Archive - Mar 2015

They will reflate - There won't be growth - There will be blood!

To some, gold is merely a tradition; to others, such as the first secretary of the North Korean embassy in the capital of Bangladesh, it is one of the easiest ways to smuggle $1.7 million. Or at least should have been on paper. Instead, what happened on Thursday night when Son Young-nam landed in Dhaka on a flight from Singapore, carrying a ridiculous amount of physical gold and hoping to get through customs without a glitch due his diplomatic status, things went downhill fast after Young-nam's baggage was searched and almost 27 kilos, or 59 pounds, of gold bars and ornaments were recovered.

Following Benjamin Netanyahu's speech to the US Congress last week, Israel's former intelligence chief voiced his displeasure. As The Hill reports, Meir Dagan, a former Mossad director, strongly disagreed with many of Netanyahu’s assertions, stating that "Iranian missiles will never be able to hit the United States," and that comments that Iran could producer nuclear weapons within a year were "bullshit." But, as Mike Krieger notes below, it's not just just Dagan that is disappointed, a large protest against him erupted in the nation’s section largest city, Tel Aviv. It appears “Bibi” is far more popular with crazy American neocons than he is with his own fellow citizens.

"Low oil prices threaten the ability of inefficient, corrupt states to service their debts and may curtail the government spending that keeps the masses content. This may in turn ignite demands for a fairer distribution of these dwindling oil proceeds and, possibly, regime change."

Could it be that one of the key factors motivating the West’s apparently illogical and self-defeating desire to constantly confront Russia is simply revanchism for WWII? Most people in the West want to live in peace and are completely unaware of these undercurrents of the war in the Ukraine. While the apparent Russophobia and revanchism is only relevant to various minority groups, the problem is that taken together and when they act in unison, these minorities end of wielding a lot of power and influence. The best way to stop them, is to shed a strong light on them and their real motives.

Now is the time to plan your Greek tax collection holiday...

On the fourth anniversary of the Syrian War, Al Jazeera is out with a new documentary that explores why young, Western Muslims feel increasingly compelled to join the fight and also looks at the ideological divide between al-Qaeda’s Syrian arm, al-Nusra and ISIS.

One of the biggest debates happening at the intersection of technology and privacy at the moment revolves around the U.S. government’s fear that the American peasantry may gain access to strong encryption in order to protect their private communications. Naturally, this isn’t something Big Brother wants to see, and the “solution” proposed by the status quo revolves around forcing technology companies to provide a way for the state to have access to all secure communications when they deem it necessary. “It’s stunningly shortsighted for the FBI and NSA not to realize this... By demanding backdoors, these US government agencies are putting everyone’s cybersecurity at risk.”

Bubbles arise if the price far exceeds the asset’s fundamental value, to the point that no plausible future income scenario can justify the price

"Secret" documents and power struggles aside, regulators are just as inept now as ever and bank stress tests are completely meaningless, as the Fed neither then, nor now, has any methodology for how to calculate capital in case of the same kind of counterparty failure chain as happened during Lehman, and when no amount of capital would have been sufficient to preserve the financial sector.

In his first TV interview in 20 years, SocGen's Albert Edwards unleashes his brutal honesty on Raoul Pal in this excellent RealVisionTV discussion. From "what Japan is doing is absolutely off the scale," warnings about money-printing to the awkward reality that "policy makers cannot eliminate the business cycle," warnings instead that "they will make the eventual downturn far worse than it otherwise would be..." Edwards' discussion ranges from the UK and US "choosing lunatic policies" to describing Alan Greenspan as "a prospective economic war criminal," the SocGen strategist concludes, rather ominously, if policy-makers keep handing out free money, it will create massive problems, "there is a trigger point where you can create inflation. I don't know where that is. The central banks don't know where that is."

Location, location, location...

The belief that the market economy requires “steering” by altruistic central bankers, who make decisions influencing the entire economy based on their personal epiphanies, has rarely been more pronounced than today... Whether this is seen as good or bad by the average citizen is not even up for debate: it is simply what the political and bureaucratic elites have long ago decided is good for the citizenry, since they think they know best.

We need to look at the concept of a reserve currency differently, because it is important. We need to look at it as a privilege and a responsibility and not as a weapon we can use against the rest of the world. If we abolish, or even lessen, legal tender laws and allow the process of price discovery to reveal the best sound money, if we allow our US dollar to become the best money it can - a truly sound money - then the chances of our personal and collective prosperity are greatly enhanced. We all have the same interest. We all want to have the highest standard of living for ourselves and our families. A sound money reserve currency offers us the best chance of achieving our shared goal; therefore, we should rally around every effort to make it so.

In what could be a prelude to a Presidential run in 2016, on Friday Joe Biden released to the public both e-mails that he has written while serving as Vice-President for the past six years...