Saturday, April 5, 2014
Exceptional Harvest
by John Wiley Spiers | 2 comments
Missing Billions
"The mystery of $6 billion that seemed to go missing in the early days of the Iraq war has been resolved, according to a new report," CNN national security producer Charles Keyes reported Wednesday. "New evidence shows most of that money, $6.6 billion, did not go astray in that chaotic period, but ended up where it was supposed to be, under the control of the Iraqi government, according to a report from the office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction or SIGIR."Oh! OK, so later another story came out. It is all traced, according to new evidence, six years later. I wonder if I had $6.6 billion, cash, how much I'd have to spend to get that story to show up on a website. And not from 8 to 6.6 to 6, soon it will be millions, not billions...
Did anyone learn anything at the State Department? Yes, they learned if the Republicans can get away with $6 billion, they want $6 billion too. So under democratic watch -
The State Department has no idea what happened to $6 billion used to pay its contractors.Although technically we have a fascist political system, until the "Strong Man" shows up, we will remain a kleptocracy. Steal, steal, steal. Waste, fraud, abuse. $6 billion missing, and the fellows whose job is to curb waste fraud and abuse sends out a memo.
In a special “management alert” made public Thursday, the State Department’s Inspector General Steve Linick warned “significant financial risk and a lack of internal control at the department has led to billions of unaccounted dollars over the last six years.
We need truth commissions, nothing else will work.
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Posted in busted by John Wiley Spiers | 6 comments
Friday, April 4, 2014
The Drop Dead Sales Letter
Thanks!...here's something you might like to blog about. I'm finding it the single best email I've ever used when chasing up long-dead leads. ... I began testing it last week have also had a response rate of over 90%, of these only 1 person replied that they weren't interested.Here's the original article I took inspiration from ...
www.lifeaftercubes.com/2013/04/18/the-sales-email-template-with-nearly-100-response-rate/
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Subject: ☛ Should I stay or should I go?Hi ,I know you’re busy. Just give me a 1, 2, or 3 –1. We’re no longer interested in ordering from you2. We’re interested but it's not a good time, reach out to me again in a month.3. I’m interested — let’s talk!
Your Name & email
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Posted in sales by John Wiley Spiers | 0 comments
Import Export Start-up Seminar
To achieve progress, someone needs to come up with new ideas and new ways of thinking, and be rewarded for them.As far as I know, I am the only person teaching and writing on business start up that gives an organic, actual, effective process for coming up with those new ideas (products) and ways of thinking (services.) This part of my seminars is very well received.
"... and be rewarded for them..." Now that is another problem not addresses, but I do. We live in an economic system that is stacked against the small business person. I know this very well. But when in history has that not been true? That "stacked against" is in the form of rules and regulations on how people are to be rewarded.
Now some people deal with this by fighting or cheating "the system" and I won't judge them. I will says there is far more money and fun in understanding the system, and "work it" to your advantages. How rewards are distributed are a result of deliberate rules and regulations. All rules and regulation have winners and losers. They are designed for you to lose. But they are in writing, they are patterns and practices, and it is easy enough, once you are so inclined, to study and realize your own "loophole." Loopholes open and shut only with great effort, so you can expect your own, personal loophole to remain.
When dealing with the system, think Jobs, not Madoff.
Let me give you an example. 99% of the taxes paid on imported wine can be recovered back from the government if you re-export as much. Not the same wine (the original rules) but merely "red-for-red" or "white-for-white." So bring in the finest French, taxed on the East Coast to distribute, and then export rot-gut from USA West Coast to China, get your taxes paid back, and sell fine in essence tax-exempt fine French wine in USA against small businesses who try to import and sell fine French wine AND pay the import taxes. Advantage big business.
Further, small USA fine wineries are trying to compete against net-untaxed French fine wines, when the taxes were designed to "level-the-playing field."
This is an outrage, since one has to be big to get the advantage (which is the point) and small fine wine importers don't have the buying power (or subsidized markets overseas) to unload USA plonk into say China. But dem's da rules.
Fine wine imported East Coast at hefty tax....
http://www.wein-shop.at/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=15&Itemid=51&lang=english |
Net result, no taxes for you! And you can go get tipsy as you crush small business!
http://drinkster.blogspot.com/2011_02_01_archive.html |
But to spot the opportunity you must
1. Be in the business...
2. Know the rules, even the unfair ones (especially the unfair ones) ...
3. Get creative...
Again, Jobs, not Madoff.
I've got two options for those desiring to start up or expand into small business international trade. I've got a live session in Los Angeles coming up Saturday May 3, if you are in the area, or an online course for everyone else on planet earth.
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Posted in business tactics, New Business Opportunities / Trade Leads by John Wiley Spiers | 1 comments
Destabilizing Cuba
Documents show the U.S. government planned to build a subscriber base through "non-controversial content": news messages on soccer, music and hurricane updates. Later when the network reached a critical mass of subscribers, perhaps hundreds of thousands, operators would introduce political content aimed at inspiring Cubans to organize "smart mobs" — mass gatherings called at a moment's notice that might trigger a Cuban Spring, or, as one USAID document put it, "renegotiate the balance of power between the state and society."Has it occurred to anyone the goals can be reached peacefully? Free trade. For over fifty years USA has had an embargo on Cuba, to assure that no American can ever trade with an independent Cuba.
It turned to another young techie, James Eberhard, CEO of Denver-based Mobile Accord Inc. Eberhard had pioneered the use of text messaging for donations during disasters and had raised tens of millions of dollars after the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti.Hmmm... I more and more doubt that any of these "young billionaires" have done it by themselves, which Obama and Biden keep insisting. And note there are IPR rules, but those can be overlooked when USAID is running a destabilization program.
To cover their tracks, they decided to have a company based in the United Kingdom set up a corporation in Spain to run ZunZuneo. A separate company called MovilChat was created in the Cayman Islands, a well-known offshore tax haven, with an account at the island's Bank of N.T. Butterfield & Son Ltd. to pay the bills.So even if it looks benign, know it is not.
By early 2011, Creative Associates grew exasperated with Mobile Accord's failure to make ZunZuneo self-sustaining and independent of the U.S. government. The operation had run into an unsolvable problem. USAID was paying tens of thousands of dollars in text messaging fees to Cuba's communist telecommunications monopoly routed through a secret bank account and front companies. It was not a situation that it could either afford or justify — and if exposed it would be embarrassing, or worse.O dear... the USAID cannot tell when it is being scammed. What idiots. They are paying out millions to Cuba while the Cubans are using the same info for which the USAID is paying the Cuban state to find out which Cubans Cuba can round up. Idiots.
Now, has it occurred to you yet why these tech companies that produce no income are all "worth" billions? Because they are fronts. And your pension is invested in their Blue Chip stocks. Which will, one after another, be banned outside the USA.
Our government is out of control. We need truth commissions. Congress knew about this, but no congressman did his job.
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Posted in intellectual property, New Business Opportunities / Trade Leads by John Wiley Spiers | 2 comments
Thursday, April 3, 2014
Rear View Cameras
But those putative reasons are sheer nonsense. this is how it works: a camera vendor kicks into a campaign, and the regulators push through new requirements for the campaign contributors products. Ka-ching. When you have a system of State Owned Enterprises, as we do in USA, this is how things work.
Safety margins get spent. ABS gave people a sense of security that offered them the opportunity to take more risks. Result, zero safety improvement.
Should we just let people run over kids? No, how about people learn how to drive? You want to avoid running over kids? Kids play in driveways. A car parked nose in the garage goes unnoticed as it just sits there. someone eventually gets in, backs up on unsuspecting Susie, and disaster.
When you show up arriving at the house, everyone sees something new on the scene, a car just showed up, even little Susie is cautious about this new element on the scene. She runs to the sidewalk.
Now, if you know how to drive a car, you BACK into the garage, so it is facing out. You back in when everyone is ever so alert. And then too, the trunk loaded with groceries is facing the communicating door to the house.
Ands when you are leaving, you are facing out with a clear forward view.
We do not need another $500 safety margin that will get spent. We simply need insurance companies stating what accidents they will cover, and will not, such as not cover drivers who are backing out of their driveway.
Problem solved.
We don't need regulators, we need free market insurance companies, something we lost about 60 years ago.
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Posted in govt regulation by John Wiley Spiers | 2 comments
Pelosi On Romney/Obamacare
“Well let me just say, those of us who fought for this knew what we believed in and really don’t think we needed any vindication,” she responded. “We just had to protect it from those ideological anti-government people who didn’t want to see it succeed — for ideological, or political or whatever those reasons are.”Why not ask? The "whatever" is economics. The plan raises costs, lowers quality, restricts access and brings false shortages. If Pelosi was not anti-taxpayer, people would not be anti-government.
But she is so over Romney/Obamacare, she is moving on to other matters.
"...So I think that while we’re proud of the Affordable Care Act, we now pivot to job creation.”uh-oh...
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by John Wiley Spiers | 0 comments
If We Cannot Trust...
“If people can’t trust not only the executive branch but also don’t trust Congress, and don’t trust federal judges, to make sure that we’re abiding by the Constitution with due process and rule of law,” declared President Obama in June 2013, in response to questions about the government’s domestic spying program, “then we’re going to have some problems here.”So, if we cannot trust, then we're going to have some problems... Problems pretty horrible to contemplate. True, true. So never give up trust in the government, and you will be safe.
Someone wrote that for him to say. He is not that slick. The real problem of course is the executive branch, the congress, and the federal judges cannot be trusted to do the right thing, from the lowest to the Chief Justice, who says it's a penalty, not a tax. This lack of trust is not from some media conditioning, it is from the experience of living in USA the last fifty years.
We want no stadiums, we get stadiums. We want no bailouts, we get bailouts. We want no wars, we get wars. We want hope and change, we get torture, wars, police state spying, Romney/Obamcare, bailouts, poverty, racism and on and on. And the executive branch, congress and the federal judges cannot and will not do the right thing, because they have all been compromised by the police state?
There is a way out, those Truth Commissions... Note the IRS official refuses to testify as to what she did working as a public servant. She is afraid of going to prison. Make it clear no one goes to prison.
Obama's role is to be the black guy Americans can blame for congress, federal judges and executive branch failure to do their job. When we can blame the black guy, we don't have to take responsibility ourselves.
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Posted in govt regulation by John Wiley Spiers | 0 comments
Wednesday, April 2, 2014
Stockman Offers Etiology
We lost two generations of entrepreneurs who went into the FIRE economy, to make their firtune, an entirely false economy at that.
Needless to say, the parabolic rise in financial sector profits from about 1.25% of GDP prior to Camp David to 4.25% of GDP today—call it a round $500 billion per year—is only the tip of the ice-berg. What lies beneath, according to the Commerce Department numbers crunchers, is “value-added” of some $3.75 trillion in the FIRE sector (finance, insurance and real estate), which generates the aforementioned accounting profits and consists primarily of compensation.That number may seem small, but it is all profits tallies on paper. If it were manufacturing it would be ten times bigger. But we got rid of manufacturing, and what manufacturing we do perform is bail-out based, and anything we actually want we make overseas to avoid taxes and lander profits.
Now we need the austerity of WalMart products, McDonalds food, and Romney/Obamacare to keep this false economy alive. Can we recover? Well say you wanted to open a toaster manufacturing company. Think of the parts you'd need. forget about it. We no longer have supply of those materials running through the USA, where fifty years ago such things were cheap and plentiful.
Now we have everyone making apps. The materials for doing so are cheap and plentiful. Except for some examples of "success theatre" where a few elect people are made billionaires by a rigged Wall Street, the vast majority of people out there are being subsidized on welfare while they pursue pixellated personal wealth dreams.
Speaking of plausible nonsense, there must have been some reason for investors to have been buying shares of newly listed King Digital (makers of the online game Candy Crush) in the secondary market this week, but we’re not aware of any compelling ones. Certainly not on valuation grounds. But then valuations in the US equity market as a whole seem to have got somewhat ahead of themselves. Value investor Tobias Carlisle (along with Tocqueville Funds’ François Sicart, and Farnam Street Investments) points out that the distribution of price / earnings multiples within the S&P 500 index is at its tightest level for 25 years. Or to put it in plainer English, this is the worst value opportunity set within the US stock market for a quarter of a century. James Montier of GMO agrees, calling it a “hideous opportunity set” for investors.As you toil at getting rich off game or app, know your chances are better buying a lottery ticket.
We need a real estate crash to get the space freed up so people can start making things again. the problem with capitalism is it brings such poverty and injustice wherever it raises its ugly head.
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Posted in govt regulation, interest, money by John Wiley Spiers | 0 comments
Cool New Camera
What does it do?
abc news |
http://www.panono.com/v/326/
When the pix open up, grab and drag and look 360 degrees aroound... pretty cool...
What makes this possible is a tiny mechanical device that tells when the ball is at the apex of the rise, and the lenses, then there is the plastics that can survive the bounce on the drop... the software that coordinates it all is no big deal... can be done anywhere. It's the materials, not the software.
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Posted in design, New Business Opportunities / Trade Leads by John Wiley Spiers | 0 comments
Price Signals
The former steel trader said that he couldn’t understand why a country blessed with a warm climate, rich volcanic soil and plenty of sunlight wasn’t much more prosperous. But he soon learned why.
“Local farmers didn’t know what the market wanted in terms of quality and variety, and even if they did, they simply didn’t have the funding to improve their crops,” Mr Say explains.
So step one is to set up a retail outfit that begins recording sales, or price signals. The price signals tell where shortages occur, to what degree, and when.
People in trade at the small business are essentially communicating price signals, and what might be done to differentiate a given product to increase demand, as reflected in price signals.
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Posted in New Business Opportunities / Trade Leads by John Wiley Spiers | 0 comments
Tuesday, April 1, 2014
Exporting Food and Beverage Business Start-up
LCL = Less than Container Load
FCL Full Container Load
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Posted in business tactics, International Trade Data, international trade seminars by John Wiley Spiers | 1 comments
Regulators Shocked, Shocked Stock Market Rigged
Michel Lewis has written a new book detailing how computer and software has managed to rig the stock market. Comments the current head of the SEC:
“The problem with high-frequency trading right now is that there’s a perception that for the little guy, the markets aren’t fair,” Gallagher told CNBC during an interview. “That perception to me is a reality. It’s something we need to address.”No doubt the requests will renew. But the salient point is SEC Chairman Dan Gallagher is shocked shocked at what has been going on for a decade, as detailed by a writer. Why, he had NO idea. No one at the SEC, known for time logged on to porn sites, had any idea. Porn, much? So he will look at it. As soon as all internet porn has been looked at. (Note he is not even yet accepting it as a fact). And after looking at it, there will be a new SEC director in 5 years, and it will be time to move on.
The amazing thing is scams are always the same thing over and over, so much so they are the basis of popular culture. But the SEC seems to be populated by people unable to perceive the most common scams.
When your pension is wiped out, you cannot complain. It is not as though you did not know what was going on. It is going on now. And you know it.
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Posted in economics, money by John Wiley Spiers | 1 comments
Monday, March 31, 2014
Congress Shocked, Shocked Regulators Did Nothing
GM first learned of the ignition switch problems in 2001 and in subsequent years consumers raised concerns repeatedly.Well, what Bernie Madoff was doing was well known to regulators for a decade before his ponzi scheme exploded. When failure costs you nothing then all there is left to do is look the other way. What about the people hurt? I suppose when you know it is not possible to do the job assigned, protect consumer safety, then why get excited one way of the other?
Congress wants to know why it took GM and the NHTSA so long to act since the problem first surfaced.
The bailouts of the auto companies were a good time to open source all auto patents and break the pro-big biz distribution rules for cars. This would have allowed competition in the auto industry for the first time in 75 years. We'd be on our way to industrial recovery. We'd have small responsive auto makers.
And true to form, congress will call in the GM CEO to explain what went wrong starting in about the 1990s in this current crisis. Never mind she started the CEO job last month. Why not bring in the last three GM CEOs? In chains?
It is edifying to see China is knocking down troublemakers from their last administration, prosecuting a "security" top dog that somehow became a billionaire in public service. This would be on par with Michael Chertoff being tried for corruption. But that will not happen in USA.
Not only China, but Israel has convicted Olmert, its past president, which would be on par with trying the Bushes for their crimes. Obama said no, prosecuting presidents for crimes might cramp ones style. What happened to the good old days when a president might face some consequences, like Nixon, or even Clinton?
O sure, we'll time from time round up a few chump congressmen, but never a regulator or a leader.
And don't bother prosecuting Chertoff, just set up a truth commission. If you spill the beans, you are free to go. If not, you'll face the music.
We cannot approximate justice anymore. So we need to know what is really going on, so we can approximate informed consent.
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Posted in govt regulation by John Wiley Spiers | 0 comments
China Real Estate Bubble
He does err here, in this post on the Chinese Real Estate Bubble:
Logic alone suggests the notion that anything can be centrally planned without huge damaging consequences is as ridiculous as it is arrogant. History proves it.Well, that would be the German Historical School of Economics. They merely catalog disasters and don't know why. Since history is not science, it proves nothing. The Austrians understand the reasons why, they can prove why, but they won't make value judgments.
The FED distorts the credit markets against the many to benefit the few. Fact. That this is wrong, well, a value-neutral science won't go there.
While the topic is the Real Estate bubble in China, as a communist country, China might exercise a useful solution to the real estate bubble. They have already done this to some extent, and that is they have limited how many condos a person can have, trying to suppress demand. Didn't work.
But as this bubble does burst, instead of massive nonsense valuations and power associated with that in the hands of the very few, simply write very aggressive homesteading laws that a condo empty for 90 days belongs to whoever is squatting in it. Within about three months the slate is clear and that is one heck of a reset button.
The people who lost their excess condos still have plenty, and no one will lose "all." It is what we should have done in USA in 2008.
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Posted in govt regulation by John Wiley Spiers | 0 comments
Taking Oneself Too Seriously
World Leaders at the Hague |
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by John Wiley Spiers | 0 comments
Sunday, March 30, 2014
The FED
All agencies have powers and effect policies, none with such leverage as the FED, none that can perniciously harm so many in the service of so few. And none with less of a rationale to exist than the FED.
It's rationale is so flimsy that its legal fiction is it is a private organization, a private banking organization. This was necessary in 1913 since no sane person has ever argued the State should have a role in money or participate in "interest." For powers-that-be agents to put the enabling legislation through, it was necessary to dress it up as non-governmental. To this day the twelve regional super-banks are .org, eg http://www.stlouisfed.org/ , whereas the headquarters is .gov, http://www.federalreserve.gov/. As you get closer to the powers-that-be, its true nature begins to be revealed.
Our democracy is a front for the FED (the bankers), the oil business, and the intel communities and violence franchise protecting it all. It cannot be changed, because when real change comes, say Kennedys, MLKing, Lennon, even a Geo Wallace, he gets shot. All by a lone nut. If you believe that, then you necessarily accept democracy cannot work because of the lone nut. But essentially a democracy allows people to vote to replace the fishing net with the safety net. Dead end that.
The problem on the ground right now is the FED policy of making select bankers unspeakable rich while destroying the middle class by concentrating credit in ever fewer hands, has made the trading price of real estate astronomically high while interest rates make land-banking strategically sound. Empty and expensive, side by side. Misallocation and malinvestment building out infrastructure for demand that will never show. Tear down storefronts to build highrises to house people for entire industries that are unsustainable in a free market.
When the bust comes, it will be real estate that will break furthest fastest. We need the FED banks gone so they cannot facilitate the crushing of any renaissance by witnessing to pretentious claims. No FED means property will redistribute to highest best use.
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Posted in anarchy by John Wiley Spiers | 2 comments
Deregulating Banks
There were very many mischievous scams being run by the managers Lehman, but let's look at one "bridge too far..":
... a typical example of rehypothecation, securities that have been posted with a prime brokerage as collateral by a hedge fund are used by the brokerage to back its own transactions and trades. While rehypothecation was a common practice until 2007, hedge funds became much more wary about it in the wake of the Lehman Brothers collapse and subsequent credit crunch in 2008-09.So there is money, and then there is lending money, then there is lending money at fractional reserve, the fractional reserve part being credit, but asset-based (yet inherently fraudulent), then there asset-free credit lending, then there are secondary market instruments based on hypothecation of potential value (conflict of interest self-serving assertions), and then there are instruments based on hypothecation, called re-hypothecation. Acid-trip valuations. Those rascally bankers! See what you get with no regulations, or as people say, deregulation?
Except....
In the United States, rehypothecation of collateral by broker-dealers is limited to 140% of the loan amount to a client, under Rule 15c3-3 of the SEC.Whoa! A regulation for making money off imaginary sand castles in the sky! What could go wrong? Bankers don't like to go to jail. So whenever they come up with a crazy idea, they go to the SEC or whatever other "watchdog" and get a rule introduced to provide for their criminal idea. (And this is not only the SEC, all USGoverment "watchdog agencies" are owned by the industries they watch. All regulators are captured by the big business regulated.)
Want a huge list of ways to scam investors without going to jail..? check it out, the law of the land.
When you are brainwashed into thinking the problem is "free markets" or deregulation or no regulation then when you agree there is a problem as defined by your enemies (deregulation) you trap yourself into accepting their solution: re-regulation. You'll never find a banker making a move without a specific provision in the regs. When their system fails, they blame the free market, and simply write more regulations, because you demand it.
Stop demanding it. Deregulate. Stop giving your oppressors the rules to cover their oppressive tactics. Deregulate banking and the financial industry completely, and let those huge banks fail, and community banks re-emerge.
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Posted in govt regulation by John Wiley Spiers | 0 comments