Japanese engineers are compelled to fake safety reports while proletariat laborers can shut down production lines for esthetic defects.

Japanese engineers are compelled to fake safety reports while proletariat laborers can shut down production lines for esthetic defects. Leftist thinking is the root cause of the problem. In Russia when they collapsed we discovered that the majority of the engineers in the aircraft industry were women because the men preferred to be proletariat laborers because laborers in aircraft factories were paid more than engineers. We are seeing the leftist unions doing the same thing now here in America. City bus drivers get paid more than engineers and retire early with 90% of their pay.

Will Gadaffi continue to make American energy policy or will someone in America show some leadership?
Inept American energy policy (a vacuum of intelligent thought) is what has abruptly put an end to economic recovery and jobs. It looks like France's President Sarcozy and the Arab League will step in. Maybe Italy's Silvio Berlusconi can help Obama make a few decisions. Sooner or later Obama has to decide if he wants to be thrown out because he is an incompetent leftist or because he is just incompetent.

George Soros may have caused the Yen to rise because it has his fingerprints all over it. First it is a stupid move and it was done while America was sleeping. Initially stupid novice currency traders who drive city busses during the day got in so the Yen picked up strength but now the Yen currency manipulation has been foiled. The strategy George Soros uses is to destabilize in one direction that makes very little sense so he attracts the fools. Then he goes all the way in the opposite direction to fleece the fools. Well this time he must be losing money because today the yen is being stabilized by the G7. Repatriation of the yen does not make sense for Japan because that only destroys their balance of trade just when they are facing a shock. Perhaps Soros intended to try to destroy Japan's economy? Perhaps he was testing his organization to eventually take out the American economy. Why did he support leftist fools in America's last few elections if he does not want to undermine America? Soros helped the leftists in Japan too in their last election. Perhaps Soros is not a leftist after all. Perhaps George Soros only helps elect ignorant leftist elitists to destabilize economies.

GE/MSNBC/Pravda should be banned from the American nuclear and defense industries after their exhibition of incompetence and irresponsibility in Japan. How can a company run by people filled with hate for free enterprise be depended upon to defend and keep America safe?


World Markets this week:
I can confirm that the following report is true of an endemic problem in Japan's culture. In the 1980s I witnessed the same problem with falsified test results so that they could keep aircraft flying until safety was an issue. We proved it to them and then they corrected that problem. The problem with their culture is that engineers in Japan are under such pressure to keep product lines running with serious safety issues while the common laborers are encouraged to shut production down when they see esthetic defects. The unfolding disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant follows decades of falsified safety reports, fatal accidents and underestimated earthquake risk in Japan’s atomic power industry. The destruction caused by last week’s 9.0 earthquake and tsunami comes less than four years after a 6.8 quake shut the world’s biggest atomic plant, also run by Tokyo Electric Power Co. In 2002 and 2007, revelations the utility had faked repair records forced the resignation of the company’s chairman and president, and a three-week shutdown of all 17 of its reactors. With almost no oil or gas reserves of its own, nuclear power has been a national priority for Japan since the end of World War II. Japan has 54 operating nuclear reactors -- more than any other country except the U.S. and France pitting economic demands against safety concerns in the world’s most earthquake-prone country. Nuclear engineers and academics who have worked in Japan’s atomic power industry spoke in interviews of a history of accidents, faked reports and inaction by a succession of Liberal Democratic Party governments that ran Japan for nearly all of the postwar period. Katsuhiko Ishibashi, a seismology professor at Kobe University, resigned in 2006 from a government panel on reactor safety, saying the review process was rigged and “unscientific.”

China is still a bright spot. Their leaders are again openly talking about political reforms. They should try freedom on the local level first. They should have local communist leaders divide into two groups and create two political parties in each town. One party should have the goal of personal freedoms for industry and especially individuals. The other party could be a milder form of communism such as socialism. Hence both parties would move in the direction of political freedom. If they sponsor these two parties across all of China when it would be stable and less likely to split into many factions. They could even model the two parties on the two major parties in Taiwan. Then initially the Chinese government would change but most of the first new leaders would be the same. They would be competing for leadership and gradually new leaders would come forward. Japan, Germany, Taiwan, and much of the world went through that process when WWII ended.

US Economy
Home construction in US slumps, and producer prices rise and become a recovery hurdle
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELDHaeEsNF0

Export Prices ex-ag. Feb rose 0.9% the same as last month 0.9%, or a 10% inflation rate
Import Prices ex-oil Feb 0.3% not as bad as last months 0.8%
Net long-term TIC Flows Jan $51.5 poorer than last month's $65.9B
NAHB Housing Market Index Mar 17 hardly improving from last month's 16
FOMC Rate Decision Mar 0.25% not changed and not helping. Raising the rate would stimulate investing in jobs instead of keeping money under corporate mattresses.
MBA Mortgage Index 03/11 -0.7 falling dramatically from +15.5%
Housing Starts Feb 479K down substantially from 596K
Building Permits Feb 517K down substantially from 562K
Producer Price Index Feb 1.6% up sharply from 0.8%, or 15% energy inflation
Core PPI Feb 0.2% down from 0.5% exactly what the FED wants.
Current Account Balance Q4 -$113.3B deficit contracted slightly from -$123.2B
Crude Inventories 03/12 1.745M down slightly from 2.52M

Yesterday
Initial Claims 03/12 385K still up from two weeks ago but a slight decline from last week's 397K
Continuing Claims 03/05 3706K drops as 99 week of unemployment runs out to 3771K
CPI Feb 0.5% got worse and is twice the FED goal. Was 0.4% last week.
Core CPI Feb 0.2% constant and acceptable 0.2%
Industrial Production Feb -0.1% Dropped again this month -0.1% Not good
Capacity Utilization Feb 76.3% still many idle factories 76.1%
Leading Indicators Feb 0.8% up due to stock market 0.1% Now stocks are declining and they are a leading indicator too.
Philadelphia Fed Mar 43.4 Philly is reviving from 35.9
On balance the economy is again flat. Housing is the biggest Obama disaster area and will hurt the economy far more than unemployment. And it won't be any better next year if Obama doesn't wake up.


Market Outlook March 18, 2011

The market rose yesterday as volume fell 25% from when share prices were dropping. Finally a bounce occurred. We are seeing funds unloading stocks on people who listen to GE/MSNBC/Pravda advice.

We think the next stock market support level will be down at Nov 4, 2010 levels about another 9% lower. But actually the real support starts about 16% lower than yesterdays close. All of this year's gains are already gone.

http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=%5ENYA+Interactive#chart2:symbo yel=^nya;range=1y;indicator=ema(50,20)+volume;charttype=line;crosshair=on;ohlcvalues=0;logscale=on;source=undefined

World Markets
The phenomena of this decline in all world equities and precious metals are because all markets are about 35% overvalued right now. International trade shows that the world economy has only revived about 25%. Look at the last five years of world trade and the last year and you can see the world has not recovered the way Obama and GE/MSNBC/Pravda socialists are telling Americans. In fact world trade based on actual shipments is now one third what it was last September.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/quote?ticker=BDIY:IND

What we are seeing now is called a redistribution of stocks from the strongest and smartest investors to the greediest and most foolish investors. This happens at every market high and the symptoms are that the smart investors sell early and sharply but then stop abruptly so that the foolish will think there are bargains and drive the market back up reducing the daily loss. The smart investors do that day after day because the sellers do not want to drive down the prices until all the greedy foolish investors have exhausted all their cash and margin.

At that point the foolish are vulnerable because they are on or close to their margin limits and have borrowed half of what they have invested. At this point the smart investors know the game is over and they sell out 90% and the market plummets forcing all the foolish investors who are on margin virtually out of the market forever. They are burned so badly that most cannot even recall how bad their experience was because it is blocked out within their subconscious and they will never invest again until about twenty years later when they have totally forgotten. Then these same fools will be attracted back into the market by their ignorance and greed and they will buy gold and other "secure safe-havens" at their peak again and then lose 75% of the retirement savings. When Glen Beck has paying advertisers hawking Gold on the radio that is a sure sign the common fools are getting on board. Gold was over $800/oz thirty years ago and then fell to almost $200/oz where the radio show buyers were down 75%. Do not be a fool. $1400 for gold is no time to buy gold. It is up 600% from the lows in the 90's. 600% is already an adequate run-up for gold. It has now become "fools gold" for the greedy. Gold and silver teeth are no longer in style. You can tell who has bad teeth today when you see gold and silver. Good teeth are generally white. Only some of the people in India still eat gold and silver. They think it makes them smarter and better than the untouchables. But even that custom of the elitists is slowly going out of style. In 2006 we used a 101 blog to warn people that that the housing bubble was about to burst.

Asian markets bounced up last night. China up 0.4%, Hong Kong up 0.1%, India down -1.5 %, and Japan up 2.7%,

European markets are leveling off this morning up in a range of about 0.3% to 1.5% half way through their day.

US pre-market futures are up about 0.7% at 9:00 AM EST.

The rallies are the opportunities for the wise to sell to the foolish. When we run out of foolish buying, the market drops seriously as many people lose everything and their accounts are closed. Free markets punish the foolish. So be prepared to buy when the panic subsides.