Alan Greenspan

It seems yet another hero of the recent cyclical bull market, resp. echo bubble, may be in danger of falling from grace. This has already happened to his predecessor Alan Greenspan, who has been gradually demoted from “Maestro” to “irresponsible bubble blower”. In this sense the somewhat less praise-laden verdicts that are lately emerging with respect to Ben Bernanke could be seen as an early warning sign.

As with all good socialists, central banks have locked the global economy onto but a single path without any possibility of choice. The purpose of all this intrusive nature through finance is actually to dethrone the defining quality that makes capitalism so useful in society’s advance – dynamic destruction. Despite the radical alteration as to what is taught in “business” schools, credit is not capital and it will never be. No amount of math will make it so, but the longer it remains operative the greater the potential we all end up with something even worse.

Take note, Gold is officially money for the most powerful entities in the world. They are not only accepting Gold as collateral but are openly trying to insure that they have their own Gold in safe custody.

Honest price discovery is essential to capitalist prosperity since it is the miraculous mechanism by which capital is raised from savers and investors and efficiently allocated among producers, entrepreneurs and genuine market-rate borrowers. What the central banks have generated, instead, is a casino that is blindly impelled to churn the secondary capital markets and inflate the price of existing assets to higher and higher levels - until they ultimately roll-over under their own weight. The Easy Button addiction of our central bankers is thus not just another large public policy problem. It is the very economic and social scourge of our times.

It feels like not a single soul is worried about the increasing amount of negative interest rates around the world. Ignorance or indifference?

Nothing is ever permanent with the QE’s because they were doomed from the start. The “dollar” system can never be refined and remade to its prior station because it was irrevocably broken on August 9, 2007. All that QE’s have done is to create reverberation within the downward channel which may, in the end, only exacerbate the degree of imbalance that weighs on the inevitable shift.

The endgame has indeed arrived. At the very least, the international elites seem to think success is within their grasp, for they now openly expose their own criminality. But they do so in a way that attempts to divert blame or to rationalize their actions as being for the "greater good." All signs and evidence point to what the IMF calls the "great global economic reset.”" The plans for this reset do not include U.S. prosperity or a thriving dollar.

Should Gary Gensler truly be Clinton's chief financial officer, and should Hillary become America's next president, then ladies and gentlemen, in the fine tradition started by Hank Paulson who nearly brought the entire wastern world to ruin, the next US Treasury Secretary will be the following fine former Goldman Sachs employee and "champion for everyday Americans."

Several years ago, Zero Hedge first, and to our knowledge only, reported that when it comes to unofficially executing trades in the equity market the NY Fed - through a slightly more than arms-length arrangement - does so using Chicago HFT powerhouse Citadel. In other words, while Citadel was instrumental in preserving the smooth, diagonal ramp in stocks since 2009 and igniting upward momentum just as everyone else stared to sell when the Markets Group of the NY Fed called, it was also paid handsomely: after all, nobody checks the Fed's broker commission statement. In fact according to some, indirect Fed compensation to what is the world's most leveraged hedge fund has been in the billions over the past decade. Well, now it's payback time, and as the NYT reported overnight, the Brookings Institution favorite blogger, former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, has joined none other than Citadel as an advisor.

As the ongoing collapse in economic productivity continues in America, and Alan Greenspan's concerns grow, the call for an end to the diversion of corporate spending to instantly shareholder-friendly actions comes from an unusual source. Larry Fink - CEO of the largest asset manager in the world - has unleashed a letter to 500 CEOs around the world  - telling them that "the effects of the short-termist phenomenon are troubling both to those seeking to save for long-term goals such as retirement and for our broader economy,” bucking the dividend/buyback trend that investors are demanding. As NYTimes notes, the shortsightedness that pervades corporate America is just a symptom of a larger issue. "This is not just a corporate problem," Fink explains, "It's a societal problem, we’re currently living in a "gambling society."

 The US stock market is trading at 1929-bubblesque valuations, with a CAPE of 27.34 (the 1929 CAPE was only slightly higher at 30. And when that bubble burst, stocks lost over 90% of their value in the span of 24 months.

Wiping out creditors by inflation is the easy part. Re-establishing money to restart the world economy is the harder one.

My advice to Ben Bernanke is simple. If you consider yourself a public servant, spend less time trying to concoct ways to defend your legacy, and spend more time on what you did that didn’t work, what can be learned from it, and what current policy makers can change and do better. Here is a theoretical title to a Bernanke blog post that I would like to read, but don’t think will ever get wrriten “Things I was wrong about, what I learned, and what the Fed should do differently going forward.”

In short, Bernanke bankrupted the US and most Americans in the span of ten years. He created the biggest housing bubble in 100 years and also casue the greatest Crash in 100 years. A few blog entries won’t change this.

"...I don’t think we know enough about how the private financial system works under these conditions... If you are an institution that is doing well within the parameters under which you’re used to functioning, you will fight any change without any notion as to whether that change is good or bad. That’s because there’s a very large uncertainty premium associated with the change... "