Archive - Jun 2015

Grit your teeth if you have to.  Cry if you want to.  US labor market is improving and the dollar is strengthening.

It is not so much that Greece and other nations are facing severe financial difficulties. At the end of the day, most man-made problems are solvable, especially in finance. What truly worries us is that this widely diverse group is required to come up with robust solutions to very sensitive political and economic problems, with wide reaching implications. Accordingly, this Greek saga has been going on for five years, and we are now deeply in the realm of unpalatable solutions – if indeed one can actually be found.

Anyone remotely following the gold market, knows that the East is deeply connected with metals. They rightly believe that they are a safe store of value and have a deep affinity that has lasted throughout the ages.

There will be a tipping point where the advantage to be gained by badly impacting the dollar and positioning the yuan as new reserve currency will be greater than the disadvantage suffered by a collapse in the value of the dollar. The tipping point is closer than many believe.

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.