they consider Friday 13th to be unlucky, according to a survey of 500 adults conducted by the conference call provider Powwownow.  One in 10 people avoid travelling by train on Friday 13th, 11pc refuse to stay in hotel room number 13 and 16pc of people won’t take flights on this inauspicious day, the survey found.

For the second time this past week, Chinese stock markets shut early after its "circuit breaking" mechanism, that was introduced on January 1, was breached within the first 30 minutes of trading. This triggered a sharp fall in the Shanghai Composite index - 7pc.

The slump in the stock market came as Chinese authorities guided the yuan lower - allowing it to decline by 0.5pc, its most since August, which resulted in a mass sell-off, otherwise known as Black Monday. Stocks should be valued based on the dividend yield not future earnings which never are realised. If debt had been priced correctly this manic stock market could have been easily controlled.  Any market in investments is inherently unstable due to the positive feedback at the heart of the trading. The problem is that unstable systems are very difficult to stabilise and often any atemps to do so can lead to further instability. The heart of the problem is that a price variation is reinforced by herd mentality. If the price goes up, then more people buy rather than fewer as would occur for most non investment items. The reverse is also true. This is worse when there is wider share ownership, as more investors act irrationally rather than based on reasoned consideration of company fundamentals. Possible other devices to consider are shorting, higher stamp duty, minimum length of share ownership, discouraging wider share ownership and price reinforcement. What is really needed is the investment equivalent of a car shock absorber combined with something that cuts or attenuated the positive feed back. My favourite is minimum length of share ownership. If a stock is subject to a speculative price hike then investors are less likely to put more in if they know that they cannot get it out in the short term. In short, short term investments are a contributory factor to price instability.  Having consulted the oracle, I get that ominous hexagram known as the Preponderance of the Great. Too much weight in the middle; all unbalanced, and clearly away from the Tao.

Truth and dicussion...about QE . UE and the Dollar

There is no jobs growth. The total hours worked in the US economy is the same as 15 years ago and most of the other economic indicators have been going south for months. The Fed is trapped and there is no way they can raise rates other than by a purely token amount without sending the whole thing rapidly to the dogs; in fact a recession next year is odds even if the Fed does nothing. We will get Big Bust 2 within the next 18 months...THERE WILL BE NO RATE RISE! Yellen knows full well you can't taper a Ponzi, so unless Goldman Sachs has massively shorted the markets and ordered its central banker minions to hike rates to crash the markets, Yellen will come up with yet another in her endless list of excuses to punt yet again on a rate hike. THERE WILL BE NO RATE RISE. Period. It's not like the Fed has any credibility left to lose. ..According to some soothsayers, there will be a 0.15% Fed rise BUT....after New Year there will be some more easing, say....$50 Billion. This time around the money printing will be in subsidies for the middle income earners. If the FED does not do this there will be turmoil and public protests. The Obama admin does not want this, not after the California shootings and most probably some more in the Christmas holiday season. The Obama gov needs the support of the public NOW more than ever....The Fed exists solely to further enrich the already super-rich. That means facilitating the looting and asset-stripping of the "middle income earners" (a soon to be extinct class) as part of the Fed's "No Billionaire Left Behind" monetary policy. The Fed will NEVER subsidize or otherwise give a damn about "middle income earners," much less savers, pensioners, and non-speculators, with whom it is in a state of undeclared financial warfare...The whole casino economy is built around perceptions. There are no relations between economic fundamentals and the value of the stock markets or the amount of public and private debt. A simple lack of confidence or misplaced rumor can cause a panic among investors. And then there's the trillions of debts owed in US dollars by entities who don't use the U.S. dollar as there native currency., Yellen will not raise rates in the absence of some exogenous event, i.e. a phone call from Goldman Sachs or the bond market going haywire as "investors" belatedly realize Yellen & her central banker cohorts are going to inflate away all government and TBTF banker debts and liabilities. 

This whole mes was a creation of the EU's imperialist ambitions , they financed the opposition to the democratically elected President with at least a billion Euros , succeeded in overthrowing him and in putting their placemen in power and then sat back. However as the West has discovered in Iraq, Afganistan ,Libya, and Syria it is extremely easy to interfere in the affairs of another country but very difficult to control events thereafter . However even the most stupid western politician should have understood Russia would not just stand by. Unfortunately our leaders have shown they are totally stupid as far as intervention in foreign countries is concerned.
Putin is in the right to defend what he cosnsiders to be his sphere of influence. As this mess continues the economic consequences for everyone but particularly the average EU citizen goes from bad to worse...

If I understand it correctly the latest false Kiev claim goes like this:

1. A mighty Russian force attacked Ukraine through the border.
2. A heroic Ukrainian army destroyed at least 50% of this menacing force.
3. The Russians put their tail between their legs and retreated before the mighty Ukrainian army could wipe out the rest of them.
4. Apparently the terrified Russians had the good sense in them to take back to Russia all their destroyed equipment for reasons of protecting the Ukrainian environment.

In all of this excitement, no soldier or journalist was able to use their iphone and capture some evidence. No aerial satellite photography either. Other than these minor details (of no evidence existing anywhere) this is a decisive victory for Kiev's unstoppable forces... Lies, upon lies, upon lies. Such is the natural environment for the beast called EUSSR. It has to feed on lies otherwise it dies. And since it refuses to die it has to constantly fabricate new lies just to keep up with its corrosive self-indulgence.

 

Even offline computers can be monitored - The NSA uses radio technology to monitor offline computers, smart phones and other devices.   According to a New York Times report, the agency installed software on 10,000 computers which were shipped around the world, enabling NSA agents to locate and monitor the machines even when offline.  The NSA insists such technology – which relies on radio waves transmitted from tiny circuit boards and USB cards inserted into computers – is "only being deployed overseas".  The program, known as Quantum, has reportedly targeted Chinese Army, Russian military and Mexican drug cartels – among others – since its introduction in or before 2008.  The Internet isn't the only way to download information - On a more basic level, computers which aren't connected to the Internet still have any number of peripheral data ports that can be hooked up to USBs, disc drives or printers. Bradley Manning – now Chelsea Manning – transported 91,000 classified documents that became known as the Iran War logs via rewritable CDs.  Moreover, hard drives eventually break down, but remain susceptible to data harvesting. The same legal technology used by data reclamation companies to retrieve information from defunct computers can be used by thieves if old hard drives are not securely disposed of.  The Russians are already doing it - Last year Kremlin sources revealed Russia's Federal Guard Service (FSO) was spending 486,000 rubles – around £10,000 – on a number of electric typewriters.  The return to typewriters was prompted by the publication of secret documents by WikiLeaks, the whistle-blowing web site, as well as Edward Snowden, the fugitive US intelligence contractor. Directives to the defense minister and the supreme commander-in-chief, Mr Putin, were already printed on paper for security reasons, a defense ministry source said at the time. Each typewriter is uniquely traceable - Some models of typewriter including the Triumph Adler are designed so that each specific unit creates a unique "handwriting" traceable to that one alone.

However... Typewriters can be spied upon  - In 1952, the FBI analyzed the ribbon of a typewriter used by CIA officer Aldrich Ames – actually a double agent for the KGB – to unearth plans for a clandestine meeting in Venezuela.  And in 1985 Soviet spies installed secret "keystroke loggers" and antennas in at least 13 typewriters in the US Embassy in Moscow to detect and transmit the typing patterns of embassy secretaries.  The same technology is used more broadly today by criminals to steal passwords and credit card details.  And of course, paper documents are still unreliable - they can be stolen or photographed, or go up in smoke in case of a fire.  There is also the matter of human error – the history of intelligence is rife with examples of spies leaving briefcases of classified documents in public places, or in the company of friendly "honey trap" agents...

It's very possible that Berlin will have to absorb the costs of its bank bailouts. At the height of the financial crisis, the German government supported ailing financial institutions such as Hypo Real Estate, Commerzbank and WestLB with capital injections and guarantees amounting to nearly €180 billion. Large quantities of toxic assets were transferred to so-called "bad banks."

But it's questionable whether these banks will ever be able to completely pay back this money. If that is the case, the federal government will have to waive its claims and permanently absorb the debt.

Schäuble's team foresees the possibility of a similar development with the euro rescue. Indeed, "irrevocable ESM payment defaults" is one of the reasons they list for their contingency plans. Behind the bureaucratic jargon lies the concern that Germany -- despite the government's solemn statements to the contrary -- will have to pay for the euro rescue.

Germany is currently supporting the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) to the tune of at least €190 billion. A portion of these guarantees and loans could actually be lost if Greece's government creditors forgive some of the country's debt. The losses to German public coffers could then easily amount to tens of billions of euros.

Consequently, Finance Ministry officials contend that the government will have to make cutbacks elsewhere in the future. Now, in a scenario that euroskeptics have long been warning about, German Chancellor Angela Merkel's government has finally admitted, for the first time, that to balance out the impact of the monetary crisis it will have to reduce expenditure for pensioners and people taking early retirement.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is well known for her opposition to further aid for crisis-stricken euro countries without additional controls, but what do German voters think? A new SPIEGEL ONLINE survey reveals that a narrow majority is opposed to any more bailouts, and almost three-quarters of Germans want stricter fiscal oversight from Brussels.

Europe is now in the third year of its sovereign debt crisis and the prospect of a breakup of the single currency no longer seems as farfetched as it once did. But from the perspective of most Germans, the euro crisis is still something that mainly affects other countries, namely Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Ireland and now Cyprus.

But although the German economy has shown itself to be surprisingly robust, with unemployment falling and tax yields rising, Germany will not be able to withstand the negative trend in the euro zone for ever. "The crisis in the euro zone is catching up with the German economy," commented Ferdinand Fichtner, chief economist at the German Institute for Economic Research, earlier this week. Indeed, the institute has just dropped its growth forecast for the German economy for 2013 from 2.4 percent to just under 2 percent.

Romania and it's billionaires

The nine richest Romanian businessmen on the Stock Exchange have a fortune put at over half a billion euros on the Romanian market in more than 60 listed companies. Their fortune accounts for just 4,2% of the Stock Exchange capitalisation, which stands at 13 billion euros. However, none of them came to the Stock Exchange willingly, but took over companies that had already been listed, especially on the RASDAQ market, where companies were privatised via MEBO (Management and Employee Buyouts) over 10 years ago.

The nine billionaires are as follows: Cătălin Chelu (14 companies - 126 million RON), Cristescu brothers (8 companies - 648 million RON), Ştefan Vuza (7 companies - 281 million RON), Ilie Carabulea (6 companies - 267 million RON), Gheorghe Călburean (5 companies - 337 million RON), Ovidiu Tender (5 companies - 228 million RON), Constantin Boromiz (5 companies - 110 million RON), Cristian Burci (4 companies worth 80.4 million RON), Dan Adamescu (2 companies worth 295 million RON).

NOTE: 1 RON = 4.2 EURO