Interesting Times...

Spring has arrived the radioactive spring the spring of the shortage, the dark spring.  Spring has arrived.  Now visible  are the first shoots of plants that will destroy the granite, that will overturn the order, that will lead to a bright tomorrow after the catastrophic misery yet to be endured.

Spring has arrived. There is still the remote hope of the Catalan sun, burning bright, and the satori which will transcend the complete loss of everything which will enable us to be free to do anything.

Spring has arrived, and remotely the promise of the sticky hot Zhejiang summer, the smile on the face of the abbot of the timeless temple which endures despite the temblors and upheavals and poison.

Spring has arrived.  And with it the thieves and patriots are emboldened, the citizenry is outraged, the children rebellious, and the rocks and stones cry out, "Let me be your messenger!"

Spring has arrived, with and all the timeless wisdom and ignorance and compassion and hatred permeates space like the dew and fog that abound outside the outskirts of the benighted city.

Spring has arrived, and for a few weeks it is Wednesday, Anything Can Happen Day.

Spring has arrived, and like this  it is none but a tragic farcical replay of Matinée d'Ivresse, and few care or are aware because it ain't squat, it ain't a paper cut even, compared to the horrors of Kampuchea and Auschwitz and the Great Leap Forward.

But it still early Spring. And I'm actually pretty optimistic despite the pervasive gloom that can be found that things won't be quite that horrible. May your near future be far better than the worst it could be.

Gold: Economic Samsara

Whether it's wampum, dollars backed by debt or gold, it's all a product of the little-m mind.

The price of gold has been rising as anxious investors cast what amounts to a throw-the-bums-out vote against, well, just about everything.

The weak dollar, the volatile stock market, the lackluster economy, the yawning budget deficit, the accommodative Federal Reserve — all this and more have people rushing for gold...

And while gold is the most obvious example of this trend, other commodities are rising, too. Wheat, copper and cotton all soared on Tuesday.

Nor is gold fever restricted to hedge fund managers wielding billions of dollars. Individual investors have also been clamoring to get in on the trade, scooping up gold coins like one-ounce American Eagles and South African Krugerrands.

“People are coming in to buy 50 or 100 coins at a time, which is pretty hefty for individuals,” said Mark Oliari, chief executive of CNT Inc., a Massachusetts coin broker. “It’s not just rich people, either. A lot of people are putting 30 to 35 percent of their net worth in gold; they are scared to put money in paper assets.”

Signs of gold’s renewed appeal have been building for months, as well-known Wall Street figures like George Soros and John Paulson piled into the metal. JPMorgan Chase even reopened a long-closed vault below the streets of downtown Manhattan to meet investor demand to store the stuff...

Since the depths of the financial crisis two years ago, gold has risen 91 percent, and it is nearly a third higher than just one year ago, according to Janney Montgomery Scott [which is an investment firm].

While gold has touched new records in nominal terms, when adjusted for inflation the price remains 40 percent below its real record high, which was reached in 1980. What is surprising economists is not the rise of gold prices, but the speed of its ascent.

As a result, even longtime gold investors, like [Abhay Deshpande, a portfolio manager with First Eagle Funds], worry that the current rally might be overdone. “It’s beginning to smell a little like the beginning stages of a bubble,” he said. “Either inflation has to pick up or currencies have to plunge to justify a continuing rise.”

Armageddon is very fashionable in the United States these days.  A great deal of faith-based folks are going to get burned by this.  Full disclosure: I own some of the ETFs related to this mania, but they are by no means the entirety of my nest egg.  But I've seen these ridiculous price-rises myself, and it is yet another bubble.  Like anything else, too much of their being burned will have been the result of actually believing the stuff that appears in their minds as a result of other stuff appearing in other people's minds, and those other people telling the first group of people what to do.

Whoa...wait..the US is poorer than Vietnam?

While the devil is surely in the details (that is, it surely depends on economic factors such as the definition of poverty as well as the issues of location and economic status and availability of goods and services), anyone that doubts the US is in decline ought to see what our equivalent of the People's Daily has served up on Hanoi's 1000th birthday party...

Vietnam remains a poor country, with most people earning about $1,000 a year, but it has made tremendous strides since opening its doors up to capitalism in the mid-1980s. Economic growth has averaged more than 7 percent annually over the past decade, and the rate of people living in poverty has dropped from 58 percent in 1993 to 11 percent last year.  

 It may also be true that the government of Vietnam is under-reporting poverty rates for propaganda purposes...but perhaps that is also true of the United States?

In the 2009 [ US Census's American Community Survey ], 14.3 percent of the U.S. population had income below their respective poverty thresholds.  The number of people in poverty increased to 42.9 million.

Scary...

Every now and then it's good to look around and see the social aspects of how we live. And in regard to that, the recession hasn't been good to us or the younger generation...

Over the past two generations, particularly among many college grads, the 20s have become a sort of netherworld between adolescence and adulthood. Job-switching is common, and with it, periods of voluntary, transitional unemployment. And as marriage and parenthood have receded farther into the future, the first years after college have become, arguably, more carefree. In this recession, the term funemployment has gained some currency among single 20-somethings, prompting a small raft of youth-culture stories in the Los Angeles Times and San Francisco Weekly, on Gawker, and in other venues.

Most of the people interviewed in these stories seem merely to be trying to stay positive and make the best of a bad situation. They note that it’s a good time to reevaluate career choices; that since joblessness is now so common among their peers, it has lost much of its stigma; and that since they don’t have mortgages or kids, they have flexibility, and in this respect, they are lucky. All of this sounds sensible enough—it is intuitive to think that youth will be spared the worst of the recession’s scars.

But in fact a whole generation of young adults is likely to see its life chances permanently diminished by this recession. Lisa Kahn, an economist at Yale, has studied the impact of recessions on the lifetime earnings of young workers. In one recent study, she followed the career paths of white men who graduated from college between 1979 and 1989. She found that, all else equal, for every one-percentage-point increase in the national unemployment rate, the starting income of new graduates fell by as much as 7 percent; the unluckiest graduates of the decade, who emerged into the teeth of the 1981–82 recession, made roughly 25 percent less in their first year than graduates who stepped into boom times.

But what’s truly remarkable is the persistence of the earnings gap. Five, 10, 15 years after graduation, after untold promotions and career changes spanning booms and busts, the unlucky graduates never closed the gap. Seventeen years after graduation, those who had entered the workforce during inhospitable times were still earning 10 percent less on average than those who had emerged into a more bountiful climate. When you add up all the earnings losses over the years, Kahn says, it’s as if the lucky graduates had been given a gift of about $100,000, adjusted for inflation, immediately upon graduation—or, alternatively, as if the unlucky ones had been saddled with a debt of the same size.

When Kahn looked more closely at the unlucky graduates at mid-career, she found some surprising characteristics. They were significantly less likely to work in professional occupations or other prestigious spheres. And they clung more tightly to their jobs: average job tenure was unusually long. People who entered the workforce during the recession “didn’t switch jobs as much, and particularly for young workers, that’s how you increase wages,” Kahn told me. This behavior may have resulted from a lingering risk aversion, born of a tough start. But a lack of opportunities may have played a larger role, she said: when you’re forced to start work in a particularly low-level job or unsexy career, it’s easy for other employers to dismiss you as having low potential. Moving up, or moving on to something different and better, becomes more difficult...

Strong evidence suggests that people who don’t find solid roots in the job market within a year or two have a particularly hard time righting themselves. In part, that’s because many of them become different—and damaged—people. Krysia Mossakowski, a sociologist at the University of Miami, has found that in young adults, long bouts of unemployment provoke long-lasting changes in behavior and mental health. “Some people say, ‘Oh, well, they’re young, they’re in and out of the workforce, so unemployment shouldn’t matter much psychologically,’” Mossakowski told me. “But that isn’t true.”

Examining national longitudinal data, Mossakowski has found that people who were unemployed for long periods in their teens or early 20s are far more likely to develop a habit of heavy drinking (five or more drinks in one sitting) by the time they approach middle age. They are also more likely to develop depressive symptoms. Prior drinking behavior and psychological history do not explain these problems—they result from unemployment itself. And the problems are not limited to those who never find steady work; they show up quite strongly as well in people who are later working regularly.

"IGMFU" is a horrendous social policy, and clearly creates more suffering than a bit of all around social compassion.

And, reading further into the article, the culture of "everybody gets a prize" seems to have made many in American culture particularly resistant to being able to go it on their own.

That's frustrating to those who have to manage them, especially those of us who were "thrown into the pool to see if we could swim."

There's cruelty out of deep kindness and there's cruelty out of ignorant greed and hatred.

Time for the dollar to drop some more...

As Marketwatch reports.