Archive - Nov 4, 2013 - Story

UPDATE: First images from inside the mall...

Shots were fired Monday night at the 2.1 million square feet Garden State Plaza mall in Paramus, New Jersey. Local TV network PIX11 reports, "according to a police source: the shooting began near the Nordstrom’s department store on the second level of the mall; At least eight shots have been fired;  The gunman is believed to be wearing body armor; Stores are on lockdown;

CNN reports from mall insider:"There was just people running like crazy so I quickly just closed my doors, ran to the back, turned off all the lights, music and everything, just to stay hidden,"

Finally, several hours after it started, the situation ends with the suspected gunman allegedly shooting himself.

As we recently noted, China is taking over the world on gold bar at a time. This growing world super-power has, it would appear (by words and deeds) grown tired of being on the receiving end of the USDollar and Fed money printing. The Real Asset Company illustrates how, in the space of a few decades, China has opened up her huge gold market which is now hungrily devouring the world's physical gold.

Obamacare goes dark.

The goal of forward guidance is to steer market, as well as public, expectations about the future path of monetary policy. It would appear, to those without PhD.s that central banks are drifting from actions to words and the following chart shows the devolution over the past 20 years of central-banker-speak. We have come quite a way from the "never explain, never excuse" view of Montagu Norman in the early 20th century to the hope-laden promises of increasingly wordy statements today...

October was Iraq’s deadliest month since April, 2008. In those five and a half years, not only has there been no improvement in Iraq’s security situation, but things have gotten much worse. As post-“liberation” Iraq spirals steadily downward, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki was in Washington last week to plead for more assistance from the United States to help restore order to a society demolished by the 2003 US invasion. Obama pledged to work together with Iraq to address al-Qaeda’s growing presence, but what was not said was that before the US attack there was no al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Never in US history have so many individuals earned over $50 million per year. Never before has the divide between the wealthy and the poor been so wide (never). The source of this catalyst for unrest in society, as Mark Spitznagel warned, is not runaway entrepreneurial capitalism, which rewards those who best serve the consumer in product and price. (Would we really want it any other way?) There is another force that has turned a natural divide into a chasm: the Federal Reserve. The relentless expansion of credit by the Fed creates artificial disparities based on political privilege and economic power.

The US bug, whereby the worse the economy, the higher the stock market and bond prices must have shifted to Greece, because while the Greek stock market was the best performing "asset" class in October, and Greek bond yields are plunging just because the greater fool stock posse has now moved to the insolvent nation if only for a few months, the economic reality just gets worse by the minute. Case in point - Greek corporations, or what's left of them, and what Greece needs more than anything - taxes. Kathimerini reports, in what is now nail overkill on the Greek economic coffin, that "hundreds of thousands of enterprises are unable to fulfill their tax obligations, according to the data published on Monday by the Finance Ministry. Within just one month, from the end of August to end-September, the number of corporations that have fallen behind on their taxes soared from 182,785 to 526,477." No, you read that right: the number of companies that went in arrears on their tax obligations has tripled to over one half million in one month. The same month in which the Grecovery was rumored to be in full swing and when John Paulson was buying every Greek stock he could find.

Desperate people do desperate things, and it appears that Americans are rapidly becoming a lot more desperate.  An epidemic of thievery is sweeping across America, and authorities are not quite sure what to make of it. So why is all of this happening?  Well, as we have written about previously, crime is on the rise in the United States, and poverty is absolutely exploding.  In fact, according to the latest numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau, 49.2 percent of all Americans are receiving benefits from at least one government program each month.  Over the past five years, we have seen an unprecedented rise in the number of people that cannot take care of themselves without help from the government.  Millions upon millions of Americans that have been forced into poverty are becoming increasingly angry, frustrated and desperate.  And what we are watching right now is only just the beginning - all of this is going to get a whole lot worse.

"The reality is we're doing less with less," is the dismal reality facing Fresno police chief and appears to sum up the situation facing many of America's cash-strapped cities (as we previously discussed here). Fresno's problem, as the mayor put it, "we have no money in the current account all." The situation was so dire that covering an unexpected expense—a new air-conditioning unit or firetruck, for example, would mean slicing into the payroll or borrowing from another depleted city fund. "We can get through the day to day. [But] if there's a derailed train, a natural disaster, where's the money going to come from?" Like many other cities, Fresno saw its sales- and property-tax revenue plummet as the economy tanked. In response, the city slashed services and staff. Fresno now can pay its bills, but it can't do much more than that.

Over 2 years ago when we first discussed the fact that "muddle through" had failed, BCG noted that "there were only painful ways out of this mess." The most painful truth, they suggested, was that "the only way to resolve the massive debt load is through a global coordinated debt restructuring... which will have to be funded by the world's financial asset holders: the middle-and upper-class' who will have a ~30% one-time tax on all their assets to look forward to as the great mean reversion finally arrives and the world is set back on a viable path." However, given the delay (and worst progression), Ken Rogoff warns that temporary wealth taxes may well be a part of the answer for countries in fiscal trouble today, and the idea should be taken seriously; but they are no substitute for fundamental long-term reform to make tax systems simpler, fairer, and more efficient.

Having been the first to warn the world about the perils of high frequency trading nearly 5 years ago, when momentum ignition, layering and quote stuffing were still incomprehensible buzzwords to all but a select few algo traders from Citadel, GETCO and DE Shaw, and warning about such top-down systemic lock ups like flash-crash over a year in advance; as well as the bottom-up impacts of 20 year old math PhDs being in charge of market topology, our crusade from the micro has since shifted to the macro and the primary nemesis of all that is free and fair, the Federal Reserve. In the intervening years, traders such as Haim Bodek opened the HFT kimono even more publicly a few years ago. The following is a must-watch documentary for every investor and trader to comprehend just what it is (and who it is) that drives stock prices day in and day out.

With the economy now more than 4 years into an expansion, which is long by historical standards, the question for you to answer by looking at the charts below is: "Are we closer to an economic recession or a continued expansion?" How you answer that question should have a significant impact on your investment outlook as financial markets tend to lose roughly 30% on average during recessionary periods. However, with margin debt at record levels, earnings deteriorating and junk bond yields near all-time lows, this is hardly a normal market environment within which we are currently invested. Therefore, we present a series of charts which view the overall economy from the same perspective utilizing an annualized rate of change. (Spoiler Alert: the economy is far to weak to stand on its own two feet.)

... but for those who can, and wish to see beyond the propaganda of the Eurozone's unelected leaders, here is Natixis with a candid, honest summary of Europe's sad, "unsustainable" predicament.

The ObamaCare website rollout fiasco, joined by the bait-and-switch “You can keep your current insurance (not)” tempest, obscure the fundamental quandary about so-called health-care in America: that it is a gigantic racket structured to allow countless layers of grift and counter-grift. The end product of all that artifice is that medical care costs twice as much in America as any other civilized country, and that it has to be operated by a cruel and despotic matrix of poorly coordinated bureaucracies that commonly leave people more disabled financially than the diseases that brought them into the system. ObamaCare was designed to work like a giant roll of duct tape that would allow the current cast of characters in charge (Democratic Progressives) to pretend that the system could keep going a few years longer.

Market attention is on the Third Plenary Session meeting of the 18th Central Committee (Third Plenum), where a blueprint for major reforms over the next decade is to be announced during the four-day congress starting on November 9. However, history shows that economic growth tends to be lower after major third plenum meetings. This is because structural reforms, while good in the longer term, tend to slow growth in the near term. While this is 'bad' for the global economy overall, the following nine nations, who are dependent on China to consumer over one-half of all their total exports, are particularly at risk.