Archive - Mar 2015

This is one of those sad times when The Onion realizes it has badly, and permanently, missed its IPO window.

A number of economists have proposed the implementation of what has been dubbed "QE for the people." They seem to prefer to apply the principle "When in trouble, double." Given the massive mistakes which were made by central banks from Weimar to Bernanke and the relentless attempts to use the printing press to finance governments, it probably shouldn't take much to convince people of alternatives, and not more of the same, right?

So is this why Xi and Putin are pissed?

The models we use for decision making determine the outcomes we experience. So, if our models are faulty or flawed, we make bad decisions and suffer bad outcomes. How broken are they? Steve Keen explains...

Forget Pyrrhic victories, the more Greek tongues that wag, the clearer it becomes that no one appears to have a clue what is going on. The contradictory tone from various Syriza members has allowed the opposition to sit quietly by (with the odd jab from Samaras) and watch the collapse unfold. The more threats and promises Tsipras makes, the more cornered he becomes as cash outflows accelerate and cash demands loom. It appears all over bar the printing as both sides are now just posturing for who bears the blame for the ultimat exit, as one wit noted, "once you remove walking away from a deal as an option, you are no longer negotiating."

When it comes to our current pre-war, pre-revolutionary world (in Paul Tudor Jones' words) there are two social classes which are jockeying for the post positioning when it all comes crashing down: the Ultra High Net Worth, i.e., the 0.01%, those 211,275 individuals (and their families) who have a net worth over $30 million and who collectively control $30 trillion in wealth, and everyone else, with the countdown to extinction for the global middle class now getting louder by the day, leaving a world of a handful of uber-wealthy oligarchs and billions of, well, others. And nowhere is this distinction more vivid than when looking at their residential real estate holdings. But while the real estate of the 99.99% is boring (and increasingly in the form of rentals), when it comes to the dwellings of the 0.01% things get exciting, and are the topic of the latest joint report between Wealth-X and Sotheby's whose findings we summarize below.

Creating even more money will not help the situation, only exacerbate it. Hyperinflation is a cancer that lurks in our monetary structure. Time to surgically remove it before it metastasizes.

As Goldman notes, the driver behind the recent modest rise in real weekly earnings: lowflation - is the wrong recipe for wage growth...

The credit-based dollar brought about a new economy. It changed the way people thought and the way their government operated. Now, deep pools of money determine which candidates are presented to voters. And there is a new branch of government: the “Deep State.” It is not mentioned in the Constitution. And it operates above and beyond the visible process of democratic government.

Despite what may look to be "cheap" valuations, JPM calls the EM contrarian approach “tactically challenging” thanks to leverage, a difficult environment for economic growth and Janet Yellen. "Each of these is a problem, in our view. In combination, they could be a serious problem," the bank notes.

If you ever doubted that bad news is good news... have faith!

"We made an error in our original estimate of the GDP tracking implications of the February PCE report. We have now reduced our Q1 GDP tracking estimate to +0.8%. We regret the mistake."

In all the annals of investing, few seemingly innocuous phrases incorporate as much by way of grave implication as those four words, “a shift to banknotes”. 2008 was bad. With central bank policy now at the outer reaches of the possible and even of the theoretical, the outlook is certainly uncertain. Not wishing to participate in the terminal stages of a momentum-driven bubble is not bearish so much as simply sane.