Trade Collapses! $51.4 Billion Dollar Hole!

Proof of Recovery seen!  (I jest, wake up.)

Want to see what happens when a country spends way more than it exports?

“The U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, through the Department of Commerce, announced today that the goods and services deficit was $51.4 billion in March, up $15.5 billion from $35.9 billion in February, revised.

March exports were $187.8 billion, $1.6 billion more than February exports. March imports were $239.2 billion, $17.1 billion more than February imports.

The March increase in the goods and services deficit reflected an increase in the goods deficit of $14.9 billion to $70.6 billion and a decrease in the services surplus of $0.6billion to $19.2 billion.
Year-to-date, the goods and services deficit increased $6.4 billion, or 5.2 percent, from the same period in 2014. Exports decreased $11.7 billion or 2.0 percent. Imports decreased $5.3 billion or 0.8 percent.

It’s all about trade.  And what’s going on in Washington?

Congressional Idiots Abound

Corporate sell-outs in Congress are putting up with crap from the Obamination that threaten members of Congress if they talk about the super-secret pending trade bill.

Scam of scams…who are these people that can’t talk about pending legislation?

Traitors is where my dictionary opens. 

THE PUBLIC’S BUSINESS IS NOT SECRET! 

HELLO?  ANYBODY HOME BACK THERE?

When the president tells members of congress they can’t talk about a trade bill it’s an impeachable offense as I see it.  And if Congress approves it, they are even bigger idiots than I’d previously thought.  Look up “sedition.”

Now let’s connect the dots:  Administration minions lay out a disastrous trade report and are hard selling members of congress.  Usually in this kind of deal, there’s a crook and a victim.  I’ll leave you to sort of which is which, here.  But sit on your wallet.

Take Statistics Carefully

Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia is not exactly top of the reading pile for mainstream economists.  Maybe because there’s no DVD with this text which has been around since 77 AD, but his advice about eating with salt sounds pretty good:

After the defeat of that mighty monarch, Mithridates, Gnaeus Pompeius found in his private cabinet a recipe for an antidote in his own handwriting; it was to the following effect: Take two dried walnuts, two figs, and twenty leaves of rue; pound them all together, with the addition of a grain of salt; if a person takes this mixture fasting, he will be proof against all poisons for that day.

Which is where “take it with a grain of salt” came from.

About here, if the brain is sufficiently coffee-logged, you should be figuring out that yes, this does have something tangential to do with economics after all.

I figure it makes as much sense as the report yesterday on consumer spending from Gallup:  You’ll be pleased to know that while the government publishes an outright lie about “Personal Savings”  (e.g. credit card payments since you used the card to put food on the table is not “SAVINGS” unless you’re a wild-eyed bureaucrat), Gallup figures the real free spending income is about $91 bucks.

It’s pretty clear why Diogenes skipped Washington D.C. in his “search for an honest man,” isn’t it?

While that $91-bucks may buy you an ounce of something passable in Washington, or Colorado, it’s just enough to  get stiffed on the pool fight PPV; there’s not a lot you can do with $91 bucks here lately.

Our favorite pastime is buying buying selected long-term options since they payoffs are more reliable than the Texas Lotto, just smaller returns.

Scare tactics like this morning’s trade disaster aside, the Dow is about flat.

The markets, which in our work should start sucking huge numbers of people in over the next year or two ($91 bucks at a time) should see in a tremendous blow-off.  As we told our Peoplenomics™ subscribers recently, when some poop culture icon starts talking about stocks, we’ll be off to the Moon and it will follow that it’s 1929 once again.  This is 1927 presently.

In the meantime, the Earthly problems continue.  But I can feel the hairs on the back of my neck:  At some point when markets hit new highs, one of these days there’s going to be such a pile-on of greed that your head will spin.  Dow 30,000?

I know a lot of people will call me nuts for saying this, but look at the headlines:  Bruce Jenner, Hillary, and here’s one about two people getting prison time for screwing on a beach.   Yes, the world is nuts.

Apocryphal websites are screaming about how the end is near.  What they universally miss is how utterly frigging crazy we have become.  Therefore, our levels of insanity must surely match the modest bubble of 1929.

And to do that, we need Dow 30,000 before total collapse.

Stick around and we’ll keep you posted, but we’ve made more money on the long side since 2009 and the people forecasting imminent doom will likely be wrong until very late 2016 or early 2017 and maybe as late as summer of that year.

The reason to study long wave economics is to figure out how crazy translates to dollars.  The current mania of infotainment is truly the analog to the Roaring Twenties and the disease is just picking up momentum.

You ain’t seen real crazy yet.  Stay tuned.

You Will Need Government – Desperately

Here’s the problem:  Another report came out a week or so back saying that 30 percent of jobs would be disappearing in the next 10 years due to robotics.

Right on cue this morning, here comes the headline that China is building a complete robotic manufacturing plant.

With no need to work, no one gets paid.  With no one getting paid, the economy collapses.

It’ll be the hugely scaled up version of what happened to America when all those people came in from the farms to work in manufacturing and then manufacturing fell in the previous Depression.  Same principle in play here:  People getting replaced by machines will WITHOUT A DOUBT blow up the current economic model.

But not before the mania peaks into late 2016.  (Peoplenomics subscribers get to watch a key chart as this unrolls…Do we know how to have fun, or what?)

Credit Where Not Due

ISIS is claiming responsibility for the Texas Cartoon shooters.  This should be (thanks Pliny) taken with a grain of salt because ISIS would claim credit for the sun coming up if they thought they could pull that off.

The CNN report here says that one of the two perps already had a rap sheet and conviction on a terrorism related charge.  So with all the frigging surveillance of innocents like you and me, why aren’t the bureaucrats bright enough to track people who are arguably higher risk?

Surely they bought gas on their way to Garland…hello?  Anyone home in the Total Information Insanity office?  But I repeat myself.

Even a third-rate TV show would track gas purchases and travels of people with such backgrounds, don’tcha think?  Oh, wait…maybe we’re not supposed to be getting our money’s worth?

OH, yeah…that’d collapse the whole Security State which props up the economy!  God forbid, can’t have THAT…

Fed’s Reassure Texas

As you’d expect, the Pentagram is soft-peddling the Jade Helm exercise.

“Nothing to Fear, Texas.”

But wait…can we pass out some IQ tests before we go with that?