– CENSORED from US corporate media
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“Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.” - Plato
Seeking Truth in a World of Propaganda. Links do not necessarily indicate agreement with stories or perspectives.
Saturday, June 17, 2017
Friday, June 16, 2017
How Much Do People Actually Make From "Gigs" Like Uber And Airbnb
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Coined shortly after the financial crisis in 2009, the so-called “gig economy” or “sharing economy” refers to the growing cadre of companies like Airbnb, Lyft, and TaskRabbit—platforms that employ temporary workers who provide a wide variety of services: delivery, ridesharing, rentals, and odd jobs. A recent Pew study estimated that nearly a quarter of all Americans earn some money through these platforms.
But how much money are the service providers in the sharing economy actually making from their "side-gigs"?
We analyzed anonymized data from Priceonomics customer Earnest, a loan provider, and examined tens of thousands of loan applicants to see how much people are earning on side-gig platforms and how these platforms stack up against each other.
We looked at a span of data accounting for just over two years, and for each worker, we analyzed a pay period of between one and 27 months. We do not know how many hours of work the income represents for each platform, as each one has a unique pricing and commission structure.
Furthermore, this data is just reflective of the Earnest user base, who are typically refinancing college loans and therefore may be more likely to be treating these services as a “side-gig” than the typical service provider who may be more likely to treat it as a fulltime job and have different earning levels.
We found that 85% of side-gig workers make less than $500 a month. And of all the side-gig platforms we examined, Airbnb hosts earn the most by far.
In our data, on all but Lyft and Uber, we excluded any worker who made a total $10 or less from a platform to eliminate data points that could simply represent a refund from the company. For Lyft and Uber, we excluded anyone with a total income of $50 or less. Then we tallied the average monthly incomes made by workers at each company.
Data source: Earnest
Making an average of $924 off their platform each month, Airbnb hosts make nearly three times as much as other workers. Workers at the general task-service platform, TaskRabbit, rank second at $380 per month. Overall, Lyft and Uber drivers make roughly the same average per month at $377 and $364 respectively. We also observed that nearly a quarter of Lyft drivers also earned income from Uber—and of that subset, we saw that the average income was actually higher for Uber ($481 vs $396.)
Of course, on all of these platforms, there is a wide range of earners. Several Airbnb hosts in our records, for instance, made over $10,000 per month, while others made less than $200.
To really understand these averages above, we took a deeper look at these ranges. Below, we’ve charted out the income distribution for each company. The figures represent the percentage of workers who fall into each month income bracket.
Data source: Earnest
Airbnb hosts enjoy the highest average monthly earnings because there is a much wider range of income distribution on that platform than at other companies: Nearly half of all hosts make more than $500 per month.
Conversely, the majority of workers at some other companies (Etsy, Uber, Fiverr) fall into the $100 or under per month bracket.
Tallying all of these companies up, the overall distribution tilts strongly toward the lower end.
Data source: Earnest
Some 84% of all gig economy workers make less than $500 per month—but in particular, workers at Getaround (98.3% under $500 per month), Fiverr (96.3%), and Etsy (95%) have especially high percentages of low-earners.
Reasons for the low income could vary—some workers may be simply trying the platform, or put in very few hours.
Lyft, Taskrabbit, and Airbnb seem to beat this “84% under $500” average.
Data source: Earnest
It might be easy to look at this data and assume that gig economy workers are working at below market rates. After all, $500 per month is hardly a livable wage. For the industry, the key question is how many of these workers are utilizing these platforms to make a little extra cash as a side-gig versus trying to forage a full-time living.
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Hillary Emails Reveal NATO Killed Gaddafi to Stop Libyan Creation of Gold-Backed Currency
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Hillary’s emails truly are the gifts that keep on giving. While France led the proponents of the UN Security Council Resolution that would create a no-fly zone in Libya, it claimed that its primary concern was the protection of Libyan …
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Thursday, June 15, 2017
Clinton Crew Dripping In Russian Entanglements While Deep State Rolls Snake Eyes On Trump
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Content originally published at iBankCoin.com
President Trump is dropping more MOABs over Twitter, blasting his enemies for what he called the "single greatest WITCH HUNT In American political history" while nothing is being done about the fact that "Crooked H destroyed phones w/ hammer, 'bleached' emails, & had husband meet w/AG days before she was cleared - & they talk about obstruction?"
Trump raised the question as to why he's being investigated for what he calls "non-dealings" with Russia, while completely ignoring the cozy relationship between the Clintons, the Podestas, and Russian banking and energy interests.
As ZeroHedge reports:
[Trump] seems to have a point on this one. Last summer, we reported fairly extensively on the Hillary email scandal while it was virtually glossed over by the mainstream media.
And, like many people, we were astonished when FBI Director Comey made the unilateral assessment that, despite Hillary's "extreme carelessness," no "reasonable" prosecutor would bring charges against her.
Unlike the current "Russia probe" which has revealed precisely zero tangible evidence, the FBI's own reports from last summer revealed that Hillary and her staff intentionally destroyed official State Department emails despite confirming they were aware of the existence of a federal subpoena demanding the preservation of those emails (we covered it extensively here: The "Oh Shit" Moment: Hillary Wiped Her Server With BleachBit Despite Subpoena).
Let's add a bit more color and review the Clinton's actual shady ties to Russia. From the NYT:
Between 2008 – 2010, Uranium One / UrAsia investors donated $8.65 Million to the Clinton Foundation.
June 2009, Russian State Nuclear Agency Rosatom (through a subsidiary) takes a 17% stake in Uranium One.
June 2010, Russian State Nuclear Agency Rosatom takes majority ownership of Uranium One, which Hillary Clinton’s State Department signed off on.
June 29th, 2010, Bill Clinton earns $500,000 for a speech in Moscow to a Russian Investment bank that assigned a “buy” rating to Uranium One stock.
January, 2013: Rosatom State Nuclear Agency now owns Uranium one and takes it private.
Wait, you say - that Uranium deal had to go through an adviiiisory committee (Michael Savage voice). Know what? That committee is a joke...
"The committee almost never met, and when it deliberated it was usually at a fairly low bureaucratic level," Richard Perle said. Perle, who has worked for the Reagan, Clinton and both Bush administrations added, "I think it's a bit of a joke." -CBS
Talking about transparency...
Clinton failed to disclose the $2.35 Million in donations (made in installments) from Uranium One chairman Ian Telfer to a nebulous slush fund subsidiary of the Clinton Foundation, set up by mining executive Frank Guistra (whose company merged with Uranium One). Guistra donated $31 Million to the Clinton Foundation. How charitable! (read more here in the New Yorker)
Let's not forget - Russia's largest bank - Sberbank - paid the Podesta group $170,000 over a 6 month period to lobby against 2014 economic sanctions put in place by the Obama administration:
Podesta’s efforts were a key part of under-the-radar lobbying during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign led mainly by veteran Democratic strategists to remove sanctions against Sberbank and VTB Capital, Russia’s second largest bank.
The two Russian banks spent more than $700,000 in 2016 on Washington lobbyists as they sought to end the U.S. sanctions, according to Senate lobbying disclosure forms and documents filed with the Department of Justice.
The Podesta Group charged Sberbank $20,000 per month, plus expenses, on a contract from March through September 2016.
What's more - Podesta forgot to register as a "Foreign Agent" while doing so!
So let's get this straight; White House regular and creepy art aficionado Tony Podesta, brother of John Podesta (who would be Secretary of State today if Hillary had won), took money from the Russians during the US election in exchange for Washington influence.
This is not the first time the Podesta group has taken Russian money:
The Podesta group made $180,000 lobbying for Uranium One (source - you have to add up the years). These donations were made over the same time period that the Clinton Foundation was receiving millions from UrAsia / U1 interests. Tony Podesta also sat on the board (along with senior Russian officials) of a small energy company called Joule. Two months after Podesta joined the board, Joule landed a sweet $35 Million contract from Vladimir Putin’s Rusnano investment fund – which Podesta failed to disclose as required by law. Oh, and before joining the Clinton Campaign, John Podesta transferred 75,000 shares of Joule to his daughter through a shell company with her address. Maybe the optics didn’t look good or something?
Given all that - do you think Hillary and associates would be under congressional investigation right now if she had been elected President?
(nope)
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Complete Exposure
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CBS Anchor Blames Trump's Tweets for Congressional Baseball Field Shooting
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Now this is the sort of journalism that gets the blood pumping. Scott Pelley from SHEE-BEE-ESH News asked the question last night, 'Was the congressional shootings self inflicted?' To prove his case, Pelley didn't cite the endless barrage of violent protest by leftists in the streets or Democratic politicians calling for 'resistance.' Instead, Pelley called into question President Trump's tweets, especially one that said the enemy of America was the media -- as the millstone from which killers like Hodgkinson drew energy from to activate into seditious violence.
The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 17, 2017
Source: SHEE-BEE-ESH News
It's time to ask whether the attack on the United States Congress Wednesday was foreseeable, predictable and, to some degree, self-inflicted.
Too many leaders, and political commentators, who set an example for us to follow have led us into an abyss of violent rhetoric which, it should be no surprise, has led to violence.
Wednesday was not the first time.
In December last year, a man with an assault rifle stormed into a Washington-area pizzeria to free child sex slaves whom Hillary Clinton was holding there -- or at least that's what political blog sites had said. He fired into a locked door to discover no children in chains.
Sen. Bernie Sanders has called the president the "most dangerous in history." The shooter on Wednesday was a Sanders volunteer.
You might think that no sane person would act on political hate speech, and you'd be right. Trouble is, there are a lot of Americans who struggle with mental illness.
In February, the president tweeted that the news media were the "enemy of the American people."
Later, at a lunch for reporters, President Trump was asked whether he worried that language would incite violence. His pause indicated it had never crossed his mind. Then he said, "No, that doesn't worry me."
As children we're taught, "Words will never hurt me." But when you think about it, violence almost always begins with words. In "Twitter world," we've come to believe that our first thought is our best thought.
It's past time for all of us -- presidents, politicians, reporters, citizens, all of us -- to pause to think again.
It's past time for all of us -- presidents, politicians, reporters, citizens, all of us -- to pause to think again.
In summary, Hodgkinson shot up a baseball field filled with GOP politicians because of pizzagate, which Pelley said inplicated Hillary Clinton in holding child sex slaves inside of Comet Ping Pong's basement (even the most extreme conspiracy theorists never implicated Clinton, just Podesta), Trump's hatred for the media, and also mental illnesses pervading America's collective psyche. CBS never bothered to mention, in this disgraceful display of agitprop, the fact that left wing extremists have been slandering the President of the United States with false accusations of treason, blatant lies regarding Russia's involvement in the elections, and a wholesale disregard and contempt for the highest office in the land. To blame right wingers for inciting violence conducted by a left wing Berniebro is reprehensible, but not unexpected by the cromagnons who traverse the indecorous halls of SHE-BEE-ESH News.
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Furious Trump Lashes Out In Afternoon Tweetstorm
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An increasingly furious President Trump has taken to twitter this afternoon to express his outrage, in a way only the President can, over the thinly veiled double standard within the U.S. intelligence community and mainstream media over how they basically ignored the Hillary Clinton email scandal while endlessly pursuing his administration without being able to present a single shred of tangible evidence that any wrongdoing ever occurred.
"Why is that Hillary Clintons family and Dems dealings with Russia are not looked at, but my non-dealings are?"
"Crooked H destroyed phones w/ hammer, 'bleached' emails, & had husband meet w/AG days before she was cleared- & they talk about obstruction?"
Why is that Hillary Clintons family and Dems dealings with Russia are not looked at, but my non-dealings are?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 15, 2017
Crooked H destroyed phones w/ hammer, 'bleached' emails, & had husband meet w/AG days before she was cleared- & they talk about obstruction?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 15, 2017
Of course, he seems to have a point on this one. Last summer, we reported fairly extensively on the Hillary email scandal while it was virtually glossed over by the mainstream media.
And, like many people, we were astonished when FBI Director Comey made the unilateral assessment that, despite Hillary's "extreme carelessness," no "reasonable" prosecutor would bring charges against her.
Unlike the current "Russia probe" which has revealed precisely zero tangible evidence, the FBI's own reports from last summer revealed that Hillary and her staff intentionally destroyed official State Department emails despite confirming they were aware of the existence of a federal subpoena demanding the preservation of those emails (we covered it extensively here: The "Oh Shit" Moment: Hillary Wiped Her Server With BleachBit Despite Subpoena).
For the record Mr. Comey, destruction of evidence is actually a federal crime and it was actually admitted to in actual FBI testimony, but only after you, Mr. Comey, decided to pass out immunity deals to Hillary's staff "like candy" (see: "FBI Is Handing Out Deals Like Candy" - Cheryl Mills And 2 Other Clinton Aides Get Immunity).
And, even though Comey couldn't seem to find "intent" in Hillary's destruction of federal property, as we pointed out last September, one lone internet sleuth was able to find it for him with a couple of simple internet searches (see "Dear FBI, This Is Intent: Hillary's "Oh Shit" Guy Sought Reddit Advice On How To "Strip VIP's Emails")...which does make you wonder just how hard he tried?
Of course, until someone within the Trump administration or Republican Party smartens up and calls for the appointment of a 'Special Counsel' to look into Hillary's email scandal, something that should have been done long ago, and not for retaliatory reasons but simply due to Comey's and AG Lynch's blatant mishandling of the investigation (a point which Deputy AG Rosenstein obviously agreed with), the Democrats have no reason to calm their mass hysteria. Then, and only then, do we suspect that Hillary might just be able to 'convince' her party to exercise some form of reasonable judgement.
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When The System Thwarts Sincere, Hard-Working People, The System Has Failed
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Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,
The net result is the organization fails its mission even as it adds employees and expands its budget and regulatory powers.
One of the most painfully visible symptoms of profound failure is the way our systems now thwart and frustrate sincere, hard-working people who labor within them. If you work within any of the institutions at the heart of our system--healthcare, education, governance, the armed forces, insurance, finance, and so on--or know people who work in these fields, you know most people are honest and hard-working, and trying to do a good job.
Sadly, the systems actively thwart the efforts of sincere, hard-working people and grind them down. This is true not just of employees in the lower echelons--it's equally true of top administrators.
School districts, for example, don't just chew up new teachers; they also chew up superintendents.
The key point here is this bureaucratic failure is system-wide-- it characterizes the entire status quo, and is not isolated to any one industry or sector.
It's easy to see the manifestations of systemic sclerosis and self-sabotage in every level. failed school districts hire a new superintendent every two years like clockwork, and announce "reforms" that will supposedly transform the district from a failed bureaucracy into a successful bureaucracy.
The reforms inevitably fail because the problem isn't limited to the top administrator--the entire educational bureaucracy is itself the problem. As a result, new idealistic teachers enter the system ready to do a great job educating our youth, and the best quit in disgust a few years later as the system thwarted their ability and desire to actually teach.
Those who need the pay and benefits enter a stage of resignation as the system grinds them down into a compliance that stifles innovation, risk-taking and initiative--the three essential dynamics in any successful organization, from a sprawling global military to a small local school district.
Look around, people: look at the number of teachers who are quitting, the number of senior physicians who are retiring early, the number of mid-rank military officers who are bailing out halfway in their professional career--this is a dead giveaway that the system has failed and cannot be reformed. I wrote a short book about these dynamics: Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform.
Why have our systems ossified into prisons of self-sabotaging regulations and hierarchies? here are a few core dynamics:
1. Those designing the regulations and organizational structure have no skin in the game, to borrow Nassim Taleb's elevation of an old phrase. If the regulations they imposed cause the organization to fail in its core mission, they suffer absolutely no loss personally: these administrators and technocrats all retire with ample pensions and benefits regardless of the consequences of their regulatory handiwork.
2. The ontology of hierarchical, centralized organizations is to add regulations, even when they do more harm than good. as I explained in my book Resistance, Revolution, Liberation: A Model for Positive Change, Hierarchical, centralized organizations have no mechanisms for reducing their power or reach, and no mechanisms for eliminating contradictory or self-sabotaging regulations.
Why is this so? Regulators justify their positions and pay by adding regulations, not eliminating regulations. The organization itself is designed to seek to increase its budget and power; to reduce the budget and reach is anathema--it goes against the genetic wiring of hierarchical, centralized organizations.
3. Hierarchical, centralized organizations seek to centralize every aspect of the organization and its mission. The idea that individual teachers should have leeway in curriculum and teaching methods is a dangerous heresy; in hierarchical, centralized organizations, control of every individual and function must be absolute.
This is how we've ended up with enormous, sprawling institutions that are micro-managed to death.
4. The cost of complying with the ever-expanding mountain of regulations bleeds pursuit of the institution's mission. As the diagram below illustrates, these bureaucratic tropisms lead to a state in which compliance, oversight, meetings, administering penalties for non-compliance, etc. absorb more of the organization's resources than the actual pursuit of its mission.
The net result is the organization fails its mission even as it adds employees and expands its budget and regulatory powers. failure is built into any system constructed solely of hierarchical, centralized organizations. No skin in the game + no self-correcting feedback = complete and total failure.
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2017 Will Be The Worst Retail Apocalypse In US History; Over 300 Retailers Have Already Filed Bankruptcy
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Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,
Not even during the worst parts of the last recession did things ever get this bad for the U.S. retail industry.
As you will see in this article, more than 300 retailers have already filed for bankruptcy in 2017, and it is being projected that a staggering 8,640 stores will close in America by the end of this calendar year. That would shatter the old record by more than 20 percent. Sadly, our ongoing retail apocalypse appears to only be in the early chapters. One report recently estimated that up to 25 percent of all shopping malls in the country could shut down by 2022 due to the current woes of the retail industry. And if the new financial crisis that is already hitting Europe starts spreading over here, the numbers that I just shared with you could ultimately turn out to be a whole lot worse.
I knew that a lot of retailers were filing for bankruptcy, but I had no idea that the grand total for this year was already in the hundreds. According to CNN, the number of retail bankruptcies is now up 31 percent compared to the same time period last year…
Bankruptcies continue to pile up in the retail industry.
More than 300 retailers have filed for bankruptcy so far this year, according to data from BankruptcyData.com. That’s up 31% from the same time last year. Most of those filings were for small companies — the proverbial Mom & Pop store with a single location. But there are also plenty of household names on the list.
Yes, the growth of online retailers such as Amazon is fueling some of this, but the Internet has been around for several decades now.
So why are retail store closings and retail bankruptcies surging so dramatically all of a sudden?
Just a few days ago, another major victim of the retail apocalypse made headlines all over the nation when it filed for bankruptcy. At one time Gymboree was absolutely thriving, but now it is in a desperate fight to survive…
Children’s clothing chain Gymboree has filed for bankruptcy protection, aiming to slash its debts and close hundreds of stores amid crushing pressure on retailers.
Gymboree said it plans to remain in business but will close 375 to 450 of its 1,281 stores in filing for a Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization. Gymboree employs more than 11,000 people, including 10,500 hourly workers.
And in recent weeks other major retailers that were once very prosperous have also been forced to close stores and lay off staff…
This hemorrhaging of retail jobs comes on the heels of last week’s mass layoffs at Hudson Bay Company, where employees from Saks Fifth Avenue and Lord & Taylor were among the 2,000 people laid off. The news of HBC layoffs came on the same day that Ascena, the parent company of brands like Ann Taylor, Lane Bryant, and Dress Barn, told investors it will be closing up to 650 stores (although it did not specify which brands will be affected just yet). Only two weeks ago, affordable luxury brand Michael Kors announced it too would close 125 stores to combat brand overexposure and plummeting sales.
In a lot of ways this reminds me of 2007. The stock market was still performing very well, but the real economy was starting to come apart at the seams.
And without a doubt, the real economy is really hurting right now. According to Business Insider, Moody’s is warning that 22 more major retailers may be forced to declare bankruptcy in the very near future…
Twenty-two retailers in Moody’s portfolio are in serious financial trouble that could lead to bankruptcy, according to a Moody’s note published on Wednesday. That’s 16% of the 148 companies in the financial firm’s retail group — eclipsing the level of seriously distressed retail companies that Moody’s reported during the Great Recession.
You can find the full list right here. If this many major retailers are “distressed” now, what are things going to look like once the financial markets start crashing?
As thousands of stores close down all across the United States, this is going to put an incredible amount of stress on shopping mall owners. In order to meet their financial obligations, those mall owners need tenants, but now the number of potential tenants is shrinking rapidly.
I have talked about dead malls before, but apparently what we have seen so far is nothing compared to what is coming. The following comes from CNN…
Store closings and even dead malls are nothing new, but things might be about to get a whole lot worse.
Between 20% and 25% of American malls will close within five years, according to a new report out this week from Credit Suisse. That kind of plunge would be unprecedented in the nation’s history.
I can’t even imagine what this country is going to look like if a quarter of our shopping malls shut down within the next five years. Already, there are some parts of the U.S. that look like a third world nation.
And what is this going to do to employment? Today, the retail industry employs millions upon millions of Americans, and those jobs could start disappearing very rapidly…
The retail sales associate is one of the most popular jobs in the country, with roughly 4.5 million Americans filling the occupation. In May, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics released data that found that 7.5 million retail jobs might be replaced by technology. The World Economic Forum predicts 30 to 50 percent of retail jobs will be gone once struggling companies like Gymboree fully hop on the digital train. MarketWatch found that over the last year, the department store space bled 29,900 jobs, while general merchandising stores cut 15,700 positions. At this rate, one Florida columnist put it soberingly, “Half of all US retail jobs could vanish. Just as ATMs replaced many bank tellers, automated check-out stations are supplanting retail clerks.”
At this moment, the number of working age Americans that do not have a job is hovering near a record high. So being able to at least get a job in the retail industry has been a real lifeline for many Americans, and now that lifeline may be in grave danger.
For those running our big corporations, losing these kinds of jobs is not a big deal. In fact, many corporate executives would be quite happy to replace all of their U.S. employees with technology or with foreign workers.
But if the middle class is going to survive, we need an economy that produces good paying jobs. Unfortunately, even poor paying retail jobs are starting to disappear now, and the future of the middle class is looking bleaker than it ever has before.
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Red Pill retweeted: They made up a phony collusion with the Russians story, found zero proof, so now they go for obstruction of justice on the phony story. Nice
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Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump |
Red Pill retweeted:
They made up a phony collusion with the Russians story, found zero proof, so now they go for obstruction of justice on the phony story. Nice
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Wednesday, June 14, 2017
Lynching Free Speech: The Intolerant State Of America
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Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,
My hometown of Charlottesville, Va., has become the latest poster child in a heated war of words - and actions - over racism, “sanitizing history,” extremism (both right and left), political correctness, hate speech, partisan politics, and a growing fear that violent words will end in violent actions.
In Charlottesville, as in so many parts of the country right now, the conflict is over how to reconcile the nation’s checkered past, particularly as it relates to slavery, with the present need to sanitize the environment of anything - words and images - that might cause offense, especially if it’s a Confederate flag or monument.
In Charlottesville, that fear of offense prompted the City Council to get rid of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee that has graced one of its public parks for 82 years. In doing so, they have attracted the unwanted attention of the Ku Klux Klan.
With more than 1,000 Confederate monuments in 31 states (in public parks, courthouse squares and state capitols), not to mention Confederate battle flags on display in military cemeteries, and countless more buildings and parks named after historic figures who were slaveholders, this isn’t an issue that is going away anytime soon, no matter how much we ignore it, shout over it, criminalize it, legislate it, adjudicate or police it.
The temperature is rising all across the nation, and not just over this Confederate issue.
The “winter of our discontent” has given way to an overheated, sweltering summer in which shouting matches are skating dangerously close to becoming physical altercations.
As journalist Dahlia Lithwick writes for Slate, “These days, people who used to feel free to shout and threaten are emboldened to punch, body-slam, and stab. It is a short hop, we are learning, from ‘words can never hurt us’ to actual sticks and stones and the attendant breaking of bones. That is what has become of free speech in this country.”
Here’s the thing: if Americans don’t learn how to get along—at the very least, agreeing to disagree and respecting each other’s right to subscribe to beliefs and opinions that may be offensive, hateful, intolerant or merely different—then we’re going to soon find that we have no rights whatsoever (to speak, assemble, agree, disagree, protest, opt in, opt out, or forge our own paths as individuals).
The government will lock down the nation at the slightest provocation.
It is ready, willing and able to impose martial law within 24 hours.
Indeed, the government has been anticipating and preparing for civil unrest for years now, as evidenced by the build-up of guns and tanks and militarized police and military training drills and threat assessments and extremism reports and surveillance systems and private prisons.
Connect the dots, people.
The government doesn’t care about who you voted for in the presidential election or whether you think the Civil War was fought over states’ rights versus slavery. It doesn’t care about your race or gender or religion or sexual orientation.
When the police state cracks down, it will not discriminate.
We’ll all be muzzled together.
We’ll all be jailed together.
We’ll all be viewed as a collective enemy to be catalogued, conquered and caged.
Thus, the last thing we need to do is play into the government’s hands by turning on one another, turning in one another, and giving the government’s standing army an excuse to take over.
The police state could not ask for a better citizenry than one that carries out its own censorship, spying and policing.
This is how you turn a nation of free people into extensions of the omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent police state, and in the process turn a citizenry against each other. It’s a brilliant ploy, with the added bonus that while the citizenry remains focused on and distrustful of each other, they’re incapable of presenting a united front against the threats posed by the government and its cabal of Constitution-destroying agencies and corporate partners.
So how do we stop this train from barreling down the tracks past the police state and straight into martial law?
Let’s start with a little more patience, a lot more tolerance and a civics lesson on the First Amendment. This will mean opening the door to more speech not less, even if that speech is offensive to some or “dangerous” in the eyes of the government.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the U.S. government has become particularly intolerant of speech that challenges the government’s power, reveals the government’s corruption, exposes the government’s lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.
The powers-that-be understand that if the government can control speech, it controls thought and, in turn, it can control the minds of the citizenry. In fact, some of this past century’s greatest dystopian authors warned of this very danger.
In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, reading is banned and books are burned in order to suppress dissenting ideas, while televised entertainment is used to anesthetize the populace and render them easily pacified, distracted and controlled.
In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, serious literature, scientific thinking and experimentation are banned as subversive, while critical thinking is discouraged through the use of conditioning, social taboos and inferior education. Likewise, expressions of individuality, independence and morality are viewed as vulgar and abnormal.
In George Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother does away with all undesirable and unnecessary words and meanings, even going so far as to routinely rewrite history and punish “thoughtcrimes.”
And in almost every episode of Twilight Zone, Rod Serling urged viewers to unlock their minds and free themselves of prejudice, hate, violence and fear. “We’re developing a new citizenry,” Serling declared. “One that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles, but won’t be able to think.”
It’s time to start thinking for ourselves again.
It’s time to start talking to each other. It’s time to start listening more and shouting less.
Most of all, it’s time to start acting like people who will choose dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery.
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The Left Refuses To Tone Down Their Inflammatory Language, And As A Result We Now Have War In The Streets
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This is not a game. House Majority Whip Steve Scalise was shot in the hip, and four others were injured. You can see some footage of Scalise being taken to an ambulance here. When Hodgkinson arrived at the practice field, he specifically asked which party was using the practice field at that moment…
Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) recounted an “odd” encounter he had as he was leaving the field just minutes before the shooting: “There was a guy that walked up to us that was asking whether it was Republicans or Democrats out there, and it was just a little odd,” DeSantis told Fox News.
According to news reports, Hodgkinson fired dozens of shots. This wasn’t a case of targeting a particular individual. Rather, it was obvious that he intended to kill as many Republicans as he possibly could.
But instead of showing remorse, many on the radical left were actually celebrating the shootings on Twitter. And there were even some that were disappointed that it wasn’t Trump that had been shot.
I hate to say this, but it is likely that this is just the beginning of the violence by the radical left.
So what would make a 66-year-old man suddenly snap like this?
His Facebook page has now been taken down, but when it was up Hodgkinson had an enormous photo of Bernie Sanders as his banner image. And it turns out that he was a huge fan of Rachel Maddow…
So, where did Hodgkinson draw inspiration for his “progressive” political beliefs? Well, according to a letter to the editor published in the “Belleville News-Democrat” in July 2012, Hodgkinson’s favorite TV show was MSNBC’s “Rachel Maddow Show.”
What you consistently feed your mind determines what you eventually become, and this case is a perfect example. On Facebook, Hodgkinson regularly shared his hate-filled beliefs…
In a March 22 Facebook post, Hodgkinson, who turned his ire against Trump, who he described as a “traitor.”
“Trump Has Destroyed Our Democracy,” he said. “It’s Time to Destroy Trump & Co.”
In a post earlier this week, the suspect highlighted a campaign calling for the president’s impeachment.
“Trump is Guilty & Should Go to Prison for Treason,” Hodgkinson wrote.
And just check out some of the Facebook groups that Hodgkinson belonged to…
▪ “The Road to Hell is Paved with Republicans”
▪ “Donald Trump is not my President”
▪ “President Bernie Sanders”
▪ “Illinois Berners United to Resist Trump”
▪ “Boycott the Republican Party”
▪ “Expose Republican Fraud”
▪ “Terminate the Republican Party”
The hate-filled ideology of the left is intellectually and morally bankrupt, and the only thing all of this violence is going to do is to drive the American people away from their cause.
I must say that I agreed with U.S. Representative Steve King 100 percent when he told reporters that “violence is appearing in the streets”, and that it is “coming from the left”…
“America has been divided,” said Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), who, in suit and tie, stopped by the crime scene to pray and was viscerally angry about his colleagues being attacked. “And the center of America is disappearing, and the violence is appearing in the streets, and it’s coming from the left.”
And of course there has been a pattern of violence against Republican lawmakers in recent months. The following compilation comes from Natural News…
Last month, as noted by The Daily Caller, GOP Rep. Tom Garrett’s town halls were replete with heavy security and police presence after he and his family were repeatedly threatened with death. “This is how we’re going to kill your wife,” some disgusting coward wrote, Garrett told Politico.
Also last month, Tennessee police arrested and charged a 35-year-old woman, Wendi Wright, with felonious reckless endangerment after she allegedly attempted to run GOP Rep. David Kustoff off the road following a raucous town hall event featuring the Republican health care legislation.
That same day, North Dakota police escorted a man out of a town hall meeting hosted by Rep. Kevin Cramer after a man became physical with him, shoving a fistful of dollars into Cramer’s shirt collar.
I almost didn’t want my wife to see what happened in Alexandria this morning, because I am very, very strongly considering running for Congress here in Idaho.
I couldn’t help but think that it could have been me out on that baseball field.
It would be naive to think that more Republican lawmakers won’t be targeted. Just like radical Islam, the radical left in this country will never be satisfied until they completely eradicate our way of life. The radical left uses tools such as threats, violence and intimidation because they simply do not have the ammunition to win in the marketplace of ideas. And so anyone that tries to stand up to them will become a potential target.
But if we just sit back and do nothing, they will win by default.
In the end, Hodgkinson and others like him will fail. Because every time they strike us, all they are doing is waking up a sleeping giant called “the American people”. We will not bend, we will not bow, and we will not break, and no matter how violent they become our resolve will not waver.
Every since the very beginning of our nation Americans have had to stand up against tyranny, and we aren’t going to back down now.
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Registration Fees Prove Cannabis Legalization Is Really Just Us Buying Back Rights From Corrupt Government
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As an ever-growing body of scientific research further verifies the efficacy of medical marijuana as a natural alternative treatment for many ailments and for preventative health, more people are demanding access to this easy-to-grow weed. And while cannabis legalization sweeps the nation, state governments are becoming more open to the idea of having a new cash cow. There is, however, an enormous difference between the concepts of legalization and de-criminalization. The former, legalization, gives new powers to the government to create an entire new subset of regulatory agencies, registration schemes, punitive laws, fees, and punishments for engaging in the very simple act of gardening. De-criminalization implies that the government simply ceases to fine and imprison people.
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Tuesday, June 13, 2017
Warning: EPA Fighting to Keep Water Fluoridated
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from The Daily Bell:
Supposedly, the EPA exists in part to protect public health. So you might think they would want to get harmful chemicals out of the drinking supply, or at very least, prevent them from being added.
Yet despite mountains of evidence that fluoride is not only ineffective at preventing tooth decay when ingested but actually harmful to the human body, the EPA is still fighting to propagate public poisoning.
A lawsuit has been filed against the EPA by various watchdog organizations dedicated to removing fluoride from public drinking supplies. They want to force the EPA to ban the intentional addition of fluoride into drinking water supplies.
The lawsuit lays out all the evidence amassed about the harmful effects of fluoride, as well as the evidence that it is not necessary or beneficial to be ingested. It states that it has been disproven that fluoride helps prevent tooth decay when ingested, as thought when it was first introduced into drinking supplies in 1940.
It is now universally recognized by dental researchers, including the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Oral Health Division, that fluoride’s primary benefit comes from topical application. Fluoride does not need to be swallowed, therefore, to prevent tooth decay.
…
Whereas fluoride’s benefit to teeth comes from topical contact, fluoride’s health risks come from ingestion.
From there the lawsuit establishes the evidence that drinking fluoridated water is causing fluorosis, the discoloration of teeth.
And then, of course, it gets to the evidence that fluoride is a neurotoxin which causes significant harm to the brain, especially in children. They cite 300 studies which established the harm done by fluoride, 50 of which specifically found that exposure impairs cognitive functions. Fluoride exposure can cause a measurable drop in IQ and is considered among lead and mercury as a chemical toxic to the brain.
The lawsuit seeks to establish a court ruling on the toxicology of fluoride in order to meet current standards for an EPA ban on neurotoxins in drinking water. Based on a preponderance of the evidence, the suit claims fluoride sho
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The Dead Giveaways Of Imperial Decline
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Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,
Nothing is as permanent as we imagine--especially super-complex, super-costly, super-asymmetric and super-debt-dependent state/financial systems.
Identifying the tell-tale signs of Imperial decay and decline is a bit of a parlor game. The hubris of an increasingly incestuous and out-of-touch leadership, dismaying extremes of wealth inequality, self-serving, avaricious Elites, rising dependency of the lower classes on free Bread and Circuses provided by a government careening toward insolvency due to stagnating tax revenues and vast over-reach--these are par for the course of self-reinforcing Imperial decay.
Sir John Glubb listed a few others in his seminal essay on the end of empires The Fate of Empires, what might be called the dynamics of decadence:
(a) A growing love of money as an end in itself.
(b) A lengthy period of wealth and ease, which makes people complacent. They lose their edge; they forget the traits (confidence, energy, hard work) that built their civilization.
(c) Selfishness and self-absorption.
(d) Loss of any sense of duty to the common good.
Glubb included the following in his list of the characteristics of decadence:
-- an increase in frivolity, hedonism, materialism and the worship of unproductive celebrity (paging any Kardashians in the venue...)
-- a loss of social cohesion
-- willingness of an increasing number to live at the expense of a bloated bureaucratic state
Historian Peter Turchin, whom I have often excerpted here, listed three disintegrative forces that gnaw away the fibers of an Imperial economy and social order:
1. Stagnating real wages due to oversupply of labor
2. overproduction of parasitic Elites
3. Deterioration of central state finances
War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires
To these lists I would add a few more that are especially visible in the current Global Empire of Debt that encircles the globe and encompasses nations of all sizes and political/cultural persuasions:
1. An absurdly heightened sense of refinement as the wealth of the top 5% has risen so mightily as a direct result of financialization and globalization that the top .1% has been forced to seek ever more extreme refinements to differentiate the Elite class (financial-political royalty) from financial nobility (top .5% or so), the technocrat class (top 5%), the aspirant class (next 15%) and everyone below (the bottom 80%).
Now that just about any technocrat/ member of the lower reaches of the financial nobility can afford a low-interest loan on a luxury auto, wealthy aspirants must own super-cars costing $250,000 and up.
A mere yacht no longer differentiates financial royalty from lower-caste financial Nobles, so super-yachts are de riguer, along with extremes such as private islands, private jets in the $80 million-each range, and so on.
Even mere technocrat aspirants routinely spend $150 per plate for refined dining out and take extreme vacations to ever more remote locales to advance their social status.
Examples abound of this hyper-inflation of refinement as the wealth of the top 5% has skyrocketed.
2. The belief in the permanence of the status quo has reached quasi-religious levels of faith. The possibility that the entire financialized, politicized circus of extremes might actually be nothing more than a sand castle that's dissolving in the rising tides of history is not just heresy--it doesn't enter the minds of those reveling in refinement or those demanding more Bread and Circuses (Universal Basic Income, etc.)
3. Luxury, not service, defines the financial-political Elites. As Turchin pointed out in his book on the decline of empires, in the expansionist, integrative eras of empires, Elites based their status on service to the Common Good and the defense (or expansion) of the Empire.
While there are still a few shreds of noblesse oblige in the tattered banners of the financial elites, the vast majority of the Elites classes are focused on scooping up as much wealth and power as they can in the shortest possible time, with the goal being not to serve society or the Common Good but to enter the status competition game with enough wealth to afford the refined dining, luxury travel to remote locales, second and third homes in exotic but safe hideaways, and so on.
4. An unquestioned faith in the unlimited power of the state and central bank. The idea that the mightiest governments and central banks might not be able to print their way of our harm's way, that is, create as much money and credit as is needed to paper over any spot of bother, is unthinkable for the vast majority of the populace, Elites and debt-serfs alike.
That all this newly issued currency and credit is nothing but claims on future production of goods and services and rising productivity never enters the minds of the believers in unlimited state/bank powers. We have been inculcated with the financial equivalent of the Divine Powers of the Emperor: the government and central bank possess essentially divine powers to overcome any problem, any crisis and any conflict simply by creating more money, in whatever quantities are deemed necessary.
If $1 trillion in fresh currency will do the trick--no problem! $10 trillion? No problem! $100 trillion? No problem! there is no upper limit on how much new currency/credit the government and central bank can create.
That there might be limits on the efficacy of this money-creation never enters the minds of the faithful. That pushing currency-credit creation above the limits of efficacy might actually trigger the unraveling of the state-central bank's vaunted powers never occurs to believers in the unlimited reach of central states/banks.
The possibility that the central state/bank's powers are actually quite limited is blasphemy in an era in which the majority of the Elites and commoners alike depend on the "free money" machinery of the central state/bank for their wealth and livelihoods.
It is instructive to ponder the excesses of private wealth and political dysfunction of the late Roman Empire with the present-day excesses of private wealth and political dysfunction. As Turchin and others have documented, where the average wealth of a Roman patrician in the Republic (the empire's expansionist, integrative phase) was perhaps 10-20 times the free-citizen commoner's wealth, by the disintegrative, decadent phase of imperial decay, the Elites held wealth on the scale of 10,000 times the wealth of the typical commoner. Elite villas were more like small villages centered around the excesses of luxury than mere homes for the wealthy and their household servants. Here is a commentary drawn from Turchin's work:
"An average Roman noble of senatorial class had property valued in the neighborhood of 20,000 Roman pounds of gold. There was no 'middle class' comparable to the small landholders of the third century B.C.; the huge majority of the population was made up of landless peasants working land that belonged to nobles. These peasants had hardly any property at all, but if we estimate it (very generously) at one tenth of a pound of gold, the wealth differential would be 200,000! Inequality grew both as a result of the rich getting richer (late imperial senators were 100 times wealthier than their Republican predecessors) and those of the middling wealth becoming poor."
Following in Ancient Rome's Footsteps: Moral Decay, Rising Wealth Inequality (September 30, 2015)
We can be quite confident that these powerful elites reckoned the Empire was permanent and its power to secure their wealth and power was effectively unlimited. But alas, their fantastic wealth vanished along with the rest of the centralized, over-extended, complex and costly Imperial structures.
There is a peculiarly widespread belief that Elites are so smart and powerful that they always manage to evade the collapse of the empires that created and protected their wealth. But there is essentially no evidence for this belief when eras truly change.
Yes, Elites have proven to be adept at shifting with the political winds; thus the guestbooks of French chateaux were filled with the names of Nazi dignitaries during the German occupation of France, and with the names of Allied bigwigs after the war ended the 1,000-year Reich.
But the complete collapse of the financial system and centralized power is not a war or financial crisis--these are storm waters which the Elites have the wherewithal to survive. But when a tsunami disintegrates the entire structure and carries it out to a nameless sea as flotsam and jetsam, there is no transfer of wealth from the Old to the New.
The Roman Elites did not become Barbarian elites who just so happened to own the same villas and vast estates they did when they wore togas and dined on super-refined delicacies. They were pushed aside along with everything that supported their wealth and power.
Nothing is quite as permanent as we imagine--especially super-complex, super-costly, super-asymmetric and super-debt-dependent state/financial systems.
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There are only two other times in history when stocks were more expensive than today
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We are having a hard time finding high-quality companies at attractive valuations.
For us, this is not an academic frustration. We are constantly looking for new stocks by running stock screens, endlessly reading (blogs, research, magazines, newspapers), looking at holdings of investors we respect, talking to our large network of professional investors, attending conferences, scouring for ideas published on value-investor networks, and finally, looking with frustration at our large (and growing) watch list of companies we’d like to buy at a significant margin of safety. The median stock on our watch list has to decline by about 35%-40% to be an attractive buy.
But maybe we’re too subjective. Instead of just asking you to take our word for it, we’ll show you a few charts that not only demonstrate our point, but also show the magnitude of the stock market’s overvaluation and, more importantly, put it into historical context.
Each chart examines stock market valuation from a slightly differently perspective, but each arrives at the same conclusion: The average stock is overvalued somewhere between tremendously and enormously. If you don’t know whether “enormously” is greater than “tremendously” or vice versa, don’t worry, we don’t know either. But this is our point exactly: When an asset class is significantly overvalued and continues to get overvalued, quantifying its overvaluation brings little value.
Great Depression, dot-com bubble
Let’s demonstrate this point by looking at a few charts.
The first chart shows price-to-earnings of the S&P 500 SPX, +0.45% in relation to its historical average. The average stock today is trading at 73% above its historical average valuation. There are only two other times in history that stocks were more expensive than they are today: just before the Great Depression hit and in the 1999 run-up to the dot-com bubble’s bursting.
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We know what happened in both cases: Stocks declined — a lot. Based on over a century of history, we are fairly sure that, this time too, stock valuations will at some point revert to their mean and stock markets will decline. After all, price-to-earnings behaves like a pendulum that swings around the mean, and today that pendulum has swung far above the mean.
What we don’t know is how this journey will look in the interim. Before the inevitable decline, will price-to-earnings revisit the pre-Great Depression level of 95% above average, or will it maybe say hello to the pre-dot-com crash level of 164% above average? Or will another injection of QE steroids from central banks send stocks valuations to new, never-before-seen highs? Nobody knows.
One chart is not enough. Let’s take a look at another one, called the Buffett Indicator. Apparently, Warren Buffett likes to use it to take the temperature of market valuations. Think of this chart as a price-to-sales ratio for the whole economy, that is, the market value of all equities divided by gross domestic product (GDP). The higher the price-to-sales ratio, the more expensive stocks are.
dshort.com
This chart tells a similar story to the first one. We’re sure a lot of bulls were celebrating and cheerleading every day as the market marched higher in 1927, 1928 and the first 11 months of 1929. The cheerleaders probably made a lot of intelligent, well-reasoned arguments, which could be put into two buckets: First, “this time is different” (it never is); and second, “yes, stocks are overvalued, but we are still in the bull market.” (And they were right about this until they lost their shirts.)
Slower economic growth
Both Mike and Vitaliy were investing during the 1999 bubble. (Mike has lived through a lot of more bubbles, but a gentleman never tells.) We both vividly remember the “this time is different” argument of 1999. It was the new vs. the old economy; the internet was supposed to change or at least modify the rules of economic gravity — the economy was now supposed to grow at a new, much faster rate. But economic growth over the past 20 years has not been any different than in the previous 20 years — no, let us take this back: It has actually been lower. From 1980 to 2000, real economic growth was about 3% a year, while from 2000 to today it has been about 2% a year.
Finally, let’s look at a Tobin’s Q chart. Don’t let the name intimidate you — this chart simply shows the market value of equities in relation to their replacement cost. If you are a dentist, and dental practices are sold for a million dollars while the cost of opening a new practice (phone system, chairs, drills, X-ray equipment, etc.) is $500,000, then Tobin’s Q is 2. The higher the ratio, the more expensive stocks are. Again, this one tells the same story as the other two charts: Stocks are very expensive and were more expensive only twice in the past 100-plus years.
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What will make the market roll over? It’s hard to say, though we promise you the answer will be obvious in hindsight. Expensive markets collapse by their own weight, pricked by an exogenous event. What made the dot-com bubble burst in 1999? Valuations got too high; P/Es stopped expanding. As stock prices started their decline, dot-coms that were losing money couldn’t finance their losses by issuing new stock. Did the stock market decline cause the recession, or did the recession cause the stock market decline? We are not sure of the answer, and in the practical sense the answer is not that important, because we cannot predict either a recession or a stock market decline.
The folly of forecasting
In December 2007, Vitaliy was one of the speakers at the Colorado CFA Society Forecast Dinner. A large event, with a few hundred attendees. One of the questions posed was: “When are we going into a recession?” Vitaliy gave his usual, unimpressive “I don’t know” answer. The rest of the panel, who were well-respected, seasoned investment professionals with impressive pedigrees, offered their well-reasoned views that foresaw a recession in anywhere from six to 18 months. Ironically, as we discovered a year later through revised economic data, at the time of our discussion the U.S. economy was already in a recession.
We spend little time trying to predict the next recession, and we don’t try to figure out what prick will cause this market to roll over. Our ability to forecast is very poor and is thus not worth the effort.
An argument can be made that stocks, even at high valuations, are not expensive in context of the current incredibly low interest rates. This argument sounds so true and logical, but — and this is a huge “but” — there is a crucial embedded assumption that interest rates will stay at these levels for a decade or two.
Hopefully by this point you are convinced of our ignorance, at least when it comes to predicting the future. As you can imagine, we don’t know when interest rates will go up or by how much. (Nobody does.) When interest rates rise, stocks’ appearance of cheapness will dissipate like mist in the breeze.
A twist
And there is another twist: If interest rates remain where they are today, or even decline, this will be a sign that the economy has big, deflationary (Japan-like) problems. Interest rates at zero did not protect the valuations of Japanese stocks from the horrors of deflation — Japanese P/Es contracted despite the decline in rates. America may be an exceptional nation, but the laws of economic gravity work here just as effectively as in any other country.
Finally, buying overvalued stocks because bonds are even more overvalued has the feel of choosing a less painful poison. How about being patient and not taking the poison at all?
How to invest today
You may ask: How do we invest in an environment when the stock market is very expensive? The key word is “invest.” Merely buying expensive stocks hoping that they’ll go even higher is not investing, it’s gambling. We don’t do that and won’t do that.
Not to get too dramatic here, but here’s how we look at it: Our goal is to win a war, and to do that we may need to lose a few battles in the interim.
Yes, we want to make money, but it is even more important not to lose it. If the market continues to mount even higher, we will likely lag behind. The stocks we own will become fully valued, and we’ll sell them. If our cash balances continue to rise, then they will. We are not going to sacrifice our standards and thus let our portfolio be a byproduct of forced or irrational decisions.
We are willing to lose a few battles, but those losses will be necessary to win the war. Timing the market is an impossible endeavor. We don’t know anyone who has done it successfully on a consistent and repeated basis. In the short run, stock market movements are completely random — as random as trying to guess the next card at the blackjack table.
However, valuing companies is not random. In the long run, stocks revert to their fair value. If we assemble a portfolio of high-quality companies that are significantly undervalued, then we should do well in the long run. However, in the short run we have very little control over how the market will price our stocks.
Our focus in 2016 was to improve the overall quality of the portfolio — and we did. We will stubbornly continue to build a portfolio of high-quality companies that are undervalued.
The market doesn’t need to collapse for us to buy new stocks. The market falls in and out of love with sectors and stocks all the time. In 2014 and 2015, health-care stocks were in vogue, but in 2016 that love was replaced by a raging hatred. We bought a lot of health-care stocks in 2016. In the first quarter, REITs as a group were decimated and we bought Medical Properties Inc. MPW at less than 10 times earnings and a near 8% dividend yield — more on that later. We also spend a lot of time looking for stocks outside the U.S., in countries that have a free market system and the rule of law.
The point we want to stress is this: We don’t own the market. Though the market may be overvalued, our portfolio is not.
For a more extensive version of our thoughts on investing in today’s environment, see “How Investors Should Deal With the Overwhelming Problem of Understanding the World Economy.”
Vitaliy Katsenelson is chief investment officer at Investment Management Associates Inc. (IMA), a value-investment firm based in Denver
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