Submitted by John Rubino via DollarCollapse.com,
Europe is the birthplace of Western civilization and the source of most of the trends and bodies of knowledge that define modernity. The average European speaks several languages versus sometimes less than one for Americans. They are, in short, a well-schooled people with vast accumulated wisdom.
With European markets closed across the continent on Monday as the Easter holiday continues, overnight Asia was busy with the Shanghai Composite letting off some steam, and closing down 0.7% at session lows on concerns the Shanghai and Shenzhen home bubble have been popped prematurely by the politburo.
We have come to associate the term “technocrats” with the kind of unelected and non-political experts that serve in European governments, particularly those responding to the recent financial crisis that has devastated several economies there. For example, economists like Mario Monti who served as Italy’s prime minister from 2011 to 2013, leading a government of technocrats in the wake of the Italian debt crisis. Their task wasn’t to transform the economic status quo in Italy, but to use their knowledge and expertise to fix that country’s economy.
Via OrientalReview.org,
Earlier this month while delivering a public lecture in Kiev, “The Challenges of an Ever-Changing World,” former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made an inspiring remark for anyone who might have been thinking that life in Ukraine was bad:
“You should go to Liberia where the standard of living is much lower, and then you will be thankful.”
Last week, when looking back at consensus economist forecasts for Japanese growth as of 1995, we compared what the pundits thought would happen, and what actually did happen: the result was what may have been the worst forecast of all time, leading to a 25% error rate in just five years later. It also unleashed the start of Japan's three lost decades.
But while laughably wrong economist forecasts are nothing new, a more troubling observation emerges when comparing the evolution of Japan's 10Y yields start in the 1990s...