Page 5 - Shrinking Planet News Today

Hey Fed, Explain Again How Making Billionaires Richer Creates Jobs Published: May 9, 2021 Despite their hollow bleatings about doing all we can to achieve full employment, the Feds policies has been Kryptonite to employment, labor and the bottom 90%--and most especially to the bottom 50%, the working poor that one might imagine most deserve a leg up. As wealth and income inequality soar to new heights thanks to the Federal Reserves policies of zero interest rates, money-printing and financial s...

ZeroHedge - On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero

Events that devastate the majority financially greatly enrich the few who bet on non-linear dynamics. I see the same question in forums, threads, articles and emails: what can I do to protect myself and my family from whatever lies ahead? Given the uncertainties and extremes that are so evident, recognizing risk is a useful first step, a recognition that is very much out of fashion. If we glance at the charts of margin debt (loans taken against ones stock portfolio) which is at record highs.....

Im sure its no surprise that the next five years will be risky and challenging; to the degree that we will be reliant on those closest to us, we are sharing a virtual lifeboat. Consider a scenario in which were on a ship thats sinking, and the lifeboats have been launched. Being some of the last still on board the doomed vessel, we can scan whos in each lifeboat and choose which one well clamber into. Its a consequential decision because the currents and weather are already separating the life...

Expropriation: dispossessing the populace of property and property rights , via the legal and financial over-reach of monetary and political authorities. All expropriations are pernicious, but the most destructive is the expropriation of labors value while the excessive gains of unproductive speculation accrue to the elite that owns most of the nations wealth. In a nation in which the leadership has finely honed the art and artifice of  legalized looting and financial legerdemain, its not su...

Democracy is fundamentally about advocacy: the people are free to  advocate for their interests and form groups to represent their shared interests. In the broadest scope, the people are free to advocate for what they hold as the  common good, policies and programs that benefit the entire populace rather than one special-interest group. Since the state (all levels of government) concentrates wealth and power via taxation and a monopoly on force, groups advocate/lobby the state to recognize ...

Democracy is fundamentally about advocacy: the people are free to  advocate for their interests and form groups to represent their shared interests. In the broadest scope, the people are free to advocate for what they hold as the  common good, policies and programs that benefit the entire populace rather than one special-interest group. Since the state (all levels of government) concentrates wealth and power via taxation and a monopoly on force, groups advocate/lobby the state to recognize ...

It’s all so pathetic, isn’t it? The only way left to get ahead in America is to leverage up the riskiest gambles. It’s painfully obvious that the only way left to get ahead in America is crazy-risky speculation, but nobody seems to even notice this stark and stunning reality. Why are people piling into crazy-risky bets on speculative vehicles like Gamestop and Dogecoin? The obvious answer is because others have reaped a decade or two of wages in a few weeks, and skimming a couple hundred...

Its all so pathetic, isnt it? The only way left to get ahead in America is to leverage up the riskiest gambles. Its painfully obvious that the only way left to get ahead in America is crazy-risky speculation, but nobody seems to even notice this stark and stunning reality. Why are people piling into crazy-risky bets on speculative vehicles like Gamestop and Dogecoin? The obvious answer is because others have reaped a decade or two of wages in a few weeks, and skimming a couple hundred thousand...

America’s financial system and state are themselves the problems, yet neither system is capable of recognizing this or unwinding their fatal synergies. why do some systems/states emerge from crises stronger while similar systems/states collapse? Put another way: take two very similar political-social-economic systems/nation-states and two very similar crises, and why does one system not just survive but emerge better adapted while the other system/state fails? The answer lies in what author ...