Leid Stories – 08.21.15

Don’t Keep It All to Yourself! Free Your Mind!
You have a treasure trove of great ideas, incisive opinions and sharp analyses of the issues of the day, but they’re all locked up in your head.
Liberate them! Give them a great place to go!
Leid Stories is a bridge between your brainwork and a community of thinkers who appreciate invigorating discussion and debate.

Jim Quinn – DEPARTMENT STORE RESULTS IMPLODING

The government issued their monthly retail sales this past week and four of the biggest department store chains in the country announced their quarterly results. The year over year retail sales increase of 2.4% is pitifully low in an economy that is supposedly in its sixth year of economic growth with a reported unemployment rate of only 5.3%. If all …

Pam and Russ Martens – How U.S. Achieves a 5.3% Unemployment Rate: If You Earn No Money, You Can Still Be Counted as Employed

Last Friday’s nonfarm payrolls report of 215,000 new jobs in July with its attendant announcement of an unemployment rate of 5.3 percent drew mostly yawns from the media. That wasn’t the case on February 3 of this year when Jim Clifton, CEO of the polling company, Gallup, wrote a stunning opinion piece on the company’s web site calling the U.S. …

Michael Snyder – 8 Financial Experts That Are Warning That A Great Financial Crisis Is Imminent

Will there be a financial collapse in the United States before the end of 2015?  An increasing number of respected financial experts are now warning that we are right on the verge of another great economic crisis.  Of course that doesn’t mean that it will happen.  Experts have been wrong before.  But without a doubt, red flags are popping up all over …

Philip Loring – It’s time for a new story of humanity’s place in the world

It goes without saying that humans are good at causing problems. Climate change, overfishing and widespread environmental contamination from chemical toxicants are all creations of our own making. But are we destined to create such problems? Many people believe so, and argue that our capacity for self-interest, avarice and ecological shortsightedness make us inherently unsustainable as a species. Not only …

U.S. Dollar Substitute to Go Public on Oct 20th? BY KELLY BROWN

THE INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND IS ONE OF THE MOST SECRETIVE AND POWERFUL ORGANIZATIONS IN THE WORLD. They monitor the financial health of more than 185 countries… they establish global money rules… and provide “bail-out” assistance to bankrupt nations. And on Oct 20th of this year, the IMF is expected to announce a reserve currency alternative to the U.S. dollar, which …

BP Data Suggests We Are Reaching Peak Energy Demand – Gail Tverberg

Some people talk about peak energy (or oil) supply. They expect high prices and more demand than supply. Other people talk about energy demand hitting a peak many years from now, perhaps when most of us have electric cars. Neither of these views is correct. The real situation is that we right now seem to be reaching peak energy demand through low …

How Big Business Invented the Theology of ‘Christian Libertarianism’ and the Gospel of Free Markets By Kevin Kruse

During the Great Depression, big business needed rebranding.  Blamed for the crash, belittled in the press, and beset by the New Deal’s regulatory state, corporate leaders decided they had to improve their image, and soon. “The public does not understand industry,” an executive complained, “because industry itself has made no effort to tell its story; to show the people of …

Credit Markets have Melted Overnight. Derivatives are a $1 Quadrillion “Ticking Time Bomb” – Bill Holter

That didn’t take long did it?  I of course am speaking of the second overnight and global meltdown of the credit markets …in the last four business days!  Before getting into this topic which I believe will soon be seen in retrospect and by historians far into the future as “THE” trigger event.   Just as we saw last Wed. …

The Wolf of Wall Tweet – Seth Stevenson

On the afternoon of Friday, March 27, as several news outlets reported at the time, somebody apparently made $2.4 million from a tweet. That tweet was a bit of breaking news from Wall Street Journal writer Dana Mattioli: Quicker than any human seemingly could have done it, someone—or rather something—bought $110,530 worth of cheap options on Altera, a company that makes digital circuits.* Over the next several …