Note:
I’m here in San Diego County in my new/old 39 foot Chevy Motorhome. I can’t get
a signal for my Verizon LG smartphone (I’ll be taking a spin in my Ford
Explorer in search of a signal; my VOIP phone, magicjack requiring a broadband
connection, is currently not up except for voicemail). The radio reception is
also limited which led me to ‘sample’ some limited AM offerings which included
shallow sean hannity the hallmark of insanity, and ‘rush revere’ [limbaugh…
he’s totally burned out (the consequence of his being ‘tired of carrying the
water for the republican party’? - his own words), relegated now to authoring
children’s illustrated books of a simplistic nature]. Shallow sean’s latest
‘crusade’ (beyond the same note/key obvious debacle of wobamacare) was defense
of the indefensible mobster but friend of sean’s, donald trump (trump should be
in jail). In defense of t_rump, he offers up the itsy-bitsy, teeny weeny
wohlman skating rink project as evidence of t_rump’s contribution to NYC (too
small for high new york priority given the magnitude of New York substantial
problems, some largely the result of trumpish tastes, ie., solid gold trump
tower fixtures, etc., that trump’s ‘pre-packaged bankrupcies’ seem to fail to
touch, and which extravagance must be paid for by someone, but not him).
Shallow sean’s excoriation of new york city never seems to link the obviousness
of t_rump’s grandstanding responsibility for same. After all, someone
ultimately has to pay for trump’s disproportionate non-value-added livin’
large. No talk of trump’s ingratiating bribe strategy for protection ( ie.,
retainer’s to law firms linked to state attorney generals, viz., {kimmelman}
wolf and sampson, chris droney’s brother, his sister’s protection/corruption
and quid pro quo from the federal bench, etc., and as well, protection of
drug-money laundering through his now nominal only casinos … See, ie., http://www.albertpeia.com/112208opocoan/ricosummarytoFBIunderpenaltyofperjury.pdfhttp://www.albertpeia.com/112208opocoan/PeiavCoanetals.htmhttp://albertpeia.com/fbimartinezcongallard.htm.Trump’s a fraud! I won’t be listening to ‘rush revere’ or shallow sean
prospectively. They’re a waste of time and preposterous given their unbridled
support of war criminals bush, cheney, etc., and the failed debacles they
created, etc……
A
banker named Andrew Huszar that helped manage the Federal Reserve's
quantitative easing program during 2009 and 2010 is publicly apologizing for
what he has done. He says that quantitative easing has accomplished next
to nothing for the average person on the street. Instead, he says that it
has been "the greatest backdoor Wall Street bailout of all
time." And of course the cold, hard economic numbers support what
Huszar is saying. The percentage of working age Americans with a job has not improved at all during the
quantitative easing era, and median household income has actually steadily declined during that time frame.
Meanwhile, U.S. stock prices have doubled overall, and the stock prices of the big
Wall Street banks have tripled. So who benefits from quantitative
easing? It doesn't take a genius to figure it out, and now Andrew Huszar
is blowing the whistle on the whole thing. (Read More....)
Have
you ever cried yourself to sleep because you had no idea how you were going to
pay the bills even though you were working as hard as you possibly could?
You are about to hear from a single mother that has been there. Her name
is Yolanda Vestal and she is another victim of Obama's "economic
recovery". Yes, things have never been better for
the top 0.01 percent of ultra-wealthy Americans that have got millions of
dollars invested in the stock market. But for most of the rest of the
country, things are very hard right now. At this point, more than 102 million
working age Americans do not have a job, and 40 percent of those that are actually working earn less
than $20,000 a year in wages. If we actually are experiencing an
"economic recovery", then why is the federal government
spending nearly a trillion
dollars a year on welfare? And that does not even include entitlement
programs such as Social Security and Medicare. We live in a nation where poverty is exploding and the middle class is
shrinking with each passing day. But nothing is ever going to get fixed
if we all stick our heads in the sand and pretend that everything is "just
fine". (Read More....)
While chart analogs provide
optically pleasing (and often far too shockingly correct) indications of the
human herd tendencies towards fear and greed, a glance through the headlines
and reporting of prior periods can provide just as much of a concerning
'analog' as any chart. In this case, while these 3
pictures can paint a thousand words; a thousand words may also paint the
biggest picture of all. It seems, socially and empirically, it is never
different this time as these 1936 Wall Street Journal
archives read only too well... from devaluations lifting stocks to
inflationary side-effects of money flow and from short-covering,
money-on-the-sidelines, Jobs, Europe, low-volume ramps, BTFD, and
profit-taking, to brokers advising stocks for the long-run before a 40% decline.
Being somewhat conscious human beings in a
world in which our “leaders” have completely lost their minds can be
challenging at times. One side effect of this condition is a certain emotional
numbness when it comes to reacting to new events occurring in the world around
you. It’s simply hard to shock us these days, but every now and then it does
happen. The following article had us literally shaking our heads the entire
time. If this isn’t peak insanity, we do not want to
know what is.
Five
years have passed since the onset of what is sometimes called the Great
Recession. While
the economy has slowly improved, there are still millions of Americans
leading lives of quiet desperation: without jobs, without resources, without
hope. Who was to blame?
"The
government, writ large, had a hand in creating the conditions that encouraged
the approval of dubious mortgages. It was the government, in the form of Congress, that repealed
Glass-Steagall, thus allowing certain banks that had previously viewed
mortgages as a source of interest income to become instead deeply involved in
securitizing pools of mortgages in order to obtain the much greater profits
available from trading. It was the government, in the form of both the
executive and the legislature, that encouraged deregulation..."
"It's not just the Fed, it's central banking,"
Jim Rogers exclaims to Reuters
in this brief clip, "this is absolute
insanity." As the world's central banks, for the first time in
history "try to debase their currencies," simultaneously, Rogers
cautions, "the world's floating around on a huge artificial sea of
liquidity." Rogers goes on to explain that he doesn't expect Bernanke to
taper and fears that Yellen won't either but hopes that she "knows that
this is going to cause problems when they stop producing so much money."
His ominous warning, eventually "it's going to dry
up.. and when it dries up, we're all going to pay the price for this
madness."
Much has been made recently of
the 'implicit' tax cut that a sliding gas price is providing for the
beaten-down, confidence-sapped, credit-using consumer. Sure enough, gas prices
are at their lows of the year. But, unfortunately, recency bias is our enemy
once again since the price of regular gas is still 8.5%
above its average since the crisis began - and that with miles-driven
still slumping. Not quite as 'tax-cut'-inspiring when viewed that way...
In the Chinese bastion of
capitalism, where there is demand, there will be supply. And in this case, the
supply of gold storage is to be found in the Shanghai Free Trade Zone, where
the physical gold ends up in custodial limbo as it is not considered
"imported" by China. In fact, the gold is theoretically in no
man's land and as such can be reexported out of China, or sent deeper into
the mainland, to China's banks or private buyers, on a whim. Of course, all
that is on paper. If and when the Communist Party says "enough" all
the gold in the FTZ would be "reappropriated." Bloomberg
reports, that a gold vault that can store 2,000 metric tons, double China’s projected consumption this year, opened
in Shanghai this month as owner Malca-Amit Global Ltd. seeks to benefit from
rising demand in Asia’s largest economy.
For
many in the US, as
WSJ reports based on the bifurcated 'recovery' in
the US, the recession never ended, "we're still in it... it feels like
like we're still in it and it's getting worse." Simply out,
America's jobs recovery is proceeding on two separate tracks - a pattern that
is persisting far longer than after past economic rebounds and lately has been
growing worse. For those with decent jobs, wages are rising, albeit slowly, and
job security is the strongest it has been since before the recession. But many
others - the young, the less educated and particularly the unemployed - are
experiencing hardly any recovery at all. As we have vociferously explained, hiring remains weak, and the jobs that are available are disproportionately
low-paying and often part-time.
Have you ever cried yourself to sleep
because you had no idea how you were going to pay the bills even though you
were working as hard as you possibly could? You are about to hear from a
single mother that has been there. Her name is Yolanda
Vestal and she is another victim of Obama's "economic
recovery". Yes, things have never been better for
the top 0.01 percent of ultra-wealthy Americans that have got millions of
dollars invested in the stock market. But for
most of the rest of the country, things are very hard right now.
This morning has seen a plague
of talking-head-based soundbites propagated through the mainstream media as
'fact' and actionable. One that caught our eye, from none other than
"largest asset manager in the world" Larry Fink of Blackrock, simply
beggared belief:
*FINK SAYS JAPANESE INVESTORS
QUESTIONING INVESTING IN U.S. DEBT
As we have pointed out
previously, in the context of corporations that have given up on growing the
top line (as virtually all free cash goes into stock buybacks and dividends and
none into growth capex), and in pursuit of a rising bottom line, employee wages
are the one variable cost that corporations will touch last of all. But what's
worse, these same unionized employees have zero negotiating leverage. Perhaps
nowhere is this more visible than in the recent strategy of smoothie retailer
Jamba Juice, which in order to battle a 4% drop in Q3 same store sales has
decided to radically transform its entire retailing strategy by getting rid
of labor, cheap, part-time or otherwise, altogether. Presenting the
biggest threat to minimum-wage restaurant workers everywhere: the JambaGo self-serve machine that just made the vast
majority of Jamba's employees obsolete. Coming soon to a fast-food
retailer near you.
The
Nasdaq and Trannies closed green, Dow and S&P red (the latter pinned to
VWAP thanks to some late-day JPY ignition dragging it off the lows). Volume was
'average and into the close VIX was bid as
stocks clung to VWAP. Treasury yields limped higher from yesterday's small rise
(30Y +1bps on the week, 5Y +4bps). The USD index would suggest a quiet day
(practically unch of the week) but dispersion with EUR
strength and AUD and JPY weakness was notable. Credit markets continued
to slide notably. The biggest moves of the day were in commodity land with
silver -3.5% on the week and gold
and oil pinned to each other (petrogold?) -1.5% on the week, and copper -1%
on the week. Today was all about POMO (as usual) and
dueling Fed speak (Lockhart talked us down and Kocherlakota saved the day).
With Ben Bernanke's tenure closing, many
financial TV pundits delight in touting the stellar performance of Ben Bernanke
as Federal Reserve Chairman with just a couple months left in his term. Before
the re-writers of history begin spinning performance, we thought why not compare Mr. Bernanke against all the other Federal
Reserve Chairman to determine which Chairman deserves recognition.
Bernanke's overall score across all factors was the lowest (let the spin begin
counterfactualists). The data suggests that Mr.
Bernanke ranks last in performance between the two mandates since 1948. Quite
an accomplishment considering what events transpired during the last 60+ years;
Korea & Vietnam, Oil Shock, high interest rates, etc...
A
banker named Andrew Huszar that helped manage the Federal Reserve's
quantitative easing program during 2009 and 2010 is publicly apologizing for
what he has done. He says that quantitative easing has accomplished next
to nothing for the average person on the street. Instead, he says that it
has been "the greatest backdoor Wall Street bailout of all
time." And of course the cold, hard economic numbers support what
Huszar is saying. The percentage of working age Americans with a job has not improved at all during the
quantitative easing era, and median household income has actually steadily declined during that time frame.
Meanwhile, U.S. stock prices have doubled overall, and the stock prices of the big
Wall Street banks have tripled. So who benefits from quantitative
easing? It doesn't take a genius to figure it out, and now Andrew Huszar
is blowing the whistle on the whole thing. (Read More....)
Sadly,
only in our new normal world is this funny...
For
many in the US, 
The
Nasdaq and Trannies closed green, Dow and S&P red (the latter pinned to
VWAP thanks to some late-day JPY ignition dragging it off the lows). Volume was
'average and 
With