Entertainment has seduced us into believing that we have a chance to live the life they live in the movies. Even the people in the movies don't live that life.
It doesn't take 135 minutes to make a life, it takes almost a century.
Everything doesn't depend on what happens in the next ninety seconds. Ever.
The people around us don't live secret lives. Spaceships and evil cowboys and pathogens aren't going to upend the world tomorrow, either.
Life is actually far better than it is in the movies. And it takes longer.
An official denial is in: Slovenia Rules Out Bailout. Here is my interpretation: "A bailout is already in the works, only the date of the announcement is uncertain".
Slovenia insisted on Tuesday that it could avoid an international bailout as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development warned Ljubljana to tackle more rapidly a "severe banking crisis" whose costs it might have underestimated.
The OECD report came amid investor concerns that the 2m-strong country's banking problems could make it the next eurozone state to require a bailout after last month's mishandled rescue of Cyprus.
The OECD said Slovenia should sell viable state-owned banks and allow others that were not viable to fail. It added that bank debtholders should take some losses to reduce the cost of banking sector resolution, and warned that Slovenia might have "significantly" underestimated the level of bad loans and need for new capital.
But Yves Leterme, OECD deputy director-general, said while presenting the report that Slovenia was in no immediate need of rescue, noting that "the government ... has been able to meet its financial needs without difficulties so far".
Speaking in Brussels, Slovenia's Alenka Bratusek, the newly-installed prime minister, said the country did not require an international rescue to shore up the teetering banking system.
"We will solve our problems on our own," she said, after a meeting with José Manuel Barroso, European Commission president.
Slovenia On Its Own
Slovenia will solve its problems on its own just like Ireland did, just like Greece did, just like Portugal did, just like Spain did, just like Cyprus did: Under duress, with threats of eurozone expulsion if the nannycrats in Brussels are not pleased.
Mike "Mish" Shedlock http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Fund manager John Hussman wrote in a recent weekly market commentary, "the real hook, in my view, is the absence of a bubble in any individual sector, and instead a bubble in profit margins across the entire corporate sector."
"Even marginal improvements in the federal deficit and in household savings, which are necessary because of the debt burdens households have taken on…we are likely to see -12% earnings growth annualized over the next three to four years - in other words substantial weakness in corporate profits," Hussman tells The Daily Ticker. We sat down with him at the 2013 Wine Country Conference benefiting the Les Turner ALS Foundation.
Click on the first link to play the interview.
Why Prospective Returns Are Low
Robert Huebscher at Advisor Perspectives put together an outstanding PDF synopsis of Hussman's presentation at the conference.
Thatcher's basic take on a tight European federation was that it was unnecessary, unworkable, and dangerous. The nation state, she insisted, should remain at the heart of the international system, and a federated Europe would threaten its sway.
Moreover, Thatcher had misgivings about the Continent as a source of moral inspiration. "During my lifetime," she reminisced, "most of the problems the world has faced have come, in one form or another, from mainland Europe, and the solutions — from outside it."
That insight alone is priceless, but it still pales compared with what she wrote more than a decade ago, when the euro was still a toddler, and the economies of Greece, Spain and Cyprus seemed as distant from calamity as they now are from salvation. "The European single currency," wrote Thatcher in 2002, "is bound to fail — economically, politically, and indeed socially."
Thatcher's reasoning for this was not ideological. It was monetarist. There can be no such thing as a united currency without a united budget, she argued, at a time when it was impolite to suggest that the euro's newlyweds would soon accuse each other of theft, deceit, laziness, imperialism and oppression.
Economics of a Housewife vs. Career Socialist Politician
"I am not prepared to accept the economics of a housewife," said Jacques Chirac, a future French president in 1987. He should have. Look at France now.
Margaret Thatcher's Last Shot at the Socialists
I have linked to the above video before, and it's certainly worth a replay now.
Mike "Mish" Shedlock http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
"I don't think it's either averting a disaster or heading for one," Pettis says. "What I think we're going to have is a decade or more of much, much lower growth."
According to Peter Schiff, CEO of Europacific Capital, there is "more capitalism in communist China than there is in America."...
"It's definitely not more capitalist than the U.S.," Pettis says of China. "It's quite tough to run a small business or any kind of business for a variety of reasons. The big saving grace of my club and CD label is that we don't ever expect to be profitable. It's easy to be successful if you don't have to earn anything."
Pollution in China is another concern we routinely hear about in Western media. A study from the Health Effects Institute, funded in part by the Environmental Protection Agency, found that Chinese pollution caused 1.2 million premature deaths in 2010, while the Financial Times reports "airpocalypse" has sent expats fleeing.
Pettis says getting rid of pollution is a political question that will require a significant portion of the urban middle class getting upset about it. He says in the last year, for the first time in the 11 years he's been living in China, he's seeing this type of substantial opposition in Beijing and Shanghai. Still, he notes, it's likely to take many, many years to address the issue.
Click on the link at the top to see the complete video interview with Lauren Lyster. His session presentation was quite good. I will post that presentation when available.
Mike "Mish" Shedlock http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com