The Federal Reserve’s QE3 has flooded the stock and bond markets with low-interest liquidity that makes it profitable for speculators to borrow cheap and make arbitrage gains buying stocks and bonds yielding higher dividends or interest. In principle, one could borrow at 0.15 percent (one sixth of one percent) and buy up stocks, bonds and real estate throughout the world, collecting the yield differential as arbitrage. Nearly all the $800 billion of QE2 went abroad, mainly to the BRICS for high-yielding bonds (headed by Brazil’s 11% and Australia’s 5+%), with the currency inflow for this carry trade providing a foreign-exchange bonus as well.
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. His latest book, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West is now available.
Do you remember the promise of the New Economy that was going to replace the lost “dirty fingernail” manufacturing jobs with innovative highly paid New Economy jobs? Well, the promise was just another deception from the elites who have stolen Americans’ future.
For the umpteenth consecutive month and year, the June BLS payroll jobs report (released on July 5) shows that the US economy has created no such jobs. The same old tired categories account for the same old lowly paid new domestic service jobs.
Free information will be our doom, Quartz‘s Jaron Lanier asserts in, “Free Information, as Great as it Sounds, Will Enslave Us All.” From high-frequency trading to online marketing, insists Lanier, big data is being used by those with the resources to collect and manipulate it to enrich themselves. Meanwhile, those of us with just paltry, personal devices are the ones creating the information, creating the value that fuels such systems. It is an argument that has been advanced before, and Lanier pursues the thread:
“Something seems terribly askew about how technology is benefiting the world lately. How could it be that so far the network age seems to be a time of endless austerity, jobless recoveries, loss of social mobility, and intense wealth concentration in markets that are anemic overall? How could it be that ever since the incredible efficiencies of digital networking have finally reached vast numbers of people that we aren’t seeing a broad benefit? . . .
“While people are created equal, computers are not. When people share information freely, those who own the best computers benefit in extreme ways that are denied to everyone else. Those with the best computers can simply calculate wealth and power away from ordinary people.”
See the article for its supporting arguments. Lanier does not leave us hanging for a potential solution. He recalls a suggestion he credits to Ted Nelson, which the IT pioneer made back in 1960: embed a “universal micropayment system” into any digital communication network, so that each individual who contributes any bit of data would get a bit of compensation in return. In that reality, for any tweet each of us sent, search query we made, or even security-camera image of us that was later used by any organization (for whatever purpose), we might become a few cents richer.
Interesting idea; can it gain any traction before the current system is set in stone?
I spotted a blog post called “Could Palantir Technologies Be Raising Additional Funding?” I have no clue who or what is behind this interesting item. The main idea is that Palantir, a high profile company which has been in the news about litigation and other matters, has been funded already. According to Crunchbase, the company has more than $300 million in funding. For the sake of comparison, Attivio and Coveo — both in the content processing space — have been able to drum up about $30 million in funding. Most of the companies in the search and content processing space — Digital Reasoning, for instance — have garnered a fraction of what long time players Attivio and Coveo have been able to gather. At the time of its sale to Oracle, Endeca — another content processing and intelligence vendors — was generating an estimated $150 million in revenues. At the time of its sale to Hewlett Packard, Autonomy was nosing into the $800 million range. But the key figure for Autonomy is that it sold to the prescient managers at HP for more than $10 billion.
Let’s assume that Palantir has received funding in the $300 million range. Let’s assume that the company is not raising any additional funding. Let’s assume that the company, founded in 2004, is going to pay back its investors, operate at a profit, and fund necessary research to keep the content processing system in step with competitors like Cybertap, among others.
So what does the gargantuan funding suggest to me, this fine, humid Sunday morning in rural Kentucky?
Narus is a company, now a wholly owned subsidiary of Boeing, which provides real-time network traffic and analytics software with enterprise class spyware capabilities.[1][2] It was co-founded in Israel in 1997 by Ori Cohen, who had served as Vice President of Business and Technology Development for VDONet, an early media streaming pioneer, and Stas Khirman.[3]
Here is the final bit explaining the complete corruption of the financial sector; it deals with the debasing of the the rating agencies. It is blatantly obvious from many sources that the Obama Administration Justice Department has failed to serve the public interest. We are five years past the 2008 meltdown, and it cannot be denied that no real effort has been made at the Federal level to hold these corporations, or the men and w! omen who control them, accountable. Thus, I do not see how it is going to be possible to avoid another meltdown. The system is simply too corrupt, I think it is going to implode again because of its unregulated greed.
Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever
Thanks to a mountain of evidence gathered for a pair of major lawsuits by the San Diego-based law firm Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd, documents that for the most part have never been seen by the general public, we now know that the nation's two top ratings companies, Moody's and S&P, have for many years been shameless tools for the banks, willing to give just about anything a high rating in exchange for cash.
In incriminating e-mail after incriminating e-mail, executives and analysts from these companies are caught admitting their entire business model is crooked.
“Lord help our fucking scam . . . this has to be the stupidest place I have worked at,” writes one Standard & Poor's executive. “As you know, I had difficulties explaining ‘HOW' we got to those numbers since there is no science behind it,” confesses a high-ranking S&P analyst. “If we are just going to make it up in order to rate deals, then quants [quantitative analysts] are of precious little value,” complains another senior S&P man. “Let's hope we are all wealthy and retired by the time this house of card[s] falters,” ruminates one more.
OUR OBJECTIVE: Figure out how to take one million people out of a virtual hell and resettle them into a virtual heaven, using only $500 million ($500 per person), and three ingredients available in plentitude: sunlight, barren earth, and salt water. Begin within 90 days and finish within two years. In so doing, create the playbook for addressing the needs of the two billion extreme poor so as to end the migration pressures on Australia, Europe, Russia, Turkey, and the USA.*
* Three hard things in one package: # of people, fixed low-cost per person, and zero base start — in the middle of a moonscape with no supporting foundation. This is about speed & scale combined, and open source and low cost per person plus assured sustainability combined. A non-trivial challenge no one else has addressed.
INTRODUCTION:
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Both human understanding and critical technologies have advanced far beyond the understanding of most academics, civil organizations including labor unions and religions, corporations, governments, law enforcement, media, the military, and non-government/non-profit organizations.
Hybrid public governance rooted in open-source decision-support — legal ethical evidence-based decision-support — is the wave of the future that we must all ride if we are to prosper.
My email is robert.david.steele.vivas [at] gmail [dot] com. I seek to attract ideas from those who believe, as I do, that there is plenty of money to create a prosperous world at peace — we simply lack applied intelligence with integrity across all traditional organizations. There are new leaders in place who appear disposed to listen. The time for Alternative C2, Open Source Everything (technical), and M4IS2 (human factor) has arrived.
