Archive - May 2014 - Story

The writing on the wall is there for anyone willing to take a look and be honest with themselves (and has been for a while). Most celebrities are the biggest cowards on earth. They prance around criticizing other nations, never daring to look inward. It is disgraceful; but Rob Schneider had a lot to say...

Baghdad Bob eat your heart out...

A perfect sign of the times is the unexpected success of a 700-page economics text called Capital in the 21st Century by French college professor Thomas Piketty reigniting the popularity of Marx's view of the world. Marx’s critique of the modern world was right-on, and the first half of his scenario is playing out just as he predicted; unfortunately, he went on to predict that the revolt of the 99% would result in a “dictatorship of the proletariat” in which workers of the world abolished private property and ran things so wisely that government would just fade away... This is of course crazy, and when it was tried in the 20th century it failed with catastrophic consequences for the Soviet Union, China, and a long list of smaller but no less tragic countries. The result: brutal dictatorships and the eventual dismissal of the Marxist ideas on which those societies are founded. Now the challenge is devising a monetary/financial reset that brings the 99% back into the game without producing a stagnant dictatorship. It will help if we understand why it’s happening.

This week's data marked a crucial turning point in US monetary policy. For all those "rules-following" economists out there with their various adaptions of the infamous Taylor Rule (a model that stipulates how much the central bank should change the nominal interest rate in response to changes in inflation, output, or other economic conditions), this week marked the point at which ALL models suggest that Fed interest rate policy is simply too easy. This explains why the Fed has shifted to a qualitative forward guidance (reminding us of porn - we'll know when to tighten when we see it) as Rick Santelli so eloquently the fact that the Fed claims to be data-dependent "is a twilight zone" and as John Taylor himself notes, the Fed's QE policy "has not worked with few if any signs of success," and now, even as they taper, their rate policy is far too easy. Simply put, they're making it up as they go along (and it's never been more obvious).

When one thinks of Switzerland, banking comes to mind easily but gold doesn’t as much. But, "it is said that the Swiss only love money... this is not true. They also love gold." A full two-thirds of the world’s gold goes through Switzerland and, in an average year, it refines grossly 70% of the world’s gold. Six of the gold refiners on the LBMA Good Delivery list make for 90% of global volume, and four of those are in Switzerland. Up until 1992, the Swiss franc’s 40% backing by gold was written in the country’s Constitution. When Switzerland became a member of the IMF it had to abandon this backing by gold. Today, Swiss citizens have asked for a referendum to be called in order to get back to that backing. As Gilles Labarthe wrote, "Switzerland is for gold what Bordeaux is to wine."

It appears the status quo may be finally making its moves to getting control over the heretofore free and open internet. As we and many others have noted previously, the internet is one of the most powerful tools humanity has ever devised. It frees information in a way that was simply unimaginable decades ago and empowers each of us to be as informed or uninformed as we desire. Just last week, we mused, that in so-called “first world” countries like the U.S. the illusion of freedom must be maintained even as civil liberties are eroded. Thus censorship must be administered surreptitiously and slowly. The following plan to implement an “Internet ID” will initially only be rolled out as a pilot program in two states (Michigan and Pennsylvania), and will only deal with government services. That said, we can see where all of this is ultimately headed, and the program, called the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace, should be monitored closely going forward.

Because when in doubt, just let "specialists" hedonically adjust it...

The joint naval drill is another example of the growing military, economic and political ties between China and Russia.

We have detailed the straitjacket into which the Japanese have been strapped for the past two decades numerous times in the last few years (in great detail here)  but as Grant Williams leaned back in his most comfortable chair after reading an article about proposed changes to the GPIF (Government Pension Investment Fund), Japan’s public pension fund; the thought popped into his mind - "Japan really is totally f##ked." What led him to that well-thought-out and eruditely expressed conclusion? Read on...

Putin at least stands for what he truly believes in. That is far more than we find in Western Politicians.

Having called for the demise of the hype/hope growth stocks, biotech, and social media schemes at the end of 2013, Marc Faber believes the weakness in those sectors is a signal of things to come (and that the so-called "rotation" to quality stocks is fallacious in the medium-term). Faber carefully notes that the size of markets allows some stocks to move up as others move down and so the overall market "looks" ok, but warns "we have already had a big break in parts of the market... but we haven't had the big break in the overall market," adding that "it's too late to buy the US stock market," confirming what we noted about Jeremy Grantham's dismal outlook for US equities in the medium-term (and how and when the bubble bursts). Simply out, given yields around the world and the fundamentals, "individual investors have excessively optimistic expectations about their future returns," which is terrible news for the record amounts of Greater Fools piling in as professionals pile out.

Yesterday we asked if the world was tumbling towards fascism. This is not the first such warning, as we noted previously (with Geoffrey Batt), in a Washington Post article from 1938 one finds an interesting warning from former president Herbert Hoover, in which he declares that the FDR "New Deal" is leading the US to fascism.

We’ve been hearing a lot about the so-called Deep State lately. What to make of this shadowy monster? Some observers link it to the paranoid fantasy called the New World Order, a staple of political talk radio (and a hobgoblin I don’t believe in). In popular movies such as the Jason Bourne epics and Mission Impossible, the Deep State launches hyper-complex schemes that work flawlessly and never fail. That is exactly why they have such high entertainment appeal. Viewers are thrilled by the precision, by the conceit of seeming infallibility. The Deep State definitely exists; it just doesn’t work the way it is depicted in the movies. We like to say that we're allergic to conspiracy theories because human beings are generally too inept to carry out schemes at the grand scale, as well as being poor secret-keepers. Insider knowledge is almost always swapped around, even in secretive organizations, often recklessly so, because doling it out confers status, tactical advantage, and sometimes money for the doler-outer. But the Deep State isn’t a secret. It operates in plain sight.

20 years in prison... That’s the penalty you could face for traveling to a country the President has labelled to be “of concern”. Sending any form of monetary assistance to people in the country merits further steep penalties.  While something as innocuous as travelling abroad is enough to get the average American 20 years in prison, the government is using your tax dollars to aid terrorism directly… and using YouTube as their auditor. Sounds about right for a terrorist organization whose leader has a Nobel Peace Prize.

Pray to the god of hockey-sticks...