Travel day

I'm off to suburban NY for some family issues from today through Tuesday. If you're in the area and would like to meet, let's see if we can schedule something.

Back to the books

It's time to brush off my web writing skills as I'm likely to be setting up my own rough prototypes for some basic structures for Citizen Intelligence. I have a nutshell book in my bookcase kindle on the subject of Drupal and I've decided to promote it to the top of my reading pile. We're getting to the point where it's time to take a good long, hard look at my coding skills and see how much I can bang together before I hire the rest of it out. I simply don't have the cash for a conventional development push.

My son learns about the downside of international trade

This morning my son got the bad news, further delays on shipping his printer, this time because it's run into the logistical craziness that is Chinese new year, a fifteen day celebration that this year starts on January 31st and runs 15 days. He won't get his printer until March though the vendors are holding out hope that it'll be late February.

This sort of thing is just one of the many fun problems you run into dealing with international trade. The China price looks really good on paper but actually dealing with them teaches you that the price on paper isn't the only China price you're going to pay. I suspect that he won't be doing business with these people again and will be looking warily at any foreign trade until he's got a great deal more in reserves to fix things if they are delayed.

Now officially on the market for a new car

It worked fine starting up this morning but the battery's drained when I went out just now to pick up my kids. An electrical system slow drain is just the cherry on top of the whole motor oil leaking, break fluid leaking, body rusting away catalog of woes for this thing. 

A good trickle charger is more of an essential tool than I thought when I originally got the thing all those years ago. 

MEFO request

I got a request to comment on Nazi MEFO bills, which I've done elsewhere in the past and it's a story that needs to be retold and hammered in to public consciousness as some people actually still buy the fiction that Nazi economics works.

Starting in the Weimar period the German Society for Public Works, AG (in german Deutsche Gesellschaft für öffentliche Arbeiten AG) was founded in 1930. It was a sham corporation, a shell with insufficient capital that nonetheless was permitted to issue OEFFA bonds. In fact, that was its whole point of being. The bonds were rediscounted by the German Reichsbank, which meant that the state issued cash in exchange for worthless paper, creating money at a time when Germany still had a gold peg. The scheme was not detected at the time and formed the basis for a number of parallel schemes for other purposes.

The most sinister of the lot was the MEFO bill which was used to secretly finance rearmament in violation of the Versailles treaty. The amount of MEFO bills in circulation and their value was a state secret but at peak was about 12 billion Reichsmarks of the things floating about at a time when the published figures for official German debt was only 19 billion Reichsmarks. The bills carried a 4% rate if held to maturity so in the generally deflationary times, many receivers of MEFO bills held on to them instead of immediately presenting them to a German bank for payment.

By issuing bonds for which there was no underlying asset, Germany could formally keep its gold peg while floating what were in essence parallel currencies in the form of these bills which could be, but often were not converted back to Reichsmarks because of the interest rates that they carried. This only works for so long though. Eventually, the chickens started coming home to roost sufficiently to alarm the Reichsbank president, Hjalmar Schacht, the major author of the plan. He demanded that the plan be wound down. Instead, Hitler dismissed Schacht from the presidency of the Reichsbank in January 1939 and 8 months later invaded Poland while instituted a policy of looting to finance the war. Thus was born the term "Nazi gold", which is a shorthand term that meant looted gold from Nazi victims of all types.

Ugly labor force participation trends

You can hide a lot in plain sight in a simple graph. Here's one that has volumes hidden in plain sight.

By original estimates we were supposed to peak out in 2012 on labor force participation. Instead we're almost 4% under that figure and looking to fall further. That's a huge difference in how the US works, akin to the 1960s jump in participation but with the direction reversed. It points to a United States less able to pay its debts, less able to innovate, lead, and less able to support its military position which has historically been supported by the country's economic power. In essence it's a country that is rather short of hope for the future.

We're moving to a society with similar to 1940s labor participation rates but with a much more confused set of social expectations, something that is inevitably leading to less happiness in general. There are no convincing narratives out there why this very large secular trend should reverse. It might happen but nobody seems to have a good tale as to why. This year will see another 10 year labor force projection release. So far it is looking like the 2014 10 year estimate will be another "surprise" where the curves drop even further, even faster. December's rate was 62.8% after all. We weren't supposed to hit that until much later in the decade.

97 Days

My write once a day streak has busted again, for the third time. This time, the streak lasted 97 days, a record. Still the same refrain though.

Ugh.

Time to start over.

One post a day.

At least.