Archive - Feb 2, 2015

During the fiscal year that ended on September 30, 2014, U.S. Special Operations forces (SOF) deployed to 133 countries - roughly 70% of the nations on the planet - according to Lieutenant Colonel Robert Bockholt, a public affairs officer with U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM). And this year could be a record-breaker, just 66 days into fiscal 2015 - America’s most elite troops had already set foot in 105 nations, approximately 80% of 2014’s total. Despite its massive scale and scope, this secret global war across much of the planet is unknown to most Americans…”We want to be everywhere,” said Votel at Geolnt...

Everything is not awesome...

Update, and in line with the FT report, here's Bloomberg: GREECE SAID TO DROP WRITEDOWN REQUEST AFTER OPPOSITION FROM EU

Over a week after the new Greek government came to power, it has presented its first actual proposal of how it hopes to negotiate with Europe that does not involve the infamous "debt write off", which as both Germany and the ECB have made clear, is a non-starter as it impairs the ECB's balance sheet and leads to a loss of "faith" in the money printer, the legacy monetary system and so on. So instead of yet another debt restructuring, the FT reports that Yanis Varoufakis "would no longer call for a headline write-off of Greece’s €315bn foreign debt. Rather it would request a “menu of debt swaps” to ease the burden, including two types of new bonds." Actually he still does, only he is not calling it as such.

In a stunningly honest reflection on itself (and its peer group of professional prognosticating panderers), The Federal Reserve's San Francisco research group finds that - just as we have pointed out again and again - that since 2007, FOMC participants have been persistently too optimistic about future U.S. economic growth. Real GDP growth forecasts have typically started high, but then are revised down over time as the incoming data continue to disappoint. Possible explanations for this pattern include missed warning signals about the buildup of imbalances before the crisis, overestimation of the efficacy of monetary policy following a balance-sheet recession, and the natural tendency of forecasters to extrapolate from recent data. The persistent bias in the track records of professional forecasters apply not only to forecasts of growth, but also of inflation and unemployment.

Greece has been borrowing its way to disaster long enough. For its part, Greece stands at a fork in the road. Syriza can move aggressively to recover Greece’s democratic sovereignty or it can desperately cling to the faltering currency and financial machinery of the Euro zone. But it can’t do both. Now and again history reaches an inflection point. Statesman and mere politicians, as the case may be, find themselves confronted with fraught circumstances and stark choices. February 2015 is one such moment.

While the US government has yet to opine on the recently leaked information during Joe Biden's November trip to Ukraine that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the US is already providing lethal aid to Kiev, and certainly has said absolutely nothing about the presence of US soldiers - either taxpayer funded or mercenary - on Ukraine soil, the topic of legitimizing lethal weapons is once again on the front of the White House agenda. According to the WSJ, "The U.S. government is considering providing Javelin antitank missiles, small arms and ammunition to Ukraine, part of an effort to try to deter further aggression by Russia-backed rebels there, according to U.S. officials."

Because admitting that the Venezuelan utopia is failing due to the policies of Hugo Chavez' "socialist revolution" would leave the thread by which Venezuelan socialism hangs ready to snap, President Maduro has shifted the blame for hyperinflating-price-based staples shortages and food lines from a cut in oil revenues to the dastardly capitalists. As The BBC reports, Maduro ordered the arrest of executives of one of the country’s largest pharmacy chains for allegedly creating shortages of everything from diapers to heart medicine. A triumphant information minister proclaimed, "we came, we normalized sales, we summoned the owners, we arrested them and they're prisoners for having provoked the people with economic war."

For the past couple of years, the economic optimists have been telling us that the economy has been getting better. Well, if the economy really has been getting better, why does the homeownership rate keep going down? If the economy really was healthy, more people would be getting good jobs and thus would be able to buy homes. But instead, the homeownership rate has continued to plummet throughout the entire “Obama recovery”.

Because nothing says "we really do fear social unrest... and please stick with the new king" like Saudi Arabia spewing a massive $29.3 billion spending program that include lavish payments of two months bonus salary to all Saudi state employees and a series of subsidies. As al-Arabiya reports, King Salman bin Abdulaziz has issued a number of decrees because - as he wrote on Twitter (which you may remember is considered "the source of all evil" by the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia) "Dear Citizens, you deserve more," adding "do not forget to include me in your prayers."

In 1923 Hitler said, “Believe me, our misery will increase. The scoundrel will get by. But the decent, solid businessman who doesn’t speculate will be utterly crushed; first the little fellow on the bottom, but in the end the big fellow on top too. But the scoundrel and the swindler will remain, top and bottom. The reason: because the state itself has become the biggest swindler and crook. A robbers’ state!” Hitler wasn’t talking about hard money, he was talking about excessive money printing by a robber state. Krugman himself echoes these words, "It’s basically about revenue: when governments can’t either raise taxes or borrow to pay for their spending, they sometimes turn to the printing press." Out of control government that can’t borrow or tax enough to pay its bills? Zimbabwe, Iran, Venezuela... what country is next?

Everything that is broken with the US judicial system, explained with the help of two judges... and why nothing in this broken, corrupt system can ever be fixed until the grand reset finally sweeps every last remnant of the existing farce.

There is intense debate going on in the worlds of economics, politics, and finance as to whether we will, in 2015, experience the mother of all stock market crashes or whether, instead, we will float along ever higher on the happy cloud that has been making at least some people rich over the last few years (or whether, for a third possibility, we will just muddle along somewhere in the middle). Beyond the diatribes from the punditocracy, there is a mood – maybe it is idiosyncratic – but there’s the feeling that something dramatic is about to happen. I mean, a snowstorm hits and the local supermarket runs out of bread?! Are we all rehearsing for something here?

Despite Greek Government Bonds bouncing modestly higher (and marginal improvement in Greek stocks) today, the epicenter of the Greek crisis - their banking system - appears to continue crashing. As the ECB's decision to accept junk Greek collateral (as it does now) for ELA funding or not - a purely political decision - looms, the message from the Greek bank bond market is "nein nein nein." As Professor Karl Whelan exclaims, don’t believe for a minute that this is a technocratic thing to do with "the ECB having to follow its rules." And it has almost nothing to do with Greek government bonds being junk-rated. All of the issues come down to discretionary decisions by the ECB and there is plenty of wiggle room for them to allow Greek banks to continue receiving various sources of funding next month in the absence of an EU-IMF program agreement.

ZIRP in essence is deflationary in nature, it becomes a self-fulfilling, reinforcing slippery slope of “Monetary Extremism” and should be rejected at all costs!

In January, gold surged 8 per cent in dollar terms, 11 per cent in pound terms and a very large 16 per cent in euro terms. January’s 8.4% gain for gold in dollar terms was the best month in terms of price gains in three years.