Juggling Dynamite

“Why aren’t more women in leadership positions? Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg tells Norah O’Donnell women need to learn to “lean in.”

“In a new book that has already touched a nerve, Sandberg proposes a reason for why there are so few women at the top: the problem she says might just be women themselves. Despite the fact that women have been getting more college degrees than men for 30 years, they still account for only four percent of CEOs in America’s Fortune 500 companies and Sheryl Sandberg says that number needs to change.”

Here is a direct link.

“Copper fell for the second time in three days as imports dropped to a 20-month low in China, the world’s largest user, and exchange inventories increased.

Inbound Chinese shipments of refined metal, alloy and products were 298,102 metric tons last month, down 38 percent from a year earlier, customs figures showed today. Global inventories monitored by exchanges in London, New York and Shanghai climbed to 803,128 tons today, rising above 800,000 for the first time since December 2003.”

See: Copper slips as China imports decline.

Chart source: Cory Venable, CMT, Venable Park Investment Counsel Inc.

Something is becoming increasingly clear to me. The experimental easing efforts of central banks over the past 4 years that have been promoted by some as the salvation of the world economy will come to be seen as the next major policy mistake. I am reminded of the way that debt securitization was originally hailed as the holly grail of the housing boom and consumer credit economy from 2003-2007. In retrospect we now see that in fact that securitization was horribly expensive for the masses as it allowed a few key perpetrators to funnel profits out of the machine while leaving worthless IOU’s for the real economy. After that, Central Banks stepped in to buy up the worthless IOU’s and restore public “confidence” in the bad debts and bankrupt institutions. Some have hailed them as heroes. In reality, the bad debts are still bad, and one of these days, they will have to be acknowledged as worthless but now fully underwritten by taxpayers who are on the hook to bail out Central Bank balance sheet losses. Expensive detour complete, we will then be full circle back to the financial crisis of 2008 but this time with even more debt than ever before.

This presentation by Charles Hugh Smith based on his recent article “The Global End Game in Fourteen Points” sheds further light on the traditional Business Cycle, the Credit Cycle and the destructive version being perpetrated by Central Bankers Here is a direct link.