Archive - May 2015

According to the IRS, in the first quarter of 2015 a record 1,335 Americans renounced their citizenship, 26% more than in the previous quarter, and 18% more than the previous all time high quarter which was in Q2 of 2013. If one anualizes the Q1 number, the number of 2015 expatriates is set to hit roughly 5,340, or a 56% increase to what was already the record expatriation year of 2014, in which 3415 Americans punched a hole through their passport.

In welfare state America its virtually certain that through one artifice or another taxes will go up and the national debt burden will rise to crushing heights in order to keep the baby boomers’ entitlements funded. While Keynesians and Wall Street stock peddlers are clueless about the implications of this - it actually doesn’t take too much common sense to get the drift. Namely, under a long-term path of fewer producers, higher taxes and more public debt, the prospects for rejuvenating the previous historically average rates of real output growth are somewhere between slim and none - to say nothing of the super-normal rates implied by the markets’ current bullish enthusiasm.

The amount of ten-year equivalents held by the Fed decreased to $1.835 trillion from $1.849 trillion in the prior week, which reduces the amount available to the private sector to $3.944 trillion from $3.919 trillion in the prior week. There were $5.778 trillion ten-year equivalents outstanding, up from $5.768 trillion in the prior week. After the Treasury issuance, maturing securities, rising interest rates, and Fed operations during the week, the Fed owned about 32.05% of the total outstanding ten year equivalents.

Meant to extend and widen trade and related commercial relationships between the participating countries, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) has also been presented as a way for the U.S. to maintain his economic and political power in East Asia in the face of the rising influence of China in that part of the world. What should be most clear is that the Trans-Pacific Partnership is not a free trade agreement. Parts of it may, no doubt, lower some trade barriers, thus making easier the production, sale and purchase of a wider variety of imports and exports. However, TPP, like all other trade agreements in the post-World War II era is a managed trade agreement.

The next time something breaks in the financial system… it won’t be just individual banks going belly up. It will be entire countries. What’s happened in Cyprus and Greece is coming to your neighborhood… wherever you are.

Te most shocking development took place yesterday when the US State Department, via spokesman Jeff Rathke, told reporters that while it "regrets" that it did not get to review the new foreign government funding, it does not plan to look into the matter further, spokesman Jeff Rathke said on Thursday. "The State Department has not and does not intend to initiate a formal review or to make a retroactive judgment about items that were not submitted during Secretary Clinton's tenure," Rathke told reporters. And while the "unbiased" media kept its mouth shut, on person who did speak up was AP's Matt Lee who asked why the State Department wouldn't investigate further to determine if the tens of millions of dollars in donations had influenced her decisions while she was SecState.

Having faced up to the dreadful reality of a dust-bowl-esque California, and following Governor Jerry Brown's mandatory water restrictions, The LA Times reports a growing list of 'plans' to solve the state's water shortage is growing. From innovations to insanity - from iceberg-towing to biodegradable towels and from 'water pipelines' to bumper stickers - officials have cataloged more than 170 messages containing suggestions and received untold more in emails, phone calls and public meetings.

Fed-created bubbles are inevitably going to implode, because they have no relation to economic reality whatsoever.  And when they implode, millions of Americans are going to be financially wiped out. Just like David and Jackie Siegel, “America’s time-share king”, America just keeps on making the same mistakes over and over again - we simply can’t help ourselves. And in the end, we will all pay a great, great price for our utter foolishness.

The following map from Goldman compares the entire market cap of various European companies to assorted standalone US corporations. The result is just a touch eerie.

Why "industry standard," together with "standard procedure" are probably two of the most overused phrases in business

A straightforward analysis of the near-term outlook for the dollar, oil, 10-year US and German yields and the S&P 500.  

The US is applying political pressure to Greece in an effort to dissuade Athens from participating in Russia's Turkish Stream Pipeline project which has been implicitly used, at various times, as a negotiating tactic in discussions with EU creditors. As the Times suggests, this is further evidence that Washington is becoming increasingly concerned that the world is rapidly shifting away from the US-dominated, unipolar model that has existed, in one form or another, since the collapse of the Soviet Union. This consternation is beginning to manifest itself in the revitalization of Cold War politics.

The system can certainly be given some sort of name, but a functioning democracy it’s not. If anything, a democracy is “A system of government in which power is vested in the people”. Makes us wonder how many clients of the 421 foodbanks and counting have voted Conservative and figured they were proudly doing their democratic duty.

The trends in both Japanese income and spending moved downward not at the inception of the tax increase but at the very start of QQE itself. Science is the study of observation whereas monetary economics has become the science of avoiding them. If economists want to see recovery in that they should be honest about so redefining the term. BoJ is two years into QQE and the hole that has been dug for the Japanese people is enormous, so it will be extremely difficult at this point just to get back to even without ever accounting for lost opportunity for compounding and time. Maybe that doesn’t count as the typical, natural recession but it is nothing short of a man-made disaster.