Bank of England

Fed Chairman Bernanke should be impeached if he does not restore Fed surveillance over primary dealers immediately.

The sole driver of risk in the past 3 years has been nothing but continued pumping of liquidity into markets by central banks: aka the Global Central Bank Put. How does this look visually? The below summary charts showing global balance sheet expansions should blow everyone's minds.

• Euro zone fragmenting faster than EU can act (Reuters)
• Wall Streeters Lose $2 Billion in 401(k) Bet on Own Firms (Bloomberg)
• Eurozone crisis will last for 20 years (FT)
• Chuckie Evans: "Please suh, can I have some moah" (Reuters)
• Quote stuffing and book sales: Amazon ‘robo-pricing’ sparks fears (FT)
• Situation in Egypt getting worse by the minute: Egypt parliament set to meet, defying army (Reuters)
• Chinese goalseek-o-tron speaks: China’s inflation eased to a 29-month low (Bloomberg)
• A contrarian view: "Barclays and the BoE have probably saved the financial system" (FT)
• Flawed analysis: Dealers Declining Bernanke Twist Invitation (BBG) - Actually as shown here, ST Bond holdings have soared as dealers buy what Fed sells: more here
• Obama team targets Romney over taxes, Republicans cry foul (Reuters)
• And all shall be well: Brussels to act over Libor scandal (FT)
• Bank of England's Tucker to testify on rate rigging row (Reuters)

It should come as no surprise to anyone that major commercial banks manipulate Libor submissions for their own benefit. As Jefferies David Zervos writes this weekend, money-center commercial banks did not want the “truth” of market prices to determine their loan rates. Rather, they wanted an oligopolistically controlled subjective survey rate to be the basis for their lending businesses. When there are only 16 players – a “gentlemen’s agreement” is relatively easy to formulate. That is the way business has been transacted in the broader OTC lending markets for nearly 30 years. The most bizarre thing to come out of the Barclays scandal, Zervos goes on to say, is the attack on the Bank of England and Paul Tucker. Is it really a scandal that central bank officials tried to affect interest rates? Absolutely NOT! That’s what they do for a living. Central bankers try to influence rates directly and indirectly EVERY day. That is their job. Congresses and Parliaments have given central banks monopoly power in the printing of money and the management of interest rate policy. These same law makers did not endow 16 commercial banks with oligopoly power to collude on the rate setting process in their privately created, over the counter, publicly backstopped marketplaces.

A generation of market participants has grown up knowing only the era of central bankers and the 'Great Moderation' of (most of) the last two decades elevated their status significantly. While central bankers are generally very well aware of the limits of their own power, financial markets seem inclined to overstress the direct scope of monetary policy in the real world.

If markets fall, investors need only to run to central bankers, and Ben Bernanke and his ilk will put on a sticking plaster and offer a liquidity lollipop to the investment community for being such brave little soldiers in the face of adversity

Monetary policy impacts the real economy because it is transmitted to the real economy through the money transmission mechanism. This has become particularly important in the current environment, where, as UBS' Paul Donovan notes, some aspects of that transmission mechanism have become damaged in some economies. Simplifying the monetary transmission mechanism into four very broad categories: the cost of capital; the willingness to lend; the willingness to save; and the foreign exchange rate; UBS finds strains in each that negate some or all of a central bank's stimulus efforts. In the current climate, it may well be that the state of the monetary transmission mechanism is even more important than monetary policy decisions themselves. Some monetary policy makers may be at the limits of their influence.

Steve Forbes has a message for a nation dominated by increasingly short-term decisions made on Wall Street and in Washington D.C., and by ever greater economic, financial and currency instability.  As long as America continues moving away from sound money; away from sound financial and economic policies; and, ultimately, away from freedom, its future grows more dim.  The dot-com and housing bubbles followed by the 2008 financial crisis and the most severe economic decline since the Great Depression serve as powerful lessons.  A future of bigger government, higher taxes, more burdensome regulations, less consumer choice and more unrealistic government promises requires more and more Federal Reserve play money. Steve Forbes has a quintessentially American policy prescription rooted in American history.  The answer to America’s economic problems is—and has always been—new wealth creation.  New wealth creation doesn’t come from the government or from the Federal Reserve’s printing press.  New wealth creation is what happens naturally with stable money based on the gold standard, lower taxes on individuals, a simplified tax code, reduced bureaucracy and free markets.

Regulators Say Libor Manipulation Started in 2005 ... But Industry Veteran Closely Involved in the Libor Process Says that the Rate Has Been Manipulated for 15 Years

With global PMI rolling over again, dimming unemployment growth, and slowing EM Asia impacting global production, it is no wonder than BofAML's economics team sees a dearth of 'feelgood' factors in the market. In fact, as they note, further rate cuts in the euro area and China along with around $500bn of NEW QE in this quarter are priced into the market with any hope for risk assets to rally more consistently, investors will need to see not just willing-and-able central bankers but an abatement of the sovereign crisis in Europe and improvement in global data - neither of which they expect anytime soon. Easier monetary policy can only cushion the blow from higher uncertainty in the US and Europe. Effective policy breakthroughs would thus have to come from compromises in the European Council or in US cross-party politics. Investors have yet to zero in on the real impacts of rising economic uncertainty in the US. As Ethan Harris and Michael Hanson have argued, it is unlikely that the cliff is fully priced into the markets and US political dysfunction will share the spotlight with the European crisis over the next few months. And as last time, the joint act will likely undercut investor confidence.

Global Crunch: Central Banks Anemic Response - A doubtful boost in investor confidence.

If you are reading this, you are probably a member of what the sociologists would term middle class (albeit at the upper end). This is precisely the segment of society which is poised to come off worst from what is coming. Here is a very disturbing idea. As this crisis develops, if you are an equity portfolio manager and you want to outperform the market, you are going to have to position your portfolio so that it benefits most from your own wealth destruction and that  of your family, friends and colleagues. Almost everybody is going to lose and there aren’t many places to hide. This is deeply unpleasant but you can blame the central planners. I’ve written about my own investing, e.g. gold and silver, equities in terms of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, etc. In this Thunder Road Report (below) and going forward, I will discuss this middle class theme and highlight positions I have in individual stocks, etc. The only good thing that can  come out of this is a rise in awareness. It’s just awful.

Print, print, print as they may, central bankers will make no leeway until the true problem falls sway... ©2009-2012 the Lyrical Reggie Reg...

While everyone was expecting the BOE to return back to QEasing with a £50 Billion increase in its asset purchase program(me), to a total of £375 billion, which is what just happened, the bigger news came 1 second before the BOE announcement, with China declaring it has cut benchmark interest rates as once again the fate of the whole world is in the hands of small groups of academics, promising each other bottles of Bollinger if they can only get the S&P500 over 1,400. In other words, once again small groups of people around the world sat down and conspired (perfectly legally) to manipulate global interest rates. No hearings are scheduled.

"Limor"

Three weeks ago, before Lieborgate broke and the world finally understood what so many had been warning about for so long, we noted something else: that not only was LIBOR manipulated and fudged daily between 2005 and 2008, but as the chart in the attached post shows, it has been gamed every single day in 2012 as well. More importantly, we noted something else - the transition at the top of the British Bankers Association: the organization responsible for compiling LIBOR submissions from member banks, and reporting what the daily Libor fixing is. Because in the second week of June, the BBA's new head became... the former head of lobbying for none other than Morgan Stanley, Anthony Browne, a firm which itself was just caught red-handed manipulating rating agency "independent ratings" to benefit its bottom line (and which itself miraculous was downgraded by less than what the market expected in order to allow it to avoid several billion in collateral calls). And what did Anthony do at Morgan Stanley until June 12: he was head of Government relations for Morgan Stanley for Europe, Middle East and Africa and was previously an economic and business adviser to London Mayor Boris Johnson.  That's right - "head of government relations" for a rather prominent TBTF bank, being put in charge of daily Libor fixing. But everyone is shocked, shocked, that gambling has been going on here for years.

Paul Tucker, the Bank of England executive at the center of the Barclays/Diamond trigger-conversation, has issued a statement requesting a Treasury hearing to show his "keenness to clarify the position with regard to the events" of that hanging chad of a phone-call. What is most troublesome (for every major banker and politician) is his apparent willingness to take more down with him. As the M.A.D. escalates, MNI reports that minutes from 2007 show Tucker (who was/is in line as we noted yesterday for the top-job once King leaves next year) was fully aware from the early days of the financial crisis that market participants believed Libor was rigged. The Group’s November 2007 minutes, from a Tucker-chaired meeting, state “Several group members thought that Libor fixings had been lower than actual traded interbank rates through the period of stress.” The minutes show that not only was the issue raised back in November 2007 but that the BOE went to great lengths as the crisis deepened the following year to keep its finger on the money markets’ pulse. It seems that instead of mounting the 'plead-da-fif' defense Tucker is coming all-guns-blazing and is willing to drag more names into this miasma as a suicide-bomb of a hearing where the truth is realized could well bring every high ranking banking official to admit the continued unreality of Libor rates.