Archive - Mar 11, 2013 - Story

If you recall, Winston Smith’s job in George Orwell’s classic novel 1984 was to go into historical records and literally change history.  He would alter photographs and text in the archives so that history would always portray “The Party” in a positive light and as omniscient.  Well folks, this behavior has arrived in America and we better nip it in the bud fast before one of these drones is flying right over our heads. "As scrutiny and debate over the use of remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) by the American military increased last month, the Air Force reversed a policy of sharing the number of airstrikes launched from RPAs in Afghanistan and quietly scrubbed those statistics from previous releases kept on their website. On Sunday, U.S. Central Command said in a statement that the decision was made to remove the statistics because the data disproportionately places emphasis on the airstrikes. The majority of the RPA missions are for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, with a small percent involving airstrikes."

The topic of Illinois' various insolvent pension systems is not news to regular Zero Hedge readers. One needs but to recall our articles from mid/late 2010: "61% Underfunded Illinois Teachers Pension Fund Goes For Broke, Becomes Next AIG-In-Waiting By Selling Billions In CDS", "Illinois' Pension Fund Death Spiral Revisited: "10 Years Of Money Left" or "Illinois Teachers' Retirement System Enters The Death Spiral: AIG Wannabe's Go-For-Broke Strategy Fails As Pension Fund Begins Liquidations" in which we clearly explained how the state's teachers pension fund was systematically doing everything in its power to mask its massive underfunding, and the fact that it was rapidly running out of money. The retiremnet fund, in turn, took things very personally, prompting Dave Urbanek, Public Information Officer at the Teachers’ Retirement System of the State of Illinois (TRS), to write an impassioned response to Zero Hedge denying all allegations. Today, over two years after the above news, the SEC finally concluded their analysis of one part of the massively underfunded Illinois Pension system and found the Illinois failed to inform investors about the impact of problems with its pension funding schedule as the state offered and sold more than $2.2 billion worth of municipal bonds from 2005 to early 2009. The SEC also said Illinois failed to disclose that it had underfunded the state's pension obligations, increasing the risk to its overall financial condition.

Because having legal authority to buy corporate bonds, ETFs and REITs, in addition to everything else the Fed now buys, is apparently not enough to crush, mangle and suicide its currency, the BOJ is now considering adding yet another "asset" to its cocktail of eligible securities for purchase: those which Buffett once declared weapons of mass financial destruction - derivatives.

Record Dow Jones, record US debt ($16,701,846,937,879.74), and now, once more, record number of Americans on foodstamps. According to the USDA, an all time high of 47,791,966 Americans closed 2012 in possession of the highly desired Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) card, managed by who else but JPMorgan. And with a civilian non-institutional population of 244.4 million in December, this means that a record 19.56% of eligible Americans are on Foodstamps.

Presenting the VIX. Or rather, highlighting the grotesque and blatant last second "banging the close" of the VIX. Thank you Simon Potter and your protege, Kevin Henry, for providing countless hours of sideline entertainment, and lamentation for what was once a stock market.

When we summarized the overnight session just before 7 am, we titled it appropriately enough, "No Melt Up (Yet) In Boring Overnight Trading." Little did we know, actually scratch that - we knew full well that moments later the ramp would make its now daily reappearance. Because if it weren't for the 7th straight day of no volume, no news levitation, someone, somewhere may have gotten the impression that the market is desperately manipulated and artificial, and that if it weren't for a constant ramp higher, confidence in authoritarian "markets" may disappear, and the retail investor may pull even more than was pulled last week, following a brief inflow in the market in early 2013.

We believe @nychealthy has the legal authority and responsibility to tackle causes of the obesity epidemic, which kills 5,000 NYers a year.

— NYC Mayor's Office (@NYCMayorsOffice) March 11, 2013

Just hitting the tape ahead of tomorrow's scheduled hit of Bloomberg's ban on "large sugary drinks":

Judge invalidates New York City's ban on large sugary drinks; ban had been scheduled to take effect tomorrow.
Judge says sugar drink limit "illegal"
Judge finds ban to be arbitrary and capricious.

Has the time come to ban independently thinking judicial authorities who don't agree with multi-term Spanish-speaking authoritarians?

Oil? Financials? Aerospace? When someone asks who the biggest sources of lobby dollars for DC's politicians-for-purchase are, these are the three usual suspects that come to mind. Some may, therefore, be surprised to learn according to the database kept by OpenSecrets between Pharmaceutical and health product industry, hospital and nursing homes, health professionals and health services, HMOs, or more broadly Pharma/Healthcare/HMO, the total lobby dollars spent between 1998 and 2012 was a staggering $5.3 billion, or nearly three times greater than the second most generous industry: insurance, and well above Oil and Gas at $1.4 billion, and Securities and Investment at $1.0 billion. Is it becoming clearer why the US government has few qualms about unsustainable taxpayer funded healthcare spending, especially when there are so many current benefits accruing to the politicians who see so many billions in benefits from passing lobby-friendly laws now (by which we mean generous taxpayer funding, the bulk of which benefits the healthcare industry's bottom line)? As for the costs: who cares - just dump them on future generations. It's not like anyone expects the $16.7 trillion in US debt to be ever repaid.

Hello-ello-ello...

In just a week's time, the political elite in the Land of the Free gave us bills which:

1. ensure the government cannot assassinate its own citizens with drones
2. impose price controls with insurance premiums
3. award the government with more power to initiate biosurveillance operations
4. create a quota system in the labor market

It really makes me wonder... how much more will it take for people to notice how rapidly they're losing freedom, or how destructive the political leadership is?

“‘Devaluing a currency,’ one senior Federal Reserve official once told me, ‘is like peeing in bed. It feels good at first, but pretty soon it becomes a real mess.’”

—Francesco Guerrera, The Wall Street Journal, 4 Feb 2013.

One of the often repeated "truisms" of modern economics, is that the advent of central banking, and the end of the gold standard ushered in a far more stable, safe and secure financial system. Facts notwithstanding (because hard as we try, we can't find a historic episode where the entire developed world had to coordinate to fund, guarantee and backstop a $30+ trillion global bail out - using even more money created out of thin air, i.e., debt - to prevent the nearly $1 quadrillion derivative complex from collapsing, not to mention the failure of every single modern financial institution, during the gold standard), the reality is just slightly different. As the following table from Bloomberg's Joseph Brusuelas shows, modern "stabilty" is certainly in the eye of the beholder, in this case manifesting itself in countless periods of uni- and multi-lateral currency devaluation, beggar thy neighbor, and currency, trade, and various other types of war.

In news that is hardly welcome to Chancellor Merkel and her September reelection hopes, German Focus magazine revealed that a substantial 26% of all Germans would back a party that wants to quit the euro. Even more disturbing is that a whopping 40% of all Germans in the prime 40-49 age group are tired of supporting a failed monetary regime and will just say "nein" to the European globalist experiment at preserving the status quo if just given the opportunity. The Italian virus is spreading: the question is which "clown" will show up on the cover of the Economist in six short months, when at least one person will appear on the political scene to take advantage of the populist protest at endless German-backed bail outs, and what as Dylan Grice so eloquently explained earlier, is merely a reaction to central banker central planning manifesting itself in ongoing social breakdown.

While it has been a while since Charlie Gasparino broke anything material, and is why we urge readers to take this news with a grain of salt, the report that CNBC's Gary Kaminsky would be leaving the Comcast channel and his role as capital markets editor and heading to Morgan Stanley as vice chair of its brokerage division would make sense, and would certainly explain the quite amicable relationship between CNBC, its various anchors, and the B-grade brokerage.