– Caterpillar Suffers Worst Month Since Lehman, 26 Consecutive Months Of Declining Retail Sales (ZeroHedge, Feb 19, 2015):
Once upon a time, Caterpillar was the world’s industrial bellwether and a Dow Jones Industrial staple. Lately, in addition to suddenly developing a very close relationship with Federal authorities who “are investigating the movement of cash among Caterpillar Inc. ’s U.S. and overseas subsidiaries”, CAT has become a completely ignored and forgotten poster name of the “old-economy” (the on in which cash flow still mattered). However, there are those who still believe that the second coming “eyeballs” as the only valuation term category is destined to end in tears, and as such care about how companies like CAT do.
Sadly, we have some more bad news: Caterpillar just reported that in January, it suffered its worst retail sales month since Lehman, with global sales plunging 14% from last January (when sales in turn had dropped 8% from a year before, while the year before had slid 3% from the year before that and so on). In fact, January was so bad, it was the first month since 2013 when CAT reported declining sales across all regions in which it does business, now that the dead CAT bounce in North America is over.
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Yet, regardless of what the real economy says, against all common sense and reason, the US markets continue to climb. How they can add the number of skim and sell transactions to their so-called volume, and claim it as growth is beyond me. Is there no forensic oversight of these crooks? This is terrifying. Everything is going to a very few people, and they pick the bones of the rest of us.
No decent jobs, save in a few pockets of prosperity, no growth unless you call corporations swallowing each other up to destroy any sense of competition as growth.
The market went up 154 points today.
Moodys, who ought to be in jail and out of business for exporting Enron accounting to the world, just downgraded Russian Sovereign debt to junk…………who the fuck are they to downgrade anyone after causing the world’s worst global economic crash in modern history by lying about the value of bonds and stock packages. They sold MBS as assets, and they were debt. There were a few A level mortgages in there, but there were mostly C level and worse, they were all debt packaged as bonds (assets). Entire nations went bankrupt. Why are they still in business? Why would anyone listen to them? Arthur Anderson went broke after their fraud in the 1980s, but we still had regulations in those days.
I have really come to understand why we only live a few decades. Nothing that is going on makes any sense, it is all pirates and hostages, and I was reared in a different world and time. It isn’t my world any longer.
Come on Marilyn. Lamenting the fact that we’ve long since been put out to pasture will only depress you further.
We endured the best, most productive and inventive period of mankind ever, and thoroughly enjoyed it and all its benefits. Personally I am grateful to have been part of it.
Sadly what has turned out to be a fragile financial house of cards, was already eating away at our security and happiness three decades ago, but then, we were so full of our own shit and importance, we never noticed, then came the dot com bubble, KenLay, 9/11, and Lehman/Citi etc with wealth polarisation in the hands of the wealthy, and whilst their appointees endeavour to deflect attention to all the CIA/Mossad created conflict zones worldwide, the polarisation continues and will continue to do so until we have the whole world safely in the hands of a continuously decreasing number of global specialist corporations forcing minimum wages on fewer and fewer staff, whilst the rest wallow in ghetto blocks and FEMA camps.
And then they die. So cheer up!