Archive - Mar 21, 2015

If you believe that ignorance is bliss, you might not want to read this article.

It matters not who is in charge of the Fed or what rules Congress may insist that it adopts. Once money printing, via fiat or fractional reserve credit creation, is seen to be both feasible, justified, and legal nothing and no one can stop it. The political pressure to fund government programs will be irresistible. Everyone knows that the Fed seemingly has the ability to solve their problem by monetizing the federal debt. Should it refuse to do so, we would see riots in the streets similar to what is happening in Europe as protesters target the European Central Bank. The only solution is to destroy the monster that makes it all possible, the Fed.

NATO is in the midst of conducting large scale military maneuvers along the Russian border in a move Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov says encourages “Kiev to pursue a military solution.” Over the course of 10 days, NATO will parade 120 combat vehicles across the region in an effort to prove how quickly the West can confront perceived Russian aggression.

Something stunning took place earlier this week, and it quietly snuck by, unnoticed by anyone as the "all important" FOMC meeting was looming. That something could have been taken straight out of the playbook of either Cyprus, or Greece, or the USSR "evil empire", or all three.

It was only a matter of time before Germany's peculiar sense of humor struck back to Greek demands for WWII reparations, and sure enough here comes Spiegel with "How Europeans look at the Germans — The German Superiority" or ""The German Übermacht", in which Spiegel decided to send over Merkel coupled with a few nazis right in the middle of the Acropolis.

The correlation between wage growth and consumer spending is now 0.93 according to RBC meaning that the 80% of the labor force who aren't seeing their pay increase will not be driving the US economic engine going forward.

Well that's settled then...

The idea is that savings exceed investment, and that a negative real interest rate is required for bringing savings in line with investment. From the viewpoint of the Austrian school, the notion of a “negative equilibrium real interest rate” doesn’t make sense at all. To show this, let us develop the case step by step. To start with, one should make a distinction between two types of interest rates: There is the market interest rate, and there is the originary interest rate.

Dear Chairman,
 
I would like one member of the FOMC to take the time to tell the American public the truth about the last seven years and monetary policy...

In the first part of this series we discussed Greece and its ongoing negotiations with the European Union – particularly with Germany – and how the complicated history between these two countries makes it exceedingly difficult for the Greek people to accept the terms on offer from the EU. This time we will turn our attention north, to a different kind of conflict.  This one has also wrought economic devastation to a European country, but of a much higher intensity.  It is the first civil war that the European continent has seen since the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, when the regional superpower of Yugoslavia was ultimately broken up amidst a series of separatist and independence movements.  Today’s conflict will almost certainly result in a similar outcome for its host country. I’m talking, of course, about Ukraine.  Let’s take a closer look.

Between 2000 and today, the global bond market has nearly TRIPLED in size. Today, it’s north of $100 trillion in size. And it’s backstopping over $555 trillion in derivatives trades.

"The planet has been our best friend by buffering our actions and showing its resilience, but for the first time ever," warns Swedish environmental professor Johan Rockstrom, "we might shift the planet from friend to foe." As RT notes, Rockstrom explains there are nine "planetary boundaries" in a new paper published in Science – and human beings have already crossed four of them... Where's Matthew McConaughey when we need him?

"That is between December and February €22bn of deposits likely left the Greek banking system and of this €10bn or 45% went under the mattress. What is clear is that the Greek banking system cannot withstand another big wave of deposit outflows."

Let's do the time warp again...

Bankers who took up their business in the Square Mile of London’s banking heart could smell the Eurodollars in the air. As Anthony Sampson wrote, “Young British bankers and their foreign counterparts began to earn higher salaries than other bankers. Skyscrapers shot up by the old classic architecture near St. Paul’s Cathedral. Far Eastern and Arabic banks appeared, as did Mercedes and Cadillacs to cart bankers around the thin London streets.” The Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries needed dollars for trade but wanted to avoid adverse US policy by not keeping or borrowing money in the United States. So they stuck funds in the London offices of British and American banks, causing the City of London to grow as a banking center and recoup some prewar financial glory.