2015: A World Ruled by Hubris, Willful Blindness and Desperation - Washington's Blog

Issuing lies and pursuing willful blindness is not leadership: it’s failure on a grand scale.

Rather than issue predictions for 2015, this week I’ll cover themes that I believe will be consequential in the year ahead.

The first theme is the dominant psychological dynamic of global leadership, which can be distilled down to a toxic brew of Hubris, Willful Blindness and Desperation.

Examples of leadership hubris abound, and they all arise from the false confidence that the same playbook and tools that rescued the Status Quo from well-deserved oblivion for the past six years will continue working splendidly in the years ahead.

Prime examples include the Federal Reserve, which clearly believes its own PR (we are omnipotent and the markets rise at our command) and China’s leadership, which clearly believes that the strategies and tools that rescued China from implosion in 2008-09 can be applied to the entirely different problem of deflating the world’s greatest quadruple-bubble in shadow banking, real estate, commodities and state-owned enterprises (SEOs).

The two problem-states could not be more different, and hence the Chinese leadership’s bravado is classic hubris.

The legal definition of willful blindness is when someone attempts to evade responsibility by claiming ignorance of conditions that they should have known.One classic example is the drug mule who claims “I didn’t know there was cocaine in this diaper bag, officer.” The courts take a dim view of this bogus defense, and the public should take an equally dim view of leadership’s claims that they couldn’t possibly have foreseen the coming crisis in pensions and unfunded liabilities.

Our leaders’ claims of ignorance are even more absurd than those of a drug mule, for leadership means grasping the nettle of what is obvious to everyone who glances at the basic facts. I have chosen pensions and unfunded liabilities as a prime example, but there are many other equally visible examples of our leadership’s willful blindness.

Complete story at - 2015: A World Ruled by Hubris, Willful Blindness and Desperation Washington's Blog

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis: Climate Model Predicts Very Cold Winter in Northern Hemisphere; Another Record Breaker?

There is a huge buildup up of snow in Siberia this year like last. Meteorologists believe that portends another brutal winter.

Bloomberg reports Climate Model Predicts Very Cold Winter in Northern Hemisphere.

About 14.1 million square kilometers of snow blanketed Siberia at the end of October, the second most in records going back to 1967, according to Rutgers University’s Global Snow Lab. The record was in 1976, which broke a streak of mild winters in the eastern U.S. In addition, the speed at which snow has covered the region is the fastest since at least 1998.

Taken together they signal greater chances for frigid air to spill out of the Arctic into more temperate regions of North America, Europe and Asia, said Judah Cohen, director of seasonal forecasting at Atmospheric and Environmental Research in Lexington, Massachusetts, who developed the theory linking Siberian snow with winter weather.

“A rapid advance of Eurasian snow cover during the month of October favors that the upcoming winter will be cold across the Northern Hemisphere,” Cohen said in an interview yesterday. “This past October the signal was quite robust.”

Complete story at - Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis: Climate Model Predicts Very Cold Winter in Northern Hemisphere; Another Record Breaker?