Archive - Nov 2, 2014

I am out of the office. Indefinitely.

For urgent enquiries, or indeed any enquiries, please contact someone who is not an insane psychopath. For escalation please contact God, though suspect the devil will have custody. [Last line only really worked if I had followed through..]”

In less than the time it takes for a chrysalis to release one of life’s remarkable transformations, many once called “capitalists” woke to find the world they once new changed into something only dreamed or told in folklore. In this new fairytale land there must certainly be a pot of gold at the end of every “rainbow.” However, one would be mistaken. For one must remember this is a “Keynesian Shangri-la” and gold here is useless. Today, at the end of these self propagated rainbows lies a Central Bank ready and willing to print as much money as one needs to see those vivid colors so plainly; only the term Technicolor® seems appropriate as a descriptor. “Markets right themselves with pain… That’s Capitalism. Back room manipulation to avoid pain only increases the severity of the pain to be felt down the road.”

The perks that come with being kept will not survive the breaking of the keep.

They had no idea what was coming...

It never fails: any time there is a dump in precious metals through their paper representation (GLD, SLV, or futures) typically as a hedge to a rally in the dollar (because last week Japan materially increasing its fiat monetary base was also somehow negative for gold and silver) or to meet margin demands from cross-asset liquidation, demand for physical PMs soars confirming yet again that any connection between paper prices and physical demand no longer exists. As reported on Friday, sales of American Eagle silver coins by the U.S. Mint jumped 40 percent in October to the highest in 21 months, defying a slump in New York futures to the lowest in more than four years.

When Calpers buys an international asset for its investors, is it intervening in the forex market on behalf of the US?

"It's never gonna get any better, be happy with what you got... because the 'owners' of this country don't want that. The 'real' owners of America - the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions - got you by the balls... What they don't want is a population of well-educated people capable of critical thinking."

Japan’s aging population needs rising prices like a hole in the head. The more “successful” Mr. Kuroda becomes in forcing prices up, the less money people will have to spend and invest. The economy will weaken, not strengthen, as a result. The advantages the export sector currently enjoys are paid for by the entire rest of the economy. moreover, even this advantage is fleeting. It only exists as long as domestic prices have not yet fully adjusted to the fall in the currency’s value. If one could indeed debase oneself to prosperity, it would long ago have been demonstrated by someone. While money supply growth in Japan has remained tame so far, the “something for nothing” trick implied by the BoJ’s massive debt monetization scheme is destined to end in a catastrophe unless it is stopped in time. Once confidence actually falters, it will be too late.

The excesses of 1980s New York investment banking as captured best (and with just a dose of hyperbole) by Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho may be long gone in the US, but they certainly are alive and well in other banking meccas, such as the one place where every financier wants to work these days (thanks to the Chinese government making it rain credit): Hong Kong. It is here that yesterday a 29-year-old British banker, Rurik Jutting, a Cambridge University grad and current Bank of America Merrill Lynch, former Barclays employee, was arrested in connection with the grisly murder of two prostitutes. One of the two victims had been hidden in a suitcase on a balcony, while the other, a foreign woman of between 25 and 30, was found lying inside the apartment with wounds to her neck and buttocks, the police said in a statement.

The Federal Reserve is saying one thing, but is actually doing the complete opposite...