Year: 2015

What is it with Bill Gross and his Morbid Death Blogs?

rafifarber The Jewish Libertarian Blog ,

I like Bill Gross. He’s not exactly an Austrian economist, but with him it’s like Kol Dodi Dofek, the Voice of my Beloved Knocking. (No, Bill is not my beloved, it’s a concept people.) His voice knocks truth even though he doesn’t get the whole picture. מציץ מן החרכים. He stumbles onto truth when he’s being sincere. But he’s been extremely morbid lately as if he’s on his deathbed, and very open about it too.

He was the head of PIMCO, formerly the largest bond fund, which basically kicked him out because he couldn’t stop saying the truth that bonds were garbage. Last week or thereabouts he came out with this really morbid post about death and bonds and the end of all things. It was widely syndicated and I saw it everywhere. The best line from that post was this:

Funny how bonds were labeled “certificates of confiscation” back in the early 1980’s when yields were 14%. What should we call them now?

He was talking about negative yields, how basically people are now loaning say $100 to a government only to get back $98 in ten years. Negative interest, which makes no logical sense, unless people are assuming all banks will fail so they can’t put their money there.

The first paragraph of that post was especially gloomy. Here it is:

Having turned the corner on my 70th year, like prize winning author Julian Barnes, I have a sense of an ending. Death frightens me and causes what Barnes calls great unrest, but for me it is not death but the dying that does so. After all, we each fade into unconsciousness every night, do we not? Where was “I” between 9 and 5 last night? Nowhere that I can remember, with the exception of my infrequent dreams. Where was “I” for the 13 billion years following the Big Bang? I can’t remember, but assume it will be the same after I depart – going back to where I came from, unknown, unremembered, and unconscious after billions of future eons. I’ll miss though, not knowing what becomes of “you” and humanity’s torturous path – how it will all turn out in the end. I’ll miss thatsense of an ending, but it seems more of an uneasiness, not a great unrest. What I fear most is the dying – the “Tuesdays with Morrie” that for Morrie became unbearable each and every day in our modern world of medicine and extended living; the suffering that accompanied him and will accompany most of us along that downward sloping glide path filled with cancer, stroke, and associated surgeries which make life less bearable than it was a day, a month, a decade before.

It’s like modern Poe. Creepy stuff. And now he’s out with another one of these deathbed rants, even though I haven’t heard anything about him being sick. Saw it on Bloomberg, “The Amount of Money I’ll Give Away is Staggering, Even To Me”. Well, OK Bill, we get it , we’re all going to die, but what is going on with you? Why do you have to be so public about all of our imminent deaths?

Gross is the Bond King. He knows it’s all a sham and it’s about to break. Maybe he’s a little ashamed of being a part of this whole global scheme of governments borrowing and then taxing you to pay back the interest it owes you on its bonds.

Can Greece Pay Up €750M Tomorrow?

rafifarber Eurozone Crisis, The Jewish Libertarian Blog , ,

Yanis Varoufakis says it can be paid. Many aren’t too sure about that. But even if it is, there won’t be enough money left to pay Greek bureaucrats, who will have to be issued IOU’s, which will start circulating as a parallel currency, which will be a de facto exit from the Euro. I went over this in my column for  TheStreet.

The Greek government passed a controversial bill on April 24 mandating local governments to transfer idle cash reserves to the Greek Central Bank. From there, the funds can be borrowed by the state to (theoretically) squeak by its upcoming IMF bill, totaling €967 million ($1.05 billion): some €201 million of interest payments, due by May 6, with a €766 million principle payment coming up on May 12.

The problem is, the bill might be far too little to help.

It looks like the Greek State will barely get through May 6, but after that, the numbers are disputed, and time is of the essence. While the government estimates the idle cash seizure move will net anywhere from €1.5 billion to €2.5 billion, secondary reports of local Greek media claim that only €160 million has actually been collected from local authorities, hospitals, universities and municipalities.

Whether the Greek State defaults to the IMF or defaults to its own bureaucrats doesn’t matter. They want to spend more money and the people who print the money don’t want to give it to them. So they’ll have to print their own. That is the meaning of Grexit.

Watch Italian bonds. They’re next.

A Conversation I had Years Ago with Feiglin Sheds Light on Greece

rafifarber Eurozone Crisis, The Jewish Libertarian Blog ,

I remember it was April 28, 2010. Happens to be the Gregorian date of my Savta Betty’s Yahrzeit. The last time I wrote a post about her it was for when my daughter Dafna Betty was born. A lot has happened since then. I said there that if I had a son I’d call him Fry, and I did have a son, thank God, and I called him Fry (Efraim), after Phillip J. Fry my favorite cartoon character, and Avraham, after my Sabba. Since then I also now have a niece named Lila, which is close enough to Leela from the same cartoon, so there’s now Fry and Lila, which is almost perfect.

But anyway, on April 28, 2010, I was finally released from prison, AKA the army, after six months of wasted time. The very next day, I went to Herzliya to hang out with Shmuel Sackett in front of the Herzliya Likud branch. It was a Likud central committee vote about postponing the Central Committee elections. All that seems so remote now as I couldn’t give a crap about Likud anymore.

To the point finally, I love ramble writing. We lost that vote. Moshe Feiglin was considering leaving the Likud then. We spoke for a few minutes a few days later and he said to me something like this:

“Look if we leave Likud, Netanyahu will have a party, Ketzaleh (then head of the extreme right wing National Union party) will celebrate, but one thing will remain: Reality. And the reality is, we need Jewish leadership.”

And so it is with Greece. I can’t find a single main stream media source that doesn’t baffle you with bullshit about this whole thing. Nothing written in the mainstream says anything about reality.

The reality is, the Greek government wants to spend money, and it has no money, and it can’t get any money. That’s reality. Whatever Tsipras and Varoufakis and the rest of those wacknut clowns claim is “just” and “fair” and whatever other label they want to put on it, there’s nothing left. They spent it all. That’s it.

Money may be fiat these days, but it still represents tangible wealth, of which there is only a finite amount that cannot be printed into existence. It has to be produced. And government doesn’t produce anything. The only tangible things it produces are designed to destroy wealth, like armies and weapons. And spies and drones and prisons.

So however long this drags out, reality will remain. Greece wants to spend money that it does not have. After all the games and all the tricks and all the blabbering about justice and fairness and values and morality and all the other crap pulled out of Greek politician’s asses, it’s either there or it isn’t, and it just ain’t there.

The reality is, Greece will default. And further out, all governments going deeper and deeper into debt will default. It’s simply reality. It cannot be stopped by sophistry and Orwellian equivocation and fancy meaningless language fed to the mainstream media. No one, nothing, can stop it.

And once it starts, the dominoes will fall very quickly. Reality will always stand in the way of bullshit. No exceptions.

 

Six Days Until Greece Defaults

rafifarber Eurozone Crisis, Gold and Silver, The Jewish Libertarian Blog , , ,

Things are starting to fall into place. We almost have another gold flag today. We may yet if gold turns positive by the end of the day. It is barely down.

Stocks are way down. Bonds are down hard. Dollar is tanking.

Gold is even. But oil is up.

In any case, this will all get much worse come Tuesday May 12, when Greece has to repay €775M to the IMF, but probably does not have the money to do so. According to Zerohedge, there will be no deal by Monday, May 11. Here ZH isn’t just speculating, but quoting a source. So they’re probably right here.

Further evidence for no deal by Monday is that Tsipras and his Syriza socialist wacknutters just reversed a measure passed by the previous government to fire 15,000 useless bureaucrats. They will now be rehired, because putting human robots on the payroll of a European backed bailout is the moral thing to do, I guess.

I’m sure the IMF will be really happy about this. You have no money but you hire 15,000 people to do nothing but shuffle paper and screw up the economy. There’s no way Greece is getting any more money. Forget it.

We’re 6 days away from D-Day, finally, on Greece.

Hasta La Vista, Eurozone.

Rooting for the Blacks, as long as they only go after police, not private property

rafifarber The Jewish Libertarian Blog , ,

I am against all violence against innocent private people as a matter of morality. I am also against all active violence against the State or its officials, which includes violence against police. Totally against, not from a moral perspective, but a utilitarian one. Attacking a policeman or burning State property doesn’t accomplish anything. There is no point to it, so it should not be done. Morally I have no problem with it, and would not consider someone who attacks a policeman necessarily as a bad person. Stupid, maybe.

The only exception is if the State is actively moving on a vast population in mass destruction of property, in which case I would say it is both moral and practically effective to start destroying State property in self defense, as in slashing tires of the busses that are coming to expel you from your home in Gush Katif. But still, violence against  the actual people is still a pretty bad idea.

The best way to protest police is to do it passively, by sitting down on a road, or by police headquarters, the way the blacks protested the State in the 1960’s. That was perfect. I would have loved to be part of that.

So when I came across this piece of news, that the Baltimore riots are now spreading to Jerusalem with Ethiopians clashing with police, I was happy. Though I think this is stupid and would not myself join them, I’m still rooting for the Ethiopians, as long as they ONLY target police or state property, NEVER private property.

To be more effective, they need to stage nonviolent sit-ins, overcrowd police stations, the way Gandhi did it with the British.

The solution, of course, is to cut off welfare, end the minimum wage, get rid of child labor laws, and end all drug laws. Let the Ethiopians work for whatever salary they can get on the market in whatever industry needs them. Unemployment will fall to zero, and there will be less idle Ethiopians on welfare and shut out of the labor markets by the minimum wage to clash with police, and these riots wouldn’t erupt.

So, good luck, and give the pigs a run for their money. Meaning our money. But you don’t have anyone’s support if you just go torching private property.

 

Libertarian Ambivalence on Yom HaAtzmaut, Israel Independence Day

rafifarber Jewish State, The Jewish Libertarian Blog ,

Last year I wrote this post on Times of Israel entitled “Why I do not celebrate the birth of the State of Israel”, though I do celebrate Yom HaAtzmaut, Israel Independence day. I went through all the reasons I hate the institution of the State, and ended with this:

I do not celebrate the birth of the State of Israel because I despise it. There is nothing it does or provides that free independent Jews couldn’t provide better and more efficiently. I wish the State would go away and let private Jews protect themselves and organize their lives based on voluntary agreements. All the politics about whose money goes which way would vanish and we could stop all the infighting. Life would finally be peaceful.

So what, then, am I celebrating? I am celebrating Yom HaAtzmaut. Independence Day. Today is not Yom Medinat Yisrael. Today is Yom HaAtzmaut. I am celebrating the fact that I am free from the British State which harassed Jews much more. This is indeed something to celebrate. I am not yet free, however, from the Jewish State. But God willing, soon, I will be.

This year it’s still harder to celebrate Yom HaAtzmaut. I suspect it will get harder and harder as the State gets bigger and bigger. It’s hard because while I know that I celebrate Jewish independence from Britain, I also know that everyone else is indeed celebrating the institution of the State itself. So it feels really awkward to be celebrating together with people who are celebrating something I hate.

Not that I’m the only one who’s ambivalent. Everyone else is, too, because when it comes down to it, they all hate the State as well. They just don’t want to come out and say it as honestly as I do, because they don’t want to sound like “anarchists” or some other scary word.

Last night it was especially evident. I’m in Zichron Ya’akov now visiting my brother and his family, who just moved back to Israel after 15 years. We ended up going to a house of a bunch of hippieish modernistic Jews, like the kind I used to hang out with in America. The Dvar Torah at the end of the service was, essentially, in so many words, something along the lines of “Even though we all hate the State and the people in charge are disgusting, we still have to celebrate it because Rav Nachman says everything will be good eventually.”

No, he did not say it that way exactly, but that was the message. It was more diplomatic of course, like “Even though there is a lot to fix in the State, it will all be better at some point.” The point is it started off conceding that there are a lot of problems. Generally, Jewish holidays don’t start off on that kind of negative.

Like, take Chanukah. The geulah, redemption, was not complete, but we only say that at the end. And Purim. Same thing, but we only say that the redemption was not complete at the end. Even Pesach, very happy, but we remind ourselves at the end that 80% of the Israelites did not make it out of Egypt alive. Footnote. But Yom HaAtzmaut, everyone knows there’s something seriously wrong here, right out in the open, and it feels disgusting for everyone to celebrate a political institution, and that awkward feeling everyone has needs to be addressed immediately. It has to be said at the beginning, because nobody feels completely right about this.

With other Jewish holidays, the celebration is obvious, we just have to remind ourselves that it’s not completely happy yet. With Yom HaAtzmaut, we have to remind ourselves that things aren’t completely horrible, and there is still something to celebrate about this.

Which is essentially what I say, but without dressing it up in qualifiers and watered-down language.

I was sitting next to my brother in the back who, it is publicly known so it’s not loshon harah, does not believe in the narrative of the Exodus as historical. So the ultimate irony hit me. Here’s what I told him.

“So, you don’t believe in the Biblical God and I don’t believe in the State, and here we are thanking God for the State.”

And we both cracked up.

On Yom HaAtzmaut, I say Hallel, with a bracha, but I can no longer do it in a minyan, because they say Hallel for the State, and I say it in spite of the State. So from now on, I daven alone on Yom HaAtzmaut.

If there are any Jewish libertarians out there anywhere in the world, male or female, who celebrate Yom HaAtzmaut but not the State of Israel, then let’s make a minyan (egalitarian even, if we can’t scrape up the male numbers) and do Hallel, through Skype, through whatever.

Jeb Bush Loves Obama and the NSA Surveillance Programs

rafifarber The Jewish Libertarian Blog , ,

Just when you thought the Bush family couldn’t get any worse, Jeb Bush comes out with this disgusting praise for Obama. Not there aren’t a few (very very few) things to praise Obama for. I praise Obama for deescalating the fight with Cuba, and for being just a bit less of a schmuck on marijuana than most other presidents.

But Jeb Bush praises him for tracking the phone calls and emails of every American, a program introduced by his alcoholic war monger cokehead brother George. This is that wonderful program that Edward Snowden bravely made us all aware of, God bless him.

From RT (Or is that too pro Soviet Union? So is the NSA monitoring your phone calls more American then)?

“I would say the best part of the Obama administration would be his continuance of the protections of the homeland using the big metadata programs, the NSA being enhanced,” Bush said.

“Advancing this — even though he never defends it, even though he never openly admits it – there has been a continuation of a very important service, which is the first obligation, I think of our national government is to keep us safe. And the technologies that now can be applied to make that so, while protecting civil liberties, are there. And he’s not abandoned them, even though there was some indication that he might.”

These programs cannot be stopped. Nobody will stop them. There’s a very small chance, very small, that Rand Paul might stop them, but I doubt it. If he is elected and does stop them I’d be very surprised. I doubt any president even has the ability to stop them at this point.

Government is turning into Skynet.

Israel’s Price Controls on New Books Come Home to Roost

rafifarber Economics, The Jewish Libertarian Blog ,

Three years ago, I wrote this, when some idiotic law was passed to force up the price of books so authors would make more money. Nobody likes the fact that when prices go up, demand goes down:

According to the bill, stores will not be allowed to discount the price of a book for 18 months following its publication. Therefore, the logic goes, people will be forced to buy the book at a higher price, thereby “protecting the author’s income”.

Well, this is genius. That should work well.

But there’s another possibility, with a likelihood of something along the lines of absolutely certain: Sales of new books will plummet at Tzomet Sfarim and Steimatzky when consumers can no longer find good deals on them. Authors’ royalties will fall through the floor. Tzomet Sfarim and Steimatzky’s sales will plunge in general,  chains will go out of business, unemployment will go up, and people will cry to the government to bail out the bookstores, or better yet, pass a national “support Israeli literature tax” to give the industry a boost so authors don’t starve because nobody is buying their books.

It took a year since the law took effect, but now the author lobby is pissed for shooting itself in groin. Sales of new books have plummeted. What a surprise. 

מה נשתנה? שנה לחוק הספרים

שנה עברה מאז נכנס לתוקפו חוק הספרים השנוי במחלוקת. התוצאה בינתיים היא ירידה במכירות, ברווחים ובמספר הספרים שיצאו לאור. החוק שרבים קיוו כי בזכותו ייחלץ הענף מהמשבר, לא מספק את התוצאות הרצויות

What happened? One Year After The Book Law

One year since the controversial Book Law came into effect, the results are a fall in sales, profits, and the number of books published. The law that many thought would save the industry from crisis has not delivered the desired results.

And now publishers are are not making money, so they’re not publishing new authors at all, because new authors are subject to price controls. It’s not going to be easy getting this piece of crap repealed.

Just like the minimum wage hurts the weakest workers, minimum book prices slaughter the weakest authors.

Amazing. The Law of Supply and Demand still works, even after these politicians passed laws to override it. I can’t believe it. Who can? Surely not Limor Livnat or Nitzan Horowitz.

Livnat has since retired from a life of telling people what to do and dictating how much books she didn’t write, doesn’t publish, and isn’t trying to sell should cost people, but “continues to work on projects” for the betterment of whatever. She should really stop doing anything, just stand still, don’t move, and don’t talk to anybody. Politicians should not try to better anything.

Don’t breathe too hard either.