08:17 – A month or so ago, one of the commenters here made a brilliant suggestion about using wash bottles to fill chemical bottles with the chemicals that fume obnoxiously, such as 6 M solutions of acetic acid, ammonia, and hydrochloric acid. So the last time I ordered from one of our wholesalers I included a box of a dozen 500 mL unitary wash bottles.
Most wash bottles have their caps pierced by soft tubing that extends loosely down into the bottle. These unitary bottles have a standard cap. The tubing is built into the bottle, extending down the inside surface of the bottle to the bottom. That makes them a lot easier to refill and use than standard wash bottles. So yesterday when I noticed that we were running short of bottles of 6 M ammonia, I decided to give it a try. It works perfectly. I no longer have to work under a fume hood, which makes filling bottles a lot more convenient.
Could this be true? Again…why?
http://twitchy.com/2012/09/14/reports-attack-on-camp-bastion-in-afghanistan-possible-casualties/
The hadjis are on a roll. They have our imbecilic State Department shitting their panties even now. Wires and red phones burning up bandwidth like crazy.
They need to send in Delta, Seals, SAS, etc. and wipe out the cadre leadership ranks, also the hordes of fat Saudi princes who finance all the madrassahs. Take out a bunch of imams, too.
Instead we’ll roll some drones, the bombers again, maybe some tanks. Check out the pages from Guderian and Patton that the War College bonzes highlighted fifty years ago.
Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, has had a reputation of being outstanding in certain areas. In the beginning, it was a teacher’s college, and it turned out (IMO) some of the best teachers in the nation by doing research in education and implementing practices that utilized the results of that research.
Nowadays, my own opinion is that—as a full university—the teacher’s college is no longer outstanding, but they currently excel in other areas. One I know about personally is their recording arts program (for music recording studios), which is the best in the Midwest. Another that they are getting significant positive acknowledgment in, is their economics department.
Here is an editorial by one of the members of that department, who backs the discussion Lynn started here not long ago, about the consequences of having such overwhelming debt. The short of it is that Q3 which the Fed has announced it will implement, is likely to cause significant price inflation this time around.
http://indianaeconomicdigest.com/main.asp?SectionID=31&SubSectionID=135&ArticleID=66564
And judging from the recent significant rises in the price of gold, Q3 has already begun. Commodities—including gasoline—are responding quickly.
I can only agree. It’s been on the news here in Europe: the Fed is buying hundred of billions of dollars of US bonds. Massive money printing. Where the article may be wrong is about previous rounds not causing inflation. From what I hear, inflation in the US is a lot higher than the official figures show.
We’re just waiting for inflation to hit here, with the money printing the Swiss National Bank is doing to keep the franc nailed to the Euro. So far, no inflation, but no one believes that will last. In 2011 the SNB bought about 250 billion in foreign currency assets (mostly Euros); according to Wikipedia, foreign currency holdings have since risen to around 450 billion.
I’m no economist, but I wonder if these figures have any significance: Total holdings of the Swiss national bank (end of 2011) 346 billion, Swiss GDP 2011 507 billion, giving a ration of around 2/3. For the US, the Fed held around 2.5 trillion at the end of 2011, against a GDP of around 15 trillion, for a ratio of 1/6. Picking a completely random country out of the hat, whose currency isn’t a major player on the international markets: the ratio for Australia appears to be 1/30. What does it mean for a country to hold foreign currency assets nearly equal to its GDP? Or is this unimportant?
Well, QE by definition is inflation. The problem is that the government has trained people to think of inflation as “price inflation” when in fact its definition is “an increase in the money supply”. Price inflation is the effect of inflation, not the cause.
I see the real effects of inflation every time I reorder components for our kits.
Price inflation is real, and significant, IMO. I have spent a couple periods of time in Tiny Town, prior to relocating here longer term. We have had the same number of restaurants here for the last 10 years—more, actually, as a couple big chains have joined the locals,—although the local owners change from time-to-time, as some retire and a new one decides to start up.
I eat lunch out at least twice a week here with relatives in sit-down restaurants. In 2004, when I was here after my dad passed on, lunch was under $5, including tip. I returned in 2007 after my mom passed, to get Tiny House emptied and ready for sale, and the cost of lunch had increased then to $7. When I returned from Germany in 2009 to live in Tiny House, lunch was $9. It is now almost 3 years since then, and lunch is pushing $12.
This is for one of the daily specials that all the local restaurants have. Actually, about a year ago, I stopped getting a drink, as coffee/cola is +- $2 here, and I can quench that thirst much more cheaply at home. So add $2 to the above current price to make all quantities equal. Thus, adding back the drink, we are talking nearly a 10x increase in lunch price in 8 years.
Few people keep records on what it costs them to live; I do. Nobody around me is getting raises (nor am I) since 2008, and they complain about that. But the prices are pushing up significantly. Not many actually know by how much.
As far as GDP, economists I read are always referring to US debt as a small and thus inconsequential percentage of GDP, and always seem to say that—whatever the percentage is—we will not be in trouble until it is double that. What they fail to include is the interest on that debt. Even a small increase in interest, can lead to financial ruin, as Europe is finding out.
Of course price inflation is real. My point was that price inflation is the effect, not the cause. The cause is the government printing money, AKA monetizing the debt.
That favors the profligate, who are able to repay loans with dollars that are worth a lot less than the ones they borrowed. And that’s what the sane people in the ECB and Bundesbank are trying to prevent. At this point, the intelligent move for Germany would be to abandon the euro and return to its own currency. They’d suffer a lot less doing that than they will by remaining in the euro, even considering the drop in real value of euro-denominated debts that Germany holds, many of which are uncollectable anyway. The only thing stopping them at this point is inertia and fear of the unknown. If/when Germany finally abandons the euro, you’ll see the value of the euro plummet to a small fraction of what it trades for now.
I think it is less and less likely that Germany will abandon the euro. What is only beginning to surface, is the amount of losses German banks have suffered in the EU affair, which have not yet been recapitalized or properly and publicly accounted for. It is massive and will eventually be found to be multiples of the half-trillion dollars Germany has already poured into the Euro affair, according Josh Rosner, an analyst with Graham Fisher. He says Germans are going to see their own interest rates rise significantly along with the debtor countries, and German banks are likely to soon be declassified as ‘safe havens’.
It is going to be a Catch 22 for Germany, as they have lied to their electorate. They have told the populace that they can—at any time—stop giving money to the troubled countries and end their problems. They cannot, as that would cause a collapse of their own system, which still has not recapitalized the huge losses their own banks have suffered.
More and more, I rebel at this utterly false media notion that the Euro crisis was caused by reckless countries over-spending. By the day, it is becoming clearer that such was not the case. Even were that true, the austerity measures demanded by Germany, with dirty hands, is clearly killing every one of the debtor nations employing them, except maybe Ireland which did not need to institute significantly more austerity than they had already instituted by themselves.
Moreover, if you are a bank, and you lend me money to buy a new car, but you did not do due diligence to find out if I had the means to repay that loan, and I declare bankruptcy causing you to lose that money, who is at fault? Ultimately, it is you for loaning me the money. The gaps in the regulatory and oversight system of the loan-originating countries are also surfacing week after week and are, IMO, shocking. Germany was the biggest salesman of US derivative funds to Europe, and the exposure of the big banks in Germany, France, Belgium, and Austria was over $80 billion at the collapse. Obviously there was a lack of due diligence in pushing those derivatives. The lack of proper investigation into loans to the debtor countries was not the fault of the borrowers (except for Greece, which lied about its status); it was the fault of the lenders. But Germany and others lent that money because it returned more interest than buying their own debt. Their wacky rating rules unbelievably declared debt of the peripheral countries to be as sound as their own!
This is all going to come home to roost with Germany, and is the reason they are dead frozen in how to cope. They have lied to their citizens, the population does not yet know that, and pulling out of the Euro will cause as much or more spending and problems, than forking over the money necessary to hold it all together.
Quite some time ago, I declared Merkel as feckless a leader as GW Bush, and it is going to be interesting to see what gyrations she tries, in order to wrangle herself out of this one. Most likely, whatever she does, will continue to fail, as she causes the rest of the world to enter a recession, the effects of which I judge to have already started, back in June. And we will watch as Germany’s unclean hands become obvious.
Recession? Hey wait and see how the shit hits the fan when Israel hits Iran next month.
I must admit wondering what will happen when Israel takes out Tehran, Damascus and Cairo in October. The immediate effect may be a significant correction in the USA stock market. The long term effect may be a rush to invest in the USA since it will be viewed as the biggest safe haven in the world that has raw materials for just about anything we want to produce. There may be a short term pain but I think that the future is bright for the USA.
But, will the sovereign violence stop in the middle east ? Or will China see this as an opportune time in the Orient ? Sounds like a Tom Clancy novel in the making.