Labor

One year ago, when the brainwashed economist Ph.D intelligentsia was stampeding over each other to come up with the most hyperbolic terms to dub the recovery that would be unleashed on the economy as a result of plunging oil, and gas, prices - with "unambiguously good" being our personal favorite - we would write post after post explaining just how wrong this is, and how in a hyperfinancialized economy, a 2-year record collapse in oil prices is about as "unambiguously bad" as it gets, and not just only for the hundreds of thousands of highly paid energy sector workers who had been

Submitted by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,

In this day and age it seems like almost everything is disposable, and many employers have found that they can make a lot more money if they have a workforce that can be turned on and off like a faucet. In America today, there are more than 17 million “independent workers”, and they represent a bigger share of the workforce than ever before.

Following recent strength on the heels of hope for a new finance minister, news that Ruosseff has sent the minimum-wage-hike Bill to Congress appears to have crushed the hype of any fiscal rectitude and sent Real tumbling. Down over 4% - the most since September 2011 - BRL is back above 4.00 per USD, giving up all the recent gains.

Broad weakness in EMFX...

Seems to have been exacerbated by:

Yesterday afternoon, Dealogic announced the for the first time in history, global announced M&A volume in 2015 would surpass $5 trillion. This record eclipses by 9% the previous all time high of $4.6 trillion set during the previous market bubble year of 2007.

The report adds that there were 10 $50 billion M&A transactions announced in 2015 worth a combined $798.9bn. That's five deals more than the previous record high activity set in 1998, 1999, and 2014. US targeted M&A ($2.5tr) accounts for half of 2015 volume and seven of the top 10 transactions.

One upon a time, back in early 2012, David Rosenberg was a prominent bear and deflationist, while his nemesis, Wells Capital's Jim Paulsen, was one of Wall Street's biggest equity bulls. The confrontation between the two culminated with a January 2012 article explaining "What (If Anything) The Bulls Are Seeing."