For example, let's talk about the price of oil. There are only two times in history when the price of oil has fallen by more than 50 dollars in a six month time period. One was just before the financial crisis in 2008, and the other has just happened...
As a result of crashing oil prices, we are witnessing oil rigs shut down in the United States at a blistering pace. In fact, almost half of all oil rigs in the U.S. have already shut down. The following commentary and chart come from Wolf Richter...
In the latest week, drillers idled another 41 oil rigs, according to Baker Hughes. Only 825 rigs were still active, down 48.7% from October. In the 23 weeks since, drillers have idled 784 oil rigs, the steepest, deepest cliff-dive in the history of the data:We are looking at a full-blown fracking bust, and this bust is already having a dramatic impact on the economies of states that are heavily dependent on the energy industry.
For example, just check out the disturbing number that just came out of Texas...
The crash in oil prices is hammering the Texas economy.Ouch.
The latest manufacturing outlook index from the Dallas Fed plunged again in March, to -17.4 from -11.2 in February, indicating deteriorating business conditions in the state.
But this pain is going to be felt far beyond Texas. In recent years, Wall Street banks have made a massive amount of money packaging up energy industry loans, bonds, etc. and selling them off to investors.
If that sounds similar to the kind of behavior that preceded the subprime mortgage meltdown, that is because it is.
Now those loans, bonds, etc. are going bad as the fracking bust intensifies, and whoever is left holding all of this worthless paper at the end of the day is going to lose an extraordinary amount of money. Here is more from Wolf Richter...
It suited Wall Street just fine: according to Dealogic, banks extracted $31 billion in fees from the US oil and gas industry and its investors over the past five years by handling IPOs, spin-offs, "leveraged-loan" transactions, the sale of bonds and junk bonds, and M&A.At the same time, we are also witnessing a slowdown in global trade. This usually happens when economic conditions are about to turn sour, and that is why it is so alarming that the total volume of global trade in January was down 1.4 percent from December. According to Tyler Durden of Zero Hedge, that was the largest drop since 2011...
That's $6 billion in fees per year! Over the last four years, these banks made over $4 billion in fees on just "leveraged loans." These loans to over-indebted, junk-rated companies soared from about $40 billion in 2009 to $210 billion in 2014 before it came to a screeching halt.
For Wall Street it doesn't matter what happens to these junk bonds and leveraged loans after they've been moved on to mutual funds where they can decompose sight-unseen. And it doesn't matter to Wall Street what happens to leverage loans after they've been repackaged into highly rated Collateralized Loan Obligations that are then sold to others.
Presenting the latest data from the CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis, according to which in January world trade by volume dropped by a whopping 1.4% from December: the biggest drop since 2011!We are seeing some troubling signs in the U.S. as well.
I shared the following chart in a previous article, but it bears repeating. It comes from Charles Hugh Smith, and it shows that new orders for consumer goods are falling at a rate not seen since the last recession...
Well, what about the stock market? It was up more than 200 points on Monday. Isn't that good news?
Yes, but the euphoria on Wall Street will not last for long.
When corporate earnings per share either start flattening out or start to decline, that is a huge red flag. We saw this just prior to the stock market crash of 2008, and it is happening again right now. The following commentary and chart come from Phoenix Capital Research...
Take a look at the below chart showing current stock levels and changes in forward Earnings Per Share (EPS). Note, in particular how divergences between EPS and stocks tend to play out (hint look at 2007-2008).And guess what?
We all know what came next.
According to CNBC, a lot of the "smart money" is pulling their money out of the stock market right now while the getting is good...
Recent market volatility has sent stock market investors rushing for the exits and into cash.It doesn't matter if you are a millionaire "on paper" today.
Outflows from equity-based funds in 2015 have reached their highest level since 2009, thanks to a seesaw market that has come under pressure from weak economic data, a stronger dollar and the the prospect of monetary tightening.
Funds that invest in stocks have seen $44 billion in outflows, or redemptions, year to date, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Equity funds have seen outflows in five of the last six weeks, including $6.1 billion in just the last week.
What matters is if the money is going to be there when you really need it.
At the moment, a whole lot of people have been lulled into a false sense of complacency by the soaring stock market and by the bubble of false economic stability that we have been enjoying.
But under the surface, there is a whole lot of turmoil going on.
Those that are looking for the signs are going to see the next crisis approaching well in advance.
Those that are not are going to get absolutely blindsided by what is coming.
Don't let that happen to you.
Regular readers of this Corporatocracy series should have a firm grasp on the concept of Corporatism. However, the uninitiated might presume that a corporation is merely a vehicle for protecting the owners of the enterprise from the liability risks of conducting business. Much attention has been devoted to the economic conditions and aspects when examining the corporate structure. But modest effort is found in business journals that discuss the social consequences of consolidating the entire hierarchy of political favoritism, access to capital and protection from competition that is at the heart of the corporatist model.
Corporatism as Theory and Practice by Joseph R. Stromberg offers a historic perspective.
“Corporatism and corporations are not yet the same subject. The key word is “yet.” If there is a relationship, it is historical. Very briefly, corporations — legally privileged from birth, pampered by courts, subsidized by Congress, with a social “in” with the most important state personnel — were likely, as ideal engines for accumulating capital, to produce unbalanced economic outcomes, mass discontent, and political unrest. Combine those engines with inherited dysfunctional institutions such as fractional-reserve banking, eminent domain, primitive military accumulation (e.g., the Indian wars), governmental distribution of resources, a venal party system, and a mighty executive, and you have a recipe for crisis. American elites recognized the danger fairly early. By trial and error they put together “corporate syndicalism” (Williams), “political capitalism” (Kolko), corporatism (varii), or “interest-group liberalism” (Lowi). It remained to be seen who (business or state?) would dominate the partnership. Hoover himself reflected in 1922 on the danger of “a syndicalist nation on a gigantic scale.”
Out of such a context the 21th century version of corporatism maintains little effort to satisfy mass discontent of the populace, because the will to achieve an independent livelihood has been stamped out so wholly by the merged state/corporate system. Viewing this alliance as a partnership vying for dominance is a false outlook. In this new millennium, the globalist economy is under total control by a financial dictate that makes laws, writes regulations, enforces compliance, bankrupts companies not in the club, subsidizes crony ventures, and imposes access to capital as a reward for playing ball.
This is not Capitalism, it is demented Corporatocracy.
Don Quijones writes in Crunch Time for the Global Corporatocracy about the closed door negotiations for the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), the US-EU trade deal (TIPP) and TISA.
“The hyper-secret Trade in Services Act (TiSA), which seeks to bind together the U.S., the EU and 22 other Western-aligned nations under a new system of laws and regulations covering telecoms, water, gas, electricity, transport, financial and legal services, software design, electronic data, tourism, healthcare and a whole lot more, is infinitely worse. The treaty’s text is designed to be almost impossible to repeal, and is to be “considered confidential” for at least five years after being signed.”
Basically, the nature of all these destructive trade agreements is reducible to “The fact that we now live in a world dominated by highly undemocratic and unaccountable supranational organizations (the IMF, World Bank, WTO, EU…) is no mere accident.”
Corporatism 101 is not taught in school or even debated in the mass media. It falls to online publications like Naked Capitalism to feature another persuasive argument by Mr. Quijones, which concludes.
“The rise of investor-state dispute settlements and the broad application of arbitration procedures are the ultimate victory in the global corporatocracy’s decades-long coup d’état. If allowed to take universal effect, the system will impose above you, me, and our governments a rigid framework of international corporate law designed to exclusively protect the interests of corporations, relieving them of all financial risk and social and environmental responsibility. From then on, every investment they make will effectively be backstopped by our governments (and by extension, you and me); it will be too-big-to-fail writ on an unimaginable scale.”
It seems that all the attention provided in business news is diverted away from the totality of integration under the auspices of a pseudo and hostile legal framework that only deepen the aggregate control over the social, political, economic and global functions, is silent by design.
So when Suarez-Villa, Luis, publishes in Globalization and Technocapitalism: the political economy of corporate power and technological domination, page 203, we all should take notice.
“It should not surprise, therefore, that a major objective of the fast neo-imperialism is to establish corporatocratic governance whenever and wherever campaigns of conquest happen to be carried out. Fast militarism thereby comes into the scene, whenever aggression is executive. Military conquest for its own sake is pointless, and the fast neo-imperialism has no real reason for being, unless the imposition of corporatocracy is part of the end game of conquest.”
The re-establishment of a neo-feudalism is not a function of privatization, when market forces are unleashed from the choke hold that keeps real competition at bay. Allowing businesses to vie for consumer favor is healthy under a free market economy. Today, there are few examples where the corporatocracy allows for free trading in goods and services.
This is the important lesson that techno corporatism refuses to accept. As the bondage economy expands, the serfs become expendable. Since the consumer economy is shifting into a financial speculation arena, the elites see little reason for continued subsistence of the bottom feeders, since they are not needed to till their estates.
Knowing this object lesson is the actual answer to the Corporatism 101 studies.
Maybe Bruce E. Levine PhD should be teaching class. Get Up, Stand Up: Uniting Populists, Energizing the Defeated, and Battling the Corporate Elite, argues that “individuals must recover self-respect, and a people must regain collective confidence that they can succeed at eliminating top-down controls. Get Up, Stand Up describes how we can recover dignity, confidence, and the energy to do battle.”
It all starts with a required understanding that the Corporatocracy economy is inherently destructive to individual liberty. If people are unable to learn this fact, life on earth will sink into oblivion.