Juggling Dynamite

Credit derivatives and computerized trading billowed the largest financial bubble in the history of the world between 2005 and 2015.  But investing or productive use of capital this is not.  The bursting of this bubble is also the largest and most global in human history–equal and opposite in the other direction. What extreme leverage giveth, it also taketh away.  See:  The world’s most extreme speculative mania is unraveling in China.

From the Dutch tulip craze of 1637 to America’s dot-com bubble at the turn of the century, history is littered with speculative frenzies that ended badly for investors.

But rarely has a mania escalated so rapidly, and spurred such fevered trading, as the great China commodities boom of 2016. Over the span of just two wild months, daily turnover on the nation’s futures markets has jumped by the equivalent of $183 billion, outpacing the headiest days of last year’s Chinese stock bubble and making volumes on the Nasdaq exchange in 2000 look tame.

By trying to force monetary inflation onto naturally deflating prices (thanks to technology) and demand (thanks to demographics and debt weight), policy makers are fighting a counter-productive battle that is wasting time and our finite resources. For a insightful discussion on this topic read: Why we need to embrace deflation. We must look forward and evolve past antiquated thinking and models.  Yes we can.

Also watch The Fourth Industrial Revolution.  Here is a direct video link.

Ubiquitous, mobile supercomputing. Artificially-intelligent robots. Self-driving cars. Neuro-technological brain enhancements. Genetic editing. The evidence of dramatic change is all around us and it’s happening at exponential speed.

Previous industrial revolutions liberated humankind from animal power, made mass production possible and brought digital capabilities to billions of people. This Fourth Industrial Revolution is, however, fundamentally different. It is characterized by a range of new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, impacting all disciplines, economies and industries, and even challenging ideas about what it means to be human.

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) followed a series of trade negotiations carried out mostly in secret between the EU and US resulting in a bi-lateral agreement to reduce regulatory barriers to trade for big business in areas like food safety law, environmental legislation, banking regulations and the sovereign powers of individual nations.

The intensely secret negotiations were planned to be finalized in an agreement by the end of 2014, but after a proposed draft was leaked to the public in March of 2014, the European commission released some clauses and in January 2015 published parts of an overview for public viewing.  The agreement is now slated to be finished by 2019 or 2020.

This video shows how that public viewing of the overview is being allowed to the ‘people’ via our elected representatives.  If anyone doubts that large corporations are fully in charge of public policy around the world this clip should illuminate.

The absurd constraints placed on Members of European Parliament who want to examine the text of the TTIP agreement between the US and the EU.  Here is a direct video link.

Just been contacted by staff from within the Euro Parliament and told I must remove this video. I won’t be. #TTIPhttps://t.co/JkVLDyxMdQ

— Luke ‘Ming’ Flanagan (@lukeming) May 4, 2016