Submitted by John Rubino via DollarCollapse.com,
Good friend Michael Pollaro just sent a couple of charts that show the US economy heading for a brick wall. The first illustrates what happens when business sales (the green line) turn negative. In the previous two boom/bust cycles, when sales started falling the economy either tipped into recession shortly thereafter or (it was discovered in retrospect) was already well into a contraction.
The 'death cross' of these two energy market indicators is all one needs to know about the oil market...
As Bloomberg notes, total industry oil stocks reported by the International Energy Agency rose for a third month, increasing by 0.5 percent to the highest on record at 2.99 billion barrels.
China’s Beige Book, released last week, showed further economic deterioration in one of the world’s largest commodity-consuming nations in the fourth quarter.
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In late October, we noted that for the second time this year, Russia overtook Saudi Arabia as the biggest exporter of crude to China.
As a result of the Fed's balance sheet expanding to $4.5 trillion over the past 7 years, the most direct consequence has been the increase in excess reserves held at various banks to just over $2.5 trillion. This, as we have shown before using the Fed's H.8 data, means that cash held by various commercial banks has risen proportionately, and as shown in the chart below, there has been a direct correlation between the amount of excess reserves in the system (shown by the black line) and bank cash holdings.
Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,
The injustice of central-bank enforced neofeudalism cannot be suppressed like interest rates.