Archive - Jun 5, 2015

While the Greek government believes it may have won the battle, if not the war with Europe, the reality is that every additional day in which Athens does not have a funding backstop, be it the ECB (or the BRIC bank), is a day which brings the local banking system to total collapse. And another day, or two, like today, and it may all be over:  According to banking sources, the Greek bank outflows on Friday soared to 700 million Euros from 272 million Euros on Thursday.

Earlier this week, using hacked and leaked documents and pdfs created by, among others, George Soros' most recent wife who is less than half his age, we showed something fascinating: the puppetmaster behind the entire Ukraine conflict may be none other than George Soros himself.  Despite the limited distribution of this very fascinating story which casts a vastly different light on the Ukraine conflict than one shone by the mainstream, it did catch the attention of one person: Ron Paul. In the following clip Ron Paul looks at the stunning implications of Soros' involvement behind the scenes in Ukraine, how he may be pulling the strings in this most critical proxy war between East and West, and what he stands to gain.

Doesn't get any simpler than this.

The Fed sees no risks of bubble trouble because they are looking at it all from the 2008 perspective. That is completely wrong-headed; if there is a “next one” it will have nothing to do with subprime mortgages, or even mortgages and real estate. Everyone seems to simply assume that the subprime problem ended in 2008, if only by crash. That is true but only of mortgages. Deleveraging is myth as debt has still expanded, and greatly, just not in the same exact places. There are certainly auto and student loans that have exploded exponentially, especially in subprime categories, but if there is another credit bubble now, the third, it is undoubtedly corporate debt.

The last time the Establishment Survey was as robust as the past year or so was 1999; then, the average productivity was 3.7%! That number actually makes sense intuitively, since businesses would have good reason to go on a hiring spree. Porting that to the current period, as in the mathematical construction of productivity here, would mean, holding output constant, that total hours in the past five quarters would have been not +2.7% but -1.7%. These numbers literally do not add up.

This is the end game of unfettered capitalism. The signs are all here. When you cast aside reasonable restraints, the unscrupulous among us will rise to the top and exploit everyone else. What we have left is a new American feudalism where CEOs move around like a pack of ruthless Somalian warlords. Riding behind the banner of efficiency, they replace employees with robots, outsource their work to foreigners and tell their employees to train their own replacements, and collude with hedge fund managers to strip companies of their most valuable assets to temporarily boost the stock price.

In yet another sign that Beijing's neighbors in the region (who have competing claims in the Spratlys) are seeking to guard against what they view as Chinese aggression, Vietnam is set to bolster its defense capabilities and deepen its security relationship with the US.

Memo to the Fed and its media tool Hilsenrath: we're not here to further enrich your already obscenely rich banker and corporate cronies by buying overpriced goods and services we don't need. Our job is not to spend every cent we earn on interest to banks and mostly-garbage corporate goods and services. Our job is to limit the amount we squander on interest and needless spending. Our job is to build the financial security of our families by saving capital and prudently investing it in assets we control (as opposed to letting Wall Street control our assets parked in equity and bond funds).

Emboldened by its recent “unprecedented” prosecutorial success, the DoJ will now pursue a fresh round of MBS-related settlements with banks that knowingly packaged and sold shoddy CDOs. Banks expected to settle in coming months include Barclays PLC, Credit Suisse Group AG, Deutsche Bank AG, HSBC Holdings PLC, Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC,UBS AG and Wells Fargo & Co.

The world’s financial system is saturated with speculations fostered by nearly two-decades of central bank credit inflation. Just since 2006, the footings of central bank balance sheets have expanded from $6 trillion to upwards of $22 trillion. That’s all combustible monetary fuel that cannot be recalled; it can only be liquidated in the course of a monumental meltdown in the casino. So, yes, after the carnage of the past few days the global sovereign bond index has lost $625 billion since the bond bubble peak in late March. Call that spring training.

In an exclusive interview with Al Jazeera, a former al-Qaeda informant for the Ali Abdullah Saleh government claims Abdullah Saleh and his lieutenants not only turned a blind eye to AQAP operations in the country, but in fact played a direct role in facilitating al-Qaeda attacks even as the government accepted anti-terrorism financing from the US.

"How long the bubble can continue to inflate is the key question – but necessarily unanswerable. Inherently irrational, bubbles usually last longer than expected, [but they] ultimately burst... they expand continuously, then pop."

All key asset classes are at or near a key inflection point: either yields breach through resistance levels and send risk lower across the board over inflation fears, or bond volatility comes crashing down and allowing the "wealth effect" stock rally to continue.

This has created a REAL problem for the Fed… and it’s going to result in a far more aggressive campaign to TRASH cash going forward.