Page 15 - Shrinking Planet News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Our Phantom Middle Class What happens when America finally admits its middle class is a phantom of feel-good fantasy? We may well find out in the next four years. Of the many things we cannot bring ourselves to admit, one of the most consequential is that our vaunted middle class is illusory, a phantom of our imagination rather than a reality. The reality is the vast majority of the nation's wealth and income has been diverted from the middle class to those at the pinnacle of the wealth-power pyramid and the technocrat / financier insider class (the top 10%) that serves the interests of tho...

Extremes get more extreme until risk breaks out; then the reversal will be as extreme as the bubble expansion. What would happen if the Federal Reserve ceased to exist? We all know the answer: global markets would instantly collapse and the global financial system, now entirely dependent on Fed stimulus, intervention, manipulation,  free money for financiers and endless printing of trillions of dollars out of thin air, would crash, leaving nothing but a steaming, fetid pile of corruption infested by the cockroaches scurrying around gobbling up the few crumbs left. What would happen if the ...

This devaluation of financial wealth–and its transformation to a dangerous liability– will reach extremes equal to the current extremes of wealth-income inequality. Financial capital–money–is the Ring that rules them all. But could this power fall from grace? Continuing this week’s discussion of the idea that that extremes lead to reversions, let’s consider the bedrock presumption of the global economy, which is that  money is the most valuable thing in the Universe because the owner of money can buy anything, as  everything is for sale. The only question is the price. Reversi...

The absolutely last thing anyone expects is a collapse of all the asset bubbles, i.e. a  deflation of assets that reverses the full 20 years of bubble-utopia since 2000. The consensus is universal: assets will continue to loft ever higher, forever and ever, because  the Fed has our back, i.e. central banks will create trillions out of thin air without any consequence other than assets lofting ever higher. This research paper from the San Francisco Federal Reserve begs to differ. Here is an excerpt from Longer-Run Economic Consequences of Pandemics (San Francisco Federal Reserve) “Mea...

Fire. but it has its defenders. like the 18 republicans in the colorado state legislator who sent a letter to the epa demanding the agency not regulate fracking. no matter what. okay. so deepwater drilling is dangerous.  drilling is dangerous. moving around oil around the country is dangerous. getting natural gas out of the ground is dangerous and don't even get me started on coal. joining me now, the professor of peace and world security studies. he has the book rising powers, shrinking planet. the new geo politicses of energy. thank you for joining me. >> it is my pleasure. >> one of the po...