If elders do not retire, perhaps they might be given a bit more respect, too. | To permit the economic bubble to expand at will, we severed the connection between money and the physical world. Money today has no physical backing. I can’t go to the issuer of the the U.S. dollar, the United States government, and trade it for gold, or silver or even beans. |
| We now find that there is currently more money in existence than the world’s resources can support — especially oil. |
| What does this mean for the relatively short-lived phenomenon of retirement? It means that whatever virtual assets you have accumulated over a lifetime of work — the money, stocks, bonds, real estate and the pensions made of those financial instruments — are headed for a massive devaluation. |
The stockpile of virtual assets that many of us relied on drawing down during retirement is already losing value; that process will accelerate. It’s time to put that value to use before it disappears entirely. Read more at transition-times.com |
Big number, even by today’s standards. The US public pension system faces a higher-than-expected shortfall of more than $2,000bn that will increase pressure on many states’ strained finances and crimp economic growth, according to the chairman of New Jersey’s pension fund. |
The estimate by Orin Kramer will fuel investors’ concerns over the deteriorating financial health of US states after the recession. “State and local governments are correctly perceived to be in serious difficulty,” Mr Kramer told the Financial Times. |
“If you factor in the reality of these unfunded promises, their deficits will rise exponentially.” |
A shortfall of that size could force state governments to take unpalatable decisions such as pouring more public money into their funds or reducing pension benefits. State and local governments have already cut spending to close budget deficits. Read more at www.ft.com |
People can actively disinvest in any pension / insurance company, or stock that has anything to do with financing coal powered generation. Short the buggers! Power companies, investment bankers and pension fund managers are fuelling an unlivable future – with our money |
| Companies who invest in coal seek short-term returns while fuelling future climate ruin. |
| Since Copenhagen, E.ON has announced that any further emissions cuts by the company will depend on governments making progress in 2010 in the climate negotiations. |
To be fair to the power companies, the fault is wider. Most investors expect this behaviour of them. Most banks, insurance companies and pension funds are happy, as things stand, to continue investing in coal. |
| This is the bottom line with the dysfunctional form of capitalism we have allowed to evolve. And the most galling thing is this: the bonus cultists are doing it, in large part, with our money.Read more at www.guardian.co.uk |
US consumer spending rose faster than incomes last month as Americans shrugged off fears about unemployment in favour of shopping, lifting hopes that consumers will be able to help propel the economic recovery. |
Separately on Wednesday, the US government released a feast of figures ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday. Other data showed that new jobless claims fell to the lowest level in more than a year last week, while businesses cut back on orders for durable goods, new home sales jumped in October and consumer sentiment fell back. |
Personal consumption expenditures rose by 0.7 per cent in October, reversing a drop the prior month. That was better than economists expected and offered a welcome sign of resilience from consumers who have seen their balance sheets ravaged by falling home values and job losses. |
| Incomes also rose last month, but at a slower pace than spending, climbing by 0.2 per cent. |
| The return of thrift was the most striking revelation in the national accounts published on September 29th. |
| Cyber criminals have created a highly sophisticated Trojan virus that steals
online banking log-in details from infected computers |
| The Clampi virus, which is spreading rapidly across hundreds of thousands of
computers in Britain and the United States, infects computers when users
visit websites that host a malicious code |
| Once on the computer, the virus sits unnoticed until the user logs on to bank,
credit card or other financial websites. It then captures log-in and
password information and sends it to a server run by the attackers. They can
then tell the compromised computer to send money to accounts that they
control, or they can buy goods with the stolen credit card details.
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| The trojan has a list of more than 4,500 finance-related websites that it
monitors, including British high street banks. Security experts warned that
it was one of the stealthiest and most pervasive threats to computers using
the Microsoft Windows operating systems.
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| emerging Asia should grow by more than 5% this year—at a time when the old G7 could contract by 3.5%. |
| indicators, which are less likely to be massaged, confirm that China’s economy is roaring back. Industrial production rose 11% in the year to July; electricity output, which fell sharply last year, is growing again; and car sales are 70% higher than a year ago. |
| surely the whole of Asia cannot be engaged in a statistical fraud. South Korea’s GDP grew by an annualised 10% in the second quarter. Taiwan’s probably increased by even more: |
| Low private-sector debt made households and firms more likely to spend government handouts; Asian banks were also in better shape than their Western counterparts and able to lend more. |
| It is easy to boost an economy with lots of government spending. But Asian policymakers now face two difficult problems. Their immediate dilemma is how to sustain recovery without inflating credit and asset-price bubbles. |
| the solution to both problems |
| Entropy is the gold standard of physics, the one thing you can count on even
when the rest of the cosmos seems to be going haywire. What makes it unpopular,
rather, is that it stands in stark conflict with some of the most deeply and
passionately held convictions of modern industrial humanity. |
| All energy everywhere, left to itself, always moves from higher to lower
concentrations: that’s the second law of thermodynamics. |
| It took an extraordinarily complex series of processes, more time than the human
mind has evolved the ability to grasp, and an equally unimaginable amount of
energy lost to entropy, to produce the highly concentrated fossil fuels we’ve
wasted so profligately over the last three hundred years. |
| Economics, once again, feeds this blindness. |
| Most of them, however, explicitly reject the role of entropy in the primary
economy |
• Biggest drawdown of cash for 54 years
• Fears banks will dominate home loans |
The difficulties facing building societies were highlighted today with figures released showing they suffered the biggest monthly outflow of savings for 54 years in June — and warnings of continued withdrawals as unemployment forces savers to dip into their nest eggs. |
The unprecedented £2.3bn withdrawn from the sector — the largest monthly fall since data was first collected in 1955 — could have implications for the mortgage market, where lending is increasingly being dominated by the banks. |
Building societies tend to be more reliant on savers to support their mortgage lending than banks. |
The sudden reversal of fortunes for building societies — which enjoyed a boom in savings after the collapse of Northern Rock two years ago — came as the Office of Fair Trading appeared to suggest it should be easier to set up banks to bolster competition. Read more at www.guardian.co.uk |
Across the board, fees have skyrocketed to their highest levels on record, including assessments for such common occurrences as overdrafts (as high as $39), stop-payment actions ($39 — double what it was 10 years ago), balance transfers (up more than 50 percent in the past year) and ATM use (nearly doubled in 10 years). |
The truth is, they are socking it to their customers for two reasons: 1) they can, and 2) fee hikes are a shifty way to snatch enormous levels of new income for themselves without doing anything to earn it. |
| These are the geniuses who made an ugly mess of the core business of banking — which is to make good loans. To make up for their huge losses in that business, bankers have essentially been reduced to flim-flam fee-scammers |
| In the first three months of this year, for example, Bank of America’s fee income rose 50 percent above the same period of 2008 — an extra $4 billion in revenue for the bank.Read more at www.alternet.org |
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The End of Retirement
