Archive - Apr 21, 2012

“Solidarity of the union has its limits,” said even soft-spoken Jens Weidmann, President of the Bundesbank

One of the biggest games in the Wall Street farce is the game of Beat the Number.

As retirement is evidently on again in 2012, let's not forget to keep an eye on HYG

Throughout the postwar period, banks have almost always lent out all the way up to the reserve requirement. So, does the accumulation of excess reserves lead to inflation? Only so much as the frequentation of brothels leads to chlamydia and syphilis. Excess reserves are only non-inflationary so long as the banks — the people holding the reserves — play along with the Fed-Treasury game of monetising debt and trying to hide the inflation . The banks don’t have to lend these reserves out, just as having sex with hookers doesn’t have to lead to an infection. But eventually — so long as you do it enough — the condom will break. As soon as banks start to lend beyond the economy’s inherent productivity (which lest we forget is around the same level as ten years ago) there will be inflation.

With Spain today, we have a virtually unregulated banking system sitting atop HALF of ALL Spanish mortgages after a housing bubble that makes the one that happened in the US look like a small bump.

At first we were going to comment on this "response" by the high priest of Keynesian shamanic tautology to Mark Spitznagel's latest WSJ opinion piece, but then we just started laughing, and kept on laughing, and kept on laughing...

Only half a year ago, Groupon was the talk of the town. It was the biggest, hottest IPO on the horizon,and it was the darling of the social media industry. Imitators were everywhere, but there was one giant that was far ahead of everyone else: Groupon.

Well, one glance at a stock chart will show you just how much the biggest, hottest IPO has been embraced since it went public. I offer you the following

Another political bump in the road?

We present our favorite chart of 2012 (now freshly updated and with that new, NINJA subprime-loan subsidized, car smell) without any further commentary.

22% of the Q1 earnings season (by market cap) is over, and anyone listening merely to soundbites and reading media headlines would likely think that stocks have soared as a result of a relentless parade of beats. One would be mistaken. In fact, as the chart below shows, there is something very wrong with this earnings season...

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man —
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began: —
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

One Federal autogiro to go...

Harvey Organ has been analyzing the bullion markets closely for decades. The quality and accuracy of his work is respected enough to have earned him an invitation to testify before the CFTC on position limits for precious metals back in 2010. And he minces no words: gold and silver prices are suppressed. With extreme prejudice. In this detailed interview, Harvey explains to Chris the mechanics how of he sees this manipulation occurring, why he predicts this fraudulent pricing scheme will collapse soon, and why it's critical to be holding physical (vs paper) bullion when it does.

Maybe it is the activity in Europe that made the markets feel more volatile than the weekly changes show. Or maybe it was that the futures traded in an almost 3% range – from 1,359 to 1,390 with several 0.5% swings during the course of most days. Market darling Apple isn’t helping calm the market either. That can reverse on a moment’s notice, or a great earnings release, but the momentum that was dragging more and more hedge funds into the trade, is now working in reverse as stop losses are being triggered. So often lately, the bulls are able to point to a decent tape in face of weak data and no stimulus, and this week ended with the opposite. Bulls will be nervous that decent earnings and a mega-plan from the IMF failed to provide strength to the market. So, it was a strange week that was more volatile than the weekly changes show, and where some real cracks are being exposed.

Germany’s campaign for austerity in the EU is about to lose its biggest ally. How exactly this will play out is unclear, but it will not be conducive to the Euro lasting in its current form much longer: aside from the fact that the EU banking system is on the verge of collapse and Spain (a country too large to bailout) has now stepped to the center stage of the EU crisis, Germany is finding itself increasingly alone in its moves to rein in the ECB’s monetary profligacy.