STOCKS クラッシュは - パニック #China を飲み込み

China Devalues Yuan as Stocks Crash

We  Told You So 

As much as we truly hate saying it, as well  as, warning folks, time and time again, for years and months on end - about the huge, looming Chinese meltdown- it was  as if we are just talking to ourselves. Nobody appeared   to listen.  

Conditions here mirror the US markets and economy of the 20's that led  to that  BIG crash. This one is going to be worse, much worse . Why? Just because the extremes are greater and it's a much larger bubble number-wise involving 1.5 billion Chinese people  (US was near 100 million). That's tells you it is potentially 15 times worse in terms of ramifications  based on  China's economy alone. 

OK  - now are you going to lend us your ears...

http://pwa2100.blogspot.ca/2016/03/stocks-nosedive-panic-engulfs-china.html 

Why Singapore's Economy Is Heading For An Iceland-Style Meltdown

By  Jesse  Columbo,  Forbes 

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jessecolombo/2014/01/13/why-singapores-economy-is-heading-for-an-iceland-style-meltdown/#346ffdb113cc

Well, the global financial system has basically been teetering since 2008,  AND "insiders" have been expecting the dark forces to arrive any day. Looks like the first stop along the way may be  Singapore?     

http://pwa2100.blogspot.ca/2016/02/singapore-faces-icelandic-grim-economic.html

Mervyn King: The  Eurozone is Doomed   

Whatever boneheads thought that supra-constitutions were better  for economic stability or governing anything had more than a few loose marbles. Basically, such stupidity undermines both free enterprise and democracy , thereby destroying the fabric, inspiration and motivation of a society while concurrently leading to oppressive states that garner Soviet-style sluggishness and inefficiencies.

 Now, if you recall the Soviet system fell apart just for the reasons mentioned above  - meaning that it was a perfect time for the  Eurozone to copy their failed ideology ( so who needs a book to figure out common sense issues?  - More dumb!) 

Repeat after FFI folks, "Tear Down Those Walls Mr Gorbachev"  

http://pwa2000.blogspot.ca/2016/03/top-british-banker-dooms-eurozone.html

Arab States Face $94 Billion Debt Crunch on Oil Slump, HSBC Says

​ 

How many businesses can withstand a drop in revenues of 50% or more and expect to survive? Few,  if any! With oil prices being down by that percentage, expect many of the resource based countries to start defaulting on their debt and thereby crashing the global banking system along with the stock markets. It will cascade!

It was all a house of cards built on an exuberant credit bonanza fueled by unprecedented low loan rates that was doomed from the start. Now here comes the payback - and it won't be pretty.

All things revert to the mean - that's the first  law of common sense, just ask Soros!

http://pwa2000.blogspot.ca/2016/02/hsbc-yikes-arab-states-going-broke.html

 

www.firstfinancialinsights.blogspot.com

母＃ロシアの石油ベースの経済暴落

Can things get any worse for Russia? You're about to find out

For a decade, Dmitri Barinov has been following the volatile economy of his homeland from the safe distance of Union Investment’s offices in Frankfurt. Last year, as other money managers were steering clear of Russia’s broken economy, the Moscow-born Barinov pulled off something of a coup: He persuaded his bosses to take the plunge and buy Russian government bonds. It was a narrow bet, but he ended up winning because the central bank—after implementing the biggest interest rate hike since the Russian financial crisis in 1998 to prop up the collapsing ruble—changed course and aggressively backtracked. In the first 10 months of 2015, ruble-denominated government bonds handed investors such as Barinov a 25 percent return in dollar terms, the biggest gain for local bonds anywhere.

Read More

http://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/can-things-get-any-worse-for-russia-youre-about-to-find-out/ar-BBpU3Q4?li=BBnbfcL

www.firstfinancialinsights.blogspot.com

The Great Global Famine - The Aftermath of Peak Oil

The Coming Famine

By Peter Goodchild

http://www.survivepeakoil.blogspot.ca/2016/02/the-coming-famine.html 

Humanity has struggled to survive through the millennia in terms of Nature's tendency to balance population size with food supply. The same is true now, but population numbers have been soaring for over a century. Oil, the limiting factor, is close to or beyond its peak extraction. Without ample, free-flowing oil, it will not be possible to support a population of several billion for long. Without fossil fuels for fertilizer and pesticides, as well as for cultivating and harvesting, crop yields drop by more than two-thirds (Pimentel, 1984; Pimentel & Hall, 1984; Pimentel & Pimentel, 2007). 

Over the next few decades, there will be famine on a scale many times larger than ever before in human history. It is possible, of course, that warfare and plague, for example, will take their toll to a large extent before famine claims its victims. The distinctions, in any case, can never be absolute: often "war + drought = famine" (Devereux, 2000, p. 15), especially in sub-Saharan Africa, but there are several other combinations of factors.

Although, when discussing theories of famine, economists generally use the term "neo-malthusian" in a derogatory manner, the coming famine will be very much a case of an imbalance between population and resources. The ultimate cause will be fossil-fuel depletion, not government policy (as in the days of Stalin or Mao), warfare, ethnic discrimination, bad weather, poor methods of distribution, inadequate transportation, livestock diseases, or any of the other variables that have often turned mere hunger into genuine starvation. 

The increase in the world’s population has followed a simple curve: from about 1.7 billion in 1900 to over 7 billion today. A quick glance at a chart of world population growth, on a broader time scale, shows a line that runs almost horizontally for thousands of years, and then makes an almost vertical ascent as it approaches the present. That is not just an amusing curiosity. It is a shocking fact that should have awakened humanity to the realization that something is dreadfully wrong.

Mankind is always prey to its own "exuberance," to use Catton’s term. That has certainly been true of population growth. In many cultures, "Do you have any children?" or, "How many children do you have?" is a form of greeting or civility almost equivalent to "How do you do?" or, "Nice to meet you." World population growth, nevertheless, has always been ecologically hazardous. With every increase in human numbers we are only barely able to keep up with the demand: providing all those people with food and water has not been easy. We are always pushing ourselves to the limits of Earth’s ability to hold us (Catton, 1982).

Read More

The Great Global Famine - The Aftermath of  Peak Oil

www.firstfinancialinsights.blogspot.com

Energy Physics Sets the Stage for Economic Collpase

The Physics of Energy and the Economy

  by Gail Tverberg 

I approach the subject of the physics of energy and the economy with some trepidation. An economy seems to be a dissipative system, but what does this really mean? There are not many people who understand dissipative systems, and very few who understand how an economy operates. The combination leads to an awfully lot of false beliefs about the energy needs of an economy.

The primary issue at hand is that, as a dissipative system, every economy has its own energy needs, just as every forest has its own energy needs (in terms of sunlight) and every plant and animal has its own energy needs, in one form or another. A hurricane is another dissipative system. It needs the energy it gets from warm ocean water. If it moves across land, it will soon weaken and die.

There is a fairly narrow range of acceptable energy levels–an animal without enough food weakens and is more likely to be eaten by a predator or to succumb to a disease. A plant without enough sunlight is likely to weaken and die.

In fact, the effects of not having enough energy flows may spread more widely than the individual plant or animal that weakens and dies. If the reason a plant dies is because the plant is part of a forest that over time has grown so dense that the plants in the under story cannot get enough light, then there may be a bigger problem. The dying plant material may accumulate to the point of encouraging forest fires. Such a forest fire may burn a fairly wide area of the forest. Thus, the indirect result may be to put to an end a portion of the forest ecosystem itself.

How should we expect an economy to behave over time? The pattern of energy dissipated over the life cycle of a dissipative system will vary, depending on the particular system. In the examples I gave, the pattern seems to somewhat follow what Ugo Bardi calls a Seneca Cliff.

Figure 1. Seneca Cliff by Ugo Bardi

The Seneca Cliff pattern is so-named because long ago, Lucius Seneca wrote:

It would be some consolation for the feebleness of our selves and our works if all things should perish as slowly as they come into being; but as it is, increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid.

The Standard Wrong Belief about the Physics of Energy and the Economy

There is a standard wrong belief about the physics of energy and the economy; it is the belief we can somehow train the economy to get along without much energy.

In this wrong view, the only physics that is truly relevant is the thermodynamics of oil fields and other types of energy deposits. All of these fields deplete if exploited over time. Furthermore, we know that there are a finite number of these fields. Thus, based on the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the amount of free energy we will have available in the future will tend to be less than today. This tendency will especially be true after the date when “peak oil” production is reached.

According to this wrong view of energy and the economy, all we need to do is design an economy that uses less energy. We can supposedly do this by increasing efficiency, and by changing the nature of the economy to use a greater proportion of services. If we also add renewables (even if they are expensive) the economy should be able to get along fine with very much less energy.

These wrong views are amazingly widespread. They seem to underlie the widespread hope that the world can reduce its fossil fuel use by 80% between now and 2050 without badly disturbing the economy. The book 2052: A Forecast for the Next 40 Years by Jorgen Randers seems to reflect these views. Even the “Stabilized World Model” presented in the 1972 book The Limits to Growth by Meadow et al. seems to be based on naive assumptions about how much reduction in energy consumption is possible without causing the economy to collapse.

Read More

About Gail Tverberg

My name is Gail Tverberg. I am an actuary interested in finite world issues - oil depletion, natural gas depletion, water shortages, and climate change. Oil limits look very different from what most expect, with high prices leading to recession, and low prices leading to inadequate supply.

www.firstfinancialinsights.blogspot.com

EYE on the World - Swiss Billionaire Says​,​ Massive Bank Crisis​ Hitting Singapore

Swiss Billionaire Says

​,​

 Massive Bank Crisis

​ 

Hitting 

Singapore

Billionaire Felix Zulauf:

​ ​

 

​"​

A massive banking crisis is brewing in Singapore:

​"​

( Thanks to Jesse Colombo 

​, Forbes,  ​

for flagging this article

​ and tweet​

)

 http://sbr.com.sg/financial-services/news/massive-banking-crisis-brewing-in-singapore-says-swiss-billionaire-zulauf

​Th​e global banking system is in rough shape as the house of cards created by giant credit-driven realty and stock market bubbles  in  China , Asia and elsewhere,  are tumbling down. Remember 2008? The first signs  began with - 

  Societe Generale pulling the plug on  US securitized mortgage debt in early August 2007, that then  triggering trading losses of  4.9 billion pounds  in January 2008.  Then  eight months  later  the crisis heightens and hits  North American  shores  causing a market meltdown, the fall of Lehman Brothers and the greatest banking bailout in US history. Guess what?  This one is much bigger. The consequences are assured to be much uglier .  

Also see

​ more signals​

 - 

​as ​

Singapore, 

​the ​

world’s 2nd largest port, container traffic fell 9% in 2015*, off 12% in January

​, too​

. *1st decline in 6 years:

https://twitter.com/Convertbond/status/698539301240442881

Canadian Banks Sure to Fall  with  Global System

( Thanks to 

​ 

Dan Mathisson

​, International Banking,​

​  

for flagging this article)

Last time, the Canadian banks were pretty well  immune from the  financial tidal wave that devastated much of the global banking system  in 2008. This time will be a different story. Real estate bubbles in its major cities along with world-leading consumer household debt to disposable income are  thereby placing these national banks on all the international monetary watch lists.   More bubble, bubble troubles...  

http://www.businessinsider.com/canada-housing-market-slides-2015-1 

Another case of greedy CEO's levering their institutional balance sheets to create excessive personal bonuses. Grand larceny at its best, when it's done with a pen; not a gun!  So,  it's the same ole game, that begs the question - where are the boards?  More importantly, where are the regulators? Is everyone, since 2008,  "still asleep" at the switch?

They probably don't even know where it is!

www.firstfinancialinsights.blogspot.com