Three Steps to Making Your Personal Finances More Private in a Digital Age

by: Stefan Gleason Imagine a world where every financial move you make gets recorded in databases that are accessible by any number of third parties – from bankers, to government bureaucrats, to data thieves. It’s the world of the cashless, all-digital economy. And it’s rapidly approaching. Fortunately, there are some steps you can take to … Read more

Morgan Stanley’s Business Conditions Index Just Suffered The Biggest One Month Decline In History

by Michael Snyder We continue to get more indications that U.S. economic conditions are going to deteriorate rapidly during the second half of this year.  Yesterday, I reported on a brand new survey which found that 69 percent of U.S. CFOs believe that a recession is coming “by the end of 2020”, and today we learned that Morgan … Read more

UK Government Blew Billions on “Help to Buy” Scheme that Enriched Home Builders and Drove Up Home Prices. Taxpayers on the Hook When Prices Sink, New Report Warns

But it helped high-income people buy homes. By Don Quijones, Spain, UK, & Mexico, editor at WOLF STREET. The UK’s government’s flagship “Help to Buy” equity loan scheme, launched ostensibly to give cash-strapped first-time buyers a leg up onto the property ladder, has dished out billions of pounds of publicly subsidized loans to relatively well heeled homeowners … Read more

Frothy Bubbles Make Me Whine

by David Haggith    These are not the tiny champagne bubbles Don Ho used to sing about, but those greenish-gray floats of foam that pile up against harbor docks where the churn of the waves meets the oil spittle of boat motors. They are the economic froth that has piled up around us and is now … Read more

Misplaced Pride: Most of the “Middle Class” Is Actually Working Class

by Charles Hugh-Smith If we look at these charts, it looks like only the top 10%, or perhaps the top 20% at best, might qualify as “middle class” by the metrics described below. The conventional definition of working class is based on income and education:the working class household earns between $30,000 and $69,000 annually, and the highest … Read more

The State of the Canadian Debt Slaves, and How They Compare to the American Debt Slaves

Wolf Richter wolfstreet.com, http://www.amazon.com/author/wolfrichter This, despite still ultra-low interest rates and the highest disposable income ever. Canadian households are known around the world for their uncanny ability to pile on debt. And American debt slaves, who’d gotten trampled during the Great Recession, turn out to be lackadaisical these days in comparison. The share of disposable … Read more

Walmart’s Desperate $3.3 Billion Acquisition of Jet.com Fails. But it Now Discloses its US Online Sales, and They’re Big

Wolf Richter wolfstreet.com, http://www.amazon.com/author/wolfrichter Ecommerce is an existential threat to Walmart, and it’s furiously trying to get on top of it, whatever the cost may be. Walmart, determined in an existential sense to become a factor in ecommerce, has been spending vast sums of money to get there, including blowing billions of dollars on acquisitions … Read more

Dire Warning Issued By Putin: “Something Catastrophic Is Coming…”

For More Information See: https://www.infowars.com/maximum-alert-putin-issues-dire-warning-plus-us-border-completely-collapses/ https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-russia-putin/putin-says-russia-u-s-relations-are-getting-worse-and-worse-mir-tv-idUSKCN1TE0L7 https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/breaking-vladimir-putin-reveals-nuclear-13758493 https://www.usnews.com/news/business/articles/2018-12-20/putin-hails-another-year-of-russian-economic-growth https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-russia-putin/putin-says-russia-u-s-relations-are-getting-worse-and-worse-mir-tv-idUSKCN1TE0L7    

What States Have The Largest Families?

https://overflow.solutions/demographic-data/what-states-have-the-largest-families-2017/ Data Notes In 2017, the average size of a family, living in a single household was 3.26 people. This data visualization explores how that differs by state. The data for this visualization comes from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2017 American Community Survey 1-year estimates. For more information visit https://census.gov/acs I used R to pull … Read more

SVEN HENRICH: The fact that central banks are about to embark on a new easing cycle, here and now, represents a global fail of epic proportions the magnitude of which has to be appreciated with hard cold data.

via northmantrader: I can’t emphasize this point enough: The fact that central banks are about to embark on a new easing cycle, here and now, represents a global fail of epic proportions the magnitude of which has to be appreciated with hard cold data. I’ve discussed some of this recently in Game Over, but the background data … Read more

China Warns of Global Recession

via scmp: US investment in China grew 7.5 per cent between January and May, year on year, a much slower pace than the 24.3 per cent recorded between January and April Mofcom spokesperson Gao Deng told a press conference in Beijing that the trade war ‘could cause a recession in the United States and global economies’ … Read more