Global Economy Bursting?

[Randolph Kinney]

Billionaires get richer, many millionaires lose ground

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/17/us-wealth-world-report-idUSBRE88G0B620120917

Many millionaires got poorer in the last year, but billionaires did just fine, using their heavyweight money management teams to ride out market and economic turmoil that hit the lesser rich, research company Wealth-X said on Monday.

The ranks of people with at least $30 million edged up to 187,380 but their total wealth fell 1.8 percent to $25.8 trillion -- still a sum bigger than the combined size of the U.S. and Chinese economies, Wealth-X said in a report.

Hardest hit globally were those in the $200 million to $499 million range, whose numbers dropped 9.9 percent and whose fortunes shrank 11.4 percent, the World Ultra Wealth Report said, using data for the year through July 31.

But the really, really rich got even richer as the number of billionaires rose 9.4 percent to 2,160 people and their wealth grew 14 percent to $6.2 trillion.

As Europe struggles and the U.S. economy recovers fitfully, the affluent are shifting away from speculative investments into private companies, commodities and property, said Wealth-X.

 

[Big ole Boy]

FED ex CEO - fundamental contractions/slaps FED

In that light, the comments by CEO Fred Smith on the company's call are fascinating (via Cullen Roche).
First is his comment about the global economic situation: global trade is in a very rare position of growing slower than GDP:


...fundamentally, what's happening is that exports around the world have contracted, and the policy choices in Europe and the United States and China are having an effect on global trade. Global trade has grown faster than GDP, except for the 2000, 2001 meltdown and 2008 and 2009, for 25 years. And over the last few months, that has not been the case. So that's what's really going on, is that exports and trade have gone down at a faster rate than GDP has.

Smith also takes a shot at the Fed:


Well, let me elaborate on what I said just a moment ago. I mean, systemically, the policy choices that have been made in Europe and the United States and China are having effect on world trade. The episodial product launches that you refer to, we've been talking about for 2 years. And we are carrying a huge amount of that traffic, but it is episodial. At the same time that you have that going on, you have a declining value per pound. In a lot of electronic equipment, you have fuel going up, partially in response to the quantitative easing. I mean, as the Fed puts more money out there, people put more money into commodities and drive the price up. So you have products that are getting lower in value per pound, which is the key correlation for goods being moved by air. And so they're going on the water to an improved container liner system that's been developed over the last few years. So you've got a lot of things that are going on there, and the product launch of Apple's and Microsoft is not going to provide the type of sustained growth in the international trade that the world has seen historically. So when that turns back around I think is directly related to the economic macro system in Europe, North America and particularly in China.

Then later he hits on a very specific point about China:


…I can tell you this on China. The locomotive that has driven China’s growth is its export industries. And with the situation in Europe and, to a lesser degree, in North America, that is a significant issue for the Chinese economy. Now the consumer consumption in China is not increasing at a significant rate contrary to everybody’s hopes. While exports from, say, the United States into China have grown, they are dwarfed by the exports from China into the United States. And as the big economies in Europe and the U.S. have grown or contracted — grown at a far lesser rate or, in the case of certain European countries, have contracted, that’s reflected in the numbers in China. And you can’t escape that. I’ve been somewhat amused watching some of the China observers, I think, completely underestimate the effects of the slower exports on the overall China economy.”


Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/fedex-ceo-on-china-2012-9#ixzz26rj35vCj


...what amuses me sir ..... is this ......... the drastic and fundamental slow down in China reflects GDP numbers here in the United States that are OVER-ESTIMATED and the same goes for EUROPE ....

..... I repeat ..... the China crash is showing that our GDP numbers here are way off ....... or that the GDP numbers are a different bird than they were before all of the QE shenanigans ...

 

[Big ole Boy]

China postures - puts money woes on Japan

China calls on Japan to take responsibility for trade fallout
Last updated Wed 19 Sep 2012
World Japan China
China's commerce ministry has called on Japan to take "complete responsibility" for any trade impact from a territorial dispute between the two countries over a string of islands it both claims.


Aerial photo of Chinese ocean surveillance, fishery patrol ships and Japan Coast Guard patrol ship Credit: Reuters/Kyodo
Last week, Chinese Vice Minister of Commerce Jiang Zengwei said tensions between China and Japan are likely to harm trade ties between the two countries.

 

[Big ole Boy]

China postures - puts money woes on Japan

China calls on Japan to take responsibility for trade fallout
Last updated Wed 19 Sep 2012
World Japan China
China's commerce ministry has called on Japan to take "complete responsibility" for any trade impact from a territorial dispute between the two countries over a string of islands it both claims.


Aerial photo of Chinese ocean surveillance, fishery patrol ships and Japan Coast Guard patrol ship Credit: Reuters/Kyodo
Last week, Chinese Vice Minister of Commerce Jiang Zengwei said tensions between China and Japan are likely to harm trade ties between the two countries.

http://www.itv.com/news/update/2012...pan-to-take-responsibility-for-trade-fallout/

 

[Big ole Boy]

Japan deflates its currency along with the US/FED

BY MEGUMI FUJIKAWA AND TATSUO ITO

TOKYO—The Bank of Japan took surprisingly strong steps to further ease its monetary policy on Wednesday, following similar steps by the Federal Reserve, as it tries to tackle entrenched deflation, an export-sapping strong yen and the impact of slowing global growth.

The central bank's policy board decided at the end of a two-day meeting to increase the size of its asset-purchase program—the ...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100...8005260696436022.html?mod=WSJ_latestheadlines

....I think the Island dispute is more about making Japan devalue its currency - China bullies Japan into submission. Case Closed.






..... India is rumbling .... people want something NEW .........sick of corruption ... sound familiar ..... world wide feeling ... masses not tickled with centralized globalism

 

[Randolph Kinney]

Median household income falls again

http://www.sfgate.com/business/bott...tek Newsletter&utm_campaign=Biztek Newsletter

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, real median household income fell for the second year in a row in 2011 - two years after the official end of the Great Recession - to $50,054. That's an 8.1 percent drop from 2007, just before the recession's onslaught. Hardest hit: white and African American households.

The nation's official poverty rate, meanwhile, remained essentially unchanged at 15 percent, which translates into 46.2 million Americans, or 9.5 million families, including 16 million children, says the report issued last week. Hardest-hit children: African Americans and Latinos.

Income inequality, on the other hand, increased, with the top 5 percent seeing their incomes increase by 4.9 percent, while the rest remained stagnant or declined.

 

[Randolph Kinney]

California heads into the dumper: crash unavoidable

A summary of California State Finances for August 2012 looks like this:

Compared to a year ago, revenues are down, sales taxes are down, and corporate taxes are down, all by significant amounts.

Moreover, the two-month totals for July and August are much worse as the following table shows.


General Fund Receipts July-August 2012

For July and August, sales Tax Collections are $108 million under budget. August sales tax collection is down 20% from a year ago, a huge decline of $633 million.

This clearly shows people in California have cut back spending.

Sales tax collections show the real story, and the real story is "recession", the reason for Fed Panic!

 

[EDWARD BERRY]

They Is Too Big To Fail.

Till Jan 4

 

[Big ole Boy]

Unlimited Supply of US treasury investors?

... lets see. ..... world needs US dollar/economy - ECB and China will always buy up US Treasuries .....

..... QE-infinity means ECB and China QE-infinity ....... each country always insuring unlmited purchasing ability of each others treasuries .....

.... so interest rates will continue to fall to near zero .....

....

..............................................................................................................................

.... but the fallout would be hyper-inflation?

...my wife bought me a vegetable scale for my birthday ... it weighs up to 20 pounds ....

.... I could weigh vegetables or lead or maybe I could figure out how to weigh sell some of my hot air ...

 

[Randolph Kinney]

Life Expectancy Shrinks for Less-Educated Whites in U.S.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/21/u...eadlines&emc=edit_th_20120921&moc.semityn.www

The steepest declines were for white women without a high school diploma, who lost five years of life between 1990 and 2008, said S. Jay Olshansky, a public health professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the lead investigator on the study, published last month in Health Affairs. By 2008, life expectancy for black women without a high school diploma had surpassed that of white women of the same education level, the study found.

White men lacking a high school diploma lost three years of life. Life expectancy for both blacks and Hispanics of the same education level rose, the data showed. But blacks over all do not live as long as whites, while Hispanics live longer than both whites and blacks.

The dropping life expectancies have helped weigh down the United States in international life expectancy rankings, particularly for women. In 2010, American women fell to 41st place, down from 14th place in 1985, in the United Nations rankings. Among developed countries, American women sank from the middle of the pack in 1970 to last place in 2010, according to the Human Mortality Database.

The slump is so vexing that it became the subject of an inquiry by the National Academy of Sciences, which published a report on it last year.

Some cautioned that the results could be overstated because Americans without a high school diploma — about 12 percent of the population, down from about 22 percent in 1990, according to the Census Bureau — were a shrinking group that was now more likely to be disadvantaged in ways besides education, compared with past generations.