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REMINDER: All investment, economics, and finance related material now appears at the new IaconoResearch.com. For the time being at least, this has become a personal blog covering a variety of mostly unrelated topics.
I’m no seismologist, but the data clustering in this Daily Chart at The Economist was hard to ignore, making clear the point that we live in dangerous times for big earthquakes.
Unfortunately, based on the dearth of big ones from the mid-1960s through the middle of the last decade and the pattern during the first half of the 20th century, there may be quite a few more big earthquakes to come in the years ahead.
Here’s a compilation of some of the more stunning footage from the 8.9 magnitude earthquake and resulting tsunami that struck Japan earlier today.
There are many more like this over at YouTube, this search for items posted today sorted by view count providing many different kinds of videos that have all been uploaded in the last few hours. This amateur footage of the earthquake in progress tops the list and for good reason – raw footage like this provides a better sense of the chaos that quickly develops.
While the central bank continues to receive strong support from the nation’s legions of economists (more on that tomorrow), according to the nearly 1,000 votes cast for this poll at the Wall Street Journal, overall, respondents think the Federal Reserve is a major factor behind soaring global inflation and growing asset bubbles.
It seems pretty clear that, even if the money printing isn’t directly responsible for higher prices around the world, Bernanke’s role as “cheerleader in chief” for higher equity prices has had a rather large spillover effect on other risk assets such as commodities. Yet, Ben Bernanke continues to claim that inflation outside of the U.S. is not his problem.
This segment of the Dylan Ratigan show with Bill Fleckenstein seems to be popping up all over the place in recent days, the two adding to the debate about the role the Fed’s latest round of money printing is playing in rising global food prices and civil unrest.
While it’s technically correct for Ratigan to say, “the most sinister driver of exploding food prices is in the hallowed halls of our central government, hell bent on covering up 2008’s massive megabank theft. The Federal Reserve’s answer to cover up that theft was to turn on the money printing machine in overdrive”, there are other factors involved, such as weather and emerging market demand, neither of which are “sinister”.
As usual, Fleckenstein provides a much more even-handed, nuanced (and less sinister) explanation for what’s going on around the world, money printing and inflation-wise.
Real estate developer and TV star Donald Trump talks about the many ills of U.S. economic policy and his upcoming effort to change that via a run for President in 2012.
We are a laughing stock throughout the world … If oil prices are allowed to keep inflating, if the dollar keeps going down in value – which is not good because you’re going to pay $25 for a loaf of bread pretty soon – if you look at what’s happening with our food prices, they’re going through the roof. You know, we could end up being another Egypt – you could have riots in our streets also.
BTW: I don’t know where part 2 is, but, there are highlights of it in this item over at the Economic Collapse blog where this video was spotted.
By Tim Iacono, Since 2005
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