Archive - Apr 2015 - Story

As many are increasingly coming to terms with the 'obvious failure of fiat currency', the inevitavble question arises "what next?" Earlier this year, we discussed the possibility of a Chinese- or Russian-currency backed by gold, amid the increasing calls (domestically and abroad) for an end to USD Reserve hegemony; but this weekend, as Bloomberg reports, Lord Meghnad Desai, chairman of The Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum, stated that IMF Special Drawing Rights (SDR) should contain some gold to help stabilize the currency.

“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” ? George Orwell

“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad.” ? Aldous Huxley

In a critical disclosure this past Friday which quietly flew under everyone's radar, the Bundesbank director responsible for bank supervision, Andreas Dombret, who is also a member of the board of the European Central Bank’s Single Supervisory Mechanism told Bloomberg in an interview in Johannesburg that "German banks should expect to lose at least half of their investments in bonds of Austrian bad bank Heta Asset Resolution AG and make the appropriate provisions... I think this situation has to be taken seriously by the German banks... if I were to put a number on this I would say it should be a minimum of a 50 percent provision for potential losses."

We are sure this is nothing to worry about... and Japanese officials will re-iterate that everything is on track but when a snake-like robot sent to inspect a reactor containment vessel at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant dies three hours into the operation, one might wonder just how "contained" the radiation situations really is.

As Nanex's Eric Hunsader pointed out, while the well-paid HFT-lobbyists proclaim their rigging clients "knit together liquidity from all markets," it appears BATS' new CEO (since the lying old one left) disagrees. The exchange that caters significantly to the front-running HFTs believes it knows how to improve the market for thinly traded stocks... it will stop handling them.

Giving up the spotlight is never easy. The United States, like many aging celebrities, is struggling to share the stage with new faces, especially China. The upcoming meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank – two institutions dominated by the US and its Western allies – provide an ideal opportunity to change that. The US must come to terms with the reality that the world has changed. The longer the US remains in a state of denial, the more damage it will do to its interests and its global influence, which remains substantial, if more constrained than before.

“I just have the same horrific sense I had" before, Druckenmiller said to an audience at the Lost Tree Club in North Palm Beach, Florida (according to a transcript obtained by Bloomberg). "Our monetary policy is so much more reckless and so much more aggressively pushing the people in this room and everybody else out the risk curve that we’re doubling down on the same policy that really put us there."

Some folks have stopped hoping...

With 'proxy' wars in the Middle East increasing morphing into actual confrontations, it is becoming ever more crucial to keep track of just who 'supports' (or does not) the various players...

The two major political parties’ unconscionable waste of money officially commences this weekend, as Democrats and Republicans will soon begin spending an estimated five billion dollars of their corporate puppet masters’ assets in an unquenchable pursuit of power...

Whether today’s most feted “intellectual leaders” and policy makers are correctly diagnosing problems or misdiagnosing them, their proposals are never anything but “viciously statist” to paraphrase Hans-Hermann Hoppe. They seemingly don’t realize that economic freedom is the sine qua non for personal freedom. One simply cannot have the latter without the former. None of them seem to believe that people can be trusted to be in charge of their own affairs. The debate over the “inequality problem” is an excellent case in point. It isn’t as if the knowledge required to understand the problem weren’t readily available. However, most of these people were educated in statist institutions, and have rarely been exposed to any non-statist ideological viewpoints. The possibilities offered by solutions that do not involve the State in every nook and cranny of the economy and our daily lives don’t even occur to them. And of course, the best social engineering plans are always their personal ones.

The problem with the relentless scramble into London real-estate is that it was almost entirely driven by the high end, which as we have reported tirelessly over the past 4 years, has become - alongside the US ultra luxury real estate market - the new "Swiss bank account": a mostly anonymous place (with anonymous LLCs and Corps buying on behalf of uber-rich foreign oligarchs) where tax evaders can park their cash, with the NAR's, and the government's, blessing. And now, the party is over. As the FT reports, "sales of homes worth more than £2m have dropped by 80 per cent in the past year."... "It is like the 1970s again, when waves of wealthy people left Britain and it was a disaster.”

Beijing has reportedly threatened to shut down Sina Weibo which China’s internet czar claims is disseminating false information, providing a platform for terrorists, questioning the “facts,” not exercising enough censorship, and, much like the townsfolk of colonial era Salem, “propagating heresy”.

In his recidivist attacks on the gold standard Prof. Krugman tediously resurrects and refutes straw man arguments drawn from marginal thinkers. Prof. Krugman sets his phaser on stun and points it at the ghost of Ayn Rand rather than tangling with his peers. But boiled to its essence, Krugman's sciencefictiononomics is a tug of war between believers in mathematical modeling and believers in common sense. One also can cast this as a war between elitists (i.e believers in the ability of an elite to manage society’s affairs better than can the society itself) and populists (i.e. believers in the ability of society to manage its own affairs better than an elite can do so for it).