North America

For Caterpillar, the great recession was bad, for about 19 months. In May 2010, after declining sharply for just under two years, CAT posted it first positive global retail sales comps and never looked back... until December 2012 when comp sales once again turned negative and have been negative ever since. For the past 41 months!

The breakdown showed that contrary to popular opinion, there has been no pick up in demand for heavy industrial machinery anywhere around the globe.

Reader Anna Salyi, a Catholic in Hungary, sends two great e-mails. I publish them with her permission:

Authored by Noam Chomsky, originally posted at TomDispatch.com,

[This piece, the first of two parts, is excerpted from Noam Chomsky’s new book, Who Rules the World? (Metropolitan Books).]

When we ask “Who rules the world?” we commonly adopt the standard convention that the actors in world affairs are states, primarily the great powers, and we consider their decisions and the relations among them. That is not wrong. But we would do well to keep in mind that this level of abstraction can also be highly misleading.

Via Financial Repression Authority,

FRA Co-founder Gordon T. Long is joined by Satyajit Das in discussing the consequences of financial repression and current policy making, along with the effects of the Chinese economy.

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,

If we understand property taxes as a "lease from the local government for the right to gamble on another housing bubble arising," we see "ownership" in a different light.

We're constantly told ours is an ownership society in which owning a home is the foundation of household wealth. The concept of ownership may appear straightforward, but consider these questions: