Archive - Jan 2, 2015 - Story

"the West has maintained the dominant narrative of 'Russia in Crimea' whereas the true narrative is 'USA in Ukraine.' The truth is not being aired in the West. It’s a surreal perversion of history that’s going on once again, as in the Bush pre-Iraq ‘WMD’ [Weapons of Mass Destruction] campaign... with CIA fingerprints on it."

Fasten your seatbelts; 2015 will be a whirlwind pitting China, Russia and Iran against what I have described as the Empire of Chaos.

Having exposed the 20+1 charts of China's demise previously, we move to Exhibit (a) in the "illusion of prosperity" that keeps the dream (looking) alive to the outside (mostly Western get-rich-quick fast-money) world - China's Zombie Factories...

Meet Emerge Energy Services: the poster boy for the “irrational exuberance” that has become institutionalized throughout the length and breadth of the Wall Street casino. Today’s Wall Street Journal story coming just five months after last summers potboiler is therefore not simply an update on a speculation gone horribly wrong. It’s actually a template for the deluge to come.

Obama + Vacation = ...

Rather conveniently, the much-heralded statement by Mario Draghi today with regard the looming need for sovereign QE in Europe contained not one, not two, but four fantastical Keynesian fallacies...

On the chart below, spot where Bill Gross quit and led to a third (so far) of PIMCO's TRF getting redeemed.

In Canada, there seems to be a cult belief that housing simply will not correct. They are full on drinking the good old tasting real estate Kool-Aid. Canada has enjoyed many years of the global commodities boom and now finds itself contending with a market full of debt and inflated housing values. Short of oil rising back up to $80 a barrel or higher, Canada is likely going to face some short-term pain. The housing market is due for a correction.

"Fixed..."

"Don't fall for the trap of myopically following yesterday's winners. Protect yourself, keep your powder dry, and wait for a better day. Think more about getting rich in 2020 or beyond... The Fed has turned the entire investing population into zombies (with a gambling addiction, I might add) wandering aimlessly in search of any tiny extra return to ravenously consume... This has left stock markets as elevated and overvalued as they’ve been since the dot-com mania (and more than they were in 1929 and 2007), which history has shown will likely lead to significant declines ahead."

Supporters and opponents of Abenomics may debate the metaphorical death of Japanese society as a result of the terminal hyper-Keynesian, hyper-monetarist policies implemented by Abe and Kuroda for the past 2 years until they are blue in the face, but when it comes to the literal death of Japan, there is no debate: as the FT succinctly puts it "deaths outnumbered births in Japan last year by the widest margin on record, underscoring the scale of the challenge facing the government as it tries to ensure a dwindling pool of workers can support growing ranks of pensioners."

The reason why the BLS has not yet revealed the reality of the shifting US labor force, and why there is virtually no real wage growth across the US, is that the BLS simply backs into statistically goal-seeked results, using seasonal and statistical (birth/death) adjustments to smooth a trendline to beat a monthly bogey used by algos to bid stocks higher. Meanwhile, the reality at the micro level, is that increasingly more Americans are seeing their work status transformed from full-time to part-time status, earning less in the process, having no healthcare and retirement benefits and virtually no job security. As a result, starting this year, some 19 states just increased their minimum wage threshold, with 3 more states due to follow later in 2015. This takes place at the state level because for numerous reasons, there simply wan't enough of a consensus to pass this at the Federal level.

The rash of “unexpected” declines in PMI’s this morning in the US, of all places, seems to have abraded at least somewhat the pervasive belief in the American “decoupling.” But... The FOMC sees 5% GDP and a serious workdown in the unemployment rate; credit markets are worried about how continued mistreatment of economic fundamentals may mean another disastrous trip like the one from the housing bust to the Great Recession. Worse than that, the treasury curve, in particular, may be going a step further by envisioning that we may already have replicated that period and are now very deep within it.