At Fed's End. Hoist with their own petar; and 't shall go hard. The world as bard, as they play their last card.

The boomer generation has born witness to the greatest private misallocation of capital in the modern era, dot-com, followed by the greatest public misallocation of capital in the modern era, blutarsky interest rates and banksters too bankrupt to go broke.

As we continue our walk through the fiscal wilderness it is fitting that 40 days and 40 nights (80 years) brings us 1932-2012. (1929-2009 being just a coincidence, of course.)

What shall we call the next generation? The busted?

The rhyming of the greatest separation of wealth since 1928 brings the spectre of the first full-blown deflationary episode post-WW2 to the forefront once again. The prevailing chestnut that deflation will result in depression is for the most part, per the historical record, nonsense. Worldwide, over the last couple centuries, there were 65 episodes of deflation without depression and 21 of depression without deflation, 65 of 73 deflation episodes had no depression, and 8 of 29 depression episodes had no deflation. Nearly 90% of the episodes with deflation did not have depression. (Atkeson&Kehoe, 2004)

Of course back then we had sound money not found money.

Deflation and depression were interlinked in GD1 of course, but not quite the way most folks believe it was. Inflation expectations were well anchored in GD1 and the black diamond in CPI to mark the onset of that crisis was symmetrical to the pop in CPI in the late 30s. Hyperinflation did not ensue because the 'deflation' more rightly should have been called disinflation, and of course deflation is the midwife of hyperinflation (caught you cribbin' Mr. Edwards.) The disinflation of the 30s was reversed with a 40% currency devaluation, the belief in wizards was strong and well met.

The empirical point to consider though is that this Great Depression is occurring in a sovereign that has the world's reserve currency with a national security apparatus that includes the rating agencies. A volatile mix of mischief that allows folks to not only dispel the administration of medicine but promote the advocacy of alchemy while bloviating on how deflation is truly the hemlock of the people, well at least some of the people.

How does this end? To the sound of great applause, folly's denouement ... and then a long period of silence.

In many ways it is the age old story of Emperors and Pirates, deflation being the Jolly Roger, and a headlong drive into oblivion with the argument that forcing the issue will resolve it. Rummy's chestnut of "If you can't solve a problem, make it bigger."

Methinks the Federales have one 'futile and stupid gesture' brewing to can-kick the ebbing empire, guns and butter redux, although this time perhaps more appropriately phrased as buns and gutter. Ultimately regaled, for those of more modest deportment, as Financial Pornography 101 : Gangbanging a String.

The Fed will end, 2016 is circled on my calendar, hoist with their own petar; and 't shall go hard. The world as bard, as they play their last card.

Financial Pulchritude, Ringfence the Multitude, Federales with Attitude, Brother can you spare a Rhyme?

"The worst is over without a doubt."
"American labor may now look to the future with confidence"
"We have hit bottom and are on the upswing"
- James J. Davis Secretary of Labor. (June,Aug,Sept 1930 respectively)

"In other periods of depression, it has always been possible to see some things which were solid and upon which you could base hope, but as I look about, I now see nothing to give ground to hope-nothing of man."
- Former President Calvin Coolidge, (1933)

'He that trusteth in his riches shall fall; but the righteous shall flourish as a branch.'
- Proverbs 11:28

In 1929 the top 0.1% of Americans had a combined income equal to the bottom 42%.

In 2004, the top 0.1% of Americans had a combined pre-tax income of the poorest 120 million people (approximately 40%.)

In 1929 the top 1% of households represented 44.2% of wealth and in 1933 they represented 33.3%. On the second data point hangs the prophetic sword with horsehair splintering over the Oracle at Eccles.

As of 2007, the top 1% of households owned 42.7% of all financial wealth (total net worth minus the value of one's home.) The bottom 80% percent? Just 7%.

As of 2007, income inequality in the United States was at an all-time high for the past 95 years, with the top .01% (yes, that is one-hundredth of one percent) receiving 6% of all U.S. wages.

In 1928, the top 10 percent of earners received 49.29 percent of total income. In 2007, the top 10 percent of earners garnered 49.74 percent.

In 1928, the top 1 percent of earners received 23.94 percent of income. In 2007, the top 1 percent took home 23.5 percent.

And the lessons learned by our blessed leaders concerning this Great Depression? Prices cannot go down and wealth inequality needs to tick up. An assemblage of price-distorting wizards locked arm-in-arm struggling to defeat the creative destruction blizzard. The insouciance of elites and the Antoinette economy. Exhibit thyself to a public that may hiss thee, bemoan the solons. Let them eat debt!

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? said the Roman poet Juvenal. Who will guard the guards themselves?

Why, pronounce our modern day guards, we will. Trust us but don't task us lest you see trust in us lost to your peril.

'Don't Task Don't Smell', the central plank of the 'I Can't Believe it's Not Capitalism Plan' has given us Sugar Mountain, where stupidity is cupidity.

The cold hard fact of our age is that the bankrupt ideology of the rich that had greatly succeeded in drafting the inner monologue of regular folks so that they would vote against their self-interests is colliding head-on with a Mr. Market that is a bit pissed off that we've inflated it out of the business cycle for the last quarter century. (AM Rule #6)

After World War 2, our blessed leaders, impressed by German 'organizational' skills crafted a policy of manufacture of consent.Over time these techniques moved to the economic realm in an attempt to manufacture content.Federales now risk the manufacture of contempt, for it is only a Great Depression if they say it is. (AM Rule #1)

Truly we need a hero or it is generation zero.

Financial Pulchritude, Ringfence the Multitude, Federales with Attitude, Brother can you spare a Rhyme?

Phat, Plummed and Cupid is no way to go through strife son.

The splinter of our disconnect. Fade to back.

Scene 1:

6 year old daughter had been misbehaving during the course of a day. Wife did the old 'wait until your father comes home.' When I arrived home just as the wife was about to regale me with the little one's transgressions, my daughter 'waved her off' and walked towards me with arms extended to support her point; 'Daddy I am still just a little girl, I am going to make mistakes.'

Scene 2:

Driving home from my wife's parents the other night.
She notices that our son (4yrs) was playing with a toy...

Mom: Is that your toy?

Son: No Mama, Grandpa and Nana said I could have it for a week.

AM: I think he is making that up.

Son : (Pause) I changed my mind.

Son: Its' craziness Mama.

Wife: What's craziness ?

Son: Its' craziness when you take a toy that doesn't belong to you.

Son : (Pause)

Son : And I'm a crazy man Mama.

Scene 3:

'Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.'
- William Shakespeare (Richard III),

Fade to Back:

'There are two mistakes one can make along the road to truth -- not going all the way, and not starting."
-Buddha

The first two above are from my children but it is a fractal of the Federales for most certainly crazy men do make mistakes.

The crystallizing mistake of our age, the crime of the century writ large, the splinter of our disconnect... is this epigram: failure to liquidate the insolvent banksters, to dip rich folks' bad speculative bets into the acid bath of price discovery, has liquidated a large part of the productive economy. And so the blast beat of the cyclic drum plays on as we fade to back.

The American Empire came to a fork in the road and instead of taking it we morphed it into a can.

A quarter century of being prophets of our fate, of the Great Moderation, scratch that the Great Modification, of deficits not mattering, of models over history, is serving up the middle class as a burnt offering and may result in our not being masters of our intermediate future as we black diamond towards the denouement of the trusted.

Just got back from a Colorado Springs conference and had the 'same conversation' once again this time with the cab driver. A decade out from California, the fella was a luxury real estate developer, and he shared two stories which characterizes our zeitgeist.

The first is that of a former client who has a 25 million dollar home (well that was what they paid for it) with several million in equity. They would like to refinance with the bank but they can't because the bank has absolutely no idea how to value it, couldn't even give 'em a number or a range.

The second is that this cabdriving victim of the misallocation of productive capital plans to stock up on guns and ammo and, offering the caveat of 'don't laugh with what I'm going to tell you Mr. Stranger in the back seat', has plans to go to Alaska with a portable home (I forget the indigenous term) to live of the land.

Being a contrarian, I suggested to him that his conversation was one that had been oft-repeated as of late (he agreed his associates were all chortling the same) and suggested that if we do get shaked and baked either through gravity dislocations (astro stuff), history relocations (war following financial crisis), or popular sniping (the manufacture of contempt for it is only a Great Depression if they say it is) the big cities will probably be the safest place to be...

After all, if the s$&% comes down do you really want to be out in the hinterlands with every other fella loaded to bare? Sounds like Mad Max to me.

If I knew the way would most probably share it, but he who has a crystal ball most certainly ends up with a mouthful of broken glass.

This I feel to be true... it is a Great Depression but with different characteristics than our First. You can read the intro to this blog as well as the inception date, your humble blogger dropped the tagline of the Great Depression of 2007 prior to the Noblesse Oblige even calling the recession.

In GD1 what was a fella to do? Collect cigarette butts on the street, sit on the porch, listen to the radio, or mayhaps go down to the Bowery and get in trouble?

Now the choices are a cornucopia of low-cost to no-cost diversion. Juvenal would be proud. Watch a movie , read a book, read a paper, or listen to music all for free via the intertubes and collect the government check. All until that zombie movie comes to your local cineplex entitled 99 Weeks Later.

Among the empirical evidence of our current dilemma are current unemployment levels being empirically worse than the worse levels of the Great Depression Volume 1 - if we apply the same measurement metric. Seriously, you can look it up!

Another nugget is the comparable extremes met in the separation of wealth in 1928 and 2007, which has actually upticked through 2010. B.S. Bernanke certainly did learn the 'lessons' of GD1, did he not?

My trading sensei berated me a few days ago in my commenting that this is GD2, with the bromide 'look at all the affluence around us!' My reply was have you ever read newspapers from 1930 and 1931? - Internally I verbalized Hemingway's chestnut...'{there are two ways a man goes broke}, slowly,and then all at once.' Once upon a rhyme is a'comin.

Here in Cook County homes over $500,000 are not to be foreclosed on (add-on : >$500K foreclosures represent about 1% of total per The King Report), the banks don't want to take the hit, the overextended upper middle class with horsehair splintering probably choosing to go to Disneyland (or Nordstrom's?) as they squat in their hut and dream of... I don't know... joining the cab driver in Alaska?

With the upper echelons of America contributing a disproportionate share of consumer spending, and their primary asset frozen in the ember of a 13-16 year downtrend where the buyers are lower and the sellers are higher (most probably chemically since the securitization market for jumbo has gone dumbo) the cyclic clock is ticking, the alarm anticipated, that will start wholesale regurgitation to flippers who will counterintuititively drag the 'cancer clearing' out as the fast money waits for the the Groundhog Day bounce back of the ever-imminent recovery right around the corner of a round room.

A generational circle smirk as it were.

And with trillions of meatballs thrown at the problem, the reserves at the Fed being nothing more than a dip financing for a generational workout, private demand is down ticking for the first time since 1928? Viva la V-shaped scratch that seeds abounding scratch that nascent scratch that unusually uncertain recovery!

If the inflection point between inflation and deflation is believing in wizards or believing your lying eyes the Oracle at Eccles better fire up the jets prior to meeting with the Jackholios cause people are squinting at the eye chart and rubbing sus ojos.

Now is the splinter of our disconnect
Made glorious summer by this sun of Ben;
And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house
In the deep bosom of our equity buried.

Fade to Back.

All good things must come to an end ... or perhaps a new beginning.

Fractal-based theories of market behavior explain discontinuous movements such as the May Trix Flash Crash.

As opposed to supposing that the bubbles in your portfolio are as random as the bubbles in your soda pop, a fractal approach concedes that bubbles are a certainty.

'Fundamentals' most certainly do matter although the use of the term is not what the conventional wisdom perceives.

Even a cursory examination of modern financial history would seem to consign the squawk of randomwalk to the febrile dustbin of history and yet the arrogance of unlimited self-determinism and the mastery of man above all motivates adherence to the ex-theory.

Like lemmings herded to discontinuous chasm after chasm, markets move in memoriam much to the prevailing wisdom's opprobrium.

For your humble blogger Mandelbrot was an eye-opener, but John Needham was the closer.

Over the last week I have automated a spreadsheet based on a 'fractal' theory where upon entering high, low, open, and close as well as ONE other indicator (proprietary from Needham), buy and sell orders can be triggered in ALL liquid markets, and quite successfully I might add.

Applying what Mr. Needham has taught in 'face-to-face' sessions and postulating as to what he will unveil in his foreshadowed 'next stages', have on this fella's spreadsheet clearly, and empirically, separated the winners from the 'sinners'.

Stunning, brilliant, simple, elegant, and in direct opposition to most every financial model known to man.

Now, gentle reader, you might ask why not publicise it Mr. Money, become rich and famous, dye your eyebrows and hair black, and become a billionaire, or at least write a book?

Well, the humble reply is as follows: 1) the entries in this blog do publicize it and have directed folks to Mr. Needham's website thedanielcode.com, however to truly appreciate his teachings one must attend a tutorial and he is coming to the States this summer ; 2) fame is way, way, overrated and I've already made enough coin for both myself and my children to be comfortable; 3) I've earned my grey hair thank you very much; 4) money is the root of all evil and should be treated with respect much like a weapon and a drug, it is so very hard to make abundance in in this world and not at the end of the day be a complete a&$%ole and 5) all I care about is feeding the kids, and from time to time the extended family, feeding a book would be torture.

And yet this is damn entertaining, and sharing, albeit anonymously, is caring.

The purpose of this blog was in part to figure it 'out', believing' it' to be 'it', with the understanding that it was much easier to make 'it' than to invest 'it'.

Now that I'm firmly ensconced into a future where I'm in 'it' to mint 'it' , the purpose of this blog is called into question.

So...will ponder that. Thoughts for now are that future entries may be limited, if any, and that the future focus will, predominantly, be on the premise that according to fractal theory 'self-similarity occurs on all scales' as well as an exploration of the more subtle concept of self-affinity which refers to a fractal whose pieces are scaled by different amounts in the x- and y-directions.

All good things must come to an end ...or perhaps a new beginning.

There is a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.

To be mindful is a discontinuous process, our senses allow us a glimpse at the perfect form (truth) but that view can often be distorted by the flickering fire of perception that illuminates the shapes we perceive to believe.

Peace.

MathTerror... we're sorry but the numbers you've reached have been logically disconnected

'We are the fools of Europe'
-Bild Magazine

'History is a set of lies agreed upon.'
-Napolean

'And you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.'
- John 8:32

WSJ : The European Union picked 440 billion euros as the size of the rescue fund because the sum of 440 billion euros and 60 billion euros available initially from an EU emergency fund "sounds nice", a European Commission official said with half a smile. Even better, said another, when the IMF's portion is included, the bailout would be rendered by the American press as $1 trillion.

Forbes: In fact, some of the most basic details, including the $700 billion figure Treasury would use to buy up bad debt, are fuzzy. “It’s not based on any particular data point,” said a Treasury spokeswoman, “We just wanted to choose a really large number.”

And that folks is the new Goldilocks world economy in the new normal - wild ass guesses promulgated to save civilization on the basis of 'sounds just right.'

Better to guess up than fess up I suppose.

Snarkiness is running aground on the shores of institutionalized fraudulent conveyance that is becoming so ridiculous that one can only stare in Gaga'd disbelief...

To wit, WSJ: 'April marked the 27th consecutive month in which small businesses either shed more or the same number of jobs that they added, according to a monthly survey to be released Tuesday by the National Federation of Independent Business, a trade group in Washington, D.C. Since July 2008, employment per firm has fallen steadily each quarter, logging the largest reductions in the survey's 35-year history. Going forward, more small-business owners say they plan to eliminate jobs compared with those that expect to create new jobs over the next three months. The latest study was conducted during the month of April and reflects responses from 2,197 U.S. small-business owners.'

Compare and contrast that with the Bureau of Laborious Statistics Birth Death Model creating 188,000 small business jobs....

Oh but it gets even wackier..

Monday's The King Report : 'For April the fabricators at the BLS have ‘men, 16 years of age and older’ gaining 456,000 jobs. But ‘women, 16 years of age and older’ gained only 94k jobs. This is impossible!!! This is the fourth straight month of impractical imbalance of job gains between the sexes.'

To wit, as mentioned here on March 8th : "the Federales Household Survey showed that this month (Feb.) the category of 'Men 16 years and older' accounted for 297,000 of the 308,000 jobs gain and last month (Jan.) 'Women 20 years and older' produced 529,000 of the 541,000 jobs gain. Dude, stats happen! Don't blame the soothsaya."

Last month the King report revealed, 'Once again we see chicanery in the March Employment because the Household Survey shows a gain of 264k jobs but ‘Men 20 years & over’ accounted for a 290k job gain. ‘Women 20 years & over’ lost 42k jobs. This is absurd!'

What will be the title of the April Household Survey? 'Stats from Mars, B$%#*&@t from Venus?'

Well they didn't choose that appellation although well they should have especially in light of yet another tragedy- per Reuters; 'The Agriculture Department said 39.68 million people, or 1 in 8 Americans, were enrolled for food stamps during February, an increase of 260,000 from January.'

Sadness layered upon madness served up to a hamster-wheeled populace.

And those of us that cry for reason before farce are left to muse until the dancing stops.

The road ahead seeming to fork between destroy the middle class now (wafting asset values with the gentle lubricant of debasement) or destroy the middle class later (deflation being the midwife of hyperinflation where the path to $5000 gold goes through $500.)

A burnt offering to the tribes and their machinations.

The Black Swan, when it isn't being blamed for its' prescience, synthesized as the hope upon hope of just muddling through.

I fear that we will see things in the near term that we would have never ever imagined could ever happen.

Unless of course Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and a requisite choir of angles, descends down to present us with fusion, teleportation, room temperature superconductors or the like to further enable the game...

Someday this war is gonna end.

MathTerror... we're sorry but the numbers you've reached have been logically disconnected..

Randomwalkin's not pinin', Barclays, 'tis whinin, the cycles are dinin', the fractals divinin'

Do we blame the umbrella for the rain?

Do we blame the parka for the snow?

Do we blame the roof and the walls for the storm?

Well if one is an advocate and sycophant of the ex-theory, randomwalking, a pristine and inviolate thesis that has been disproven this last century to the tune of a gazillion-squared, I guess one does indict the forenamed suspects for their obvious culpability.

In the WSJ, lead right section C, the pablum narrative to end all pablum narratives, the silliest, most inane, and flat-out stupid article that these eyes have witnessed in a long long time.

'Did a Big Bet Help Trigger 'Black Swan' Stock Swoon' is the title.. the randomwalkers' version of 'And how long sir have you beaten your wife?'

Universa Investments, a fund that bets to win on discontinuous market movements, where Nicholas Taleb is an advisor, and Benoit Mandelbrot is considered to be a visionary (a sentiment also shared by your humble blogger)... is being blamed for the 'flash crash'!

You have to be f&%$*&g kiddin' me!

The article details how Universa made a big bet, a whoppin' $7.5 million for 50,000 options, that would have paid off about $4 billion should the S&P 500 stock index fall to 800 in June. Admitting that the trade was not 'out of character' for the fund and that 'on any other day' the option contracts 'might have briefly hurt stock prices' the Wall Street Journal then lays out in a breathless array, conclusive evidence, in an attempt to brand Universa as the most likely culprit in a crash that all credible models insist should have never happened.

'The trade may have played a key role', 'traders on the other side of the transaction' led to 'selling to offset some of the risk', then, as the market fell 'those declines are likely to have forced even more hedging ' creating a 'tsunami', a 'tidal wave of selling into a market already on the edge' and 'a blast of orders' causing exchanges to be 'clogged', and causing individual stocks to 'collapse'.

'The working theory among traders and others (others??) involved in the exchange meltdown is that the "Black Swan" -linked fund may have contributed to a Black Swan moment, a rare, unforeseen event that can have devastating consequences.'

Pay no attention folks that the working theory that all our blessed mathematical models are based on emphatically states that the rare and unforeseen can be foreseen to never occur.

And so if it pleases the court (of public opinion) we shall cast the accused into the waters and if she floats she is clearly a witch... may God have mercy on her soul.

Or one can make another argument. Hours before the panic began, selling volume was unusually heavy. The selling of stocks was at its highest since the day the market reopened after the Sept 11 terror attacks. The Universa trade along with likely dozen of other trades across the market, led to a cascade of selling in the futures markets. As the trading volume soared, data systems across the stock market began to get clogged. With the high frequency funds either selling or pulling out of the market, Wall Street brokerage firms pulling back and the NYSE stock exchange temporarily halting trading on some stocks, offers to buy stocks vanished from underneath the market.

'Universa alone couldn't have caused the market meltdown", said Mark Spitznagel, Universa's founder. "We had reached a critical point in the market, and it was poised to collapse.'

Well that's a very convincing counter-argument but here's the thing... I am quoting from the same article.

Edward R. Murrow is convulsing in his tomb.

So why wasn't the headline 'Ex-theory fails again. Universa profits from discontinous market movement'?

Well aside from the obvious reason, one might note from reading between the lines that Barclays most certainly falls under the auspices of the aforementioned 'others' and in part, or perhaps in whole, the enabler for this hatchet job. Universa placed their order on Barclays trading desks, Barclays was selling hard, and a market data feed at Barclays that delivers data on "buy" and "sell" orders went down, although a backup data system purportedly went 'immediately online'. Although Barclays disingenuously 'declined to comment' for the article, their head of electronic trading is cited once and the bank is named seven other times in this missive, suggesting someone over there was squawking and deflecting.

The sentence in this trash worth considering is the brief citation to Taleb's fame referencing his thesis that 'unlikely events in the financial markets are far more likely than most investors believe.'

If quantum theory is correct there is an alternate plane of reality where their Wall Street Journal would expand upon this assertion in the following manner.

Randomwalkin's not pinin'! It's passed on! This theory is no more! It has ceased to be! It's expired and gone to meet 'is maker! 'It's a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed it to the masses it'd be pushing up the daisies! It's metabolic processes are now 'istory! It's off the twig! It's kicked the bucket, it's shuffled off 'is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible!! THIS IS AN EX-THEORY!!'

Natural law is based upon a "fractioning" of a larger structure into smaller structures that have not only the features of the larger structure but if scaled up will look identical to the larger structure. Mandelbrot showed this scalability by graphing long-term financial data that appeared to be discontinuous on logarithmic paper revealing a fractal relationship in markets.

Per Benoit: 'Price changes are not independent of each other.My heresy is a different, fractal kind of statistical relationship, a "long memory." Why this should be is not certain; but one can speculate. Whatever the explanation, we can confirm the phenomenon exists- and it contradicts the random-walk model. Contrary to orthodoxy, price changes are very far from following the bell curve. Such theory predicts that index swings of more than 7 percent should come once every 300,000 years; in fact, the twentieth century saw forty-eight such days.(Over 50 now!) Truly, a calamitous era that insists on flaunting all predictions. Or perhaps, our assumptions are wrong.'

Mandelbrot discerned that markets exhibit a wild trait of abrupt change or discontinuity. This hierarchy of turbulence, a pattern that scales up and down with time, he describes as the Noah Effect - catastrophic, but transient. This Noah Effect is seen in the market's discontinuity : this is the pillar of fractal geometry.

The market's second wild trait - almost-cycles- he describes as prefigured in the story of the prophetic dreams of Joseph, a biblical tale of pattern recognition or long-term dependence. The Joseph effect is the influence of a long-term memory through which the past continues to influence the present.

Per Benoit: ' But how exactly do these two effects- Noah and Joseph, dependence and discontinuity - interact in markets? Answer: At least one market mechanism I identified naturally leads to the other. Suppose, for instance, that you have an "almost-trend" emerging in a stock price: a few weeks, say, in which a stock price rises seven days out of ten. The pattern must eventually break up, of course; otherwise, it would be a real trend that you could bet on continuing a few weeks, and hope to make some real money. But when the "almost-trend" finally does break, it can do so rapidly. A sudden lurch downward, perhaps. A discontinuity. Or, in the terms of the Biblical metaphor, a Noah Effect produced by Joseph-style dependence.

For some real-world examples, think about investment bubbles. They seem calamitous -but they happen all the time. Conventional economics tells us they are aberrations, "irrational" deviations from the norm, caused by a rapacious speculator, mass greed, or some other unpleasant factor. But under certain circumstances they can be entirely rational and flow from the entwined effects of long-term dependence and discontinuity.

The distribution of price changes in a financial market scales. Given that event X has happened, what are the odds that Y will happen next? With financial prices, scaling means that the odds of a massive price movement given a large one are akin to those of a large movement given a merely sizable one. Such is the confusion of scaling. It makes decisions difficult, prediction perilous, and bubbles a certainty.'

Wolf pack a circlin', Febrile piiggies at the troughs, Greek skies are going to fear up, as they task the Keynesian whores

There are few sights more terrifying to a father than watching ones' young child claw at his throat, in duress, struggling to gather a breath. This scenario played out for your humbled blogger as my son's peanut/tree nut allergy flared up in full force after a family outing yesterday. Fortunately we had the necessary medicines, benadryl and an EpiPen, which did stabilize him as an ambulance quickly arrived to whisk us to the Children's Hospital Emergency Room. The missus and I had notified our family that our son did have this allergy and folks had agreed to put any desserts or foods that contained such ingredients out of reach, but the soon-to-be 4 year old is in the 100% percentile on height and is developing a commanding reach. Even given our best intentions he must have spied a tasty dessert and indulged himself. The solution is clear, if a function carries any foodstuffs with allergic ingredients we just can't bring the family and we're going to have to put an alert bracelet on him.

Consider though, gentle reader, the following analogy where his nut allergy is our financial crisis. In that scenario most certainly the parents would have been chagrined by the duress. However these parents would have resolved to first consider how debilitating all different types of nuts might be and then would have resolved to put the 'nut buffet' on a table and pretend that the table in fact did not exist. If however one tenacious fella at the family function named Market did, vaingloriously, begin to pontificate on the disappeared table still in plain sight, then the parents would have assuaged him with a team of physicians at the ready with limitless medicine at their disposal. Further, they would have argued that the very sight of the flotilla of remedies would, by themselves, dissuade the deleterious effect of the allergy and lastly, that the table of nuts was in fact required for a balanced diet notwithstanding the potential knock-on effects that as previously stated would be tightly monitored...

The child is safe with us! No worries...

In reading about the latest Nancy Capitalist exercise in can-kicking, Le Tarp, the oh so fine print suggests that the implementation of the European bazooka (or better yet hookah) is contingent upon the need to go through 'the parliamentary procedure' in the relevant member states.

Good luck with that!

As the preliminary results of Germany's North Rhine-Westphalia's elections come in suggesting legislative gridlock, one wonders if we will be blessed with a redux of Paulson, er I meant Trichet on bended knee, in front of Merkel?

Wolf pack a circlin', Febrile piiggies at the troughs, Greek skies are going to fear up, as they task the Keynesian whores.

Those who fail to learn from history may be doomed to repeat it but those that purportedly have learned the lessons, but now proclaim they are masters of their fate and that this time is in fact different, are doubly damned.