USA! USA! USA!, Were Number 5?

"Free fallin, now I am, free fallin..."~ Tom Petty

Excerpt from AgoraFinancial.com

Even the power elite recognizes something is amiss. Each year, the World Economic Forum — the outfit that holds an annual shindig in Davos, Switzerland — issues an annual ranking of the world’s countries and how competitive they are.
The standards are cut and dried: Are property rights protected? Are officials easily bribed? Are the courts independent? Is organized crime a problem?
The United States ranked No. 1 as recently as 2008. By last year, it had slipped to No. 5. And the overall rankings don’t tell the whole story:

 

http://5minforecast.agorafinancial.com/something-rotten-in-the-state-of-america/

Loosing My Religion!

“I’m not one of those religious believers in gold,” says Matthew Bishop, “but I guess I’ve become a bit of an agnostic/atheist about my faith in government-backed money, so I really think governments are in a position where they’re going to debase in a big way.”
Mr. Bishop is New York bureau chief of The Economist… and he’s penned a book called In Gold We Trust?: The Future of Money in an Age of Uncertainty. He has put us in a difficult position as we aim to stake out “fat tail” ideas.
We likewise have no faith in government-backed money. And we’re agnostic about gold, for that matter. “Just because you understand monetary policy, the Fed and the dangers of fiat currency,” Addison said by IM between meetings this morning, “doesn’t mean you’re necessarily a gold bug.”
In any event, Mr. Bishop is onto something. “People have lost faith in the 20th-century religion of government-backed fiat money,” Mr. Bishop tells The Wall Street Journal’s video unit, “and they’re saying at the moment, ‘We don’t trust governments with our money.’”
To wit: The blogosphere is buzzing this morning with word that the national debt under President Obama has grown by $5,027,761,476,484.56.
That’s now more than George W. Bush racked up in two terms.
Early in Bush’s second term, we were already concerned enough that Addison and Bill Bonner teamed up to write Empire of Debt. Then Addison devoted 2½ years to turn it into a film… before the current occupant of the White House was even part of the national conversation.
Then, few were alarmed that Bush racked up a debt total nearly equal to all his predecessors combined. Now, however, it appears the outrage threshold’s been reached.

http://5minforecast.agorafinancial.com/fading-faith-in-fiat/

More than European debt weighing on investors’ minds.

Evidence is mounting that "sell in May and go away" might be a good idea again in 2012.

CNBC.com Article: World Stock Markets Face 'Risk-Off' Road Ahead: Index

Global stocks are entering a potentially negative period, according to one index with a solid track record that is indicating there is more than European debt weighing on investors’ minds.

World Stock Markets Face 'Risk-Off' Road Ahead: Index

Published: Thursday, 12 Apr 2012 | 1:43 PM ET

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By: Jeff Cox
CNBC.com Senior Writer

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Global stocks are entering a potentially negative period, according to one index with a solid track record that is indicating there is more than European debt weighing on investors’ minds.

The Global Financial Stress Index, compiled by Bank of America Merrill Lynch, has seen 10 of its 40 components rise to a level associated with risk-off mode in the financial markets, which means investors usually sell more volatile assets like stocks and move to the safety of fixed income.

The GFSI's Critical Stress Signal last flashed risk-off on July 12, 2011 and remained there until Jan. 4. While U.S. stocks, as measured by the Standard & Poor's 500 [.SPX1377.44-10.13(-0.73%)], fell 2.7 percent during that period, global indexes tumbled 9 percent. BofA says the CSS has been accurate more than 60 percent of the time in predicting global stock drops.

Full Story:
http://www.cnbc.com/id/47029609

Ez Credit: Here we go again!

Addison Wiggin – April 12, 2012

• Look out below: Three — no, make it 4 — reasons it feels like 2007-08 this morning…
• Subprime lending up (again… really?), private equity opting for IPO and a shocking fact you didn’t know about oil prices…
• “Normal market behavior”… Vancouver favorite cheers up gold holders who bought at the most recent top…
• Death, taxes and one grim statistic… still time to buy a house… muddy boots in South America… and more!

“Even I wouldn’t make a loan to me at this point,” says Annette Alejandro. Ms. Alejandro recently emerged from bankruptcy, her car was repossessed last year and she has no job.
But her mailbox is stuffed with offers for credit cards and car loans.
We begin today’s episode with “deja vu”-induced vertigo this morning. Three items flitted into our inbox in the last 24 hours. By themselves, the items might not mean much. Coagulated, they give us the same queasy feeling we had in 2007-08.
Credit card lenders issued 1.1 million new cards to subprime borrowers last month — up 12.3% from a year ago, according to the credit-reporting outfit Equifax.
“As financial institutions recover from the losses on loans made to troubled borrowers,” reports The New York Times, “some of the largest lenders to the less than creditworthy, including Capital One and GM Financial, are trying to woo them back, while HSBC and JPMorgan Chase are among those tiptoeing again into subprime lending.”
Plotted on a chart, it looks like this…



http://5minforecast.agorafinancial.com/feeling-the-2007-twitch/