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"Green Shoots"? Yeah, Right.

The “ghost fleet“

Revealed: The ghost fleet of the recession

The biggest and most secretive gathering of ships in maritime history lies at anchor east of Singapore. Never before photographed, it is bigger than the U.S. and British navies combined but has no crew, no cargo and no destination – and is why your Christmas stocking may be on the light side this year…

…The world’s ship owners and government economists would prefer you not to see this symbol of the depths of the plague still crippling the world’s economies.

So they have been quietly retired to this equatorial backwater, to be maintained only by a handful of bored sailors. The skeleton crews are left alone to fend off the ever-present threats of piracy and collisions in the congested waters as the hulls gather rust and seaweed at what should be their busiest time of year…

…This time last year, an Aframax tanker capable of carrying 80,000 tons of cargo would cost £31,000 a day ($50,000). Now it is about £3,400 ($5,500)…

There are no “green shoots”, boys and girls – just a bit of money-shuffling which government and corporate bean counters will call “growth” over the next few quarters…but out there in the real world, nothing is happening. The global economy is still declining – not rising, not even bottoming out. And eventually the unsustainable fiscal policies of all the major nations of the world will come home to roost – you can’t spend your way to wealth; and when you’re broke, borrowing money just makes things worse. The final collapse of all this will be quite stunning – very sad, too, as a lot of people are going to get hurt who wouldn’t have if we hadn’t tried to bail out failed corporations like GM and BofA…

HAT TIP: Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis

UPDATE: US credit shrinks:

Professor Tim Congdon from International Monetary Research said US bank loans have fallen at an annual pace of almost 14pc in the three months to August (from $7,147bn to $6,886bn).

“There has been nothing like this in the USA since the 1930s,” he said. “The rapid destruction of money balances is madness.”

The M3 “broad” money supply, watched as an early warning signal for the economy a year or so later, has been falling at a 5pc annual rate.

Similar concerns have been raised by David Rosenberg, chief strategist at Gluskin Sheff, who said that over the four weeks up to August 24, bank credit shrank at an “epic” 9pc annual pace, the M2 money supply shrank at 12.2pc and M1 shrank at 6.5pc.

“For the first time in the post-WW2 [Second World War] era, we have deflation in credit, wages and rents and, from our lens, this is a toxic brew,” he said.

Earn as much as you can; save as much as you can; pay off as much of your debt as possible – those who are wise, now, will bear the next few years better than those who aren’t.

Phrase of the Day

Sage advice from the father of our Country:

Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair; the rest is in the hands of God. – George Washington

In the end, its all men and women of honor can hope to do.

Culture of Death Stumped Over the Way Killing Innocents Working Out

The story:

India’s feminists and population control-pushing government are “stumped” by the dramatic drop of female births among the wealthier classes due to sex-selective abortions, reports the Globe and Mail’s Indian correspondent Stephanie Nolen.

Due to a ‘son preference’ in Indian culture, the use of new technologies to detect and abort baby girls has become widespread…

… India’s 2001 census revealed that there were only 927 girls aged 0-6 per 1,000 boys, a marked drop from the 1991 census, which found 945 per 1000. This means that in that decade there were 35 million fewer females registered in the country than males, according to Canada’s International Development Research Centre.

The statistics in certain areas are shocking. The IDRC revealed last year that the wealthier urban families of the Indian Punjab have merely 300 girls for every 1,000 boys. In South Delhi, the ratio is 832:1000, and in the state of Haryana it’s 822:1000.

“Conventional wisdom has long held that as India develops – as more families struggle their way into the middle class, more girls go to school and more women join the work force – traditional ideas about the lesser value of girls will erode,” writes Nolen. “The incentive to abort them would fall away.”

“Instead, the opposite has happened,” she continues, “and the reasons – and solutions – have government and activists stumped.”

Its really quite simple – ABORTION IS EVIL. When you propose to do something evil, what you will get is evil results. I’m not going too fast here, am I, liberals? You do realize that if you’re killing innocent people that you’re not going to get sweetness, light and reason as a result, don’t you?

Well, of course you don’t. Because you don’t want to – because its easier to be a coward and go along with evil rather than bravely do the right thing. In India and China, its girls bearing the brunt of abortion…in the United States, is minority children…elsewhere in the world where abortion is legal is probably many other evils. A rotten, stinking thing is abortion – and we must end it.

Senate Votes to Kill ACORN Funding

The story:

Senator Mike Johanns (R-NE) introduced an amendment to the HUD and Transportation appropriation bill to strip ACORN of all federal funding. A week ago, Johanns wouldn’t have gotten the amendment to the floor. Today, however, after three straight days of BigGovernment.com’s video exposés of ACORN offices in Washington DC, New York City, and Baltimore offering assistance to pimping, tax evasion, and trafficking in underage Salvadorean girls, Johanns not only got his vote — but he got an impressive bipartisan showing. The Senate passed the Johanns amendment 83-7.

At the beginning of the vote, it appeared that Democrats might resist. Initially, a half-dozen Democrats cast votes in opposition to the amendment. A few more cast votes against it as the rest of the Senate voted, but the tide appeared to shift. More and more Democrats signed onto the amendment, and votes started changing. One male voice could be heard in the chamber saying, “I want to change my vote!” Among those who changed their votes: Tom Udall (D-NM), Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), and Herb Kohl (D-WI).

Now, these are Obama’s boys and girls, and he won’t let them go hungry…we’ll have to see if ACORN is really cut off or if some sort of late night, backroom deal isn’t reached in a reconciliation package to provide these ACORN crooks with taxpayer money. Be that as it may, this is proof that the times are changing…just 9 short months ago, liberalism was triumphant…now people are moving away from it, fearful of being anywhere near any liberal icon.

How Many People Were There?

Estimates range from the dinosaur media’s ludicrous 70,000 to internet rumors of 2,000,000. How many, really?

Charlie Martin gives the answer.

ALERT: Liberals should not read the linked article…it’ll give you fits.

Two Wins for the Good Guys

In New York:

New York City police and the FBI raided at least one home in the borough of Queens early on Monday as part of an investigation into suspected terrorism, focusing on one man who has been under surveillance, officials said.

Members of U.S. Congress briefed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation said there was no imminent danger.

“There was nothing imminent, and they are very good now at tracking potentially dangerous actions and this was preventive,” said Charles Schumer, a U.S. Senator from New York who was among those briefed by FBI officials.

And in Somalia:

A senior al Qaeda operative behind the 1998 attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania is believed to have been killed during a raid by covert forces in southern Somalia.

Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan and another person are thought to have been killed in the southern town of Barawe during a raid by what was originally reported to be French commandos; the raid is now said to have been carried out by US Special Forces.

Congratulations to the magnificent men and women of the United States armed forces and American law enforcement – and a tip of the hat to President Obama for having the courage to sign off on the Somalia operation. If we let our troops do their thing, we’ll remain safe…

Wilson to House Democrats: Get Lost!

That’s the way to treat those corrupt hypocrites:

One apology is enough, a digging-in-his-heels Rep. Joe Wilson said Sunday, challenging Democratic leaders who want him to say on the House floor that he’s sorry for yelling “You lie!” during President Barack Obama’s health care speech to Congress.

The leadership plans to propose a resolution of disapproval this week if the South Carolina Republican doesn’t publicly apologize to Congress. Such a measure would put lawmakers on the record as condemning those two words, uttered during last Wednesday’s prime-time speech, that have become a fundraising boon for the defiant Wilson and his Democratic challenger.

Wilson said a resolution would show that Democrats simply wanted to play politics and divert attention from a health care overhaul that is lagging in Congress.

“I am not going to apologize again. I apologized to the president on Wednesday night. I was advised then that, ‘Thank you, now let’s get on to a civil discussion of the issues,’” Wilson said. “I’ve apologized one time. The apology was accepted by the president, by the vice president, who I know. I am not apologizing again.”

It was only barely necessary for Wilson to apologize in the first place – and not for what he said, but for where he said it. President Obama is lying – or is a complete fool. No one can increase the number of people covered and reduce costs at the same time – anyone who says such is a knave or a fool. Wilson finally let the cat out of the bag – we know darned well that Obama and his Democrats aren’t playing honestly in this health care debate, and all other debates…they are saying whatever poll-tested, focus-grouped words seem necessary to ram Obamacare through…and if those words are at variance with the facts, they simply don’t care. To Obama and his Democrats, winning is more important than honor. Wilson called them on it.

Phrase of the Day

Freedom is what we need:

Economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life which can be separated from the rest; it is the control of the means for all our ends. And whoever has sole control of the means must also determine which ends are to be served, which values are to be rates higher and which lower, in short, what men should believe and strive for. – F A Hayek

The "Financial-Regulatory Complex"

The nasty mix of Big Government and Big Corporation:

…President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of the birth of a military-industrial complex. Today we have a financial-regulatory complex, and it has meant a consolidation of power and privilege. We’ve created a class of politically protected “too big to fail” institutions, and the current proposals for regulatory reform further cement this notion. Even more worrying, with so many explicit and implicit financial guarantees, we are courting a bigger financial crisis the next time something major goes wrong.

We should stop using political favors as a means of managing an economic sector. Unfortunately, though, recent experience with health care reform shows we are moving in the opposite direction and not heeding the basic lessons of the financial crisis. Finance and health care are two separate issues, of course, but in both cases we’re making the common mistake of digging in durable political protections for special interest groups.

One disturbing portent came over the summer when it was reported that the Obama administration had promised deals to doctors and to pharmaceutical companies under the condition that they publicly support health care reform. That’s another example of creating favored beneficiaries through politics…

You cannot have justice if there’s even a little bit of injustice in it – you also can’t have the truth if there’s an element of lie; what is good tends to spotlessness. Right now, we’ve got a free market which is so tightly bound to government and so desirous and dependent upon special favors that it simply isn’t really a free market. It apes many of the aspects of a free market, but just as injustice and lies corrupt justice and truth, so does any special privilege in the market corrupt the free market. What we’ve got is a bastard hybrid – neither socialist nor capitalist; neither entirely free nor entirely servile…but the bad news is that no matter how you slice it and dice it, the people with the best political and corporate connections always wind up with the best part of the deal.

I am a free-market advocate – it is the only way to rationally distribute goods and services; what I want us to do is return to a free market…a market where neither government picks the winners nor where monopolists prevent competition. We’ve got monopolistic winner-pickers, and if you wonder why your 401K is down, your house is upside down, your health insurance premiums are through the roof, your college education is extortionate…well, the place to look is in the offices of Wall Street and DC.

What should we do? Allow failures to fail, and do whatever we can to encourage the new and the small against the old and the large. General Motors is not a sacred element of the United States – its just a corporation which screwed itself in to financial oblivion (with much government help, of course). We can live without GM – but we can’t live without a free market. Someone will make cars in the United States – and if it isn’t a corrupt, failed GM living off taxpayer dollars, then it will be a brash, new start up living off a dream and hard work. Who says that Citi and BofA are immutable parts of America’s financial system? You think that after thousands of years of people going in to banking that they’ll stop doing it if BofA goes bankrupt?

We’ve been sold a lot of nonsense over the years – and as our current crisis picked up steam, the level of nonsense has risen to amazing heights. Its time to have done with it – and done with those who got us in to this mess (with the understanding, of course, that we partially got our own fool selves in to it). Stop bailing out; stop providing special privileges; stop picking winners and losers – help the poor, encourage the hard-working and then just get out of the way.