Archive - Mar 5, 2015

The growing dilemma we now face is private police officers outnumber public officers (more than two to one), as the corporate elite transforms the face of policing in America into a privatized affair that operates beyond the reach of the Fourth Amendment. What we’re finding ourselves faced with is a government of mercenaries, bought and paid for with our tax dollars, all the while claiming to be beyond the reach of the Constitution’s dictates. When all is said and done, privatization in the American police state amounts to little more than the corporate elite providing cover for government wrong-doing. Either way, the American citizen loses.

Perhaps echoing two entire nations' frustration, one reporter loses his cool when Mario Draghi explains how everyone else in Europe gets free money except Greece and Cyprus...

Are gold prices going to US$ 5,000 or US$500 an ounce?

The past two times US manufacturing orders declined at this rate, the US economy was already in a recession.

Thick black smoke billowing from oil wells northeast of the city of Tikrit is obstructing Shi'ite militiamen and Iraqi soldiers attempts to drive ISIS from the Sunni Muslim city after militants set them on fire. Reuters reports a witness and a military source said Islamic State fighters ignited the fire at the Ajil oil field to shield themselves from attack by Iraqi military helicopters. As we noted previously, the battle for Tikrit is key as it will determine whether and how fast the Iraqi forces can advance further north and attempt to win back Mosul, the biggest city under Islamic State rule.

The BoJ's Takahide Kiuchi warns of “dire consequences” if the central bank continues to blatantly disregard the “side effects” of QE and also expresses skepticism about the ability of further asset purchases to boost inflation, going so far as to suggest that the BoJ’s prediction of 2% inflation by mid-2016 is nothing more than a fairytale.

It wasn't the vetoed Keystone XL pipeline which exploded today: it was a tanker train carrying 103 trains of oil and belonging to none other than Obama's tax advisor, Warren Buffett, that ended up in a dramatic fireball in the middle of rural Mississippi.

Last week, after reading a Time article titled "Why Bashar Assad Won’t Fight ISIS" written by a journalist whose recent work includes "The YouTube War", and who sourced two unnamed, anonymous sources to reach the conclusion that Syria's president Assad is in cahoots with ISIS, we made a simple conclusion: "The Stage Is Set For The Syrian Invasion." Barely a week has gone by and the wheels for the Syrian invasion are indeed turning: earlier today, US Secretary of State John Kerry (who one hopes doesn't use kerryemails.com as a work email server) who is on a trip to Saudi Arabia unveiled the next steps when he said that "military pressure may be needed to oust Syria's President Bashar al-Assad."

Did initial jobless claims just flash the biggest 2007 deja-vu warning yet?

Has the DNA of the global economy been gradually altered by endless injections of quantitative easing, morphing it into a freakish mutant? Are things that are not supposed to happen for centuries on end going to become common occurrences? The collapse of oil prices and jump in the Swiss franc have forced us to puzzle over these weighty questions. In isolation, these events and the direction of their moves did not worry us, but their magnitude, velocity and proximity to each other sent me on an intellectual quest.

When we parsed the newly released 2009 Fed transcripts yesterday we were too busy looking to uncover things like a previously unreported plan to create a bad bank to look for signs of central planner levity, but fortunately, the research department at Bloomberg was looking for the important stuff. Thanks to their efforts we have the official Fed Chuckle Count for 2009.

So, zero down payment loans to low-income borrowers with basically no cash reserves, on properties least likely to increase appreciably in value, and probably most likely in need of repairs.What could possibly go wrong with this set-up?

So much for that wall of worry...

Throughout history governments have often overestimated how much their citizens are willing to accept. Japan has a beautiful stoic culture that has been able to endure tremendous suffering. That said, everyone has a breaking point. And that’s when you see that there’s a big difference between love of country and love of government. Bottom line - it’s already starting to unravel.

Four months ago, in another failed attempt to boost confidence in the Eurozone and stimulate lending (failed because three months later the ECB finally launched its own QE), the ECB conducted its latest stress test, which as we explicitly pointed out was an utter joke as even its "worst-case" scenario did not simulate a deflationary scenario. Two months later Europe was in outright deflation.  It was initially unclear just how comparably laughable the Fed's own stress test assumptions were, but refuting rumors that Deutsche and Santander would fail the Fed's stress test (perhaps because former FDIC head and current Santander head Sheila Bair wasn't too happy about her bank being one of the failed ones), moments ago the Fed released the results of the 2015 Fed stress test, and.... it seems there was no need to provide a sacrificial lamb as with stocks at record highs. In fact everything is awesome! FED STRESS TEST SHOWS ALL 31 BANKS EXCEED MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS