Slipnslide

If you don't like scary stories involving trillions of dollars in bad loans, then don't read

http://www.nytimes.c...v=top-news&_r=0

Not sure the Fed has enough electronic digits to cancel the effects of $5 trillion going !poof!. And what if it's more than $5 trillion? When it comes to the Chinese government, I always assume things are much worse than what meets the eye.

The BDI is forever cited as evidence of the collapse in trade. But as a shipping rate index, it has a shipping supply factor--it is not a pure measure of demand. Therefore I looked at tonnage statistics for the Panama Canal and the Suez Canal which are pure measurements of shipping demand. Both canals show growth, not slowdown year- over -year.

Apparently industrial commodities are in less demand, but someone sure as hell is shipping something unless the canals are just fudging their data or the same stuff is being hauled back and forth

I don't understand why the world is on tenterhooks waiting for the Fed to "raise rates." The level of the federal funds rate seems like a firecracker compared to nuclear power of trillions of dollars of QE.

I get the power of POMO / QE. But can someone point me to an explanation of how upping the federal funds rate, particularly when nobody want to do any capex anyway, is going to have massive market effects?

next Portugal, then Spain, then Italy? Feel free to include major cities, counties and states. Too bad Meredith Whitney cried wolf way too soon. She could have gone down as one of the greatest prognosticators ever had she waited.

2/28/2015
Washington, DC

Today the House and Senate leaders issued a joint statement denying the concept of infinity. "We're not some egghead ivory tower mathematicsticians," said Boehner, "but anyone with common sense knows that the highest number is a quadrillion or right around there. That fast talking guy who used to do the commercials can only count to like 30,000 in a day, so if he never slept he'd probably have a tough time counting to a quadrillion."

The Kochs denounced the statement saying that they'd have a lot more than two quadrillion dollars but for the brutal confiscatory tax scheme of the federal government.