Asset protection

The Lucrative New Tech Hijacking Your Privacy

on Tuesday, 21 January 2020 10:41

We’ve come a long way from being able to superimpose Trump’s hair on our own heads. We’ve also come a long way from wearing masks and sunglasses in public for reasons of fashion or healthcare. Now, it’s about dodging facial recognition.

Protesters in Hong Kong are doing exactly this to avoid facial recognition technologies, with some even employing lasers that cameras can’t process or recognize.  But it’s not just amid mass protests in Hong Kong that everyone should be worried about facial recognition technology. It’s used everywhere from airports and shopping centers to all that lies in between.

Proponents hail the crime-solving and potential crime-prevention benefits, but the sacrifice is great.

Privacy advocates say it could lead to automatically identifying and tracking anyone, not just criminals, and it can be used for violations of privacy….CLICK for complete article

It’s Time to Pay Attention to Commercial & Industrial Loans

Posted by Wolf Richter

on Tuesday, 14 January 2020 11:29

Commercial and industrial loans (C&I loans) at all commercial banks fell to $2.33 trillion as of January 1, the lowest since March 2019, according to Federal Reserve data on commercial banks, released on Friday. C&I loans peaked in August last year at $2.38 trillion and have since fallen 1.7%. This has occurred despite three rate cuts by the Fed over the period.

C&I loans are used by businesses for working capital or to finance capital expenditures. Working capital loans are usually collateralized by receivables and inventories. Capital expenditure loans are collateralized by equipment and the like.

These loans are often credit lines with floating interest rates – which are very low and very appealing for borrowers. And banks are eager to extend these loans and are offering them aggressively, even to my little company. So there is no issue at this side of the equation…CLICK for complete article

Smart Money Is Getting Increasingly Nervous

Posted by Anes Alic

on Thursday, 19 December 2019 10:25

Could it be that stock markets are catching on to the fleeting nature of tweeting, or is there something bigger at play here as the massive rebound one might expect on good news all around fails to translate on the S&P 500 or the DOW? Before the open on Monday, the S&P 500 had gained only 30 points since Friday’s news of a “massive” trade deal with China, combined with a victory for Boris Johnson in the UK that should have signaled less uncertainty over Brexit.

The DOW went from 27,907 at Wednesday’s close to 28,130 at Thursday’s, and then it lost the thread. By Friday, the news failed to seem exciting anymore, and the DOW closed 28,137…CLICK for complete article

Stocks You Can Tolerate

Posted by Andrew Ruhland

on Friday, 13 December 2019 12:15

This is Andrew’s follow up video to his September webinar, Protect & Prosper Through the Coming Chaos.

The Fragility Of Monetary Policy

Posted by Keith Weiner

on Friday, 29 November 2019 9:47

Physics students study mechanical systems in which pulleys are massless and frictionless. Economics students study monetary systems in which rising prices are everywhere and always caused by rising quantity of currency. There is a similarity between this pair of assumptions. Both are facile. They oversimplify reality, and if one is not careful they can lead to spectacularly wrong conclusions.

And there are two key differences. One, in physics, students know that pulleys have mass and friction, and graduate to a more sophisticated understanding. Two, the Quantity Theory of Money (QTM) is not a simplified view of reality. It is oversimplified, to be sure, but it is a false theory.

QTM leads one to think that the groceries you can buy with a dollar are intrinsic to the dollar itself. And this leads to the idea that, the lower the dollar goes, the easier it would be to pay dollar debts. Returning to our physics analogy, pulleys are not massless and frictionless. And the value of the dollar is not 1/P (purchasing power).

Useless Ingredients

We have written a lot about when government forces businesses to pay for things that their customers do not value, and do not usually even know about. We deem these things useless ingredients. Consider an example. Suppose the federal government got more serious about the Americans with Disabilities Act, and they no longer allow noncompliant restaurants and bars to remain grandfathered under the old code. All of these businesses now must spend a lot of money getting compliant, and reducing their revenue-generating floor space for the sake of much larger bathrooms. This does not cause prices to rise, directly. If restaurants could charge more, then they would already be charging more…CLICK for complete article