ETC

The stock market is just too important to leave to the vagaries of an actual market now. Too much depends on good-looking numbers now. It must be guided and controlled, or else the stilts on which our global financial system balances become shakier and more visible. The market must be rendered increasingly meaningless simply because it's too meaningful to our current economic system.

Something's profoundly wrong with our global financial system. Pope Francis is only the latest to raise the alarm...What the Pope calls “an economy of exclusion and inequality, where money rules” is widely evident. What is not so clear is how we got into this situation, and what to do about it.

The problem with these policy extremes is that they are so painfully visibly acts of central-planning desperation. If things are as positive as we're told, then why are central planners forced to impose such absurdly extreme policies to keep the status quo from imploding? If these policies worked, why are interest rates still pegged to zero after six years of "growth" and the inflation of monumental asset bubbles? If these policies don't work (and they obviously don't, otherwise the authorities could have normalized interest rates and ceased quantitative easing, stock purchases, plunge protection schemes, etc. many years ago) and central planners keep doing more of what has failed, then the only possible conclusions are...

The debt-fueled prosperity that so many of us take for granted is about to come to a screeching halt, and we are about to enter the hardest times that any of us have ever known.  And we are not just talking about economics either.  Based on all of the intel and information that we have gathered, we are about to enter a “perfect storm” that is going to shake this country in just about every possible way that it can be shaken.  So we hope that you will truly savor this summer – days like this will not come around again any time soon.

If you can't print money or slash expenses, you have to borrow more money. That's the template not just for Greece, but for many state and local governments in the U.S who share key characteristics with Greece: they have soaring pension, Medicaid and employee healthcare obligations, but their tax revenues are either stagnant or prone to boom and bust cycles--and the current boom cycle is now entering the inevitable bust phase, when tax revenues plummet but the obligations just keep piling up. The template of over-indebtedness as a response to soaring obligations is scale-invariant, and it always ends the same way: default, more financial tricks to mask the default, and eventually, insolvency, bankruptcy and massive losses being distributed to everyone foolish enough to choose financial trickery over dealing with reality back when the pain would have been bearable.

On Thursday this past week there were a few attempts at crisis management that should go into textbooks (as well as history books) everywhere in years to come as: Crisis Management 101.a – Lessons in Ineptitude. The responses as to settle the angst in an ever-more-skeptical, as well as frightened investing class was not only inane as demonstrated by the responses (or better yet; lack there of) given at the NYSE by way of “answering” as to why it halted its operation for nearly 4 hours. Was only outdone by what many view as the near insane when one views the steps taken in China to “calm” their markets. Is that how one instills confidence? It instills something – however the term isn’t anything resembling “confidence.”

It was a weekend in which, according to traders, Greece facing an "absolutely final" was going to be saved. Instead, it may go down in history as the weekend in which the Eurozone finally split and its long-overdue disintegration began.

"With the drastic fall in share prices recently, social stability is clearly at stake," Credit Suisse says. With the bubble now finished it is only a matter of time before all the 'nouveau riche' farmers and grandparents see all their paper profits wiped out and hopefully go silently into that good night without starting mass riots or a revolution.

There is nothing incrementally new or different to what we revealed earlier in the leaked Greek proposal (i.e., no actionable pension cuts, no debt "reprofiling") and as Bloomberg makes it all too clear in flashing red headlines:

GREEK GOVT PROPOSAL SIMILAR TO EU COMMISSION'S JUNE 26 PROPOSAL

... or the one which 61% of the Greek people said no to.

Modern Greece is legendary for its absurd public benefits. This modern-day version of ‘xenia’ is an insane, easily abused system that’s brought Greece to bankruptcy. Upon return from his adventures, Odysseus responded by killing every one of 108 men who milked the system. The Greek government is certainly set on doing the same. But since they can’t identify any single perpetrator, they’re going after the entire nation.

The reality is that financial insecurity is rising for everyone...

Over the past two weeks, China has resorted to an eye-watering array of policy maneuvers and pronouncements in a desperate attempt to resurrect the country's margin-fueled equity bubble. Amid the chaos, Morgan Stanley — whose "don't buy this dip" call might well have been the straw that broke the dragon's back, so to speak — is out with a detailed history of Beijing's plunge protection playbook.  

The US mint running out of physical silver, confirming surging demand, on the same day the price of spot silver plummets, implying dropping demand. just does not quite compute...

In hyperinflation, the currency's purchasing power collapses. Many Fed critics have predicted this will come soon, though it hasn't happened yet. However all is not well with the dollar.

"Strange how paranoia can link up with reality now and then."