Quote from: iCEBREAKER on November 23, 2014, 05:43:01 PM

Isn't it nice that you have this thread to talk to yourself in?

It's like your own padded room!

Very useful to contain your lunacy and prevent it from bothering the sane people.

You choose to remain ignorant of the poll on this thread and that 46% voted in agreement.

http://blog.mpettis.com/2014/11/china-europe-and-optimal-currency-zones/#comment-97706

Quote from: me

Quote from: Suvy

None of that really matters now. The reality is that Russia is on the verge of financial collapse.

...

Also, were not headed towards World War III. I think were headed towards a bunch of Cold War-type scenarios and proxy wars. Youre seeing a containment policy on not just Russia, but China as well.

...

With the containment policy towards China, itll be Japan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, India, Australia, and a few other countries against China. In the case of Russia, were seeing the lines being drawn. The line being drawn in Ukraine is a HUGE advantage for both the US and Europe.

...

Autocracy and authoritarianism doesnt work over an extended period of time.

Suvy you pontificate without considering reality of history as a catalog of repeating outcomes.

1. The entire world is on the verge of economic collapse. Historically when countries implode economically, they start an external hot war to turn national disgust into patriotic sacrifice which is what we will see in those countries which are unified internally (e.g. Putin has 80% approval rating, Japanese and Chinese are still patriotic to the extreme of being xenophobic). The USA instead will fracture internally as the disagreement over socialism (Obamacare, police state, etc) reaches the boiling point.

2. As the global economy implodes, the price of oil falls, North America's fracking and oil sands become uneconomic (below about $75/bbl). One of the pillars of the USA remaining relatively stronger was its recent upsurge in fossil fuel production.

3. Russia and China are nuclear powers. Japan and Australia are not and the rest you mentioned have no military capability except India which has no incentive to enter a hot conflict with China. Russia has been flying their nuclear bombers close to USA's West Coast over the past year or so.

4. Russia and China are doing deals with countries all over the world. They both recently inked deals for example in Argentina.

5. The USA is now approaching a totalitarian regime (with its true nature as a police state to be more pronounced after 2015.75 as the USA economy starts to head down).

6. I have no idea what is your justification that wars need to remain cold? That was only the incentive while debt and global commerce were expanding. Now that everything turns down, the incentive to keep war muted is lost.

http://blog.mpettis.com/2014/11/china-europe-and-optimal-currency-zones/#comment-97869

Quote from: me

Suvy, I agree with you that the USA was more diverse (not controlled by a few oligarchs) which made it more competitive. Unfortunately the socialism has taken over and the USA is losing the freedoms (to innovate) that made us the most competitive. As the USA economy turns down after 2015.75, the police state and socialism will become more prominent and start to drag even more severely on the economy and plundering the high tech sector that made the USA strong. For example, I guess you haven't been paying attention, e.g. Obama is ready to regulate the internet as a public utility using executive power to do so bypassing Congress.

http://blog.mpettis.com/2014/11/china-europe-and-optimal-currency-zones/#comment-98048

Quote from: me

Quote from: Suvy

Suvy I already provided links on this page that showed the cyclic model since the 1980s has been accurately predicting events even a decade into the future If you are truly rational and believe in the scientific method

Yea, methods like that are inherently unscientific. You can show me all the evidence youve got, but this is just backtested BS. Theres ZERO statistical validity to such nonsense.

Since Michael didn't accept my prior reply on your assertion of ZERO statistical validity, let me phase it in a more concrete manner. Armstrong claims he trained an A.I. model with $millions of data (or $100s of millions if inflation adjusted to today's dollar) that he acquired dating back from 1000s of years ago to present. He for example spent $10 million collecting ancient silver coins to construct an accurate chart of silver coinage during the Western Roman empire.

A.I. models are typically trained with a combination of methods including neural networks. A neural network is inherently a statistical model of the data it has been trained on.

http://blog.mpettis.com/2014/11/china-europe-and-optimal-currency-zones/#comment-98288

Quote from: me

@Suvy & @Csteven,
Please tie this reply together with my other comments today. Although I agree the more acute economic adjustment will be in China (and Japan and Europe), going forward from that long-term China, Japan, and Asia will bottom and are on the way up, and the USA (and Europe) is systemically on the way down. The USA has an aging population and will eventually lose its high tech edge. And I also think there will be a massive brain drain out of the USA as the shakers and movers in the high-tech industry will jump ship as the NSA and Obama take control over the internet. I count myself as one who already did. I think there is coming shift where the incomes of the middle class of the developing world approaches critical mass especially as they start intertrading, e.g. the coming Asian Union free trade and employment migration zone starting 2015. The high tech sector is going to jump to greener pastures. China will correct (probably harder than Pettis' optimistic soft landing), then start moving up again probably within a decade or so, as the West falls over the cliff towards decadence. The new financial center of the world will move to Asia by or just after the global monetary reset by 2032.

http://blog.mpettis.com/2014/11/china-europe-and-optimal-currency-zones/#comment-98351

Quote from: me

Quote from: Suvy

Anyone that uses that kind of precision on stuff like this is obviously spewing BS. The more complicated the model, the more quickly you lose precision. Anyone using that kind of precision for this kind of complexity has major red flags on their work.

Armstrong has pointed out that long-term predictions are actually much more accurate (less statistically noisy) than short-term ones[1].

I found the blog where he explained how he discovered the model and the statistical possibility being in in the 1-in-a-billion of the model being a random match.

I also found the blog where he explains the correlation between machine learning and density estimation in statistics.

[1] http://armstrongeconomics.com/2014/08/12/the-long-term-is-not-spontaneous/

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/12/17/bernankes-speech-at-the-ceremony-commemorating-the-centennial-of-the-fed-reserve-act/

http://blog.mpettis.com/2014/11/china-europe-and-optimal-currency-zones/#comment-96710

Quote from: me

Quote from: Suvy

Theres one thing you forgot. Much of the debt has been securitized, so when one loan gets paid off, several others do as well. You need to take a look at the debt adjusted for this part of the financial system (both Steve Keen and Krugman talk about this, and Krugman is right on this occasion). I found the chart somewhere, but I cant find it right now. Its NOT the total debt/GDP (which runs at around 250% or so), but it accounts for the securitizationit should be around 170% or something around there.

Ah thanks. So perhaps that explains why I have seen a global total debt figure from Armstrong of $158 trillion while I've been citing the $227 trillion total debt figure I had read at a WSJ blog.

http://blog.mpettis.com/2014/11/china-europe-and-optimal-currency-zones/#comment-98542

Quote from: me

@Jon
I suppose each of us has some confirmation bias, myself included. I caution you on being married to one asset class, because it can cause you to be defiant of the market and lose your shirt.

Armstrong actually doesn't think its very likely that gold will go much higher than $5000. And I agree. Because for gold to go as high as you are predicting would require the world be plunged into a Dark Age. But in Dark Ages, gold loses its value and food becomes money. There is only so far you can go with hard money before society resets the monetary system to satiate and address the problem that was making gold move higher, or society is unable to do so and we go over the cliff into the abyss of another 600 year Dark Age where for example only rice was money in Japan. This is because velocity of money and thus GDP falls off the cliff when hard money is hoarded.

Also don't rule out crypto-currency. This could radically influence the equation of the future monetary system. I am working in that sphere (as well as continuing to program mainstream social media applications) and I know more about what is developing behind the scenes that is not public yet. The key to making a crypto-currency really matter ties in with giving it a reason to be adopted as a currency (i.e. high velocity) by common people. Bitcoin lacked that widespread reason, as well as having technological deficiencies. I think the entire internet model will change (and is underway).