[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZ-4gnNz0vc?rel=0]
Category: Business
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New Zealand Mulls $100 for Pack of Cigarettes
New Zealand’s Health Ministry has reportedly considered boosting the price of a pack of cigarettes as high as $100 ($81 U.S.) in a bid to make the country smoke free by 2025.
An internal government working paper raised the possibility of upping the cost of a 20-cigarette pack by 30 to 60 percent and tacking on yearly increases of 30 percent, Sky News reported.
With cigarettes now priced at about $16 to $17, New Zealand Prime Minister John Key said the $100 suggestion seemed like “an awful lot” and could encourage a black market, Fairfax NZ News reported.
via NBC New York.
Yikes!
Can you say Black Market?
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Bank of America Hates the Second Amendment
McMillan Fiberglass Stocks, McMillan Firearms Manufacturing and McMillan Group International have been collectively banking with Bank of America for 12 years. But no more: In a recent meeting, the mega-bank told the firearms company that its business is no longer welcome.
Operations director Kelly McMillan told the Daily Caller that his company has never been late on a payment and has never bounced a check. …
Writing Thursday on Facebook, McMillan described a meeting at his office with Ray Fox, a business banking Senior Vice President with the giant bank. What was originally scheduled as an “account analysis” meeting, however, quickly became a political smackdown.
The Bank of America emissary, he said, “spent 5 minutes talking about how McMillan has changed in the last 5 years and have become more of a firearms manufacturer than a supplier of accessories.”
“At this point I interrupted him,” McMillan said, and asked, ‘Can I possibly save you some time so that you don’t waste your breath? What you are going to tell me is that because we are in the firearms manufacturing business you no longer what my business.’”
Fox’s reply, according to McMillan? “That is correct.”
via The Daily Caller.
Well that pretty much says it all (more details to the story at the link.)
I hate it when people say this but… please pass this story along. It is just so wrong that BofA would stop doing business with a successful company solely based on their manufacture of a legal and non-prurient product.
I, thankfully, don’t do any business with BofA. Can say that I certainly don’t intent to do so now.
UPDATE: Title changed to more accurately reflect the story.
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Michigan’s Armed Raids on Small Pig Farmers
NaturalNews can now confirm that the Michigan Department of Natural Resources has, in total violation of the Fourth Amendment, conducted two armed raids on pig farmers in that state, one in Kalkaska County at Fife Lake and another in Cheboygan County. Staging raids involving six vehicles and ten armed men, DN[R] conducted unconstitutional, illegal and arguably criminal armed raids on these two farms with the intent of shooting all the farmers’ pigs under a bizarre new “Invasive Species Order” (ISO) that has suddenly declared traditional livestock to be an invasive species.
via Natural News.
It’s worth noting that Natural News’ writing contains some hyperbole. So I went looking for another source for the story….
Implementation of the ISO, as of April 1st, not only takes private property without compensation it also denies farmers of fundamental private property rights and the right to make a living. It will reduce or eliminate customer access to heritage breed pork, a product that has become increasingly popular with health conscious consumers and restaurants across the state.
The ISO allows DNR to seize and destroy pigs raised by Michigan farmers; Michigan DNR has publicly stated they will not compensate farmers whose pigs are destroyed. Possession of prohibited swine after April 1, 2012 is a felony with penalties of up to two years in jail and $20,000 in fines.
Attorney Joseph O’Leary is suing the DNR on behalf of four of the aggrieved business owners. He explains, “Wildlife is owned by the state; it is the role of the DNR to regulate and control state property. Livestock on farms is privately owned and properly belongs in the jurisdiction of the Department of Agriculture. When a governmental agency blurs these lines, people had better wake up and take notice because at that point we are all in a lot of trouble.”
via Global News Wire.
A little more perspective there. And I tend to agree with attorney O’Leary. Government intrusion into our private lives rarely ends well. This story reminds me of Reagan’s old line about the nine most terrifying words in the English language being, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”
But we still don’t know what’s really going on here. Why is the Michigan DNR going after small pig farmers in the first place?
The Michigan Pork Producers Association and other large agribusiness interests, as well as conservation groups have worked together with the DNR to push for the ruling to be implemented. For the factory pork breeders, this is about eliminating the competition. The ISO ensures consumers will only have the choice of pork raised in confinement, known as confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs).For more than a decade, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources has worked politically to drive private hunting preserves out of business. However, the Michigan state legislature repeatedly rebuffed their attempts. Elected officials recognize how important private property rights are, and they were unwilling to prohibit landowners to raise and harvest animals in open areas. Now, backed by large Agribusiness interests in the state, DNR has done an end run around participatory democracy and declared swine with certain characteristics “feral” which not only includes animals raised at hunting preserves but thousands of other small farms across the state.
“The DNR has strayed into the unfamiliar territory of agriculture regulation. Given the nebulous and open ended description by which pigs are targeted, farmers fear for their futures,” says Pete Kennedy, Esq., President of the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund.
Wow!
You see, it doesn’t matter whether it’s the GSA partying in Vegas or the MI DNR, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. People placed in positions of power will abuse that power if not constantly checked on by the people.
I hope this story gets some MSM attention and people understand that the few should not get away with oppressing the many.
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Google’s Brin: Web Faces Greatest Threat Ever
The principles of openness and universal access that underpinned the creation of the internet three decades ago are under greater threat than ever, according to Google co-founder Sergey Brin.
In an interview with the Guardian, Brin warned there were “very powerful forces that have lined up against the open internet on all sides and around the world”. “I am more worried than I have been in the past,” he said. “It’s scary.”
The threat to the freedom of the internet comes, he claims, from a combination of governments increasingly trying to control access and communication by their citizens, the entertainment industry’s attempts to crack down on piracy, and the rise of “restrictive” walled gardens such as Facebook and Apple, which tightly control what software can be released on their platforms.
via The Guardian.
I’m not actually a big “Brin” or Google fan. Although I do believe the story is accurate, it may be nothing more than a Google play for more “openness” so that Google kind find out more and more about you… so they can track you.
We need to face the fact that Google is beyond spooky. It tracks everything about you and has some undisclosed relationships with the government. That’s not a good combination.
Perhaps Brin should do a little spring cleaning in his own house before pointing fingers at Facebook and others.
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European Markets Tank
European markets took a big hit today, obliterating any hope generated by yesterday’s rally. Contagion is back, baby! …
Italy and Spain led the downward trend, with the latter index briefly down over 4 percent. Yields on Spanish government bonds continued to push 6 percent, but did not exceed that benchmark level.
via Business Insider.
The wheels are falling of the bus. Italy and Spain will soon be Greece, Ireland is not far behind. The Germans cannot afford to bail-out all of the Eurozone. They too will fall if pushed much further.
Our own demise is not much farther away. The debt is staking up with no end in site. Investors have to make the choice of holding Europe’s bad paper or the U.S.’s bad paper. They’ll choose to hold neither.
Good time to get into the long term commodity market.
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Is the Fed Promoting Recovery or Desperation?
A lengthy beating to the Fed begins:
On Friday, the Department of Labor reported that March non-farm payrolls increased by 120,000, falling well short of consensus expectations in excess of 200,000. … On the payroll front, our present expectation is that April job creation will deteriorate toward zero or negative levels.
Immediately after the payroll number was released, CNBC shot out a news story titled “Disappointing Jobs Report Revives Talk of Fed Easing.” …
via Hussman Funds.
And so begins an excellent analysis of when we stand economically.
Hussman has a few words on QE:
How QE “works”
Keep in mind that the U.S. banking system has trillions of dollars sitting in idle deposits with the Fed already. Quantitative easing simply does not relieve any constraint that is binding on the economy. Rather, QE is a method by which the Fed hoards longer-duration, higher-yielding securities like U.S. Treasury bonds and replaces them with cash that bears zero interest. At every moment in time, somebody has to hold that paper. The only way for the holder to seek a higher return is to trade it for a more speculative asset, in which case whoever sells the speculative asset then has to hold the cash. The process stops when all speculative assets are finally priced so richly and precariously that the people holding the cash have no further incentive to chase the speculative assets, and are simply willing to hold idle, zero-interest cash balances.
Why does the Fed want this? Simple. Chairman Bernanke believes that by creating a bubble in speculative assets, people will “feel” wealthier and keep consuming – regardless of the fact that real incomes are stagnant and debt burdens are already intolerable, and despite the fact that there is extremely weak evidence for any such “wealth effect” in the historical record. …
A simple — and accurate — way of looking at the QE operation. Nothing more than an illusion. Some lightly rose colored glasses on the eyes of an unsuspecting public. All the while, the rich — who understand it’s just a trick — keep getting richer, and the poor — who accept the con — continue to spend and spend and spend, making themselves poorer.
Ya want proof? Just look at the jobs data:
Last week, we observed “Real income declined month-over-month in the latest report, which is very much at odds with the job creation figures unless that job creation reflects extraordinarily low-paying jobs. Real disposable income growth has now dropped to just 0.3% year-over-year, which is lower than the rate that is typically observed even in recessions. …
If you dig into the payroll data, the picture that emerges is breathtaking. Since the recession “ended” in June 2009, total non-farm payrolls in the U.S. have grown by 1.84 million jobs. However, if we look at workers 55 years of age and over, we find that employment in that group has increased by 2.96 million jobs. In contrast, employment among workers under age 55 has actually contracted by 1.12 million jobs. Even over the past year, the vast majority of job creation has been in the 55-and-over group, while employment has been sluggish for all other workers, and has already turned down. …
Beginning first with Alan Greenspan, and then with Ben Bernanke, the Fed has increasingly pursued policies of suppressing interest rates, even driving real interest rates to negative levels after inflation. Combine this with the bursting of two Fed-enabled (if not Fed-induced) bubbles – one in stocks and one in housing, and the over-55 cohort has suffered an assault on its financial security: a difficult trifecta that includes the loss of interest income, the loss of portfolio value, and the loss of home equity. All of these have combined to provoke a delay in retirement plans and a need for these individuals to re-enter the labor force.
In short, what we’ve observed in the employment figures is not recovery, but desperation. Having starved savers of interest income, and having repeatedly subjected investors to Fed-induced financial bubbles that create volatility without durable returns, the Fed has successfully provoked job growth of the obligatory, low-wage variety. Over the past year, the majority of this growth has been in the 55-and-over cohort, while growth has turned down among other workers. Meanwhile, overall labor force participation continues to fall as discouraged workers leave the labor force entirely, which is the primary reason the unemployment rate has declined. All of this reflects not health, but despair, and explains why real disposable income has grown by only 0.3% over the past year.
Go read the entire piece.
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Worst Housing Market Is In?
New data out of Standard & Poor’s this morning painted a somewhat mixed picture of the U.S. housing market: showing home prices may have hit bottom.
via Business Insider.
Hit bottom? Unlikely. But what I really wanted to show what this chart:
Looking at the worst performing cities: Atlanta, Las Vegas, Chicago.
In January 2011, I wrote:
Further, when a developer gets a piece of land, financing, or other services from the TIF it lowers the developer’s costs. This causes an interesting thing to happen. This developer has a competitive advantage over a developer who has to buy land or services at market rate. Therefore, this developer can sell units either cheaper or at a higher margin than the developer without the TIF. This interferes with the market forces, causing more units to be built in TIF districts than would otherwise by market forces alone. This over-development has caused Chicago’s housing market to be overly sensitive to the nationwide collapse in real estate. In Chicago we have overbuild so many housing units that we have damaged not only the home owners market but also the rental market. Thousands of condos build to be owner occupied are now rentals. Standard rental apartments are going unfilled because of the cheap flood of rental condos.
I believe I was right then… and right now.
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Bogus Chicago-area Jobless Rate Dips
Lies… Damn Lies… and Statistics:
The February unemployment rate in the Chicago area dropped to 8.9 percent from 9.6 percent a year ago, according to preliminary data released Thursday by the Illinois Department of Employment Security.
The Chicago area, which includes Joliet and Naperville added roughly 38,100 jobs to the payrolls, according to the data, which was not seasonally adjusted. …
The unemployment rate identifies individuals who are out of work but looking for work.
via Chicago Tribune.
What was that last line again? Oh ya, the unemployment rate identifies individuals who are out of work but looking for work. And it’s missing one very important fact, it also ONLY includes people who HAVE WORKED. Recent grads are not eligible for unemployment, so they don’t count.
The “Chicago Area” as they call it consists of over 9.4 million people. Contrary to the facts of the story, there were no, zero, zilch job added to payrolls in February. What really happened is that 38,000 or so folks removed themselves from the job market.
0.40% of the folks simply gave up looking for work OR have been on employment for so long that the benefits simply ran out.
If one took into account age, time on unemployment, underemployment and other factors we’d see that the real unemployment rate is far, FAR, higher.