Juggling Dynamite

Another obvious solution, painfully slow in the dawning! See,  Roofs of big box stores key in shift to 100% renewable energy:

The U.S. has the technical potential to produce more than 100 times as much electricity from solar photovoltaic and concentrating solar power installations as the nation consumes each year. Given our abundant solar resources, America must take advantage of untapped opportunities to install solar technologies—like using rooftops of large superstores and “big box” retail stores as hosts for clean electricity generation.

Some refreshing candor out of the guest in this clip.  Even as the Bloomberg-tainers keep trying to pump sexy and sophisticated ‘plays’, Carnutt doesn’t relent: central bank intervention has broken financial markets, to protect savings one needs to ‘de-risk’ ie., sell risky assets and products…and more central bank tricks from here will further compound problems and risk, not help.

Dean Curnutt, chief executive officer at Macro Risk Advisors, discusses volatility created by central banks and strategies for taking volatility out of your portfolio.  Here is a direct video link.

And as my partner Cory Venable reminded yesterday, although the media circus focuses on oil, it’s actually all industrial commodities that are screaming ‘global slowdown’.

Meanwhile after blowing out to record levels into 2015, margin levels (levered bets in red shown below in inverse scale) have finally rolled over in the past year leaving a glaring chasm under the precariously inflated S&P 500 (in blue). Before this cycle completes, these two lines will change places–as they did in 2000-02 and 2007-09. Imagine that.

Simplistic thinking settles for extreme precepts of ‘left’ and ‘right’ ideologies; but a robust social fabric is in fact nuanced and complex.  As I have written in the past, meaningful improvement of present problems will take much more than a change of government or the sex or race of leaders.  If only it were so easy.  This discussion dares a look beneath the veneer of  buzz words like ‘socialism’ and ‘capitalism’.

Is socialism still an American taboo? Not so much, says professor Richard Wolff; nor was it in the past, says Nation columnist John Nichols. Richard D. Wolff is Professor of Economics Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, and a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs at the New School University in New York City. He has authored or co-authored more than a dozen books, including his most recent; Capitalism’s Crisis Deepens: Essays on the Global Economic Meltdown 2010- 2014, and he hosts the weekly Economic Update podcast. John Nichols’ many books include The “S” Word: A Short History of an American Tradition…Socialism, and, most recently, Dollarocracy: How the Money-and-Media-Election Complex is Destroying America. Here is a direct audio link.