A new study by the Boston Consulting Group has found that while wealth inequality is growing on a global scale, it has kicked into overdrive in the United States – where America’s 1% are expected to control 70 percent of the nation’s private wealth by the year 2021.

The banker bailouts of the 2008/09 period changed my life forever. I was working on Wall Street at the time, and the way in which the government rallied around the financial institutions that torched the world and left its victims in the dust threw my entire delusional worldview into disarray. Prior to that, I had bought into the absurd assumption that I was financially successful at a young age primarily because I was hard-working and talented.

Four things are not going to happen in the Imperial City before October 1. That is, there will be no bill to repeal and replace Obamacare, no sweeping tax cut stimulus, no debt ceiling increase and no appropriations bills for FY 2018, which happens to commence on that date.

As the amount of household debt rises, so does the risk of another financial crisis. A new milestone has been reached in the U.S.

People are just starting to grasp why deflation is also present in the USA. Despite all the screaming about Quantitative Easing, most remain confused why hyperinflation has not taken place.

You see, the owners of this country know the truth. It's called the American dream. Cause ya have to be asleep to believe it.

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Banking is rapidly changing at the hands of financial technology.

Retail sales continue to decline, when compared to wages we can see as wages are dropping so are sales. GE is in trouble, they do not have enough to meet their pension obligation.

India joins the Bitcoin revolution. Ford is not building a plant in the US and it is not building a plant in Mexico, they decided to go to China. Illinois comptroller says they are very close to a major crisis.

The banker bailouts of the 2008/09 period changed my life forever. I was working on Wall Street at the time, and the way in which the government rallied around the financial institutions that torched the world and left its victims in the dust threw my entire delusional worldview into disarray.

A new study by the Boston Consulting Group has found that while wealth inequality is growing on a global scale, it has kicked into overdrive in the United States – where America’s 1% are expected to control 70 percent of the nation’s private wealth by the year 2021.

GATA reported yesterday, and we picked up the story, about a golden rooster being confiscated by the Treasury in 1960. The rooster weighed in at a hefty 14 pounds of solid gold – that’s a lot of gold. The rooster was commissioned by a Las Vegas casino that would later become the Golden Nugget.

Economists spend inordinate time gauging the business cycle that they believe drives the US economy.  However, running in the background (and nearly entirely forgotten) is the population cycle.  The positive population cycle is such a long running macro trend thousands of years in the making that it is presently taken for granted. 

In other words, just as I have repeatedly warned, on the day you want to get out of a crypto currency as it’s crashing, you won’t be able to sell. The value of the virtual currency will crash to almost zero in a matter of minutes, long before your sell transactions can be processed. This was neatly demonstrated today as Ethereum plunged 96% before most people even had a clue what was happening… all while Coinbase basically gave its users the finger.

BRITISH factory orders have hit their highest level for nearly 30 years, the CBI business organisation revealed today.

The figures will fuel optimism for Britain's economic future as we prepare to leave the European Union.

They also bear out analysis that the fall in the value of the pound since the EU referendum a year ago today, on June 23, 2016, has significantly boosted industry and particularly exporters.

As the United States continues to push towards a military conflict with Russia, there will likely be no real winner when the dust settles.  However, if we compare the these two superpowers in the current “gold market”, the Russians are the clear winners.

The white hot cryptocurrency Ethereum went on a wild ride on Wednesday, plummeting from around $320 to around 10 cents in a so-called "flash crash."

...

As Adam White, the VP of GDAX, explained in a blog post, one investor placed a multi-million dollar Ethereum "sell" order at 12:30 p.m. on Wednesday. The size of the order caused the price of the currency, which is already volatile, to dip.

Things started to go really haywire, however, as the price dip triggered a series of stop loss orders.

"This slippage started a cascade of approximately 800 stop loss orders and margin funding liquidations, causing ETH to temporarily trade as low as $0.10," White explained.

In other words, the computers executing the stop loss orders began to sell at all costs and, so long as there was someone on the other side to match the order, the trade went through—even if the price was totally irrational, and driven only by an algorithmic frenzy.

TAKE a moment to admire—and fear—the ascent of America’s big-five tech firms. Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook have recently become the five most valuable listed companies in the world, in that order. With a total market value of $2.9trn, they are worth more than any five firms in history.

THE UNITED STATES CANNABIS COALITION (USCC) IS A PRO-CANNABIS NON-PROFIT ORGANIZATION DEDICATED TO INFLUENCING FEDERAL LEVEL DECISION MAKERS

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Employers have no choice: it's innovate/automate or die.

A few days ago, cryptocurrencies sold off quite dramatically.

Bitcoin fell around 25% on average and Ethereum fell around 15% on average across major exchanges.

Canada is a G7 country with a varied economy. As one of the US’ largest trading partners, what happens in the Canadian economy can have consequences for the rest of the world.

By Michael Maharrey

The Texas bullion depository took a major step closer to reality last week when officials formally announced the private vendor that will run the facility. The creation of a state bullion depository in Texas represents a power shift away from the federal government to the state, and it provides a blueprint that could ultimately end the Fed.

Gov. Greg Abbot signed legislation creating the state gold bullion and precious metal depository in June of 2015. The facility will not only provide a secure place for individuals, business, cities, counties, government agencies and even other countries to to store gold and other precious metals, the law also creates a mechanism to facilitate the everyday use of gold and silver in business transactions...

A new study by the Boston Consulting Group has found that while wealth inequality is growing on a global scale, it has kicked into overdrive in the United States - where America's 1% are expected to control 70 percent of the nation's private wealth by the year 2021.

The banker bailouts of the 2008/09 period changed my life forever. I was working on Wall Street at the time, and the way in which the government rallied around the financial institutions that torched the world and left its victims in the dust threw my entire delusional worldview into disarray. Prior to that, I had bought into the absurd assumption that I was financially successful at a young age primarily because I was hard-working and talented.

Tim Young sat down with Congressman Steve Russell (R-OK) to speak about his military service and his semi-regular publication Waste Watch.

A few days ago, cryptocurrencies sold off quite dramatically.

Bitcoin fell around 25% on average and Ethereum fell around 15% on average across major exchanges.

And as a whole, the entire altcoins market capitalization fell over 20% excluding bitcoin.

The Republicans have started work on undoing the damage done to the banking industry by Dodd-Frank. Predictably Democrats like Elizabeth Warren have gone all out in defending this bill. It is one thing to support a bill in its inception without seeing its real world consequences. It is quite another to keep supporting it when the bill is put in practice. At this point we have to ask ourselves. Have Elizabeth Warren and the Democrats been bought by lobbyists from Giant banks?

Brexit talks begin and they will continue until a deal is reached, that is the plan. Housing bubble 2.0 is getting ready to pop, the Fed is removing the helium tot his bubble.

A new study reveals that up to 5.7 million illegal immigrants were likely to have voted in the 2008 election,

Up to three-quarters of refugees in Germany will still be unemployed in five years’ time, according to the country’s commissioner for refugee integration Aydan Ozoguz.

Financial expert and former top Federal Reserve insider Danielle DiMartino says, “I think gold is in the very late stage of a correction phase.

The Retail Apocalypse.

Carmageddon.

Same story.

Different industry.

VIDEO COLLECTION

“Improving the company’s operational fitness.”

Do you have an emergency fund?  If you even have one penny in emergency savings, you are already ahead of about one-fourth of the country.  I write about this stuff all the time, but it always astounds me how many Americans are literally living on the edge financially. 

A United Nations economist has been arrested in New York on fraud charges related to his hiring of a domestic worker. Hamidur Rashid was charged Tuesday in federal court. Authorities say the 50-year-old employee in the United Nations Secretariat underpaid and overworked a domestic worker at his Manhattan residence.

By Jeff Paul

I spent three years in Hawaii. It’s obscenely expensive to live there. Real estate, food, electricity, health care, and travel costs are significantly higher in Hawaii than on the mainland. And incomes aren’t rising fast enough to match rising cost of living. As a result, many natives rely on government aid to survive. This week, Hawaii passed a new measure to study the universal basic income (UBI) as an attempt to address this problem.

But will it make costs even higher?

The bill, House Concurrent Resolution 89, declares that all families are entitled to basic financial security and empowers a number of government offices to evaluate universal basic income options...

The HK financial system is “very strong” and “can withstand an adjustment in the property market.”

Yield-desperate investors stop before nothing. What have central banks wrought?

The petrodollar system was set up by Kissinger in circa 1975 to drive up the demand for U.S. dollars.

"The state can no longer function without a responsible and complete budget without severely impacting our core obligations and decimating services to the state's most in-need citizens," Mendoza wrote. "We must put our fiscal house in order. It is already too late. Action is needed now." -- Unveiling the most dire langage yet, in her letter Mendoza said "we are now reaching a new phase of crisis" perhaps in an attempt to prompt the Democrats and Republicans to sit down and come up with a compromise...

One of the big questions on everyone’s minds following the recent acquisition of Whole Foods Market by Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos is what will become of the natural and organic grocer moving forward? The prospect of Whole Foods becoming more like Bezos’ other ventures is an ominous one for many people, especially because it affects something that’s very near and dear to all of us: Clean, chemical-free food.

You can take this to the bank: Americans are messed up about money. A slew of new surveys and data have come out revealing that we don’t save enough, we spend money we don’t have, we have our financial priorities backwards — and more. Here are five new stats that prove Americans are backwards about money.

Volatility expectations in the small-cap space just hit their lowest level on record.

This has been the MOST HATED BULL MARKET in history. What is fascinating is how long this current bull market has been in play yet all we hear is how it is going to collapse like 1929 and fall to dust on the floor. I have been asked for interviews because they have been unable to find someone bullish.

We spoke with Peter Hug, Kitco’s Director of Global Trading. Metals have been stuck in a sideways channel for quite a while. Just when it looked like gold would break through the $1300 per ounce mark, the market turned.

The European “bail-in” rules have been cheered claiming taxpayer money will be spared.

It’s no secret that America’s infrastructure is in dire need of repairs.

The U.S. shale industry is in danger of killing of the very rally that it had hoped to take advantage of.

US Healthcare: Consumes 80% of World's Opioid Prescriptions

(*And if The Experts Would Kindly Explain How That DOES NOT Trace Back To Former Republican President George W Bush' Illegal Premptive Invasion Of The Nation Of Afghanistan , And How A Good Patriot Would Never Seek Indictments Against Members Of That Administration's War Crimes , And Their Elongigated After Effects , It Would Be Appreciated )

Towards the end of the 1990s tech stock bubble, “new media” – i.e., the Internet — was ascendant and old media like magazines, newspapers and broadcast TV were yesterday’s news. This was reflected in relative stock valuations, which gave Internet pioneer AOL the ability to buy venerable media giant Time Warner for what looked (accurately in retrospect) like an insane amount of money.

The entire global economy now depends on this stripped-of-information "market" for its stability.

In some states, when a couple enters into divorce, the court may award “alimony,” or spousal support, to one of the former spouses for the express purpose of limiting any unfair economic effects by providing a continuing income to the spouse. The purpose is to help that spouse continue the “standard of living” they had during the marriage.

You have to feel sorry for Americans. They are some of the most financially enslaved people in the world.

The quote in the headline comes from Ron Paul, and it should be the goal of every conservative lawmaker in the entire country.  When professional politicians tell you that they are in favor of reforming the tax code or reducing taxes a little bit, essentially what they are telling you is that they are perfectly fine with the status quo. 

Several years ago when the Federal Reserve had its Fed funds rate at zero to 25 basis points (one-quarter of one percent—0.25%), there was a great deal of talk, somehow presented as urgent, whether the Federal Reserve would raise interest rates.

Here’s something Wal-Mart could do to Amazon, just to be nasty.

In 1915 in Govan, just south of the river Clyde in Glasgow, bands of women torpedoed flour bombs at creeping eviction enforcers from the towering windows of their tenements. Exasperated by increasingly predacious landlords and the rising rate of evictions for those that couldn’t make their rent, and armed with a sound understanding of the sticky power of flour in the UK’s rainiest city, the women organised. A carefully coordinated eight month rent strike followed, and working class women paved the way for the Rent Restrictions Act 1915, Britain’s first form of rent control.

. If Trump gets his way, as much as $2 trillion in funds will be "unlocked" for banks to lend out. Banks were forced to "lock" those funds away after the last financial crisis. Is this how banking is supposed to work? By the dictates of central planners? And what will $2 trillion in loans to an already deeply indebted American public produce?

Not everyone (ourselves included) was convinced the Federal Reserve would increase its interest rates in June, but the FOMC has indeed hiked the benchmark rates by 0.25%. On top of that, it’s now increasingly likely we will also see the Fed starting to reduce the size of its balance sheet although it might take a while before the central bank starts to unload its securities at a more aggressive pace.

These days it’s easy to tell when general elections are approaching in Germany: members of the ruling government begin bewailing, in perfect unison, the ECB’s ultra-loose monetary policy.

Wolf Richter Talks Shop: “Carmageddon” and tips on buying a car.

You may not see it yet, but the scale of the retail apocalypse is so massive that it is about to engulf the US economy. As when a flood tide has crept around you on all sides while you were standing on a high spot out on the flats, not paying attention, you can look up now and see it all around you, and it is coming in rapidly. You can now feel the current under your toes.

Violators Get 10 Years in Prison

Wall Street’s fingerprints are all over the Treasury recommendations