HALF-FULL REPORT 03/21/14
THE 1974 OBVERSE
CHINA DEFAULT?
China faces the biggest property default on record as credit curbs threaten to break the housing boom, leaving a string of "ghost towns" across the country. The Chinese newspaper Economic Daily News said Xingrun Properties, in the coastal city of Ningbo, is on the brink of collapse with debts of $570m, mostly owed to banks. The local government has set up a working group to contain the crisis. "As far as we know, this is the largest property developer in recent years at risk of bankruptcy," says Zhiwei Zhang, from Nomura Securities. "We believe that a sharp property market correction could lead to a systemic crisis in China, and is the biggest risk China faces in 2014. The risk is particularly high in third and fourth-tier cities, which accounted for 67% of housing under construction in 2013." Yu Xuejun, the banking regulator for Jiangsu province, says developers are running out of cash. This risks undermining land sales needed to fund local government entities. "Credit defaults will definitely happen. It's just a matter of timing, scale and how big the impact is," he said. The charts below tell the story.
IGNORING THE GLOBAL WAR
The "news" is resolutely out of context. A subject about which virtually nothing is known - the mystery of the missing airplane - gets saturation "coverage," while events of potentially earth-shaking importance are largely unreported. Any self-respecting "news network" would relentlessly run stories about the ongoing demonstrations from Caracas to Maracaibo - demonstrations surely the equal of those from Maidan Square in Kiev - but no. The Venezuelan uprising may turn out to be the biggest story of all, because it is part of a world-wide battle that pits anti-Western tyrannies against their own people, and against their neighbors. It is of a piece with Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, Iran and Russia itself, where, just a few days ago, fifty thousand Muscovites demonstrated against Putin's imperialist moves in Ukraine. I've been saying for years that we're the target of a global war, that the Pyongyang-Beijing-Moscow-Tehran-Damascus-Havana-Caracas Axis of Evil is hell-bent to dominate and destroy us. Now the evidence is so clear that only a willfully blind man could fail to see it.
HOW THE ENVIRONMENTAL LOBBY SUPPORTS RUSSIAN IMPERIALISM
The Russian economy is highly dependent on oil and gas exports, and reducing Russian oil and gas exports would be the most direct way to cause pain to the Russian leadership. However, Europe is heavily dependent on Russian gas and oil, particularly gas. The countries in the EU did not need to be in this position, because the EU has plenty of gas reserves that could be economically tapped using hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Because of the environmental lobby, though, the EU has allowed itself to become dependent on foreign energy sources -- particularly Russian. Perhaps Peter Foster said it best in Canada's Financial Post on March 8: "Europe's alternative-energy policy is in a shambles. The EU would be even more vulnerable but for a typically unanticipated example of free-market ingenuity: hydraulic fracturing and the boom in oil shale gas. But guess what: Greens are everywhere resolutely opposed to fracking, and nowhere more than in Europe. [L]ike their peace march colleagues half a century ago, they are ultimately dupes for an authoritarian agenda."
HOW UN-AMERICAN IS HARRY REID?
Aging industrialists Charles and David Koch are "un-American," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said in a speech on the Senate floor Feb. 26. That's an expression we haven't heard much since the early 1950s, when Joe McCarthy was accusing Army dentists, State Department clerks and various and sundry others of being secret Communists. Back then, liberals thought it was vile to call someone "un-American." Some still do. Sen. Reid's screed was "the definition of McCarthyism," said Joe Scarborough, host of the "Morning Joe" program on MSNBC. His guests March 6th agreed. So just who is Un-American here?
HALF-FULL REPORT 03/14/14
Important Announcement: the last section of this HFR is devoted to addressing concerns regarding the New TTP Forum. The theme for the week is Birds of a Hubristic Feather. The shades of Sophocles and Aeschylus are looking up at us from the depths of Hades in sad wonder that humans in power never learn the lesson the Greeks knew so well two and a half millennia ago. Thus we get such marvelously good news this week as Pelosi Galore announcing that Dems Won't Run from Obamacare in Midterms. You're just not going to get a better example of masochistic hubris than that. It's of course the path to electoral disaster in November. Zero could take a different path, but can be supremely confident this will never happen - because Zero is a solipsistic narcissist who lives in Hubris City. In addition, he's ignorant, uneducated, and actually pretty stupid - all his affirmative action Ivy League degrees notwithstanding. He's glib and shrewd and smooth - but not smart. Now,is there anyone on the planet more hubristic than Zero? Why, yes - that would be Vladimir Vladimirovich Pooty-Poot Putin. Oh, look! He's riding a horse without a shirt! Oh! He's so big and tough and strong! Oh, what a pile of horse manure.
IS PUTIN IN A FANTASY WORLD?
Russia risks a wave of capital flight and a shattering economic crisis as the West prepares a package of sanctions over the seizure of Crimea. Chancellor Angela Merkel spelled out the danger for Russia in a speech to the German Parliament yesterday (3/13) that silenced pro-Kremlin voices in her own coalition and left no doubt that Europe is now fully behind the US on punitive measures. "If Russia continues on its course of the past weeks, that will not only be a great catastrophe for Ukraine. It will cause massive damage to Russia, both economically and politically," she said. "None of us wants it to come to this, but we are determined to act. Let me be absolutely clear; the territorial integrity of Ukraine is not up for discussion." The West has threatened visa bans and an asset freeze on individuals as early as next Monday (3/17) unless Russia steps back from the brink on the annexation of Crimea. And that is only the begining. Russia has threatened to retaliate with "symmetrical sanctions" but Tim Ash, from Standard Bank, said it is a one-sided contest that Moscow cannot win. Here's why.
THE POGO PRESIDENCY
Ever hear of a guy named Walt Kelly? He was born in Philly in 1913, moved to California in the 30s to draw Donald Duck cartoons for Walt Disney, and started his own newspaper comic strip in 1949. It featured anthropomorphic animals in Georgia's Okefenokee Swamp, with the main character named Ponce de Leon Montgomery County Alabama Georgia Beauregard Possum - a dig at the South's pretentious aristocracy. Kelly titled his comic strip after Ponce's nickname - Pogo. If you grew up in the 50s or 60s, you grew up with Pogo, along with an innumerable cast of lovable animal characters (there were almost 1,000 over the years), all poking gentle fun at the human condition. In 1971, two years before his death from diabetes, he published the cartoon for which he is best known. 
This is more frighteningly relevant today than 42 years ago - and the "us" is all of us. There are varying degrees of complicity. At the top, of course, is an Anti-American President who hates his own country. Zero is an affirmative action baby, handed everything on a platter without earning it because of his race and made-up bio. He's our #1 security threat because he doesn't want to defend us, and worse, doesn't know how if he did want to. Bad combo. Which bring us to the real security threat beyond our shores. It isn't Russia, with its one-trick pony economy that can't even get itself above water with oil at $100 a barrel. Putin is all bare-chested bluster, all hat and no cattle. No, the real foreign threat we face is China. I've been going to China since 1979, and as you know, just got back from there again last week. Here are three pictures of the spectacular places we visited that I took with my Panasonic DMC-TZ5 compact camera. There is a particular reason for me to show them to you.
OBAMACARE AND A CARAVAN OF UNICORNS
Obamacare will reduce the earnings of its 300,000 members by up to $5 an hour, said a union which represents chiefly lower wage workers in service industries. Obamacare "threatens the middle class with higher premiums, loss of hours, and a shift to part-time work and less comprehensive coverage," said Unite Here. "The Obamacare website says (my husband and I) would have to pay $8,057.04 a year more to keep the great insurance we have now," said Angela Portillo, a maid at the Mandalay Bay Resort in Las Vegas. "That's a $3.87 per hour pay cut." Americans who've been hurt by Obamacare outnumber those who say they've benefited from it by more than 2 to 1, according to a Rasmussen poll March 3 and a Gallup poll March 6. Administration officials hold out hope for a rush of signups before the March 31st deadline. I, by contrast, hold out hope my retirement will be financed by the arrival of a caravan of unicorns laden with baskets filled with gold dust. My hope may be the more realistic.