US Federal Reserve

Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

Do the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page editors read their own newspaper?

The frontpage headline story for the Labor Day weekend was “Low Wage Growth Challenges Fed.” Despite an alleged 4.4% unemployment rate, which is full employment, there is no real growth in wages. The front page story pointed out correctly that an economy alleged to be expanding at full employment, but absent any wage growth or inflation, is “a puzzle that complicates Federal Reserve policy decisions.”

Authored by Chris Whalen via The Institutional Risk Analyst,

“The great wheel of circulation is altogether different from the goods which are circulated by means of it. The revenue of the society consists altogether in those goods, and not in the wheel which circulates them”

 

Adam Smith, 1811

Back in June, one of Wall Street's more philosophical derivatives strategists, DB's Aleksandar Kocic looked at the state of the market and postulated that far from "stable" the existing risk  "equilibrium" is one which can be described as "metastable", the result of widespread complacency, and which he compared to an avalanche where "a totally innocuous event can trigger a cataclysmic event (e.g.

Whatever doesn't kill bitcoin - and many have tried in the past month to do just that - has a habit of making it stronger, and two weeks after the cryptocurrency crashed 40% from an all time high of $5,000 to less than $3,000 when first China banned ICOs and exchange trading of cryptocurrencies, then Jamie Dimon called it a fraud, the BIS said it has no future unless it is subsumed by central banks, days after South Korea likewise ordered an end to ICOs, the SEC filed the first ever civil charges against companies raising capital through ICOs and Switzerland announced it too was cracking do

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Labor’s share of the national income is in freefall as a direct result of the optimization of financialization.