Eco Factor: Zero-emission aircraft powered by electric engine.
Germany-based PC Aero has unveiled a lightweight all-electric airplane for a single passenger. Dubbed Elektra One, the aircraft was showcased at the Aero 2010 in Friedrichshafen, Germany. Weighing just 120kg, the airplane is powered by a 16KW electric motor that can operate for up to three hours at 120kph.
Love it or hate it Ed Hardy has released a bunch of new iPhone cases. They range from gel cases to faceplates, and protective sleeves. Each one features their signature tattoo designs from Skulls to tigers. Prices range from $27 to $39 and are available from the Ed Hardy Shop directly.
Eco Factor: Eco-friendly camp stove generates electricity from waste heat.
According to recent statistics, over 1.6 million people are killed each year by inhaling toxic smoke from indoor cooking fires. Moreover, burning wood in an inefficient stove results in toxic fumes that waft up into the atmosphere. BioLite has unveiled a new Camp Stove that pollutes less, is highly-efficient and surprisingly, it can charge your portable electronic gadgets as well.
Sexual abuse victims meet journalists outside the Cousin's Center, owned by the Milwaukee Archdiocese in St. Francis, Wisconsin March 25, 2010/Allen Fredrickson
Stung by fresh charges of priestly sexual abuse and allegations of a cover-up that reach the Vatican, the Roman Catholic Church in the United States faces a crisis of empty pews and empty coffers.
Attendance was down noticeably at some Easter Sunday services in Milwaukee, reflecting the litany of troubles facing the U.S. Church and a torrent of criticism over its handling of abuse cases.
“The Church is at a crossroads,” said Tim Flanner, 51, a member of St. John Vianney church. “There are people who are really ticked off, and there are a lot of them. The Church needs to address its own failures, acknowledge its own guilt, and ask for forgiveness, and heal as a family.”
Last month, amid explosive charges that a now-dead priest molested some 200 boys at a school for the deaf over more than two decades, Milwaukee Archbishop Jerome Listecki apologized to the victims and acknowledged the Church was wrong to not defrock the priest, Rev. Lawrence Murphy.
But beyond the church’s tarnished reputation, the financial fallout from paying settlement claims to victims is being felt in Milwaukee and dioceses across the United States. Four lawsuits are pending in Milwaukee, and the diocese has put its headquarters, the Cousins Center, up for sale to help pay $27 million in settlement costs that have threatened to bankrupt the diocese.
Police have released information on two new sexual batteries of UCLA students, the latest of several attacks against women on or near campus in recent weeks.
Two sexual batteries occurred Tuesday in Westwood Village, the UCLA Police Department said. Both victims were students.
The attacker appears to wait in the path of women who are using their cellphones and then grabs them, police said.
The suspect is described as a Latino between 5 foot 3 inches and 5 foot 6 and weighing between 150 and 180 pounds. He has a dark complexion, brown eyes and a pot belly, and wears hats, including baseball caps, police said.
In all, five incidents have occurred between March 8 and Tuesday. All the victims were students, according to police. Police have previously warned women about the assaults.
Anyone with information is asked to call detectives at (310) 825-9371.
— Robert J. Lopez
Recently we looked at the state of Linked Data in 2010, noting developments such as governments putting public data online and Thomson Reuters putting structure around commercial data using OpenCalais. In a follow-up post, we explained the distinction between Linked Data, Open Data and the Semantic Web.
Georgi Kobilarov, who runs a Linked Data startup from Germany called Uberblic Labs, recently issued an interesting challenge on his blog. He asked: if we had a Web of Data, what would you build? Not to steal Georgi’s thunder, but we think this is a great question to put to ReadWriteWeb readers too.
Sponsor
Here’s Georgi’s idea:
"If we had a Web of Data, I would built an application for painless travel planning. It would integrate flight plans, train timetables, bus routes, car rental offers, etc. And the user would be able to just say: I want to go from A to B: Find me the best/cheapest/fastest routes. […] With a Web of Data, an application could do all that combining for me, the same way flight booking sites do that today for just flights."
Here’s my idea for an app that uses the Web of Data. I’d like a web site or app that allows me to discover the locations of original art works by my favorite artists, and then create travel itineraries for me to see some or all of those art works (most famous artists have their art works scattered around the world, in various museums and galleries). It’s possible that there is a web directory of artists somewhere that has some or even all of this data already, but if so I haven’t found it.
I ask for this because every now and then I search the Web for a painting that I saw in a book. A recent example was a Modigliani painting that I was attempting to create a copy of, for my beginners acrylic painting class. The original painting was called "Portrait of Madame Hanka Zborowska." One of the results from Google told me that the original painting is located at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Rome, Italy.
I could potentially spend hours hunting down the locations of Modigliani’s paintings, using Google – and it’s likely that some of the data isn’t currently online. So it would be great if I could query one web site or app: tell me where all the originals of Modigliani’s paintings are in the world, and draw me an itinerary for visiting all or some of them. Heck, maybe even book my flights and hotels!
That’s my example of what I’d build from a Web of Data. Now tell us what site or app you would like built, if the data was available on the Web.
Article Tags: Carbon Trading
WARSAW: Poland has sold Japanese private sector entity carbon dioxide emission quotas worth 30 million euros (40 million dollars), Poland’s environment minister said.
A private sector entity from Japan recently “paid 30 million euros for CO2 quotas,” Environment Minister Andrzej Kraszewski, told Thursday’s Dziennik daily without specifying the identity of the buyer. The cash will be used to help improve energy insulation on public buildings, he said.
“This year we will sell, according to our preliminary estimates, carbon dioxide quotas worth 150 million euros,” the minister added. Carbon dioxide is regarded as the principle greenhouse gas responsible for global warming.
The Kyoto Protocol sets binding targets for 37 industrialized countries and the European community for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. These amount to an average of five percent against 1990 levels over the five-year period 2008-2012.
Last year’s UN Copenhagen summit on climate change failed to produce a new global treaty on tackling climate change.
Source: economictimes.indiatimes.com
Pokefans rejoice! Nintendo has announced a new set of Pokemon titles that will soon invade its handheld platform. Coming to Japan later this fall, Pokemon Black and Pokemon White will be the 5th generation installment of the
Eco Factor: Concept zero-emission sea scooter.
The Powered Body Board is a concept sea scooter that is designed to keep the aquatic ecosystem clean and green whenever you’re enjoying on the waves. Designed by Design Icon, the sea scooter is equipped with an electric engine that powers the onboard propellers generating the needed thrust.
La Roche-Posay Anthelios W High Protection Gel SPF 30 is a facial and body sun protection which provides high protection against the sun rays and especially during a sport activity involving a high sweat. It effectively prevents the formation of spots caused by UV. It lessens fine lines and aging problem. The skin can soon look brighter and healthy with natural colour showed. Highly water-resistant. UVA Ultra [PPD 19].
A graphene two-fer this evening. This news is another important finding toward commercializing graphene.
The release:
With support, graphene still a superior thermal conductor
Super-thin material advances toward next generation applications
IMAGE: A one-atom thick sheet of graphene (highlighted in the circular window) on top of a silicon dioxide support proves to be an excellent thermal conductor, according to new research published…
CHESTNUT HILL, MA (4/8/2010) – The single-atom thick material graphene maintains its high thermal conductivity when supported by a substrate, a critical step to advancing the material from a laboratory phenomenon to a useful component in a range of nano-electronic devices, researchers report in the April 9 issue of the journal Science.
The team of engineers and theoretical physicists from the University of Texas at Austin, Boston College, and France’s Commission for Atomic Energy report the super-thin sheet of carbon atoms – taken from the three-dimensional material graphite – can transfer heat more than twice as efficiently as copper thin films and more than 50 times better than thin films of silicon.
Since its discovery in 2004, graphene has been viewed as a promising new electronic material because it offers superior electron mobility, mechanical strength and thermal conductivity. These characteristics are crucial as electronic devices become smaller and smaller, presenting engineers with a fundamental problem of keeping the devices cool enough to operate efficiently.
The research advances the understanding of graphene as a promising candidate to draw heat away from “hot spots” that form in the tight knit spaces of devices built at the micro and nano scales. From a theoretical standpoint, the team also developed a new view of how heat flows in graphene.
When suspended, graphene has extremely high thermal conductivity of 3,000 to 5,000 watts per meter per Kelvin. But for practical applications, the chicken-wire like graphene lattice would be attached to a substrate. The team found supported graphene still has thermal conductivity as high as 600 watts per meter per Kelvin near room temperature. That far exceeds the thermal conductivities of copper, approximately 250 watts, and silicon, only 10 watts, thin films currently used in electronic devices.
The loss in heat transfer is the result of graphene’s interaction with the substrate, which interferes with the vibrational waves of graphene atoms as they bump against the adjacent substrate, according to co-author David Broido, a Boston College Professor of Physics.
The conclusion was drawn with the help of earlier theoretical models about heat transfer within suspended graphene, Broido said. Working with former BC graduate student Lucas Lindsay, now an instructor at Christopher Newport University, and Natalio Mingo of France’s Commission for Atomic Energy, Broido re-examined the theoretical model devised to explain the performance of suspended graphene.
“As theorists, we’re much more detached from the device or the engineering side. We’re more focused on the fundamentals that explain how energy flows through a sheet graphene. We took our existing model for suspended graphene and expanded the theoretical model to describe this interaction that takes place between graphene and the substrate and the influence on the movement of heat through the material and, ultimately, it’s thermal conductivity.”
In addition to its superior strength, electron mobility and thermal conductivity, graphene is compatible with thin film silicon transistor devices, a crucial characteristic if the material is to be used in low-cost, mass production. Graphene nano-electronic devices have the potential to consume less energy, run cooler and more reliably, and operate faster than the current generation of silicon and copper devices.
###
Broido, Lindsay and Mingo were part of a research team led by Li Shi, a mechanical engineering professor at the University of Texas at Austin, which also included his UT colleagues Jae Hun Seol, Insun Jo, Arden Moore, Zachary Aitken, Michael Petttes, Xueson Li, Zhen Yao, Rui Huang, and Rodney Ruoff.
The research was supported by the Thermal Transport Processes Program and the Mechanics of Materials Program of the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Office of Naval Research, and the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science.
History shows that when the governments grow desperate to finance deficits, they get creative.
During WWII, the US government needed investors to buy an unprecedented amount of Treasury bonds. Commercial banks loaded up on Treasuries, which limited the amount of credit that could be granted to the private sector. It may have been the patriotic thing to do, but the real returns from war bonds were very poor. Napier said, “That’s the type of society [the US and the UK] had to run to sustain our government debt. And I’m suggesting to you that these are exactly the sorts of things we have to look out for in our future.”
Napier then summarized one of the conclusions that economists Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff reached in their book This Time is Different. Financial crises morph into fiscal crises. But the thing that has yet to frighten investors is the next stage: financial suppression. This is the process of forcing private sector savings into public sector debt. Most investors will tell you that this is impossible. But Napier ticked off two potential tools the government could use to strong-arm investors into Treasuries:
1. Capital controls: An example of this comes from the UK in the 1970s. For most of this decade, the yield on UK government bonds was below inflation. The government wouldn’t let investors take money out of the country.
2. The “Buffett tax”: Political leaders would say, “We love capitalism. It is the best thing America has ever had. And we would really, really like to promote it. And the best way we can promote capitalism is to get all you capitalists to invest with a long-term holding period.” The idea would involve a 4% “transaction tax.” This effectively forces shareholders to engage more deeply with corporate executives, rather than trading shares aggressively. The authorities would say, “This is a wonderful thing because Warren Buffett does it. And if Buffett does it, it has to be good. So as of tomorrow, we’ll have a 4% ‘Buffett’ tax for the trading of all financial instruments except for government debt.”
Napier says the government can’t get away with inflating away its debt in a free market. If it were attempted in an aggressive fashion, yields would soar, making the process self-defeating. So the government will make the Treasury market a “less free” market. In other words, it will stack the deck in favor of Treasuries, to the detriment of all other financial assets.
But the authorities should know that this type of action would have huge consequences for global financial markets. A big driver of the global economic growth over the past three decades has been the liberalization of capital. Capital could easily migrate across borders to seek out the highest risk-adjusted returns. Today, the international flow of capital is just as important as the flow of international trade. Capital controls, if they get too onerous, could wind up leading to a 21st Century version of the Smoot-Hawley tariff.
As distasteful as it is, investors must pay close attention to politics and policy. “We’ve spent our professional careers analyzing supply and demand,” Napier explained. “Now, we must analyze supply, demand, and government. [During the 2008 financial crisis], the government didn’t like what supply and demand were doing; supply and demand were inducing deflation and creative destruction, so the government stopped it.”
Napier thinks that the catalyst to end the unsustainable status quo of the developing world financing US trade deficits will be inflation in the emerging markets. Emerging economies believe that they can export their way to prosperity, but they cannot. “40% of the world’s population has a great plan to get rich by selling stuff to 14% of the world’s population,” Napier observed. “That can work for several years, and it has – particularly if 14% of the world’s population is prepared to gear like crazy to buy all of this stuff.”
Now that US consumers are deleveraging, Asia’s mercantilist economic and currency policies aren’t as effective as they once were. These countries will not be focused on undervaluing their exchange rates forever. If aggressively debasing your currency were a guaranteed road to high growth and low inflation, paper money would have a much better reputation among historians.
The downside of this currency policy is that it can lead to inflation at the local level. Eventually, the supply of existing and new money will overwhelm the growth of productivity in China’s industrializing economy. These emerging markets will have to eventually allow currencies to rise to prevent inflation from getting out of control.
We’re seeing more examples of rising imported commodity prices hurting Chinese industry. The price of iron ore is soaring, thanks to China’s aggressive infrastructure investment and its suppressed currency. International iron ore markets are so tight that supply contracts are switching from yearly to quarterly pricing adjustments. The Financial Times this week reported on this evolution in the pricing of iron ore, which will feed through to higher steel prices: “The new price system will lift the cost of iron ore to Asian steelmakers to about $110-$120 a tonne during the April-June period, up between 80 and 100 per cent from the $60 level at which the 2009-10 annual contracts were settled.”
If China allowed its currency to appreciate, it would pay less to import iron ore and other crucial imports like oil. A strengthening Renminbi would increase demand for imported oil, which translates into more expensive oil for US consumers. A few years from now, Washington, DC may come to regret its push for China to appreciate its currency.
Napier also addressed the subject of Europe, Greece, and the Euro. He said, “The creation of a single currency is not an economic event, it’s a political event. Unfortunately, the ten guys in Europe who run this currency have all got Ph.D.s in economics.”
Napier then told us about his experience working in Hong Kong in 1998. That year, the French senate sent a delegation to Honk Kong to investigate the Asian financial crisis, and consult Napier about the evolving project that was the Euro.
The French delegation was convinced of the merits of establishing the Euro, because it would supposedly bring lasting peace along with economic integration. WWII was still a searing memory. The delegation asked whether the Euro would help “iron out the inefficiencies” across Europe. Napier replied, “The things you call ‘inefficiencies’ here in Hong Kong are the things in France you call ‘culture.’” He knew that currency integration without political integration wouldn’t work.
Napier fears that the political will to save the Euro is forcing “economic deflation” in Greece and the other spendthrift countries within the Eurozone. Those running the ECB may rightly note that wages in Greece might decline to achieve a healthier Eurozone equilibrium. But Napier believes that if too much harsh austerity is imposed on the Greek economy, the democracy in Greece might be destroyed in the process. Napier points out that democracies very rarely deflate. They instead devalue their currencies and push new money supply through the channels of commerce.
Napier is concerned that “the ECB will not change its mind on hard money until it destroys one of the democracies in Europe.” Then came the most shocking thing Napier said in his hour-long speech: a prominent Greek businessman confidently assured him that the United Nations will be running Greece by September. If so, this should keep fear in financial markets at healthy levels through this spring and summer. Greece is not resolved, yet the markets appear to believe so.
When asked for a forecast of the best potential asset class over the next decade, Napier’s replied: “A basket of Asian currencies.”
Dan Amoss
for The Daily Reckoning Australia
Similar Posts:
A Fullerton mother was arrested Thursday on suspicion of killing her newborn baby boy in September, police said.
Yanira Valderrama, 20, was taken into custody at her home, where she lives with her parents, the Fullerton Police Department said.
The case began when rescuers responded to a medical emergency at Valderrama’s home Sept. 4 and took her to a hospital for treatment, police said. Doctors determined that she had just given birth.
Authorities returned to the home and found the newborn baby’s body. An autopsy confirmed that the infant died from "blunt force" trauma to the head and "asphyxia while submerged in water," the police department said.
Officials say Valderrama was trying to conceal the pregnancy from her parents.
Valderrama is being charged with murder, child endangerment and inflicting great bodily injury while committing a felony, police said. She was booked at the Fullerton jail and then taken to Orange County Jail.
— Robert J. Lopez
Photo: Yanira Valderrama. Credit: Fullerton Police Department
Article Tags: BBC
The first round of UN climate talks since December’s bitter Copenhagen summit opens in Bonn on Friday with the future of the process uncertain.
Developing countries are adamant that the UN climate convention is the right forum for negotiating a global deal and want it done by the year’s end.
But others, notably the US, appear to think this is not politically feasible.
Some delegates are concerned that the whole process could collapse, given the divisions and lack of trust.
Click source to read FULL report
Source: news.bbc.co.uk
Eco Factor: Energy monitor encourages users to save energy.
Intel has unveiled its new proof of concept Intelligent Home Energy Management device that instead of providing weather information lets you save energy by monitoring your home’s energy consumption. The Wi-Fi enabled device works with the local energy company to provide data as well as suggestions on how to save energy.
The enterprise may now have what they have wanted for the iPhone. But now they have to decide if such a locked down device is control they want secede to Apple
We expect that Apple’s tight control over its hardware, software and content will not stop an enterprise from purchasing the device. But it may cause some to pause and consider a smartphone with the Android OS – built on an open-source model with many of the same enterprise features that will come with the iPhone OS 4.
In our post last week, we spoke with Ken Westin, CEO of ActiveTrak, who said the iPhone OS lacked multi-processing, SSL VPN, an and relied too much on MobileMe, making it troublesome for IT administrators. ActiveTrak allows for devices to be tracked if lost or stolen.
Sponsor
It looks like Apple checked most of the items off Westin’s list except for one caveat. Multitasking work on the iPhone 3GS, its latest device but not the iPhone 3G.
That actually may help sell a lot more phones into the enterprise. IT will want the multitasking feature, primarily for security purposes. As Westin points out, it’s the multitasking that makes it possible for the ActiveTrak service to run in the background.
With multitasking, ActiveTrak would not have to do any social engineering as is required wit the current OS. Currently, ActiveTrak is disguised as a Safari icon on the iPhone. The application activates when the user accesses the Internet from the iPhone. If it is not accessed, the device can not be tracked.
But the Android has had multitasking capability since its inception so in this respect, it is not revolutionary for the iPhone to get such a feature.
As for control, could an enterprise lose access to iPhone apps? This is not likely but as we have seen with Flash, Apple will make uniform decisions about what content it allows. The Android offers an open marketplace that has none of the restrictions that Apple imposes.
Here’s what is included in the iPhone OS 4:
ReadWriteWeb’s Mike Melanson says the purists may not consider it multitasking but for most uses, it is close enough. He writes that multitasking, “for the most part, is handled by a double click on the home button, which pulls up a screen showing icons of all the apps currently hanging out in the background. Some, like Skype or Pandora, will actually be running, while others will simply be in a frozen state.”
Is that enough for an app like ActiveTrak? He said that from what he has seen so far, yes, it will suffice. Bit it is not something that puts it ahead of the Android.
SSL VPN is now supported in iPhone OS 4. Apps are expected from Juniper and Cisco that will support SSL VPN, which allows for better way to securely access the enterprise from a browser across any device.
Email on the iPhone is now up to speed with the rest of the market. The iPhone allows a user to set up multiple Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync accounts. It also works with Microsoft Exchange Server 2010. Multiple email accounts may be pulled into one account or accounts may be viewed separately.
IT administrators may now configure devices to update wirelessly. The device may be monitored to abide by corporate policies. It may be locked down if lost or the data may be wiped.
This would allow the control over what apps someone places on their device. According to Apple: “The iPhone OS 4 enables enterprises to securely host and wirelessly distribute in-house apps to employees over Wi-Fi and 3G. Apps can be updated without requiring users to connect to their computers.
One thing we don’t hear mentioned much is the lock down of the iPhone. Is it a major issue? It does mix into the whole scope of the app platform. So, we argue that it does. But, overall, we have to agree with the NextWeb. The difference between the iPhone and the Android in the enterprise might be best considered a draw:
“Wireless delivery of applications, great data encryption, Exchange Server support. When you’re in a business world, with today’s technology, these things become expected. These are no longer seen as value-added features of any OS, mobile or otherwise. Now, in fairness, Android OS is not at the top of the Enterprise game. But neither is Apple. For years, RIM has set the standard. Even today, other companies have a lot of work to do in order to catch up. I have to call this an even draw.”
Cut expenses. Go broke. Be happy.
Everybody is convinced the market is going up. So what does the market do? It goes down – 72 points yesterday.
What do you call it when the market goes down 72 points? A beginning!
Well, we don’t know if it’s really the beginning of the end or not. We’ve seen more beginnings than we can count. Still, no sign of the end. But there must be an end out there somewhere. Always is.
And look at what is happening in the gold market. While everyone has been watching health care…and stocks…and bonds, gold has been moving up. It rose another $17 yesterday to bring the price up to $1,151.
Why is gold moving up? Because it anticipates higher inflation? Because it is afraid of government defaults?
Most likely, it has no more idea than we do. It doesn’t know what’s going to happen…but with the feds borrowing more than 10% of GDP each year, it ain’t going to be pretty.
The S&P is now trading at a P/E over 23, according to the most recent Barron’s report. Dave Rosenberg:
“No matter how we slice it, whether on a Shiller P/E, Tobin Q or historical profit basis, the US market is anywhere between 20% and 30% overvalued.”
Emerging markets are soaring. Oil is over $85. And the temperature here in Baltimore is 83 degrees.
The heat is on. Something’s gonna blow.
But Goldman Sachs is as cool as a cucumber. Goldman released its annual report earlier this week. The firm said it hadn’t done anything wrong. It hadn’t bet against its own clients. Nor had it expected any help from the government.
Here at The Daily Reckoning, we’ve always taken Goldman’s side. We’ve always had a weak spot for cripples, lamebrains and predatory lenders. Besides, Goldman stole the money fair and square.
Critics charge that Goldman ‘perverted’ capitalism. But they just don’t understand how kinky capitalism can be on its own.
You see, dear reader, when it comes to putting meat on the table, nothing beats capitalism. But it only succeeds so well because it is allows foolish hunters to blow their own heads off. In his book FIASCO, Frank Partnoy recalled his days on Wall Street:
“The way you made money from derivatives was by trying to blow up your clients,” he writes.
He described how Wall Street regularly sold extravagantly complicated derivative instruments to institutional buyers who were either too dim or too lazy to figure out what they were buying. If they had known what was in them, they wouldn’t have bought them.
Then, of course, the instruments blew up…along with the pension funds, endowments and insurers who bought them.
But that’s just the way it should work. Capitalism doesn’t like it when idiots have too much money. So it uses people like Goldman to help take it away from them. That’s what Lloyd Blankfein meant when he said Goldman was doing “God’s work.”
We don’t know if God wanted Goldman to blow up the world economy…but capitalism seemed to be calling for it. And it looked like capitalism was going to blow up the bomb tosser, too. Unfortunately, the feds stepped in. They bailed out AIG…and the whole financial industry – including Goldman. Now, they lend the big banks money for practically nothing…which the banks lend back to the feds at 4%. The banks make money. They restock their reserves with US Treasury debt. And the feds get to finance their gigantic deficits. It’s great for everyone – until it blows up too.
It’s true, of course, that capitalism had already been twisted long before the feds bailed out the banks. Individual investors believed they could make money just by buying mutual funds or a house. Institutional buyers thought they could make money by buying collections of mortgages, any one of which they knew was likely to be garbage. But these crackpot ideas are just part of what makes capitalism so much fun to watch. And don’t worry, just leave it alone…it will correct those mistakes in a jiffy.
Here we are barely 24 months after the correction began. Who thinks he can make money by buying a house now? Only people standing on the courthouse steps and hoping for an extreme bargain. Who thinks he can finance his retirement by buying stocks? Only the young and the dreamers.
And who thinks you can make an economy richer by consuming more? Or cure a problem of too much private sector debt by adding more debt in the public sector?
Only economists! And that’s a whole ‘nuther subject.
And more thoughts…
While the markets are hot, the economy is cool.
Nearly 7,000 people go bankrupt every day – a record number. And in March, M3, the broadest measure of the money supply, recorded its biggest drop ever.
And get this. Peak to trough, December ’07 to February ’10, 8.3 million jobs were lost. As we reported yesterday, take away the statistical tricks and the number of people with real jobs actually fell last month – despite reports of an additional 163,000 new jobs in March.
Consumer credit fell again in February – down $11 billion. To put this number in perspective, the US government has run about $2.5 trillion in deficits since the correction began. So, in spite of pumping monthly deficits on the order of $120 billion…consumer credit still sank by $11 billion.
What can we say? It’s a Great Correction, after all.
Greece is going broke after all. Yields on Greek debt rose over 7% yesterday. So let’s look at how this works. Investors worry about a default. They push up yields (they need higher interest payments to justify the risk). This causes Greece to go further into debt (the cost of paying the extra interest), which causes even more worry among lenders.
Why doesn’t Greece just cut expenses?
Ah…glad you asked. This just goes to show what a dead-end debt can be. The government has already proposed substantial cuts. But it has to answer to the voters – who are on the verge of rioting in the street. And its own cabinet ministers are calling the Germans ‘racist’ because they refuse to give the Greeks money.
It’s hard for a popular democracy to cut spending. And then when it does, it discovers that it is in another trap. So much of the private sector depends on government spending that, take it away, and the whole economy shrinks. This causes tax revenues to fall by more than the budget cuts. In other words, a multiplier works in the other direction – causing the budget deficit to widen when cuts are made!
And guess what? Greece is not the only government that is falling into this hole. Latvia. Iceland. Maybe Ireland, England, California…and even the US…
Where, exactly, the point of no return lies, we don’t know. But it’s out there somewhere…
What’s the solution? Well, just to bite the bullet. Make the cuts. Default. Be happy.
Regards,
Bill Bonner
for The Daily Reckoning Australia
Similar Posts:
Article Tags: World Temperatures
The first satellite to measure Arctic and Antarctic ice in detail has successfully taken off.
The ‘ice mission’, led by British scientists, will show how melting ice could affect weather patterns in the future in the so called “Day After Tomorrow” scenario. The European Space Agency satellite, that cost £122 million to build, took off on a Russian launcher rocket from Kazakhstan and has already sent signals back to Earth.
Duncan Wingham, a climate physicist at University College London, was relieved to see the launch after a previous attempt landed in the sea five years ago. The 1,543 pound CyroSat 2 will be able to measure the thickness of Arctic and Antarctic ice to within a centimetre – an accuracy unmatched until now.
The film The Day After Tomorrow imagined that the melting of the polar ice caps would cause a second ice age by reversing the gulf stream. Prof Wingham said that scenario was “silly” but the satellite will give scientists a better idea of how fast Polar ice is melting, which can affect weather systems around the world, including in the UK.
“If anything, this mission is even more important now than a decade ago when we first proposed it,” he said.
Source: telegraph.co.uk
Perth looks like it’s booming again. This is the fourth time since 2003 your editor has come out to the frontier of Australia’s resource boom to get the vibe in person. A shiny new glass building is going up just in front of our hotel on Hay Street. On Hay Street itself we can see the signs for Louis Vuiton, Yves St. Laurent, and Tiffany and Co. Who knew the miners were so well appointed? More on Perth in a moment.
But first, how about those yield spreads between 10-year Greek and German debt? They are now at 4.27%, the highest level since Europe’s monetary union began in 1999 according to Bloomberg. Now yield spreads aren’t the stuff of breakfast (or even dinner) conversation. But they do matter. Why?
Theoretically, it should cost the Germans and the Greeks roughly the same to borrow. Both governments use the same money and both economies have their interest rates set in Brussels by the European Central Bank. So why do the Greeks have to pay more to borrow for ten years than the Germans?
It’s the debt and deficits, to be sure. Greece is trying to get its fiscal house in order. And Germany is traditionally (or at least in the post-War era) Europe’s best steward of sound money policies. But for all of Europe (and America) these rising bond yields can be reduced to a much simpler explanation: you can’t get something for nothing.
Europe’s political and economic living arrangement – in which the State provides for an increasingly large share of private needs, wants, and dreams – is running smack into the brick wall of demography. Some people find it off putting to hear that the Social Welfare state – despite its best intentions to improve the human condition – is a Ponzi scheme funded by coercive taxation. But we reckon it’s true anyway.
The good news the State is just one of the institutions in a liberal society. There are other ways people can care, love, and empathise with one another. It doesn’t all have to be mediated by the civil service.
But modern government has grown so grotesquely fat and ubiquitous that an entire generation of Westerners have been trained to think only the government can and should solve problems. It’s like having an Uncle stuck in your living room who’s become too fat to move. You have to feed and clean and care for him and after awhile he becomes a living piece of inconvenient and intrusive furniture right smack in the middle of your life.
But cheer up. This will work itself out. The world is too complicated for a room full of well-meaning (or ambitious) men and women to manage it. Complex societies (or adaptive systems) cannot be managed by a handful of human brains. They can only be mismanaged.
In fact here’s a prediction: what happened to the Catholic Church in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries will happen to the Nation State in the 21st. That is, the funding model which puts one institution at the centre of public and private life will break down. The institution will get too large, inefficient, slow, and greedy to do all the work it’s taken for itself.
This is a good thing. In economic terms, it up opens up new productive possibilities. Maybe all the world’s capital won’t be consumed by over-borrowing governments who are robbing from the future to win elections today. Or maybe it will. We’ll see soon enough.
Is there an investment story in today’s DR? Maybe. Gold is up 28% in the last year. Oil is up 75%. And silver is up 48%. They might go higher. But are they cheap? Probably not. As we said the other day (quoting our friend Rick Rule), with commodities you’re either a victim or a contrarian. Entering commodity stocks at these levels might be profitable. But it feels more like speculation on higher prices rather than investing based on tangible asset values that are cheap.
Speaking of which, there is a lot of vacant land in Australia. A lot. Flying across to Perth from Melbourne we looked out at the Great Australian Bight and wondered if anyone could ever live there, and what would they do if they did. Can resilient, decentralised communities that generate their own energy (and somehow find water) be a genuine alternative to having 65% of 21 million people living in the same large capital cities?
Who knows? But that’s a long, long way off anyway. The more immediate question is whether there’s anything worth buying on the stock market right now at these valuations and with this economy. Our take on it – published yesterday in the Australian Wealth Gameplan – is that now is a great time to become an 21st century energy baron. And it’s easier than you think.
Granted, the idea may be completely nuts. But if you want to avoid being a victim you have to buy stuff nobody wants now but may be worth something later. Radioactive mineral sands come to mind. They could become a new substitute for uranium in powering nuclear reactors. And with a fleet of cheap nuclear reactors you could build desalination plants and pipe water into Australia’s red centre and make it bloom like an oasis in the desert.
But less romantically, land prices also appreciate during a great inflation. And we think a great inflation is coming with a rising bond yields presaging currency collapses in Europe and America. We know this from some research we did on the birth of the industrial revolution in Britain in the 16th and 17th centuries.
The full story, for now, is only available to AWG subscribers. But the concept is simple: become a land banker. Mind you , you’re still doing this through the stock market and you’re still buying shares. And with shares you can lose everything. But owning a kind of call option that could profit from a long term energy trend AND the financial crisis coming round the bed seems possible to us, elegant even.
It could be rubbish too. But we’ll see. That’s why the stock market is not a savings account. You have to take risks to get rewarded.
What else can we say about Perth? Well there’s a lot more to say but we’ve run out of time and we forgot to bring a tie. It’s time to see what they cost on Hay street before we give our presentation today on why all libertarians should be institutionalised. Until Monday…
Dan Denning
for The Daily Reckoning Australia
Similar Posts:
Article Tags: World Temperatures
At last December’s UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, former Vice President Al Gore shrilly proclaimed that “The entire polar ice cap … could be completely ice free within the next five to seven years.” As implausible as Gore’s claim already was at the time, recent developments in the arctic have only served to make the fear of an ice-free polar zone all the more absurd.
During the most brutally cold period of this past winter, some pundits were recommending that England’s poor should burn copies of Gore’s book in an effort to stay warm. Now the online edition of the The Times of London is noting that the deep freeze extended far north of the British Isles. According to an April 4 article (“Arctic ice recovers from the great melt”), Gore’s supposed meltdown has frozen over:
#IF you thought it was cold in Britain for the time of year, you should see what is happening around the North Pole. Scientists have discovered that the size of the Arctic ice cap has increased sharply to levels not seen since 2001.
#A shift in the chilly winds across the Bering Sea over the past few months has caused thousands of square miles of ocean to freeze.
#The same phenomenon, known as the Arctic Oscillation, is also partly responsible for the cold winter experienced in northern Europe and eastern America.
#It allowed icy blasts of air to escape from the Arctic and make their way southwards. Provisional Met Office figures for December to February suggest the UK had its coldest winter since 1979, with an average temperature of 1.6C — a full 2.1C below normal. Last week a teenager was killed in Scotland when a school bus crashed in the snow — just days into British Summer Time.
Source: thenewamerican.com
