This is not exactly a “big deal” morning. Futures were down 60 and here comes post options let-down. Wake me up later.
A lot of reasons to snooze, of course, but the main ones go something like this:
1. Thanks to Emancipation Day being a DC holiday, TODAY is the deadline for IRS tax filings, unless you get the extension request in.
2. The Fed Meeting on rates is next week, not this week (some coffee kicked in) so we will have some real interesting data next week, but not so much this week.
I don’t know about you, but I like it when we get a week where there is a Fed statement on rates and the Case Shiller Housing numbers. Keeps life interesting.
True, there is a minor Housing index out in a couple of hours, and the Census Housing Starts tomorrow morning, but even when you toss in existing home sales Wednesday, it still doesn’t contain the information that’s in the Case Shiller report.
That gets us through Wednesday and Thursday is another day to dose up on Triple Americanos because most of the news is minor..
Come Friday, if you work in finance, this would be a good day to take off early and take in some lower lakes freshwater trout fishing. Single-egging is good this time of the year if weather cooperates.
If you don’t know what “single-egging” is, you’ve spent too much time on a Facebook and not enough time in a Fishboat.
WE define cultural insanity as wifi &/or G3/4 coverage of a trout lake.
Excavating Ecuador
That 7.8 quake in Ecuador has us very concerned for a couple of regular contributors to the discussion pages of this site: Bruce and Deborah, we hope you are OK.
With luck, when conditions down there recover a bit, they will be able to fill us in on what it was like. Reason? We often put out of our minds the possibility that such an event could happen any time here in the USA in at least three places: Pacific Northwest, SoCal up to SF, and the New Madrid region. Any learnings along the way are valuable, but the biggest one on my list is lots of drinking water.
For now, the death toll from the 7.8 is climbing toward 300 and with 3,000 reported injured, a reasonable guess is that those figures will at least double in coming days.
Change in Brazil
The lower house of the Brazilian parliament has voted to impeach president Dilma Rousseff – which means we can expect change there, shortly.
With a population about one third smaller than the US, and with a land area of 3.2 million square miles, it’s a big place. By comparison, the US is 3.5 million square miles, but back our the wilds of Alaska and things get a little closer.
The thumbnail of Brazil’s economy from Wikipedia goes like this:
The Brazilian economy has been predicted to become one of the five largest in the world in the decades to come, the GDP per capita following and growing,[211] provided that large investments in productivity gains are made to substitute the GDP growth of the last decade that is attributable to the increase in the number of people working.[212] Its current GDP (PPP) per capita is $15,153 in 2014[6] putting Brazil in the 77th position according to IMF data. Active in agricultural, mining, manufacturing and service sectors Brazil has a labor force of over a 107 million (ranking 6th worldwide) and unemployment of 6.2% (ranking 64th worldwide).
In terms of what happens next – in a post-impeachment Brazil – it’s hard to say. The country has been self-governed for a very long time so as a result, it will probably end up in about the same boat as the impeachment of Richard Nixon in the USA, but it doesn’t really result in a massive change of how things work.
Except: With that much land and such a key high-output landmass, we will sort of look for environmental policy change and birth control to emerge as discussion points as a new government preps to take over.
The Brazilian Federal Constitution establishes that a Vice-President succeeds as President when the elected President dies, resigns or is removed from office. The other officers in the line of succession are the President of the Chamber of Deputies, the President of the Federal Senate, and the President of the Supreme Federal Court, in that order, but those other officers do not succeed to the presidency as a Vice-President would. Instead, they merely serve as Acting President.
The Vice-President and the other officers in the line of succession, in accordance with the constitutional order of preference, also serve as Acting President when the President is under incapacity, or is suspended due to impeachment proceedings, or when the President travels abroad.
In Brazil, when the Vice-President dies, resigns or is removed from office, or when a Vice-President succeeds to the Presidency, the Vice-Presidency remains vacant until the inauguration of the Vice-President chosen in the next election. That election is usually the presidential election held in the last year of the presidential term to choose the President and Vice-President that will serve in the next four-year presidential term. Only when both the Presidency and the Vice-Presidency become vacant at the same time are special elections summoned to elect a new President and Vice-President to complete the pending presidential term.
Still, it is an interesting change to watch, but without huge stocks of nuclear and chemical arms, and without a Muslim insurgency, it’s more an academic process than a headline maker.
Dangerous Drones
As a (self-grounded for the moment) pilot, I’ve told you it is only a matter of time and unlicensed idiots with drones before we get our first passenger jet crash to be blamed on a drone.
Today, we have moved closer to this coming true, as it’s reported that a British Airways jet with 137 aboard hit a drone over Heathrow/London.
A few ounces of bird into a jet engine will make a mess in the hot section, but an equal amount of metal and plastic could be a lot different outcome. It’s just a matter of time.
The Press – Some Genuine Curiosities
I mentioned this to Peoplenomics subscribers recently: When I see too much hype around a product, I sill sometimes look at shorting the underlying stock.
So here’s another morning when Google News has another Tesla story (This 70-Year-Old Has The Best Reaction To A Model S With Autopilot) and it seems to have become a daily “thing.”
This sort of warms me to the point: There are a lot of Americans who don’t trust the Press – and only 6% of your countrymen buy their sanctity.
Need another example?
OK, sure. Here’s a story to consider: NYC to Donald Trump: He’s not one of us. This was from CNN.
This is the kind of story people might be well-advised not to trust. The headline implies that Trump is not popular in New York (“not one of us”) and yet when you get into the story, the people interviewed seemed to be mostly democrats.
The topic comes up in the New York Times (and other content monsters) under headlines like “For News Outlets Squeezed From the Middle, It’s Bend or Bust.”
And going further, another article notes that the online ad money is flowing into the (I think useless) social media sites and search.
Further Dark Musings
Since we’re on such a pleasant trail this morning, here comes an update on national defense preps from our buddy warhammer, a former oak lead cluster type:
This article posits whether “we [America] are ready for a cyber attack on the power grid!”
<http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/are-we-prepared-cyber-attack-power-grid-lawmakers-n556001>
Short answer – no! Nor are we prepared for a direct terror attack, a solar CME strike or an EMP burst, man made or cosmic.
The U.S. population and government are 99% dependent upon having uninterrupted power. No power means no communications, no lighting or refrigeration, failures in our food and other supply distribution and a 3rd World equivalent for medical care.
It is America’s Achilles Heel. How many Americans could cope with being thrown back to an early 1800s living arrangement? The death toll would be staggering.
Every time a read a story about a power outage (like 15.000 Area residents experience power outage), I think to myself: Is this some jihadi code-warriors making a test run?
Something to think about because it comes up all the time in books about EMP and just like there was talk about jihadists from Saudi Arabia extremists before 9/11, everyone’s going to act surprised with the lights go out here.
Repeat after me: Those who don’t learn the lessons of history are doomed to what?
Big day tomorrow.. what affect with this have against the value of the dollar.. I figured this was coming after what the IMF did in November .. Now that it is having and a gold backed security without any exchange rates allowed for the dollar because it isn’t secured by anything could be big news..
https://www.superstation95.com/index.php/world/1152
my bet still rides on spring 2017 for the fireworks.. my original prediction was a fake fall.. drop the market by the titan’s so that they can pick up stocks at rock bottom prices.. then do the roller coaster till next spring then let the fake fall shoot them into another galaxy.. this april 19th event though could be the beginnings of the battle between the titan’s
What about the Gold and Silver price fixing. Should be major News. It seems it has gone all quiet on the Western Front ! From a past Peoplenomics subscriber who has become a casualty of our great economic recovery !
Isn’t that the way with every news article that has some truth to it that the tptb want quiet.
George, warhammer is absolutely correct. Our whole economy has shifted to the JIT model, which has no reserve or margin of error. It doesn’t take much to mess up a system chock full of single points of failure. As a nation our greed and arrogance may be our undoing.
Having spent close to 3 decades in the power industry our transmission system is especially vulnerable. There are approximately 12 sites where if all were taken down it would cause most of the electric grid to fail. The transformers used at these places are all built overseas now and require several years lead time to replace.
Texas is less vulnerable as it is on it’s own power grid (called ERCOT). The rest of the contiguous 48 states are divided between the Eastern and Western Interconnection. If the grid tie connections fail you will have a fair chance of still having power. In event of an EMP voltages will be lower than those in more northern latitudes.
I live in the eastern edge of the New Madrid Seismic Zone. FYI, nearby Louisville is planned by FEMA and the Red Cross to be a major staging area for relief efforts in event of the ‘big one’. It is believed to be the nearest major transportation hub that is expect to still remain functioning. Louisville airport is UPS’s worldport and headquarters and can handle a lot of freight traffic.
James Johnson, ex-nuke
It sometimes feels like the slow-boiling frog in the pan that is perched on a hot-plate sitting on a three-legged stove in a 50mph wind.
The JIT governments and policy makers seem to be always in reaction mode rather than making governments stronger and thinking ahead. Like the cancelled OPEC meeting because one country wouldn’t play in the sand box. The world’s “leaders” act like children on a playground and their biggest worry is what their mom packed in their lunch-box.
Thanks for the one eye efforts these past days
so much fo ecauador expast?? think i’ll stay home. thany you
George Noory of Coast to Coast AM is pushing hard to get the grid “hardened”. It is assumed that 90% of us will be dead in a year after the electricity dies.
If it happens, I hope the Ure’s survive the hordes coming to your home for what you have.
George:
It was just a couple of weeks ago that you said the latest sun storm would probably cause some massive earthquakes. Boy were you were right!
Oak lead cluster?? ROFLMAO!
You have a catch 22 scenario with china at this time, If they inflect damage to the dollar it will hurt them just as much. What I would be looking at is Saudis threatening to dump 750 billion T bills. Black mail for the 28 missing pages on 911 report
Since you’re working with one eye, maybe add in a pirate effect to your writings. :-) yarrrr m8teee
There is new (NEW to the power industry nerds, has actually been around a while) academic work on the subject of Grid Failure … Discover magazine did a wonderful in depth article about it in the last couple of months.
Assuming the new theories on Grid Failure are accurate the new theories actually indicate a way to over time reduce the risk, and reduce it quite dramatically, but it will take a commitment of money and time to do it.
In today’s “run lean ALL THE TIME” environment that money to correct the problems may not be there before The Grid suffers major reliability issues.
I personally am surprised that home grown, but foreign trained, terrorists haven’t targeted The Grid yet … probably only a matter of time.
Commenting on your Amazon ads; don’t know if they’re automatically generated, but I read that Ted Koppel book and it wasn’t very good. One second after is excellent, but the one you might have missed is “Dies the Fire”. It involves a change in physics that makes electricity no longer work. “Dies the Fire” is the first in a series; great reading!
How did your eye surgery go?
We were in Cotacachi when the quake hit. It went on for a long time, but was rolling and did no damage. Our Manta property was habitable by midnight. The electricity and Internet were turned on today, much more quickly than anyone expected. The building has what looks like superficial cracks. A structural engineer friend looked it over for us and emailed that there appears to be no structural damage. Some cracks and broken water pipes. With the electricity on, it should be easier to fix the pipes and get water restored.
I haven’t heard from anyone in Cuenca if the quake was felt there. The southern Andes are older and more settled. They are in a much lower risk zone. The coast from Manta to the Colombian border is much more prone to quakes and is the most vulnerable. I hope going forward that the rebuilding will be done to standards and codes. It has been a very “buyer beware” situation with property down here.
My heart goes out to all those effected by the disaster. I know from going through 9/11, that it is a long recovery. Thank you George, for your concern.
As anyone who lived in or near NYC during the late last century knows: Donald Trump was responsible for helping restore if not save outright both the reputation and fiscal competence of the city! He did what virtually nobody would dare to do, and succeeded beyond anyone else’s wildest dreams. He’s not perfect, but he is smart, personable, influential, business savvy and a Real American populist. He knows what’s wrong and has a plan to mitigate the damage, unlike all the rest. I’m appalled that even CNN would dare to say he’s not “one of them”, regarding NYC.
Some ‘tribe’ tied up Manhattan’s traffic to protest against the ‘Donald.’ I wonder if same ‘tribe’ would have got a permit to demonstrate against the ‘money queen?’ I doubt it!! Most annoying were the helicopter overhead–though the noise is not enough, already.
I like the Donald..I think he would be the one that could make the needed changes.. Unfortunately.. he is his own man he speaks his mind like it or not the way he is thinking.. I truly don’t think the puppet masters would ever let him be in control unless he was willing to dance to their strings.A good sign to that is just how much trouble they are going through to get him off of the ballot.. I don’t think they would let Bernie have it either and I even question if they would like teddy to have it as well.. I think it will definitely be a most interesting election..
Goerge, Hang in there with the eye trouble. Sorry you are going through that right now. Our prayers are with you and hope all goes well after your visit to the hospital. I will echo “Strider”, thanks for the one eye effort.
That (possible power issues) is why I sent that pdf as plans for a backup power source. Interesting timing. Along come a bunch of earthquakes to remind us that decentralized power is better. Too much dependence on others is NEVER a good thing.
“and a 3rd World equivalent for medical care. ”
http://www.cc.com/video-clips/cbbn22/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-third-world-health-care—knoxville–tennessee-edition
WE is gonna steal the Arab reserves under guise of freezing them to allow Americans to sue the Saudis for 911 damages.. No fair that we are allowing Iran to be sued when even we said they had no part in the 911 false flag…I used to think nothing could get crazier than what was going on, probably has not seen anything yet.. However, not allowing access to the money BUYS US MORE TIME..
that sounds like a double edge sword…..
Dear George: I am sending to you every positive thought I can generate that can help your eye. W.
I don’t own any gold but the silver that I do have I keep inside the Berkey Water Filter it seems to help you sterilize the water that’s what the settlers the frontier Wagoneer settlers did they kept some of their silver or silver coin in their big water barrel to help the water you know yeah