Archive - Apr 2015

These are your euro money markets on central planning. The ECB is attempting to help correct the distortions created by its QE program by lending out its holdings in order to grease the wheels of European repo markets, but as JPM notes, the central bank's program will likely not be sufficient.

Moments ago NBC and various news wires reported that the US Capitol was on lockdown following reports of a suicide on the west front of the building. Related to this incident, the U.S. Capitol Police are continuing to investigate the suspicious package on the lower West Terrace of the U.S. Capitol Building. AP quotes Kimberly Schneider of the Capitol Police says in a statement that the suspected shooter has been "neutralized," but there is no immediate explanation what that means.

Water is perhaps the world’s most important resource, and one of the most common resources. For decades water was regarded as a common good, and it was plentiful enough that in most parts of the world there was little money to be made off of it. Now as the world’s population continues to grow, all of that is changing...

China’s world-beating, margin debt-fueled, equity mania has now made its way to Hong Kong much to the delight of local housewives and security guards who have recently decided to become day traders. Deutsche Bank sees big upside for shares of "Don't worry, don't panic" HKEx amid the madness.

What a wonderful and perfectly representative dichotomy of where monetarism stands. We have Bernanke - the former, massive practitioner of QE - telling the world how it does nothing much; while at the exact same time Draghi - the latest - tells the world its super-healing and supporting properties. What’s reconcilable about those two positions is simply asset bubbles, as they are what stand against the former and remain the only, dim hope of the latter.

This is why Bernanke said rates won’t normalize in his lifetime: any normalization means a crisis magnitudes larger than the 2008 crash.

The US dollar has been even stronger than this bull thought let alone the perma-bears.  Here's why,  

In a move that, if confirmed, is certain to escalate the Yemen conflict which as a reminder is a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia, overnight local media first, and Reuters subsequently, reported that local militiamen in the southern Yemeni city of Aden said they captured two Iranian military officers advising Houthi rebels, during fighting on Friday evening.

GE Capital's 2014 loan portfolio was marked at $363 billion. It will take a lot of maneuvering to bring it down to the $90 billion target. With the market at all-time highs and with valuations stretched beyond all conceivable rationality, GE CEO Jeff Immelt said now is a "perfect time to be a seller. People are lining up at the starting line."

The implosion of America serves a very particular purpose. It is not a product of blind coincidence, fate, political stupidity or corporate greed. It is an engineered event meant to clear the way for an even more sinister economic environment designed to establish a final economic empire with the purpose of permanently enslaving us all.

It has been a bad year for California whose drought is rapidly approaching historic proportions: according to the LA Times, which cites climatologist Michael Anderson, "you’re looking on numbers that are right on par with what was the Dust Bowl." And it is about to get even worse. According to the USDA, the west-wide snowpack is melting earlier than usual, according to data from the fourth 2015 forecast by the United States Department of Agriculture's Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS). "Almost all of the West Coast continues to have record low snowpack," NRCS Hydrologist David Garen said. "March was warm and dry in most of the West; as a result, snow is melting earlier than usual."

"Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced." - James Baldwin

Bloomberg goes to China and discovers what we've known all along... that it's "as bad as the data looks, or worse."

“What the Great Recession has shown is that things have fundamentally changed,” The White House warned this week and, as Bloomberg reports, states would have to cut spending or raise revenue by a combined $21 billion in the event of a recession, further exacerbating economic weakness, Moody’s Analytics found in a stress test of state finances. While investors are willingly buying bonds with both hands and feet, The White House warns, states "need to be much more prepared for very volatile fiscal conditions than they had been in the past."