Whither Boomers?

Personally, I see a lot of postings online, advertisements, promoting living abroad for retirement. (Yeah, I know. It's coming up, for better and worse). Just a few examples:

How to Retire Abroad

Best Places to Retire in 2018  

Annual Global Retirement Index

The 10 Best Places to Retire Overseas in 2018

4 under-the-radar countries 

where you can retire for cheap

5 Cheap Places To Retire Abroad

And check this out. Even AARP is pointing the way.

Top Ten Countires to Retire - AARP

And the thing is, I get the feeling a bunch of us Boomers are going to go be expats in other nations like Mexico, Belize and yes, as shown in the picture above, Portugal. Check out the reasons:

--The dollar goes further 

--Health care isn't as absurdly, obscenely expensive 

--There isn't as much wealth inequality in other nations and finally, a big factor is that 

--No other nation has as many guns and shootings and killings as we do in the US

One more thing. Better, older, saved architecture. 

Oh. Another. The food. Frequently in these places, great food.

Yeah.

I see a LOT of us leaving.

The situation in the EU

I came across what I thought is a very good, if simple, description of the European financial system and its problems right now: "Underfunded banks buys underfunded government bonds and underfunded governments guarantees underfunded banks.? It's one of those things that, again, is simple and that seems true but you certainly hope is not. Links: http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2012/02/capital-flight-from-italy-greece.html; http://www.marketwatch.com/story/10-myths-about-the-european-quagmire-2012-02-27?link=MW_story_popular; http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/27/opinion/krugman-what-ails-europe.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Big, big questions for 2012

They are big, indeed, the questions we can pose now, for this coming new year. So many people are predicting collapses of different kinds. So here goes, some of my questions for 2012: 1) Will Greece's economy collapse? 2) Will Italy follow suit? 3) Spain? 4) Portugal? 5) Will the Euro collapse, in full or part? 6) Will the US financial system face the same or very similar collapse as we did in 2008, yet again? 7) Seriously, many people I've spoken to--friends--have predicted and are predicting--gulp--the collapse of the US. Nice thought, huh? Understand, I'm not predicting any of the above. I've just seen many people predicting these things. Consider it just food for thought. Think happy thoughts, y'all. And happy new year.

If the Euro and Eurozone fail...

This out today in the news: US bank warns of eurozone breakup 'pandemonium' Citigroup economist and former central banker Willem Buiter warned Thursday that a fully blown breakup of the eurozone could spell a global depression with unemployment of 20 percent and economic pandemonium. Sketching a stark picture of the stakes facing European leaders as they gather in Brussels to discuss how to save the single currency, Buiter said a breakup would unlikely be planned, orderly or gradual. Buiter, a former Bank of England policy maker, predicted in a research note that a breakup would be "disruptive, destructive and without any winners." Basically, I think this is what he has in mind: Wish us all luck, ladies and gentlemen.

And while we're on the subject of who's "Number One"

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released the Better Life Initiative, examining how various aspects of people's lives affect the general well-being of whole countries and came up with the following list of "The 10 Countries With The Best Work-Life Balance." Guess what country who thinks--and claims, frequently, that it's "number one"-- ISN'T EVEN ON THE FREAKING LIST? Yeah, I think you know. European countries? All over the place. The Netherlands? You bet. No Uncle Sam. Read it and weep, suckers. As I've said before, your boss loves you. Try to have a nice weekend anyway. Link to original post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/01/top-ten-countries-with-work-life-balance_n_868224.html#s285262&title=10_France

Something to keep in mind as the economy seems to get worse

Riots in Greece and across Europe. Can it happen here? Food for thought: "If inequality continues to increase relentlessly, it seems likely that major social disruptions are inevitable. What people should keep in mind is that the U.S. has the weakest social safety net of any advanced country." --"Martin Ford, Founder, Silicon Valley-based software development firm. Links: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/martin-ford/could-we-have-civil-unres_b_906478.html; http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2011/07/raging-inequality-may-cause-unrest-and-violence/

Quote of the day

"...could the full force of a depression be delayed with a combination of yet more debt and spending? Governments around the world are betting that it can. But they are also hedging their bets by preparing and implementing austerity measures as it must be obvious, even to them, that the historically unprecedented expansion of state spending and debt cannot go on for ever if capitalism is to survive. Keynes himself famously ignored this problem. 'In the long run, we’re all dead,' he said. Over the next decade, we’ll discover what happens in the ‘long run’. The probability is that previously taken-for-granted entitlements (to education, jobs, retirement, health care, an income during periods of illness, joblessness or disability, and so on) and standards of living will end. There will be continuing struggles both within the capitalist class and between the capitalist and working classes over who is to bear the brunt of the losses. The hegemony of the United States may be challenged in the not too distant future, with potentially catastrophic consequences: bear in mind that it took a world war to completely end the last truly major depression. And the depression, if not rescued by a major war, could be deeply exacerbated by the falling off of cheap and easy oil and energy supplies and the possibility of ecological catastrophe." --Stuart Wilkins; Link: http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/jul11/is_the_crisis_over.html#top

It doesn't look pretty out there

And no, I'm not talking about the weather.

I ran across a few websites this afternoon--one of them absolutely alarmist--that tell of the biggest of the world's problems right now, economically and otherwise.

There was one, though, with the following article that seemed both not alarmist or overly-emotional but calm, rational and correct.  You can check it out here:

10 Tipping Points Which Could Plunge The World Into An Economic Nightmare

The two things that strike me from this article are first, that so much of the warring and conflict problems do seem to be centered in the oil-producing Middle East and Northern Africa, which is horribly problematic for oil distribution and so, the world's economic engines to keep running.

The second thing that strikes me is that of the debt across the world--mostly nation-state--but also personal, household debt that is coming down on so many of us right now and slowing, if not stopping our economies.

Some possibly scary stuff, for sure.

Stay tuned.

Me?  I'm sitting here crossing my fingers.

Here's hoping, y'all.

"Great Depression" just around the corner? (updated at bottom)

If this guy's data and assumptions are correct, it looks really bad for Europe's economy, at minimum, but I fear and expect for the US and the world:

May 23 2011: Right. Italy. Serious.

If you don't have the patience for all of it, go down to what a Greek default would spell for them and Europe.

What happens when Greece defaults

He's not saying "if Greece defaults", but "when..."

Yikes.

Scary and getting scarier.

The sky might well be falling.

Chinese Rating Agency Downgrades UK Sovereign Debt

Roller coaster ride ahead?

If this guy knows what he's talking about, we could be in for one wild, financial roller coaster ride:

May 23 2011: Right. Italy. Serious.

Quote of the day--on our previous--and next?--financial collapse

From Andrew Ross Sorkin today, this morning, on NPR's Weekend Edition: "I think about this all the time and I dont want to ever have to write a sequel to this book. But what I worry about, actually, is not Wall Street but what worries me now is that too big to fail is now being applied to countries and states like California and Greece and Italy and Portugal. And the same problem that Lehman Brothers had, this idea that other banks weren't going to trade with them because all of a sudden they weren't confident enough that they were going to be able to pay back the money, that that's what's going to happen to a state like California and that's what's going to happen to this country, that in the future countries are going to have this problem, that people are just going to decide, you know what, we dont trust these guys, we're not confident that they're ever going to be able to pay us back. And that's what worries me the most." Me? Personally? I KNOW we need government. We need government to create schools and pave the streets and build and maintain our infrastructure. And we need it to police the corporations. We need them to protect us. Too many Americans haven't come to this realization, in spite of the last decade and our near-collapse. Link to original post: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129953853

Are you paying attention? (Guest post)

A Still Moment

Tuesday 27 April 2010

by: James Howard Kunstler, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

George W. Bush was onto something in the fall of 2008 when he remarked apropos of the Lehman collapse: "...this sucker could go down."

It's my serene conviction, by the way, that this sucker actually is going down, right now, even as I clatter away at the keys -- perhaps in slow motion, so that not many other bystanders have noticed yet, and the few who have noticed are mostly too crosseyed with nausea to speak.

It's perhaps useful to define even what we mean when we say "this sucker."

Everybody knows what a sucker is, of course -- say, a Midwestern public employees' union pension fund snookered into buying a fat slice of equity tranche in a Goldman Sachs-engineered CDO. But "this sucker" is something else: a rather large cargo of commercial relations, entailed obligations, hopes, expectations, habits of daily life -- indeed millions of whole lives -- loaded onto the rather creaky vessel we call modern civilization. "This sucker" was such an apt term coming from someone whose understanding of civilization was like unto that of a boy who found a PlayStation under the Christmas tree.
It's also perhaps useful to define what we mean by "going down." To my mind it means an awful lot of money disappears and nobody can pay for anything and an awful of things that have kept going on promises to pay and to get paid will stop keeping going. I don't think that the idea of money disappears -- that is, paper certificates representing claims on future work -- but there will be a lot less of it to go around. Eventually the idea of money could go, too, at least in its current form as Federal Reserve notes. But mostly for some years it will just be a lot of people, companies, and governments who are broke.
"Going down" will mean a society with no money and an infrastructure for daily life that requires gobs of money to run, and a populace too dazed, confused, and inflamed to do anything useful in the way of organizing new infrastructures for daily life for their new circumstances. In retrospect, the Great Depression of the 1930s will look like "The Philadelphia Story" compared to what we wake up to ten years from now.

President Obama's speech at Cooper Union last week was a remarkable performance. It managed to appear forceful and serious without containing any really serious or forceful proposals to discipline a banking system that is running a hostage-and-ransom racket on civilization. If this is finally what the Obama Experience is all about than his detractors have been right all along: he is a tool. Finance reform aside, there are still plenty of laws left on the statute books that could be applied to the frauds and rackets that ran absolutely amok on Wall Street the past few years. I would still like to know why buying CDS "insurance" against your own issue of bonds deliberately engineered to default is NOT a form of insider trading, to put it as simply as possible.

The SEC action against Goldman Sachs is likely to open a Pandora's box of troubles for that company, and perhaps all of the Too Big To Fail banks. But even so, I believe this sucker is going down before 99.9 percent of it is sorted out. Anyway, there was a lot about the SEC action that seemed curious, to put it mildly, from the timing of it, to the brevity of the document, to the strange fact that it emerged at all from an agency whose principal activity the past few years has been the viewing of internet porn, and which has otherwise behaved so indifferently in the face of numberless offenses to common decency, not to mention the public interest, that it might as well have been staffed by a thousand head of Holstein cows rather than licensed attorneys and graduates of accredited colleges.

This sucker is going down because the train of bankruptcies underway has a remorseless self-reinforcing power to provoke more and more bankruptcies at every stop along the line as every promise to pay is welshed on. The mortgages will not be paid and securities will not pay their investors and the banks will choke on the bad paper promises in their vaults and the pension funds will not pay their beneficiaries and the states and counties and municipalities will go broke and not pay their employees and creditors, and the federal government will not be able to "print" new money in sufficient quantities fast enough to compensate for all the money not being paid up-and-down the line... and one morning we will wake up and discover that all those promises to pay were sham promises based on no productive activity whatsoever... and that will be a sad day. Perhaps the Dow Jones Industrial Average will hit 35,000 on that day.
Nothing can stop this chain of bankruptcy. It's already baked in the cake. There is probably some wish on the part of those in charge, like Mr. Obama, to try everything possible to postpone it. And there is likewise surely a huge effort underway in the banking sector right now to cream off as much cash as possible so that when this sucker does go down they will bethink themselves better positioned to survive the consequences.

Personally, I believe that the damage was mostly done during the tenure of poor dim George W. Bush, and his predecessor Bill Clinton. I suspect that Mr. Obama learned at the height of 2008 election campaign -- during those days of the Lehman collapse and the TARP -- just how completely the government -- and the people of the USA -- were in fact hostage to the banking system, and that it has been his unfortunate role to pretend that there is some other fate to bargain for besides this sucker going down. It is probably why he continues to smoke so much. He must be lighting one Marlboro off the tip of another, one after another, in whatever inner sanctum he repairs to when the midnight chimes toll around the White House. It's sad to think of this graceful, still rather young man going down in history as the chump-of-the-century, a reincarnation of Herbert Hoover on steroids, with sugar on top.

Animosities brewing as they are among the white trash elements of the country, I just hope this sucker doesn't resolve into an ugly bout of attempted ethnic cleansing. Certainly Obama's racial make-up has inspired a revival of the Ku Klux spirit around the Nascar ovals. I'm sincerely worried that the misdeeds of people name Blankfein, Rubin, and Madoff could provoke a red-white-and-blue pogrom.

The big mystery for the moment is how come a few good men of stature in important places have not stepped forward to say the right thing or do the right deed. How come no US congressperson challenged the knavish behavior of Republicans who condone malicious idiocy that they know to be false like the so-called "birther" activity. How come no putative "progressive" has called the Democrats on their disingenuous failure to call illegal immigrants what they are. How come no state attorney general has filed charges against TBTF bank misconduct even if the US attorney general lies in state over at the US DOJ. How come no political figure of any stripe has called for the resignation of Summers, Rubin, Gensler and other Goldman Sachs "sleepers" infesting high levels of government. How come Dylan Ratigan is the only visible figure in any major newsroom willing to identify the precise nature of the meta-swindle.
When this sucker goes down, our primary task will be reorganizing American life on a much more local and de-complexified basis. It's a very big assignment and especially daunting against a possible background of political disorder. The losses will be epic and the changes severe, but it doesn't have to mean the end of recognizably American culture. There will be very little money around, and it may end up being a certificate backed by gold issued by a bank other than the Federal Reserve. Or maybe we'll just be swapping stuff for the makings of dinner.

So many forces are roiling around 'out there' now that it's hard to believe that the authorities in government and banking can keep the illusion of normality going a whole lot longer. The possible litigation against Goldman Sachs-style frauds by a thousand aggrieved victims is enough to paralyze the system. Meanwhile, trillions in credit default swaps are ticking away like dirty bombs. Greece is going down, with Portugal, Spain, Ireland, and the UK standing by to go next. Nobody can pay their bills. Before long, the old folks won't get their checks. Then the poor folks. Lately, I wonder if there will even be an election six months from now.
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Sure, keep in mind it's James Kunstler (if you don't know of him, his work or viewpoints go to Wikipedia), but he's got some very valid points.

More--but from me--tomorrow.

Link to post:
http://www.truthout.org/james-howard-kunstler-a-still-moment58898