ilene's blog

Things were going according to plan (even though the plan was horrifying) and everyone was happy but then Uncle Ben had to screw it up this morning when "The Bernank," speaking in Germany, indicated that the Fed would pull the plug on QE2 if they thought inflation would rise higher than "2 percent or a bit less."

It’s now two years later, Bloomberg has won at both the U.S. District Court and the Second Circuit Appeals Court and the information is still being withheld.

But the real story is that this financial crisis in Europe could potentially cause the break up of the euro and of the European Union.

Bernanke is like the Sorcerer's Apprentice: Given the magic hat - he commands his broom army to fetch buckets of dollars to inflate the economy the easy way but his lazy solution quickly turns into disaster as the waters start rising and he finds he has no way to stem the rising tide

The heart of the matter is “Big fish eat little fish.” There’s not enough tax money to continue swelling the fortunes of the super rich while making even a pretense of saving enough to pay the pensions and related social support that North American and European populations have been promised. Something must give.

We don't care (from an investor standpoint) IF the game is rigged, as long as we understand HOW it's rigged so we can play along at home.

This isn’t about jobs at all. It’s about power. It’s about who is going to dictate policy to the rest of the world. Bernanke wants emerging markets to bear the costs of a financial crisis that originated on Wall Street and was nurtured every step of the way by the easy money policies of the Federal Reserve.

Why should this time be different as the current conference broke up with NOTHING accomplished other than to promise to get right on these issues at next year's meeting. REALLY?

In fact, just yesterday we had a TERRIBLE 30-year note auction on just $16Bn worth of notes. Already Ben is pretty much the only buyer of Tim’s trash paper and, as that bid to cover ratio drops below 2:1, you’ll see rates begin to tick up dramatically, despite the Fed’s best efforts to contain them and that will put pressure on houses, corporate debt, government debt, municipal debt etc and suddenly we’re Greece.

You can see that gold is mainly a negatively correlated trade against the dollar - it's there to protect your cash! You stocks are not cash, your TBills are not cash, your other commodities are not cash so don't make the mistake of over-protecting yourself because gold will crash with the markets - that's something a lot of people did not realize in our last crash as people panicked into the dollar and sent commodities right off a cliff along with equities.

People like Jennifer Fan and pretty much everyone at JPM have no clue what the impact of $87.50 oil is on their limo drivers and thus they can make idiotic predictions like that AND get paid for it. There simply is not enough money in the World to support $100 oil.

Main Street is not stupid enough to believe that engineered rallies as a result of QE2 stimulus are making them wealthier and so they should go out and buy another Coach bag. This is really crazy stuff that I can't say enough negative about...

After putting over $2Tn into our Dead Parrot Economy since the crash and getting no response, Bernanke is upping the ante with another $600Bn round of Quantitative Easing ON TOP OF the ongoing $250-$300Bn round of POMO commitments for a total of about $110Bn per month dumped into the economy... This represents a 10% increase in the money supply over 8 months and, therefore, a planned 10% decrease in the purchasing power of your dollar-denominated assets - a 10% tax on everything you own.

Do I feel bad about that? Not anymore, they are going to get the economy they just voted for and that's survival of the financially fittest and we'd better get serious about it because no prisoners will be taken in the next round of "Survivor, America."

Now they promise they’ve sobered up and learned their lessons and are expecting the voters to welcome them back with open arms and Wall Street could not be happier to welcome the new boss, who is the same as the old boss that let them operate free of rules and restrictions and not only bailed them out when their gambling spree lost them $4Tn...