Here"s How Much Retirees Are Spending To Support Their Adult Kids

At one point in time in America, living at home with mom and dad after crossing out of your teenage years and into your 20s was embarrassing and something that was generally avoided at all costs.  And while hard times come and go, 20-somethings who were forced back into their parents" care worked their tails off until they could save up enough money to once again regain their freedom.

But, these days millennials seem to be embracing the free room and board provided by their parents.  According to a new study from the Census Bureau, roughly one-third of all millennials live at home with their parents and one-fourth of them can"t be bothered with enrolling in school or finding a job.

Of course, while living at home can help millennials cut down on costs, according to a new study from Nerd Wallet, it can also have a devastating impact on the retirement savings potential of their overly accommodating parental units...to the tune of a quarter million dollars.  Here are some of the key takeaways from Nerd Wallet"s survey:

• Parents could miss out on almost a quarter-million dollars in retirement savings by paying their adult kids’ expenses: According to NerdWallet analysis, a parent’s retirement savings could be $227,000 higher if they chose to save the money that would otherwise go to their child’s living expenses and tuition.

 

• Parents paying college costs could be missing out on almost $80,000 in retirement savings: More than a quarter of parents of children 18 and older (28%) are paying or have paid for their adult children’s tuition or student loans. The average parent takes out $21,000 in loans for their child’s college education, but the hit to retirement savings is almost quadruple that amount.

 

• Most adult children are living with their parents for more than a year after they turn 18: Almost 3 in 5 parents with kids 18 and older (59%) have had adult children living with them for more than a year; over 1 in 5 (23%) have had adult children living with them for more than five years. On average, these parents say the longest period of time they have had their adult children living with them is 4.5 years.

 

• Parents expect their kids to help them financially during retirement: Almost a quarter of parents saving for retirement (23%) expect their children to provide financial support for them after they retire. Millennial parents are most likely to say this (44% vs. 25% of Generation X parents and 5% of baby boomer parents), despite saving more than parents from other generations.

So where is the money going..

Many parents of children 18 and older are paying or have paid for their adult children’s basic living costs, including groceries (56%), health insurance (40%) and rent or housing outside the family home (21%). Some parents are also covering or have covered their adult child’s cell phone bill (39%) and car insurance (34%). But it’s important for parents — especially those who are behind in saving for retirement — to note that those same dollars could significantly grow their nest eggs over time.

 

In addition to these living costs, some parents of children 18 and older are paying or have paid for other expenses, such as clothing (32%), entertainment (20%), an allowance (10%) or a car loan (10%).

So, how long can your adult children be expected to interrupt your golden years? According to Nerd Wallet, 1 in 5 households surveyed said their adult children lived with them for more than half a decade.

Frankly, we continue to be shocked that all of those kids out there with $250,000 Art and Anthropology degrees are finding it difficult to land their dream jobs...

Refugee Admissions Into U.S. Plunge 83% In First Two Months Of FY18

As monthly refugee admissions into the United States lap the last few months of Obama"s administration, the stark changes enacted by the Trump White House are more apparent than ever with admissions down a staggering 83% in the first two months of fiscal 2018 (October and November) compared to the first two months of fiscal 2017.

As CNS News points out, a total of only 3,108 refugees were admitted in October and November down from the 18,300 refugees who were admitted in October and November of last year.

The most striking change between the refugee admissions in the initial two-month period of this fiscal year and last fiscal year was the relative differences in size of the contingents from Syria, Somalia and Iraq.

In Oct.-Nov. 2016, 2,259 Syrians (97.6 percent Muslim, 1.7 percent Christian), 2,463 Somalis (99.9 percent Muslim) and 2,262 Iraqis (75 percent Muslim, 17.3 percent Christian, 7.4 percent Yazidi) were resettled.

 

In Oct.-Nov. 2017 the numbers had dropped to 33 Syrians (66.6 percent Muslim, 33.3 percent Christian), 126 Somalis (100 percent Muslim) and 76 Iraqis (84.2 percent Muslim, 10.5 percent Christian, 3.9 percent Yazidi).

 

Among the 3,108 refugees admitted since FY 2018 began, the five largest contingents came from Bhutan (805), the Democratic Republic of Congo (627), Burma (347), Ukraine (290) and Eritrea (281).

 

The religious breakdown of those 3,108 refugees was: 59.6 percent Christian, 15.4 percent Muslim, 9.6 percent Buddhist, 7.6 percent Hindu, 4.7 percent Kirat and 0.9 percent Jewish.

 

By contrast, the five countries represented most strongly among the 18,300 refugees resettled by the Obama administration in the U.S. during the first two months of FY 2017 were the DRC (4,236), Somalia (2,463), Iraq (2,262), Syria (2,259) and Burma (1,509).

 

The religious breakdown of those 18,300 refugees was: 48.1 percent Christian, 43.6 percent Muslim, 2.4 percent Buddhist, 1.7 percent Hindu, 0.9 percent Kirat and 0.3 percent Jewish.

Meanwhile, fourteen months after the Obama administration backed a push at the U.N. for global responsibility-sharing for refugees and migrants, the Trump Administration has pulled out of the initiative with U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley saying it “is simply not compatible with U.S. sovereignty.”

Now the administration is also withdrawing from a U.N. initiative called the Global Compact on Migration.

 

In a statement Sunday, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the U.S. would continue to engage at the U.N. but in this case it “simply cannot in good faith support a process that could undermine the sovereign right of the United States to enforce our immigration laws and secure our borders.”

 

“The United States supports international cooperation on migration issues, but it is the primary responsibility of sovereign states to help ensure that migration is safe, orderly, and legal.”

 

Haley said Sunday the New York declaration “contains numerous provisions that are inconsistent with U.S. immigration and refugee policies and the Trump administration’s immigration principles.”

 

She said no country has done more that the U.S. in providing support for migrant and refugee populations across the globe, “and our generosity will continue.”

 

“But our decisions on immigration policies must always be made by Americans and Americans alone,” she said. “We will decide how best to control our borders and who will be allowed to enter our country.”

Of course, it"s just a matter of time until Chuck Schumer and/or Nancy Pelosi tell us that Trump"s efforts to not outsource decisions regarding American sovereignty to the U.N. is just more evidence of the inherent racism plaguing the current administration.

Will Population Crisis Spark a call for A.I. to Manage Human Reproduction? (VIDEO)

By Joe Joseph, The Daily Sheeple | 

It looks like the Agenda 21 plan is moving along just as the ‘Control Freaks’ have planned. Birth rates are plummeting, the family has been destroyed, and people worship their government god. What could possibly be left?

Watch on YouTube

---

Contributed by Joe Joseph of www.TheDailySheeple.com.

The post Will Population Crisis Spark a call for A.I. to Manage Human Reproduction? (VIDEO) appeared first on The Sleuth Journal.

Labor Market Conundrum: Number Of Millennials Living At Home With Mom Continues To Surge

Nary a day goes by that President Trump and/or the talking heads on CNBC fail to mention the following unemployment chart as evidence that "everything is awesome" with the U.S. economy...

...which might be true unless you"re among the 95 million-ish Americans who have been looking for a job for so long that you no longer even count as a human being to the Bureau of Labor Statistics...

...or if you"re a millennial.

Despite being the most educated generation ever to walk the face of the

planet, at least according to their tuition bills paid by mom and dad, a

staggering number of millennials still can"t seem to land a steady job.  Moreover, despite the steadily improving labor market, as the USA Today points out, the outlook for millennials continues to inexplicably deteriorate with 20% of 26-34 year olds currently living at home with mom versus only 17% back in 2012.

The share of older Millennials living with relatives is still rising, underscoring the lingering obstacles faced by Americans who entered the workforce during and after the Great Recession.

 

About 20% of adults age 26 to 34 are living with parents or other family members, a figure that has climbed steadily the past decade and is up from 17% in 2012, according to an analysis of Census Bureau data by Trulia, a real estate research firm. The increase defies record job openings and a 4.1% unemployment rate, the lowest in 17 years.

 

Not surprisingly, a much larger portion of younger Millennials age 18 to 25 (59.8%) live with relatives, but that figure generally has fallen the past few years after peaking at 61.1% in 2012.

So why does the professional development of millennials continue to diverge from other generations?  While one can never be sure, perhaps the answer to that question lies in the personal experience of young Heidi Toth who decided to quit her job, after gaining just two years of experience, to join a church mission for nearly two years.  Then, after returning to work from her travels, Toth quit again in 2013 after a "series of layoffs modified her duties"...which we assume roughly translates to..."a bunch of people got fired which meant I had to work harder so I quit."

After graduating from Texas Tech University with a journalism major in 2005, Heidi Toth, now 35, got a job quickly at a Provo, Utah, newspaper. But in early 2007, she went on an 18-month church mission, landing her back in the job market in the depths of the recession in 2008. Unable to find work, she moved in with her mother in Roswell, New Mexico, for nine months while she hunted for work and took part-time, low-paying jobs.

 

She was rehired at the Provo paper in spring 2009 but left again in 2013 after a series of layoffs modified her duties. After months of fruitless job searching and traveling, she returned to her mother’s house for three months until she was hired at a Lubbock, Texas, paper.

 

Toth was grateful she could live rent-free during her periods of unemployment. But, she adds, “It wasn’t ideal, professionally or personally.”

 

Prospective employers in larger, distant cities didn’t think she would be readily available for interviews. And at home, “I felt like I was back in high school,” she says. “I felt like I had to ask permission to go out.”

Meanwhile, as the Pew Research Center recently noted, even the Millenials that manage to hold a job and establish their own residence aren"t much better off as they now head more households living below the poverty line than any other generation and, in aggregate, represent nearly one-third of all impoverished households in the United States. 

More Millennial households are in poverty than households headed by any other generation. In 2016, an estimated 5.3 million of the nearly 17 million U.S. households living in poverty were headed by a Millennial, compared with 4.2 million headed by a Gen Xer and 5.0 million headed by a Baby Boomer. The relatively high number of Millennial households in poverty partly reflects the fact that the poverty rate among households headed by a young adult has been rising over the past half century while dramatically declining among households headed by those 65 and older.

 

Of course, that"s all despite the fact that they only head just over 20% of all households...

Millennials are the largest living generation by population size (79.8 million in 2016), but they trail Baby Boomers and Generation Xers when it comes to the number of households they head. Many Millennials still live under their parents’ roof or are in a college dorm or some other shared living situation. As of 2016, Millennials (ages 18 to 35 in 2016) headed only 28 million households, many fewer than were headed by Generation X (ages 36 to 51 in 2016) or Baby Boomers (ages 52 to 70).

 

Of course, those aren"t the only stats that prove just how much those anthropology degrees are paying off...Millennials are also winning at the "cohabiting-couple" game...presumably because it takes a village of millennials to cover one monthly rent bill.

Conclusion:

Fourth Turning"s Neil Howe: Why Millennials Aren"t So Unique

Authored by Marianne Brunet via AdvisorPerspectives.com,

The conventional wisdom is that Millennials are a generation with unique needs and buying habits, but Neil Howe says that they are very similar to the Greatest Generation.

Howe, who coined the term “Millennial,” says that both generations are highly risk-averse, a characteristic brought on by their shared parenting environment.

In a talk last week, Howe explained how we can use generational patterns and historical economic trends to better understand the future of the global economy.

He also cautioned investors about the impact global aging trends will have on future economic development and financial market conditions.

Howe spoke on November 2 at a National Association for Business Economics luncheon in Boston.

He is an authority on social change in America, and an acclaimed bestselling author. He is also a leading researcher at Hedgeye Risk Management and a senior associate to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C.

How aging populations will impact the fiscal future

Howe has spent his career researching demography within the context of economic history. But in his talk last week, he revealed that he recently shifted his focus to a new area of study.

“Political demography is a whole new budding field,” Howe said. “And it will never go away, not for the rest of our lifetimes.”

According to Howe, “Political demography is premised on the fact that in the next century, we are going to see a greater divergence of demographic trajectories, more than we’ve ever seen before in human history.”

This divergence is based on two global aging trends.

On the one hand, “there are places in the world today whose demographics are essentially the same as in pre-modern times,” Howe said. “These are high-mortality, high-fertility societies – I’m talking about a lot of South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.”

“And then you have other areas of the world with extreme low-fertility and low morality societies,” Howe explained.

“Look at South Korea,” Howe said. “According to the United Nations constant-fertility scenario, by the year 2035 there will be more people turning age 90 every year than being born every year.”

“We’ve never in human history seen this situation amongst different societies around the world,” according to Howe.

This divergence will undoubtedly drive significant changes in the future global economic landscape. “What are the implications for the direction of capital flows? What are the implications for labor productivity and competitiveness?” Howe asked.

He urged economists to consider societies whose working-age population is shrinking. “Every year their normal growth is declining faster than their normal productivity is growing,” he said. “Which means that even in a ‘normal’ non-recession year, they have negative GDP growth.”

“What’s the impact on investment, savings and competitiveness?” Howe asked rhetorically.

Howe theorized that one possible response to a decline in economic growth driven by shrinking population is for nations to become much more anti-competitive.

He predicted that nations “will actually move towards cartelizing market and carving them up, rather than competing.”

As a historical example of this sociological response to a loss in competitiveness, Howe pointed to the 1930s, “a decade of cartels and measures to keep productive institutions going.”

Howe highlighted one concern in particular – the future global standing of developed nations with demographic concerns.

“There’s a lot there, not just in terms of its impact on the economy, but demography’s impact on geopolitics,” Howe said.

 

“What happens to societies whose populations are declining every year versus those that are rising? Does this impact geopolitics and does it have to do with the rise and fall of empires?”

Circling back to the example of the 1930s, Howe highlighted that declines in the competitiveness of certain nations has marked historic global shifts. He explained that Britain, which had been a super-power on the international stage, experienced a dramatic shift in its economic and geopolitical standing culminating in World War II.

Part of Howe’s research has focused on measuring risk and publishing aging vulnerability indices. This tool can be used to consider “the affordability and sustainability of pension funds around the world,” according to Howe.

“In the late 1990s, one of our big stories was on Australia,” he said. “Australia always got ‘first place’ because it has the mandatory superannuation fund,” he explained, “a required defined-contribution plan, which is fueling tremendous savings in Australia.”

“Perhaps not coincidentally, Australia is the only country that has had no recession over the last 25 years,” Howe said with a smirk.

How generations impact economic development

Howe focused his presentation on how population growth rates will drive change in the global economy. However, he also spoke about another demographic factor that will significantly impact the future of international markets – generational shifts.

According to Howe, to consider the future of the global economy, we also need to understand “differences in how generations think and the strengths they bring to political power.”

Howe’s research has focused on the archetypal differences between generations, and what they bring to the table.

“What we found was that each generation looks at the world differently even though they experience many of the same events, because of course they had a different location in history.”

Howe used Boomers and their parents to explain this in a real-world context. “We had Woodstock, they had D-day,” Howe said.

Boomers prided themselves on how different they were from than parents. “They were building battleships, while we were discovering ourselves,” he added comically.

They prided themselves on having differing perspectives, but Boomers eventually went on to occupy the same societal roles as their parents, just at different points in history and with different views.

“Looking generationally at social change allows you to see into the future in a way that a lot of people don’t appreciate,” according to Howe.

“No one applies this perspective,” according to Howe.

“For instance, if I go into a consumer retail company that sells cosmetics to people in their forties and ask them about their future market,” Howe said, “They will tell me: ‘I know everything about 40-year olds, we know everything about them, we studied 40-year olds throughout history and we just extrapolate that forward’.”

But Howe argues this is the wrong approach. “I would look at today’s 20- and 30-year olds instead,” Howe said.

With this approach as a basis for his analysis, Howe went on to discuss the future of the American economy.

Howe explained that we can use the traits of generations to understand how they will lead when they occupy influential societal roles. According to Howe, we can understand the traits of Millennials as a generation by examining the impact their parents had on them during their formative years.

For instance, according to Howe, because Millennials were sheltered by their parents they are now very risk-averse.

Are Millennials like the G.I. Generation?

In his research, Howe found that there are predictable cycles when generational personalities oppose their immediate predecessors, but share significant traits with groups they may never meet.

That is, although both Millennials and Boomers don’t share traits with their parents, they do resemble other previous generations.

“When people ask me to draw parallels like ‘what decade does this last decade most resemble?’” Howe said, “I tell them the 30s.”

According to Howe, we can predict trends about the future of the Millennial generation by examining the G.I. generation (also known as The Greatest Generation), which is made up of people born between 1900 and the mid-1920s.

Both the Millennial and G.I. generations grew up with similar parenting and similar historical conditions, according to Howe.

In terms of social and cultural similarities, “One of the trends we saw in the 1930s was declining fertility, a rise in multi-generational households, a decline in home ownership and a decline in youth violence,” according to Howe.

He urged economists to compare that to today’s environment and Millennial behavior.

“I would argue that in the last 10 years we have seen a personal turning away in risk-taking,” Howe said. “If you look at 200 youth-risk indicators the CDC keeps, almost all of them are hugely down.”

According to Howe, this is because “their parents assured them from the time they were born they were special, that they’re precious to the world, and that they should take care of themselves.”

“This is why this generation does not take risks,” Howe argued, “Why they’re not starting business, why they think stocks are really dangerous things.”

He went on to explain how this risk-averse mentality emerged for both the G.I. and Millennial generations from an economic perspective.

“Both the current generation and the G.I. generation grew in the shadow of a massive financial crisis,” Howe explained.

 

“Both have been characterized by a disappointing employment of labor and capital, low standard of living gains, low productivity growth, negative real interest rates, the failure of monetary policy and competitive devaluation.”

Looking forward, Howe inferred, much like the G.I.’s, Millennials will have to deal with a great conflict, but theirs will be a culture war.

Who"s Going To Eat The Losses?

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via PeakProsperity.com,

Unsustainable.

Many more people need to understand what that word really means, and how it applies to pretty much everything in the current human living arrangement. Especially the so-called "developed" nations.

Here’s the dictionary definition:

Let"s take these three definitions one at a time.

First: our entire economic model, which dependent on borrowing at a faster rate than income (GDP) grows, is something that simply cannot be maintained at its current rate or level. Check.

 

Second: depleting species, soils and aquifers are all wildly unsustainable practices that are accelerating. Check.

 

Last (and most glaring of all): the world’s leadership (and we use that term very loosely) continues to insist on adhering to the indefensible idea that infinite growth on a finite planet is possible  Checkmate.

Said another way, the daily comforting stories we are told about how all of this somehow makes sense are just a load of nonsense. Each is entirely unsupportable by the evidence, facts and data.

What happens when a culture’s dominant narratives are not just unsatisfactory, but entirely unworkable? 

Well, for one thing, the younger generations that are being asked (goaded?) to step into an increasingly flawed future begin to resist. Which is completely understandable. They have nothing to gain if the status quo continues.

At the same time, the older generations mostly just settle into a stubborn insistence that everything will be fine if everyone will just do more of precisely what got us into the mess in the first place. Younger people should step up to make sure Medicare/Social Security/pensions remain fully funded, and buy the financial assets and homes of downsizing seniors at top dollar. The boomers have everything to lose if the status quo changes.

Why do I bother to tell you all this?  Why have I spent the last ten years of my life trying to alert the public of risks they keep telling me make them uncomfortable?  Because I care. Because I hope to help a few people preserve their hard-earned wealth. Possibly even save a few lives with this information. And, ultimately, to help people lead lives filled with greater connection, aliveness and joy.

The key to all of these better outcomes is having a clear-eyed view of "what is", and then being able to predict "what’s next". Which means that understanding is the first step. Informed action follows from that.

Mind The Gap

In the US, through selfish over-consumption, the baby boomer generation has screwed the prospects for following generations. It"s now doing everything to deny and defend its extraordinarily self-serving and short-sighted decisions, and delay the repercussions for as long as possible.

For the record, I seriously doubt the current younger generations would have behaved any differently were we to teleport them back in time  The boomers came of age when net energy from oil was still climbing and that ‘taught’ them about ‘how the world worked.’  When you have abundant resources, especially high net energy oil, you can pretty much do anything you want.

But today?

Not so much. A BIG fallacy of the past is that wars lead to rapid economic expansion afterwards. A more correct version of this is that the destruction of war leads to rapid recovery and rebuilding ONLY IF you also have access to abundant high net energy oil. If you don"t, wars only lead to destroyed economies.

Think of it this way: an 18-year-old who injures his knee has the resources of youth to help them recover completely. But an 80-year-old? Not so much.

This fallacy of thinking that we can just have another nice major war (North Korea?), or a few major hurricanes (Harvey, Irma and counting...), and then not only recover, but return better than ever is a dangerous delusion to hold. It"s no different than our 80-year-old thinking that taking up downhill skateboarding would be a safe and sensible thing to do. 

Self-deception is a process of denying or rationalizing away the relevance, significance, or importance of opposing evidence and logical argument. Self-deception involves convincing oneself of a truth (or lack of truth) so that one does not reveal any self-knowledge of the deception.

(Source)

The inter-generational resentment mentioned above is growing ever more extreme and it’s creating a significant social (and soon political) disturbance that will prove to be utterly disappointing for all. Already we see the signs in failing pensions having to cut benefits, young people opting out of such bulwarks of cultural stability as car ownership, marriage and having children.

If the DNC hadn’t straight up stolen the primary from Bernie Sanders, it’s quite possible that he’d have handily won the US presidential election and we’d already be feeling the effects of the political power of the next generation.

In this view, Trump is nothing more than the first (but not final) reflection of boomer denial backfiring badly. The sclerotic remnants of the past held fast and tried to jam Hillary down the throats of a very unenthusiastic electorate that long ago concluded that business-as-usual is literally a vision without a future. And so Hillary was rejected and Trump, the only alternative left standing, got the victory.

Who’s Going To Eat The Losses?

The US economic data to back up this decidedly dim view of things could not possibly be more robust and unassailable.

If we were allowed just one chart, just a single piece of data to back up this assertion, it would be this one:

The oft-cited and worried over ‘US federal debt’ of some $20 trillion is the lowest dark-blue shaded area on that chart .It’s not even 10% of the predicament the country faces

No country has ever dug out from under a debt + liability load anywhere close to that amount. It"s just too big a hole to climb out of.

With GDP growth stubbornly anemic for going on 12 years now, and no fresh sources of high net energy to fund future GDP growth, we can say this very simply about the promises our politicians are soothingly singing to us:

Any thought that these promises will be kept is delusional.

They won’t be kept because they can’t be kept. It’s really no more complicated than that.

Only one question matters when presented with a chart like this: Who’s going to eat the losses?

The keepers of the status quo, such as Hillary and Trump and their cozy relationships with Goldman-Sachs, et al., want the answer to be ‘the taxpayers’ (and not ‘the banks’). But they"d never publicly admit to that. So they pretend that losses will never matter, and instead promise perpetual prosperity for all.

So people, companies, communities and the entire nation of the United States makes plans and investments as if the above chart didn"t even exist.

This is no different than our 80-year-old refusing to draft a will because he simply can"t face the reality that one day he"ll need one. Such denial and self-delusion make a terrible strategy to live by.

The fact that you live in a world where the leaders of most countries are engaging in willful denial does not mean you have to be a victim to the consequences of their irrational delusion.

This is why having a clear-eyed view of the data, knowing your history, and forecasting the most likely outcomes are critical for positioning yourself for safety.

Those who do this empirically realize that the global economy is far more likely to contract, possibly viciously, before it expands. Given this, today"s global equity prices and non-investment grade bonds are absolutely mis-priced for such an outcome -- instead they"re practically priced for perfection, and thus due for a major correction.

Last week we issued a report warning of the multiplying number of important indicators signaling a coming market correction and economic recession.

*  *  *

In Part 2: How To Deal With Our Dangerous Markets And Failing Future, we explain why the fall from today"s market highs will be so painful, and where today"s concerned investor can look when seeking safe haven for their capital. We have the world"s central banking cartel for our situation, who have -- for the third time in less than 20 years -- blown a gigantic bubble.  Or rather, have blown a nested set of bubbles (stocks, bonds, housing), each of which will help accelerate the popping the others when the time comes. As with a developing hurricane, the time to prepare yourself for these eventualities is well before they actual manifest.  Once they’ve arrived, your ability to respond and react will be hampered by the fact that your efforts will be accompanied by those of thousand and millions of other people. Don"t be one of the panicked herd. Take prudent action today. Click here to read Part 2

Introducing Cryonics: Putting Death On Ice

There is a potent thread winding its way through generations of human culture. From Ancient Egyptian rituals to Kurzweil’s Singularity, many paths have sprung up leading to the same elusive destination: immortality.

Today, as Visual Capitalist"s Nick Routely notes, the concept is as popular as it’s ever been, and technological advances are giving people hope that immortality, or at very least radical life extension, may be within reach. Is modern technology advanced enough to give people a second chance through cryonics?

Today’s infographic, courtesy of Futurism, tackles our growing fascination with putting death on ice.

Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist

THE PROSPECT OF IMMORTALITY

Robert C. W. Ettinger’s seminal work, The Prospect Of Immortality, detailed many of the scientific, moral, and economic implications of cryogenically freezing humans for later reanimation. It was after that book was published in 1962 that the idea of freezing one’s body after death began to take hold.

One of the most pressing questions is, even if we’re able to revive a person who has been cryogenically preserved, will the person’s memories and personality remain intact? Ettinger posits that long-term memory is stored in the brain as a long-lasting structural modification. Basically, those memories will remain, even if the brain’s “power is turned off”.

DESCENDING INTO THE DEEP-FREEZE

There are three main steps in the cryogenic process:

1) Immediately after a patient dies, the body is cooled with ice packs and transported to the freezing location.

 

2) Next, blood is drained from the patient’s body and replaced with a cryoprotectant (basically the same antifreeze solution used to transport organs destined for transplant).

 

3) Finally, once the body arrives at the cryonic preservation facility, the body is cooled to -196ºC (-320.8ºF) over the course of two weeks. Bodies are generally stored upside-down in a tank of liquid nitrogen.

THE ECONOMICS OF CRYOPRESERVATION

At prices ranging from about $30,000 to $200,000, cryopreservation may sound like an option reserved for the wealthy, but many people fund the procedure by naming a cryonics company as the primary benefactor of their life insurance policy. Meanwhile, in the event of a death that doesn’t allow for preservation of the body, the money goes to secondary beneficiaries.

Even if we do eventually find a way to reanimate frozen humans, another important consideration is how those people would take care of themselves financially. That’s where a cryonics or personal revival trust comes into play. A twist on a traditional dynastic trust, this arrangement ensures that there are funds to cover costs of the cryopreservation, as well as ensure the grantor would have assets when they’re unthawed. Of course, there are risks involved beyond the slim possibility of reanimation. The legal code in hundreds of years could be vastly different than today.

If you created a trust for specific purposes in 1711, it is unlikely it would function in the same way today.

 

– Kris Knaplund, Law Professor, Pepperdine University

COLD HUMANS, HOT MARKET

At last count, there are already 346 people in the deep freeze, with thousands more on the waiting list. As technology improves, those numbers are sure to continue rising.

Time will tell whether cryonically preserved people are able to cheat death. In the meantime? The cryonics industry is alive and well.

Terror Cases In Germany Quadruple In One Year

More evidence revealing the ridiculousness of the centrist position on immigration – namely that refugees can be seamlessly integrated into European society without a spike in crime or terror – has emerged courtesy of the German newspaper Welt Am Sonntag which revealed Sunday that the number of terrorism-related cases investigated by German authorities has quadrupled over the past year.

Prosecutors have opened more than 900 cases so far this year, compared with just 240 throughout 2016, and 80 cases in 2013.

Germany’s federal police estimate 705 Islamist extremists willing to carry out terror attacks are active in the country, up from 600 during an estimate in February. Germany’s domestic intelligence agency recently said around 24,400 Islamists are active in the country but most of them don’t pose an immediate terror threat.

To be sure, the number of migrants applying for asylum in Germany plummeted to about 280,000 in 2016, about one-third the number from the prior year. But the increase in crime – coupled with the Christian Democratic Union’s embarrassing showing in federal elections last month – are slowly inspiring the country’s centrists to accept that more needs to be done to limit and control immigration in Europe’s largest economy.

According to the Daily Caller, Germany’s federal prosecutor’s office can’t keep up with the increase in the number of cases. To wit, nearly 300 cases have been transferred to the state level. Not all cases involve plans to carry out attacks. Migrants from Syran, Iraq and Afghanistan have been tried over alleged membership in terror groups without being suspected of planning attacks on European soil.

BKA chief Holger Münch told daily newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau in July that the danger from politically motivated far-right and far-left wing extremist is dwarfed by the threat posed by jihadis.

“In the left-wing scene, the [German] states have currently estimated a number that can be counted on the fingers of one hand,” Münch said. “In the right-wing scene, the number is in the low double digits.”

Frustration over this increase in crime manifested last month in the far-right Alternative for Germany party’s sweeping electoral triumph. The party, while still a minority, received 13% of the vote, earning it a place in Parliament – the first time a far-right party has held a spot in the legislature since World War II. It’s now the third strongest party in Germany, and has created a headache for Chancellor Angela Merkel by busting up her ruling coalition.

As Statista points out, perhaps key to understanding Germany’s tilt to the right is the indication that the majority of AfD voters say they made their decision not based on belief in the party, but rather as a reaction to their disappointment in the other parties – a dissatisfaction stemming from Merkel’s insistence on an “open doors” refugee policy that has been proven to be a failure.

Two years after the European Commission carried out the bidding of German Chancellor Angela Merkel by approving a plan to distribute migrants entering the Schengen area through Greece and Italy evenly across the European Union, the recent landslide victory of “Czech Donald Trump” Andrej Babis and his Eurosceptic and anti-establishment political party shows how disillusioned the people of Europe have become with “open doors.” Babis’s victory followed another important win by Austria"s young conservative star, Sebastian Kurz, who at 31 is now the youngest leader in Europe.

The reason for this populist surge? Well, it appears Europeans have begun to realize that Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic – three countries that refused to accept migrants under the EU plan – have suffered far fewer terror attacks, as the map below shows.

Can you spot the gaps?
 

Is Population Decline Catastrophic?

In the 1970’s we heard the earth was going to get so crowded we’d be falling off. Now the panickers have flipped to population decline. They were wrong in the 70’s, so are they wrong again? Is a declining population catastrophic?

Countries from Germany to Japan are investing in mass immigration or pro-birth policies on the assumption that they must import enough warm bodies to stave off economic collapse. I think this is mistaken.

Falling population on a country level is certainly no catastrophe and, indeed, may be positive. I’ll outline some reasons here...

Historically, the first question is why population declined. If it’s the Mongols invading again then, yes, the economy will suffer. Not because of the death alone, but because wholesale slaughter tends to destroy productive capital as well.

On the other hand, if the population is declining from non-war, we have a well-studied natural experiment in the Black Plague. Which is generally credited with the “take-off” of the West. Because if the population declines by a third while capital including arable land stays the same, you get a surplus. Same resources divided by fewer people.

Think of zombie movies where dude’s running around with unlimited resources at his disposal — free cars, riverfront penthouses. That, in diluted form, is what a declining population gives us — more land, more highways or buildings, more resources per person.

Now, if the population’s declining not because of a terrible disaster like the Plague, rather because people simply want fewer children, then you don’t even get the massive hit from losing productive people. A worker dying at 40 takes a lot of productivity with him, while a child unborn isn’t actually destroying anything but hopes and dreams.

So if the Plague was a per capita economic bonanza to Europe, having fewer children should be an even larger per capita bonanza.

Take Germany; before recent rises in immigration, Germans averaged 1.25 children per woman. This translates into a 1/3 decline in population per cycle (i.e every 75 years if people are living 75 years). So without immigration, Germany might expect a 1/3 decline by 2100. Is this good or bad?

The question breaks into 2 parts: absolute number of people, and changes in age composition. On numbers alone, it’s great for Germans; same physical capital, same amount of land and air and water. True there are fewer taxpayers to amortize shared costs like defense, but these costs are small and, empirically, often scale to the population anyway. For example Holland’s military budget and population are both about 1/5 of Germany’s.

So on numbers it’s great — more stuff for fewer people.

Now the second question is age profile. The key here is that a declining population means fewer working-adults to pay out pensions, but it also means even fewer kids. Who are very expensive. The number that captures both is “dependency ratio,” which is the ratio of workers to children-plus-elderly.

To take a real-world example, the UN expects Germany in 2100 to have 68 million people, compared to today’s 82 million — about a 20% decline. The age profile shifts so they expect a third more over-65’s — from 17 to 23 million. Meanwhile, children 14 and under fall from 11m to 9m. So total dependents goes from 28 million today to 32 million in 2100. Meanwhile, population age 15 to 64 goes from 54 million today to 36 million in 2100. Upshot is today a single working-age person supports half a dependent — 54 million carrying 28 million. But in 2100 that worker will support a single dependent — 36 million carrying 32 million. So far so bad, right?

Well, there are 2 big caveats here, both based on long-lasting trends.

First, for over a century now people are not only living longer, but living healthy longer. This is called “health expectancy” and, sticking with Germany, is rising by about 1.4 years per decade.

This implies that 65 year-olds in 2100 will be as healthy as 53 year-olds today. While today’s 65-year-olds are as healthy as 2100’s 78-year-olds. This alone would bring the elderly numbers back down to today’s, but the lower number of children means worker burdens actually decline.

Of course, this would require raising retirement ages in line with health expectancy - 1.4 years per decade - which politicians are obviously deeply reluctant to do.

Second caveat is another long-term trend, economic growth. The irony here is that, from a population growth viewpoint, economic growth is actually the worst-case scenario. Because if the economy crashes instead, then historically the population actually soars — kids become your safety net if the welfare state goes bankrupt. So if we fail to grow, the demographic problem actually solves itself anyway. Either we grow, or population decline was a false alarm anyway.

Quantifying this growth, over the past 50 years Germany has grown 1.65% per year, real per capita. That trends puts a 2100 German worker making 4 times what they do today. Keep in mind this is likely underestimating the benefit, because any outperformance makes Germans richer yet, while any catastrophe probably makes them have more kids.

So, summing up, rising health expectancy implies there will actually be fewer dependents in 2100 Germany, while economic growth implies German workers will be 4 times richer, just on growth alone. The demographic burden plunges by 80% or more.

By the way, if you’re freaked out at the prospect of working an extra 1.4 years per decade, that economic growth alone suggests a 50% decline in worker burdens - twice the dependents on four times the income. So even if politicians are spineless, the welfare burden declines even with more dependents.

Bottom line, whether we look at total numbers or demographically, population decline coming from simply choosing to have fewer kids is nothing remotely catastrophic.

Now, a final point: in a worldwide context, more people does tend to increase investment, therefore innovation and economic growth. This is obvious in the aggregate - there wouldn’t be any factories if there weren’t any humans - but people forget. So, on a world-wide level, we should have a bias towards more humans, while recognizing that, on a country level, a shrinking population is certainly no catastrophe.

EU Unveils Plan To Resettle More North African Refugees, Support Project With 500 Million Euros

Just days after The Economist primed the world with its narrative that sending 1.2 bilion unskilled Africans to Europe would increase global GDP, The EU"s executive has unveiled plans to resettle at least 50,000 refugees, focusing on people from northern Africa, to bypass smugglers.

As we noted previously, The Economist"s argument is plain idiotic.  

The Economist confuses countries with companies that are profit-oriented, and where people are disposable resources. Yet, countries are communities, and citizens do not usually expect their governments to merely maximize GDP. History teaches us that migration causes social unrest, disrupts social cohesion and ultimately the stability of the recipient nation. And even if we set aside these social or national considerations, the Economist’s reasoning is still false.

The whole argument breaks down on social security and the massive world oversupply of unskilled labour.

Social security determines the minimum price of labour.

If there is abundance of unskilled workers, governments step in and buy or take out of the market the oversupply of labourers for a minimum price called social welfare.

And so, as DW.com reports, the EU central planners think more immigrants, more social welfare, more forced dependency on the uber-alles-arching Brussels corporotocracy...

The plan announced by the European Commission, the EU"s executive arm, on Wednesday involved setting aside 500 million euros ($587 million) for the resettlement effort.

It would involve bringing at least 50,000 people considered the most vulnerable and in need of protection directly to Europe over the next two years. The focus should be on people in North Africa and the Horn of Africa, the commission said, mentioning Libya, Egypt, Niger, Sudan, Chad and Ethiopia. Libya is the main departure point for people making dangerous journeys across the Mediterranean in smugglers" boats to reach Europe.

"Europe has to show that it is ready to share responsibility with third countries, notably in Africa. People who are in genuine need of protection should not risk their lives or depend on smugglers," EU Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos told media in Brussels.

The EU has already resettled 23,000 people, mainly from refugee camps in Turkey and the Middle East, under previous resettlement schemes.

The move is part of the EU"s effort to cope with an ongoing migration crisis which has seen more than a million refugees and unauthorized migrants enter the bloc over the past two years and threatened European solidarity. The recommendations from Brussels are not legally binding on member states, which are individually responsible for deciding on resettlement numbers.

Of course, as is well known, European countries have struggled to agree on and implement migration policies as well as deals to distribute asylum seekers who arrive at EU border countries across the bloc. Separately, Brussels on Wednesday also released plans to allow countries in the Schengen free movement area to reintroduce border controls for security reasons for up to three years during a crisis.

Of course, it is not lost on us that Europe is already struggling to distribute thousands of migrants in the bloc, so how does this help? As we concluded previously,

Africa has 1.2 billion people that will double in the next 25 years, of which huge numbers are about to join European labour force in the coming decades. At the same time the highly educated and skilled western populations will decline, reducing the demand for unskilled labour even further. There is no chance that Europe can afford to keep its social welfare without enforcing a quota on migrants. And even if social security is dropped altogether, the European labour market will reach a situation where there are so many labourers that they become as worthless as they are in Nigeria. For the unskilled European working class it is tantamount to suicide to vote open borders advocates into office.

Interestingly enough, The Economist implicitly stated that Africans are not able to utilise their labour force themselves. Bringing the African population under European supervision failed during the very brief period of colonisation of Africa, and now the Economist wants to bring the Africans under European supervision by using open borders policy and moving the African population to Europe.

Does the Economist really suggest that white Europeans are the only ones who can solve Africa’s problems?

Millennials Head One-Third Of All Poverty-Stricken U.S. Households (The Rest Live With Mom)

Millennials just can"t catch a break.  Despite being the most educated generation ever to walk the face of the planet, at least according to their tuition bills paid by mom and dad, a staggering number of them now head households living below the poverty line...and that excludes the ones forced to live at home with mom and dad.

According to a recent note published by the Pew Research Center, Millenials now head more households living below the poverty line than any other generation and, in aggregate, represent nearly one-third of all impoverished households in the United States. 

More Millennial households are in poverty than households headed by any other generation. In 2016, an estimated 5.3 million of the nearly 17 million U.S. households living in poverty were headed by a Millennial, compared with 4.2 million headed by a Gen Xer and 5.0 million headed by a Baby Boomer. The relatively high number of Millennial households in poverty partly reflects the fact that the poverty rate among households headed by a young adult has been rising over the past half century while dramatically declining among households headed by those 65 and older.

Of course, that"s all despite the fact that they only head just over 20% of all households...

Millennials are the largest living generation by population size (79.8 million in 2016), but they trail Baby Boomers and Generation Xers when it comes to the number of households they head. Many Millennials still live under their parents’ roof or are in a college dorm or some other shared living situation. As of 2016, Millennials (ages 18 to 35 in 2016) headed only 28 million households, many fewer than were headed by Generation X (ages 36 to 51 in 2016) or Baby Boomers (ages 52 to 70).

Of course, those aren"t the only stats that prove just how much those anthropology degrees are paying off...Millennials are also winning at the "cohabiting-couple" game...presumably because it takes a village of millennials to cover one monthly rent bill.

Meanwhile, for the first time in history, more young adults today are living at home with mom and dad than with a spouse.

Conclusion:

And The Best State To Grow Old In Is...

Elder-care company Caring.com recently conducted a study to determine the best US states to grow old in. And the winner is…

Utah.

That"s right: In addition to being one of the top 5 fiscally responsible states in the Union, the home of Mormonism is also the most friendly state for elderly Americans to grow old and retire in. Earlier this year, the Mercatus Center at George Mason University compiled a comprehensive study, based on a number of objective financial metrics, ranking the 50 US states according to their overall fiscal condition. Utah came in third behind Alaska and Florida.

But Utah handily bested both those states on a ranking based on 13 categories including quality, cost, and availability of health care for seniors, as well as factors that speak to the state’s overall quality of life.

Here’s a breakdown of the data, courtesy of Bloomberg:

Best states:
Utah/$2,950
Iowa/$3,518
South Carolina/$3,000
Washington/$4,500
Nebraska/$3,510

Worst states:
Wyoming/$3,995
North Dakota/$3,340
New York/$4,136
Indiana/$3,528
West Virginia/$3,263

New York, one of the worst states for retirees, was singled out because of the extreme disparity between health-care cost and quality, as Bloomberg explains…

“New York, No. 33 in the well-being ranking, was singled out by Caring.com for its extremes. The very high cost of the state’s health care doesn’t produce results close to commensurate with that spending, according to the report. While New York ranked 46th in cost (the lower the rank, the higher the cost), its life/health care quality rank was 34 (the lower the rank, the worse the quality). Massachusetts had a similar pattern; it ranked 49th in cost and 18th in quality. That’s reflective of a larger trend in the U.S.—high spending on health care isn’t translating into longer lives, as this interactive graphic demonstrates.”

Washington State and California do a better job of translating higher costs to better-quality care…

“Higher costs show more of a payoff in Washington state and California. Washington is 38th for cost and is the top state for quality of life and health care. California has a cost ranking of 36 and quality ranking of 3 (it’s tied with Oregon for quality).”

According to Bloomberg, the lighter the color, the higher the overall ranking of the state as a place to grow old.

The study was conducted by Caring.com, which ranked states on 13 categories, including quality, cost, and availability of health care for seniors. The study’s authors used a range of data sets, including Census data and proprietary data sets from AARP.

“The ranking, which drew on data from the U.S. Census, the insurer Genworth, AARP, the Commonwealth Fund, and Gallup-Healthways, among others, also factored in 150,000 consumer reviews from Caring.com’s database of facilities and care providers for seniors. The availability, quality, and cost of care for the elderly got greater attention in the report than some of the common measures used in retirement destination rankings.”

As Tim Sullivan, vice president at Caring.com, explains, the author’s decision to name the study “The Best States To Grow Old In” instead of “The Best States To Retire In” was meant to highlight an important distinction...

“One reason we call this report the best states to grow old, versus best states to retire, is because it’s really important for people to plan out their 60s, 70s, and 80s with as much care as they plan their retirement in their 30s, 40s, and 50s,” said Tim Sullivan, vice president at Caring.com. “Your needs change as you age, and they are not always going to be driven by the sort of leisure or amenities or weather considerations that are what a lot of people think about retirement.”

The report’s greatest utility, according to Bloomberg, is helping to spark a discussion about where millennials should plan on settling down for the long haul. Unfortunately, Utah is largely devoid of the amenities – like comprehensive public transportation and quality night life – that millennials covet. But affordable health care, low taxes and the state’s overall low cost of living make a compelling case for going without.

Fourth Turning's Neil Howe Fears "Strong Parallels" Between 1930s And Today: "It's Going To Be A Rollercoaster Ride"

This week on the MacroVoices podcast, host Erik Townsend interviewed Neil Howe, co-author of The Fourth Turning, an investing tract that’s found renewed relevance thanks to White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, who’s cited it as an inspiration for his (and by extension, President Donald Trump’s) worldview.

According to the New York Times, which published a story earlier this year explaining the theories encapsulated in the book, the Fourth Turning was “written by two amateur historians, making the case that world events unfold in predictable cycles of roughly 80 years each, and that they can be divided into four chapters, or turnings: growth, maturation, entropy and destruction. Western societies have experienced the same patterns for centuries, the book argues, and they are as natural and necessary as spring, summer, fall and winter."

Few books have been as central to the worldview of Mr. Bannon, a voracious reader who tends to see politics and policy in terms of their place in the broader arc of history.”

Townsend shares Bannon’s enthusiasm, saying in his preamble that he believes the Fourth Turning is “the most important investing book of our time…I am such a big fan of this book personally that I literally named my own investment management company Fourth Turning Capital Management after Neil’s work.”

During the interview, Townsend and Howe discussed Howe’s conclusion that America is presently in the middle of a 20-year-long period of social, economic and political upheaval.  

Howe begins by explaining how the first book written by himself and William Strauss, with whom he also collaborated on the Fourth Turning, introduced him to the idea that America’s economy and culture follow distinct patterns. While studying cultural differences between generations of the American population, Howe says he began to notice a pattern, with one generation tearing down and reinventing some of the institutions, both physical and cultural, of the generation that preceded it.

“So, on the one hand, you have these turning points which are civic and institutional and involve politics and empire and the economy. These are the fourth turnings. And then you have these value-focused episodes which involve culture and religion and the interior of life, not the exterior of life. And of course our most recent awakening was in the late ‘60s and ‘70s, something a lot of us boomers today remember because they came of age during that period.

So this was an interesting pattern to us, and it was in The Fourth Turning where we sort of formalized that into looking at history moving through a series of social moods in a certain order. And we think there’s some very fundamental reasons for why we move through history.

And not just American, I should mention, but I think most of the modern world moves through history and cycles like this. They can be interrupted, they can be cut short, but there is a tendency for this. It’s manifested itself very strongly in American history. And we call these—each of these eras is about a generation long, they’re about 20, 21, 22, 23 years long, and we call them first, second, third, and fourth turnings.

The fourth turning is the final season of history, if you will, the final generation. And that is the period of crisis. That is the period when we tear down institutions that we’ve built, everything that’s dysfunctional. And we sort of rebuild things from scratch again. And it usually follows a period where—it’s bound up in a period where there’s complete disgust, complete distrust with what we have. And, usually under pressure by the younger generation, we kind of rebuild. These are the civic rebirth moments we’ve talked about earlier. That’s by way of introduction. That book was in 1997. You’re right, it’s about 20 years ago.”

In Howe’s more recent writing, he has cited the 2008 financial crisis as the catalyst that signaled the beginning of the most recent turning. But Townsend questions why Howe didn’t pick 9/11. For one, Townsend believes it had a more dramatic impact on how Americans view and feel about the US’s relationship with the modern world.

Howe says he didn’t choose 9/11 because it didn’t have the same transformational influence on markets that the financial crisis had. It also arrived too early: In 2001, most members of the millennial generation hadn’t graduated from high school yet, and most baby boomers hadn’t reached retirement age.

“A couple of reasons. One is that, although 9/11 changed America’s attitude towards the rest of the world, I think that the stock market boom and celebrity circus that’s here in the United States really hadn’t changed very much. And I don’t think you really had a shift, a fundamental shift, in America’s perception of themselves as a people, as their own country, to a fundamental degree until 2008. Also, 2001, as we explained to many people at the time, was simply too early. Every turning starts when each generation is beginning to move into a new phase of life. Back in 2001 boomers were not yet retiring, millennials were still—maybe the first one of them was barely graduating from high school.

So, this was not what we expected. 2008 really did coincide with the generational maturity of the turning, so to speak. And I think that, in terms of the basic shift in our efficacy of the social system, I think 2008 was a bigger change.” The crisis also ushered in an era where central banks exhibit total control of markets, which has created an “artificial quality,” Howe said.

“The economic emergency that occurred in 2008-2009 really catapulted us into by far the biggest economic emergency we’ve been in since the early 1930s. And, arguably, we are still living out the consequences of that with complete change in central bank policy, monetary policy, with sustaining these record low interest rates and arguable very high valuations in financial markets—almost anything pushed by that—and people still wondering how we’re going to get out from under that.

The constant discussion is when are central banks going to pull back on their balance sheets and actually go back to the old normal? So, I think there is the sense, even in this the booming markets that we see today, that there is this artificial quality: people think that there’s something wrong about this. We have not re-righted where we were. We are not letting price discovery and actual markets function the way they did before then.

So, I do believe that 2008 was the beginning of a whole new regime. And I also believe that the political dysfunction, the sense of political dysfunction—created during the two turns of the Obama presidency and, obviously, also into the Trump presidency—of government completely grinding to a halt is going to have some very powerful repercussions in the years shortly to come.”

Of course, there’s a certain futility in trying to determine the exact beginning and ending of a turning cycle while it’s still in progress. Townsend asks, since we can’t predict the future, how do we know that there isn’t an even worse crisis just around the corner? It’s a great question, Howe responds.

“It’s certainly a danger out there. Now we all just saw this morning how markets reacted to this war of words between President Trump and North Korea. I think that there is a rising tide of nationalism around the world. I think it’s driven by younger generations. And I should say not just nationalism but authoritarianism. And I would say these are strong parallels that we see between the decade we’ve been living through and the 1930s. Because it isn’t just what happens to/in the economy. I mean, you consider so many ways in which this last decade has recapitulated the 1930s, starting off with a financial crisis, worries about deflation, worries about declining fertility rates, and currency wars, and beggar thy neighbor policies, and radical attempts by monetary and ultimately fiscal policy to remedy the situation.

But also consider the geopolitical atmosphere of the 1930s. Which was a new world in which there was no concert of great powers, no great power who was taking responsibility for guiding or leading the world. Britain had largely retreated from its global influence after World War I.

The League of Nations had fallen apart. And the 1930s was the time when authoritarian leaders, and with growing popularity—growing numbers of people thought that that was actually a pretty good answer to the world’s problems. These regimes were doing whatever they wanted in their corner of the world with no one really to stop them.”

Evidence of the millennial generation’s contribution to the current turning can be found in the shift in political attitudes from those of their parents. Howe claims millennials are less interested in democracy, and that there’s a “growing appeal of authoritarian leaders that get things done.”

“And I think today we live in a similar era. Just look around the world today. You see a vacuum of any great power or concert of great powers who are orchestrating what goes on in the world. And basically people doing what they want and creating an increasingly dangerous world. I even think in the culture you find strong parallels. The decline in home ownership, for example. The decline in the birth rate and the fertility rate. The blanding of the popular culture that occurred during the 1930s is very similar to what’s going on with the millennials today. And the growing appeal among younger people, activists among younger people—younger people have a more collectivist or authoritarian notion of what kind of government works.

We actually wrote a piece recently called Are Millennials Souring on Democracy? And look at some of these recent opinion polls around the world showing that millennials are less interested. Not just in America but in Europe and East Asia. Not necessarily favoring liberal democratic solutions. It’s a growing appeal of authoritarian leaders that get things done. Well, you can see here in the United States we have a government that no longer thinks about the future at all and can’t get anything done. So you can imagine how turned off you would be if you’re a young person trying to think of the rest of your life.”

If Howe is correct, the US has another decade or so before the present cycle ends, and the next first turning, supposedly a period of economic and cultural renewal, begins. So, Townsend asks, with 10 years of turmoil left on the clock, what can Americans expect? Howe said Americans should be watching for "all these little problems to coalesce in one huge problem.""

“I think this is going to be the real rollercoaster ride. And I do think, not only—as you mentioned there are four stages to a fourth turning. One is the catalyst. The next is the regeneracy when we see some center of public trust beginning to grow around the new public agenda. We really haven’t seen that yet. Although you can look at various parts and begin to see certain—I would say particularly look at what young people are doing. Every fourth turning you kind of see where are young people going, who are they beginning to trust both on the right and the left. I think that’s an interesting marker. But then ultimately you move to the crisis.

And that’s when this new sense of public trust, which I think won’t really begin to appear once we begin to hit public problems that we have to solve. And I mentioned about two or three that we’re probably going to have to hit by the end of this year. And then, of course, comes the mid-term election next year. But that’s when that begins to grow.

And then the crisis, when all of these problems begin to coalesce into one huge problem. It’s when the Great Recession met all of these—the rise of fascism both in Asia and in Europe, and everything came together, currency wars, everything became part of a huge problem. Which, by the resolution, you see—and this is what happens at every fourth turning. All the little problems come together into a giant problem. And the giant problem gets completely solved.”

Americans – and investors, in particular – shouldn’t find comfort in the notion that the worst of the crisis has passed. Central bankers managed to engineer a quick recovery (in asset valuations, at least) with an unprecedented injection of freshly printed capital, but the magnitude of this intervention is preventing markets from working properly - what Howe calls “the valuation issue.”

Central banks’ willingness to keep us “not too far from the zero bound” has had myriad benefits for investors. But with US equity valuations still so close to all-time highs, Howe wonders: “Have we created a monster here.”

Listen to the rest of the interview below: 

USGS Says California Needs Close Monitoring Of 8 Active Volcanoes

California could be even closer to a major natural disaster than ever before.  With eight active volcanoes and a high state population, the United States Geological Survey says that the Golden State is in desperate need of very close monitoring.

“I call them the watch-list volcanoes,” said Margaret Mangan, Scientist-in-Charge at the California Volcano Observatory. Scientists know from geophysical and geochemical research that these volcanoes have molten rock and magma, “in their roots,”  and the world’s top volcanologists aren’t taking any chances anymore.  They are heading to Portland, Oregon on August 14 for the first international volcanology assembly held in the U.S. since 1989. The many famous, prominent, and dangerous volcanoes of the West Coast will be the subject of field trips and much discussion during the assembly.

The volcanoes which will get the most discussion are shown in the image below.

USGS caption: Volcanoes of very high to low threat are scattered throughout California, from the Oregon border (north) to Mexico (south). Other older volcanoes in California are of less concern. California’s volcano watch list is subject to change as new data on past eruptive activity are collected, as volcanic unrest changes, and as populations in threatened areas grow or decline.

Throughout the Cascade Range and into southern California, the West Coast is home to most of the country’s highest-threat volcanoes, as ranked by the United State Geological Survey, making California a ticking time bomb. As if the earthquake threat on the heavily populated West Coast wasn’t enough, scientists are now concerned about the volcanic activity as well. While Mount Shasta unsurprisingly tops USGS’s list of very-high threat volcanoes in California, there are seven other volcanic areas in the state that are also “young, nervy, jacked up on magma, and likely to erupt.”

Back in 2005, a national team led by John Ewert, a volcanologist with the USGS Cascades Volcano Observatory, established a system for other volcanologists, which would help them decide which of the United States’ 169 young volcanoes are the most dangerous and most in need of monitoring. In the “Framework for a National Volcano Early Warning System,” Ewert’s team identified 57 priority volcanoes in the U.S., and eight just in California are now on high alert.

Roughly half of the nation’s 169 young volcanoes are dangerous because of the manner in which they erupt and the communities within their reach.Volcanologists are going to be monitoring these volcanoes in California closely, and maybe they can give those nearest some kind of warning should major changes signaling an eruption occur.

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Author: Mac Slavo
Views: Read by 114 people
Date: August 13th, 2017
Website: www.SHTFplan.com

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