This is a very good book that examines the 1929 crash from a foreign bond market perspective, the parallels between what went on then and what is going on now are uncanny and its a very good read, not dry and boring.

Read just the first 10 - 20 pages and you will see what I mean.


http://mises.org/books/bubbleworld.pdf


Hat tip to Mannfm who writes some good posts here and elsewhere for linking to it

And who seriously takes seasonal holiday employment increases as a positive metric? A half-million would make me happy in a normal xmas season - not so at only 100k.

KD, you giving yourself some room aren't you? 75K +/-50K? I know the BLS or whatever puts that out could make up anything, like the 200 straight upward revisions of declines in claims that unrevised would now produce a negative number.

I see that the criminals in Europe are taking a page out of the Alan Greenspan market manipulation box with their sudden out of the blue rate cut. Looks like a rush to the waste basket. Bet the banks knew in advance and leveraged trades 1000 to 1 (used borrowed money to pile into futures).

When this is going to recover is when the honesty returns to the game. As long as criminals are running the game, all numbers will be cooked and the game will be run for the criminals. The whole world is beginning to look like post USSR Russia and probably pre-Russia USSR.

My usual error band on these guesses is +/- 50k. Sometimes I go a bit wider, but rarely narrower. The Bureau of Lies and Scams is well known for cooking the books.

andyc, thanks for the link!

I'm guessing they've concocted a "surprise" positive report for tomorrow. The end of the year is in sight and they've got the HFT's programmed to produce a gain.

ditto thanks for link

Andy, thanks for the follow up link. I think I might read that book again, because it puts up what created the bubble in the first place. You have to follow it from the start, which is it all started when the creation of the Federal Reserve allowed for the creation of massive war debt for France and England. Garrett state that the purpose for entering the war was to allow for loans to Britain and France. As time went on following the war and the collapse of Weimar, the US made loans to Germany for imports and for making payments to France and Britain so they could make payments to US banks on the war loans. Also, as mentioned, the NY banks financed European governments and peddled the loans to small banks throughout the US. This kind of sounds like the CDO crap we saw this time around and like the Europe situation today.

There were a few things that happened. The free lunch French began calling the US a shylock nation for making them pay their war debts (we should have stayed out of the war and let the germans gas all of them). Creditanstalt, the failed Austrian bank, France pulled it gold deposits. They did the same thing in the US though they were debtors to the US. Hitler clearly killed the wrong people.

The point of all of this is you only need one group to step out of line. One contention in the bubble book was that Germany was broke. Of course, France wanted to hold their feet to the fire. I think the US wanted them to default because we were throwing good money after bad, kind of like what Europe is doing with the PIIGS. The Fed, as back then, is trying to orchestrate the dance. Bernanke will go down with Rasputin and Benedict Arnold in the annuals of history for undermining his own country. Geithner and Obama will be right with them.

Mannfm

Some of the things he talks about sound like they are straight out of today's headlines...."curing debt problems with more debt?....

Ive seen the usual story about the 1929 crash and depression, the speculation, margin buying, bucket shops, market crash, but I never realized that there was also a huge bubble going on in the bond markets at that time as well...Wall Street was shilling massive amounts of foreign bonds to an eager public then on the pretense of supplying credit to "customers" to increase trade for the US, yet the foreign governments were using the credit to build their industries to compete with our own.

The thing that gets me is that there is a strange parallel between then and whats going on now with the US and China, we were the creditor then supplying the world with money which they then were using to build industry, now China is the creditor supplying us money which we then immediately***** away or even more ironic, supplying us with money so that we can then build industry INSIDE CHINA!!

: )

Oh and the usual "whocouldaknowed" from the bankers when it all came crashing down...the bankers en masse then claimed they were merely something on the order of "grocers" supplying an eager public with "produce"

Suddenly they were no longer sophisticated bankers, careful assayers of risk and such but mere "merchants" selling cotton or grain, some of these previous kleptomaniacs actually claimed in congressional testimony at the time.

They claimed the public had an insatiable demand for these issues but as Garrett points out, "if the public's demand was so strong why did the banks feel they needed to hire armies of salesman to sell these bonds door to door or via "radio ballyhoo" with constant advertising?

Same old scams, same old skim, then as now.