Is quantitative easing the cause of the rally?

Tyler Durden at Zero Hedge thinks so, and offers the following graph to illustrate the correlation:

Correlation is not the same as causation: I'd be a little happier about this theory if the mechanism could be explained. How exactly did the Federal Reserve's purchase of government bonds force up stocks?

I suppose the effect was indirect, in that the stock market recovered confidence when it saw that interest rates would be kept low with this extra demand for government credit, so making debt-fuelled market speculation cheap and easy. Also the fear of a banking sector collapse eased as the policy of official support at all costs became clear.

I guess the new bubble is in government credit, and will continue to inflate until a weak seam in the fabric splits. Keynes said, "Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent"; similarly, governments can stay irrational longer than you can afford to short their darlings. I'd be in no hurry to bet on a market reversal, even though it "should" happen and the present state of affairs is not tenable indefinitely.

Which is why I grit my teeth and hold cash.

DISCLAIMER: Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog.

The correction will be delayed until after the bonuses are calculated

Bob Clark over at FSU airs the bonus-conspiracy theory of stock market movements, and after the way 1999 ended I'm inclined to give it some credence:

... there are a lot of Christmas bonuses tied to fund performance at year end. If you are the Fat Boys, why not let the funds buy the price up into a strong, year ending close. Sell to them, then kick the stool out from under them early next year. They make easy victims.

On 3 December on CNBC, Gary Kominski said (video embedded here) that effectively, there were only 9 trading days left because there is very low volume in the last two weeks of the year - "the 17th is your last day to make a significant change to your portfolio." If Clark is right and the "Fat Boys" are setting us up for a fall, I'd expect them to sweep up the cards and stand up from the table a week before Christmas. Perhaps we should be watching the behaviour of "the usual suspects" in this period.

DISCLAIMER: Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog.

Measuring GDP for real

Another thing to thank Wikileaks for:

GDP figures are “man-made” and therefore unreliable, Li said. When evaluating Liaoning’s economy, he focuses on three figures:

1) electricity consumption, which was up 10 percent in Liaoning last year;

2) volume of rail cargo, which is fairly accurate because fees are charged for each unit of weight; and

3) amount of loans disbursed, which also tends to be accurate given the interest fees charged.

By looking at these three figures, Li said he can measure with relative accuracy the speed of economic growth. All other figures, especially GDP statistics, are “for reference only,” he said smiling.

So, how would that set of measures work in our case?

DISCLAIMER: Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog.

The uselessness of gold

An article by Elliot Turner last week ("Why I Sold My Gold") echoes what I've been saying for a while:

No one knows what will happen in the event of chaos, but to me the only real answer would be to buy a cave stocked with canned goods. Forget about gold, as that would do nothing in a state of anarchy. Gold ultimately relies on the same psychological comfort that fiat currencies do in universal acceptance, and therein lies the gold as currency paradox.

I'd suggest that gold is not a protection against disaster per se, but a speculation during moderate troubles, and a store of wealth for a future time after disaster, when recovery has happened. But as with the Staffordshire Hoard, that latter time may be a long, long while later and you may not be there to benefit.

So I propose a new currency valid in good and bad times:

"Ah," you may say, "but this currency is perishable." So was the scrip issued in Wörgl in 1932-33; in fact, a negative interest rate was built into the scheme to encourage circulation instead of hoarding during a deflation. It worked wonderfully - so well that it displeased the local socialist party and the central bank.

Which leads me to think that the true measure of a currency's virtue, as of a man's, is not its supporters but its enemies.

Footnote:

The Heinz will also be superior to the current pound (= 100 pence) in terms of giving change, as was the old British pound. The latter was worth 240 pence, each penny legally exchangeable (until the end of 1960) for 4 farthings, thus £1 = 960 farthings.

You can get two 400g cans of Heinz beans today for less than £1, and each tin contains over 400 beans. So the modern pound must buy you c. 960 individual baked beans. I therefore propose to call a single baked bean a "farting".

DISCLAIMER: Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog.

Restructure debt, or lose prosperity and liberty

Karl Denninger draws our attention to an interview with David Stockman on CNBC (see below). Key points:

• Combining middle-class earners with government employees (aside from teachers), we see that millions of jobs have previously been lost and there is now no net gain in half the 130 million American jobs market. Stockman terms this the "new normal".
• Numbers are increasing among part-time earners, but their annual pay averages $20,000 instead of the middle class' $50,000. As Stockman says, you can't support a family on that.

This is industrialization in reverse gear. America - and even more so the UK - now faces a great question: are we prepared to watch our industry eaten away? Last month, it was reported as a sort of victory that Britain made a deal with China to export pigs to them. Though agricultural production is important - God speed the plow - I don't see a bright future for the whole nation as pig farmers.

In a digitized world and globalized economy, our problems are evident and important to our competitors. Back in September China's "Beijing Review" crisply summarized America's woes and their causes:

Increasing financial pressures forced middle class Americans to rely on debt to continue their current lifestyles. Meanwhile, thriving financial innovations on Wall Street have encouraged their lifestyle of high debt and high consumption. The median debt-to-income ratio of the middle class families climbed to 1.19 in 2004 from 0.45 in 1983. So basically, credit-supported over-consumption of the middle class laid the groundwork for U.S. economic prosperity over the past three decades.

The over-consumption can be corrected by cutting back - something that is certainly a matter of concern to Beijing - but though the spending song is over, the debt melody lingers on. Private and public debts are absorbing the resources that should go into trade and industry. Lowering interest rates further is scarcely possible, and as Michael Panzer reports in "Ready for some crowding out?", the need (especially in Japan and the USA) to roll-over huge amounts of debt in the near future may see a bond market revolt and higher interest rates, instead. Commercial finance may well become both harder to obtain and significantly more expensive.

Meanwhile, the burden of debt now lies not in interest rates but in the capital repayments. As average incomes fall (owing to the shift from higher-paying to lower-paid jobs), the liabilities will grow heavier in proportion. Some of this ballast may have to be ejected from the balloon if we are not to crash to earth.

Normally, one would say that letting debtors off the hook is a moral hazard, but I think the scale of the emergency takes us beyond that consideration. In any case, default is already happening piecemeal in the residential mortgage market, and would be far more extensive if lenders constrained by capital adequacy requirements were not reluctant to foreclose. Beneath the tide of "jingle mail" is a savage undertow of tolerated delinquencies (*). Similarly, the banking sector would be pretty much dead if the government had not also been willing to defer foreclosure.

The challenge is to tackle the debt monster openly and through policy, not inaction and denial. Cutting welfare won't do it fast enough and generates many other problems. If we can't restructure our debts by agreement with creditors, we have to accept the "new normal": high unemployment, a reduced and distressed middle class and, perhaps, political instability barely restrained by greater authoritarianism.


(*) See today's post (with many graphs) by Michael David White, who thinks housing in America is only halfway through its correction.

DISCLAIMER: Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog.

Serbian Jazz is hot!

Even Johnny Depp comes to Serbia - admittedly more for the film, but the brass sound seems to be "in."



My favourite so far is this one:


BOBAN MARKOVIC-RROMANO BIJAV-LA BELLEVILLOISE
Uploaded by aceituna11. - Watch more music videos, in HD!

Governments should provide secure inflation-proof savings vehicles

Logically, speculators and investors should be residing in two different groups, but the two kinds of sheep keep wandering out of their respective pens. And there are wolves outside the pens.

John Lounsbury, reviewing ‘What Investors Really Want,’ by Meir Statman.

This is the difficulty we face now. If you are a savvy speculator and willing to accept a high degree of risk, you may (with luck) do well in today's volatile markets.

But if you are an ordinary investor (like most people), you are looking for something that will at least preserve the value of your savings and reward you with modest real growth for not spending them.

Unfortunately for investors, our governments' attempts to shore up an essentially bankrupt banking system and profligate welfare system involve lower-than-inflation interest rates, and at least one product that is guaranteed to overmatch inflation has been withdrawn - see what happened to NS&I Index-Linked Savings Certificates in July.

Sadly, one suspects that even if such products continue to be available, inflation will be defined in a way that does not fully reflect increases in the cost of living for ordinary people. In fact, definition tweaking is already happening, as in the case of "hedonic adjustment" in the American CPI Index. This means, for example, that a new computer that costs the same as your old one but has double the memory, has effectively halved in price - even if the extra computing speed has absolutely no practical benefit for you (we don't all live in the fantasy world of role-playing games).

I'm quite happy to let the speculators play high-stakes poker with each other, as long as the rest of us can humbly and patiently build security through thrift. It should be a lasting shame to governments that they are denying us ways to do this.

"The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed."

DISCLAIMER: Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog.

A 13th century account of the Big Bang

At the briefest instant following creation all the matter of the universe was concentrated in a very small place, no larger than a grain of mustard.

The matter at this time was very thin, so intangible, that it did not have real substance. It did have, however, a potential to gain substance and form and to become tangible matter.

From the initial concentration of this intangible substance in its minute location, the substance expanded, expanding the universe as it did so.

As the expansion progressed, a change in the substance occurred. This initially thin noncorporeal substance took on the tangible aspects of matter as we know it.

From this initial act of creation, from this etherieally thin pseudosubstance, everything that has existed, or will ever exist, was, is, and will be formed.

Rabbi Moshe ben Nahman (aka "Ramban" or "Nahmanides"), 1194 - 1270; Commentary on the Torah

Wikipedia article here, looked up in reference to a reader's query in the Dail Mail today.

Will Wikileaks break a US bank?

Which American bank is going to be blown apart by promised revelations from Wikileaks?

Britain's Daily Mail newspaper today reported US speculation that it might be Citigroup, but that doesn't appear in the online edition so maybe it was just a wild guess. Tyler Durden hears that the hard drive of a Bank of America executive casts a shadow over Merrill Lynch and/or Countrywide.

Slightly creepy though Julian Assange may be, it seems he's doing what our journalists over here used to do, before they started to see themselves as part of the New Aristocracy. When the horse-puckey hits the turbo, maybe we could see another Enron-type scandal complete with jailings and business foldups.

But I think there will be other repercussions. One will be, presumably, a drive to "clean up the act" - more regulations to try to bring the rogues under control.

Another will be how discussions are (or aren't) recorded in future. I'm sure that thanks to Assange's latest stunt, many diplomats will now be encoding their gossip prior to transmission.

But the most significant will be how observation will be evaded and rules circumvented.

This has already happened in politics: it's one of the curious features of Tony Blair's decade-long "sofa government" that decisions were often made without civil servants present to take minutes: no name, no pack drill, as they used to say in the Army.

We can expect the same in commercial circles. Again, some smart guys have been doing this all along: Jordan Belfort's book "The Wolf of Wall Street" describes how, in order to carry on share-ramping without the inconvenience of explaining their office telephone transcripts to SEC investigators, his boys would simply tell the client they'd call back, then go out and fire up their personal cellphones for an intimate, no-repercussions sales spiel.

The Sicilian Mafia showed them all the way. Bernardo Provenzano ran the Outfit from a shack, avoiding all electronic communication and typing little notes ("pizzini") on his Olivetti instead.

It's kind of a Darwinian co-evolution of predator and prey. We can expect continued crookery, with heightened secrecy. And a surge in sales of two-colour typewriter ribbons.

DISCLOSURE: No positions. Not even in typewriter ribbons.

DISCLAIMER: Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog.

The blind leading the blind ...

I have wondered for some time whether the investment community were a bunch of con artists, or deluded.

I believe that I have my answer.

In the November issue of the US edition of Playboy is an article titled 'How to Destroy a Bank'.

In it, the author interviews several investment bankers. All of them lost a great deal of money in the recent collapse; are convinced that they can make it back with 'hard work'; and see financial Doomsday as impossible.

In other words, they are idiots.

Has gold ended its bull run?

The price of gold has soared in the last decade. Can it continue?

Two views make a market, as the saying goes. in "Gold's Run is Over -- I'd Much Rather Own This Stock", Tim Begany writes:

"Gold is the worst investment around. Anyone buying it now is doing so at their own risk, near the end of a bull run that's apt to end badly.

A major clue gold's time is up: institutions and hedge funds are starting to get out.

In October, for example, these big players reduced their long gold futures by -9%. Meanwhile, small investors added +5% to their long gold positions. It's a familiar pattern in which large investors exit the market of an overheated asset in a timely fashion, leaving the little guy to drive the final run-up to the big pop.

I give gold up to another year, maybe two, before it peaks. From there, it's all downhill."

Tim prefers shares in an ex-bankrupt company - Owens-Corning (NYSE: OC) - that makes insulation for buildings.

Bargain-hunting among distressed firms can be rewarding. The financial journalist George Goodman (aka "Adam Smith") once interviewed a fund manager who'd bought stock in the Santa Fe railroad, then bankrupt. The manager explained that the land, buildings and rolling stock had substantial value that was not yet reflected in the share price. This was decades before Warren Buffett and George Soros (an ex-railway porter) discovered their recent interest in choo-choos - maybe for similar reasons. (But it's worth noting that Soros recently sold his holdings in Canadian Pacific - cold feet?)

And it's true that the ratio of the Dow to gold has dropped below the long-term average since the closure of the "gold window" in 1971:

- though the ratio hasn't fallen to its 1980 low. It's also true that gold has outpaced inflation in a way not seen since the end of the 1970s:

So why do the gold bugs still have a voice?

I'd say it's because, as in 1980, these are not "normal" times. JK Galbraith said "The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable" and all their cyclical predictions are junk when an asteroid is spotted coming in our direction. That asteroid is a combination of the vast debts of Western nations, the dependence of much of their populations on wealth transfers within those economies, and globalized trade.

Can we deflect it with rockets of bailout and default? The bailouts appear to be devaluing our currencies and may end with high inflation in necessary commodities; sovereign debt defaults would affect not only international relations but the mutual and pension funds on which many of us hope to live in retirement. If the biggest banks are allowed to fail and their shares go to zero, what will that do to Everyman's portfolio?

Gold is a speculation unlike most others: it's a vote of no confidence. As such, it's a systemic indicator, not an ordinary item of trade. At this level of the debate, graphs are meaningless. Among the bears, opinion is divided between people like Peter Schiff who think we can make something out of this crisis, and those like Michael Panzner who believe that when a civilization falls, even the richest citizen can lose all. For example, the biggest-ever hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold was discovered last year, not far from where I live. It's thought to be from the Kingdom of Mercia in the 7th or 8th century. The people who put it there never came back.

We should turn our minds from playing with money to repairing the framework of our nations, and preserving our liberty and democracy.

DISCLAIMER: Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog.

If you think I'm a bear, read THIS...

By his own account, "Savelife" is a mental health professional who is "a professional investor for a charitable trust" which pays richly for investment analysis by outside experts. Their assessment exceeds the worst I've dared suggest - and it's coming very soon.

"Their call: Markets will crash within two to six months (can happen at any time). First drop, in seven days, 3,000 points on the DOW. Then over six months, DOW will tank to about 1,000 points. Then a unionizing recovery will occur to the upside. Allow a decade or better for total recovery."

DISCLAIMER: Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog.

Reasons to be fearful: a warning about the stock market

Previously published on Seeking Alpha - the business site with 3m readers monthly:
_______________________________

This is the time that tests bearish investors.

Interest rates on deposits are lower than inflation, if you look at food and energy costs. Since the 1990s, I have been more cautious than most of my investors and have been careful to suggest that they might like to keep their powder dry. Some listened and switched to cash in 1998 and 1999, and so avoided the fall out of the 2000-2003 decline.

Just when I was beginning to feel that things were getting sensibly priced, interest rates were pushed down and the already-existing house price bubble superinflated from 2003 on, along with much else. And then...

But now there is talk of investors being "forced" into the market by negative real returns on cash - and fears that inflation may rise significantly. I recently displayed a graph from the Now and Futures site, showing how German shareholders survived the Weimar hyperinflation of 1923, after a severe interim drop. "Financial Armageddon" author Michael Panzner justly pointed out that there was a danger that investors in a similar situation might lose their nerve, sell out and miss the market recovery.

It is also very hard to stay out of the market when it has risen dramatically. I was batting away queries from clients in the latter stages of the tech stock boom with warnings of what I strongly suspected was a bubble ready to burst. But there is pressure to get in, not merely because of greed but in the case of fund managers, fear: the fear that your boss will use peer benchmarks to judge you negatively and appoint someone else to take over the portfolio. So you need nerve at more than one level in the organization.

Invesco Perpetual's Neil Woodford has that kind of nerve. During the dot com craze, he stayed out and stuck to his guns despite the stellar tech-invested performances of others' funds - and fortunately the management backed him.

Woodford was very bullish - selectively - in January this year, according to the Daily Telegraph. So how does he feel now? Well, bearish about China this week, according to Investment Week. This, at a time when others are coming late to the emerging-markets party, looking for something to get exciting returns. Surely, we tell ourselves, someone's making money somewhere, and we want a piece. This, I think, is the dangerous time.

It's caught out geniuses before now. During the South Sea Bubble of 1720, Sir Isaac Newton bought in, sold out and made £7000 profit - about £1 million in today's money. Then, seeing the market soaring further, he bought in again. And the scam crashed, costing him £20,000 - the equivalent of nearly £3 million.

Some say the market now has been climbing a "wall of worry", so that really we're not in a mania and reasonable concern has already been factored into valuations. Personally, I fear that this is like a lunatic certifying his own sanity and discharging himself from the hospital - "I'm all right now."

I'm not alone in this fear. In a Financial Sense article by Tim Wood yesterday, he says:

"I continue to believe, based on the evidence at hand, that the rally out the March 2009 low is a large scale bear market rally that should ultimately prove to separate Phase I from Phase II of the much larger and ongoing secular bear market. But, just as I told my subscribers before that low was even made, the longer this rally holds up, the more dangerous it becomes. Reason being, it becomes more and more convincing."

We have interest rates lower than ever, debts higher than ever and a financial sector borrowing cash at giveaway rates and playing games in the market. We now have an interdependent world economy, which is like lashing all the lifeboats together - extra security in a small storm and complete disaster in a big one.

Granted that the situation is such that there is no completely valid basis of comparison - and remembering that the Dow now lists companies that garner much more from foreign earnings than they used to - let's take a look at the Dow adjusted for CPI inflation since the peak before last - the one in January of 1966:

Remember, too, that everyone agrees that we've just had a recession, and many say we're not out of it. Where would you pin the tail on this donkey? Mr Market appears to have stuck it on the back of his neck.

If we are climbing the Wall of Worry, we're starting from very high up. Don't look down.

DISCLAIMER: Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog.

The God of small things

Eyelashes growing out of human skin - one of many wonderful electron microscope pictures here.

Should rich people be asking us to think that money isn't everything?

It's a debate here at the moment. I'm only asking.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/5003314.stm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/sep/20/economics-wealth-gdp-happiness

Protect your cash savings (UK customers)

The following is an extract from a just-published article by Nadeem Walayat on securing your bank deposits in the UK:

UK Savers Emergency Plan:

a. Ensure that you have at least 2 current accounts across banking groups.

b. That you have procedures in place to ensure that you can act fast to initiate transfer of funds from instant access savings accounts, especially if your total funds with a particular banking group exceeds £50k / £83k (1st Jan 2011).The best strategy is to limit exposure per banking group to the limit.

c. Do not have ANY savings are fixed deposit exposure to banks that do not fall under the UK Financials Services Compensation Scheme.

d. Limit exposure to PIIGS banks, that is Greece, Ireland, Spain, Portugal and Italy as these are at the most risk of going bust thus triggering a lengthy process of Savers having to wait for compensation.

The following list represents Britians' largest deposit taking banking groups and the banks that fall under each.

Note whilst banking groups may have multiple licences as a consequence of mergers and takeovers, however they also may be in the process of merging licences so for ultimate safety one should remain focused on banking groups.

LLOYDS BANKING GROUP
Lloyds TSB Bank
AA Savings
Bank of Scotland / HBOS
Birmingham Midshires
Capital Bank
Cheltenham & Gloucester Savings
Halifax
Intelligent Finance
Saga

SANTANDER GROUP
Santander bank
Abbey National
Asda Savings
Alliance and Leicester
Bradford and Bingley
Cahoot
Moneyback
Honycomb
Nationwide Building Society
Nationwide Building Society
Cheshire Building Society
Derbyshire Building Society
Dunfermline Building Society

BARCLAYS GROUP
Barclays Bank
Standardlife Bank

HSBC GROUP
HSBC Bank
First Direct
Marks and Spencer Financial

ALLIED IRISH GROUP
Allied Irish Bank
First Trust

CITI GROUP
Citibank
Egg

CO-OPERATIVE GROUP
Co-operative Bank
Britannia
Smile
Unity Trust Bank
RBS Group
Royal Bank of Scotland
Nat West Bank
Direct Line Savings
Lombard
The One Account
Drummonds
Ulster Bank

Additional comments

Foreign Banks under UK FSCS Scheme - ICICI (India), First Save (Nigeria)

Small business are covered by the FSCS on the basis of 2 of following 3 conditions - upto a turnover of 6.5 million, less than 50 employees, balance sheet total not more than £3.26 million

Banks not under the UK FSCS.

Post Office - Currently Guaranteed by the Irish Government, pending coming under the UK FSCS.
ING Direct, Tridos - Dutch
Anglo Irish, Bank of Ireland - Ireland

Don't delay! Act today to form a quick personal savings protection contingency plan, otherwise you may wake up one day to find yourselves locked out of your funds Iceland style!

For more on how to protect your wealth from debt default bankruptcy see the Inflation Mega-trend Ebook (FREE DOWNLOAD)

Comments and Source: http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article24572.html

By Nadeem Walayat

http://www.marketoracle.co.uk

Copyright © 2005-10 Marketoracle.co.uk (Market Oracle Ltd). All rights reserved.

DISCLAIMER: Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog.

EU: superb dressing-down by Nigel Farage

Using our brains

It is common wisdom that the Soviet Union and associated states collapsed because of the failures of centralized planning. Then why do we allow and encourage the same kinds of structures in large corporations and government in the West?

The ostensible reason given is easy to defend: large entities can be much more efficient. As a secondary reason (not usually stated), large entities also mean a concentration of power and wealth.

The problem with efficiency is that it comes at a price. This is not only the loss of jobs and transfer of wealth, but more disturbingly the catastrophic nature of any breakdown. We saw it in 2003 with the power grid in the US, in 2008 with the collapse of the banking system, and in new cars, which are much more reliable and efficient than those from the 1970’s, but harder and more expensive to repair.

The key to preventing or mitigating future disasters in finance, oil, energy and water appears to be the opposite of our past practices. Rather than make everything bigger, we should take a hint from the designers of the World Wide Web, and decentralize as much as possible. This will take planning and cooperation, and a thought process unlike anything since World War II. Just consider: how many large purchases for homes, business or government consider the long-term costs of maintenance?

Doing the same idiot thing ...

What makes the scientific community different from most groups of humans is the willingness of the group (but not necessarily individual scientists) to let go of emotionally-satisfying hypotheses when they are not supported by the data.

By contrast, consider education and government.

For at least two decades, we have been warned by business and government leaders that we need more graduates in the technical fields, just to sustain our infrastructure. Even in these tough economic times, the graduates in Engineering, Mathematics and Geology are finding good jobs. These disciplines require a great deal of Mathematics training to succeed, and our Education College experts hold to the philosophy that the key to that teaching is pedagogy. To that end, they have tried to make it easier to learn, to reduce the speed at which the students learn the material, or to dispense with material altogether. These huge experiments have not made a significant difference in the graduation rates in these subjects.

To my experimental mind, this suggests that the difference is one of innate ability, which is anathema to the John Dewey philosophy of education as a social equalizer. Instead, we just try to pump even more money into failing ideas.

In the case of government, we can look at tax policies. Since the 1950’s, the tax burden has shifted from corporations to individual taxpayers. Within that latter group, the past 30 years have seen a shift, where the lowest 50% or so pay very little in taxes, and the marginal tax rates for the wealthy have gone steadily down. All of these changes were supposed to make our economy strong, and have utterly failed. Yet, what is the current mantra? Cut taxes for business and keep the tax cuts for the wealthy (including preferential rates on capital gains and no estate tax).

While I can readily understand that the rich and powerful would have this view, what is it that makes middle-income and poor Americans support this idea?

Rough justice, Aussie-style

http://the-public-house.blogspot.com/2010/11/tiger-in-cage.html