Ben Bernanke

• JPMorgan $13 Billion Mortgage Deal Seen as Lawsuit Shield (BBG)
• J.P. Morgan Is Haunted by a 2006 Decision on Mortgages (WSJ)
• World powers, Iran in new attempt to reach nuclear deal (Reuters)
• Keystone Foes Seek to Thwart Oil Sands Exports by Rail (BBG) - mostly Warren Buffet?
• How Would Fed Deal With Debt Ceiling Crisis? Look to Minutes for Clues  (Hilsenrath)
• Anything to prevent the loss of prop trading: 'Volcker Rule' Faces New Hurdles (WSJ)
• BOE Sees Case for Keeping Record-Low Rate Beyond 7% Jobless (BBG)
• Obama Backs Piecemeal Immigration Overhaul (WSJ)
• Abenomics Seen Cutting Japan Bad-Loan Costs to 2006 Low (BBG)

Yesterday the US Senate held hearings on "virtual currencies" (meaning Bitcoin).  Meanwhile the "virtual currency" ran up above $800/USD and it was reported it got above $900.  It pulled back but as of now, is hovering above $700.

Bitcoin has increased more than tenfold since the beginning of 2013. One of the reasons for the incredible surge is that bitcoin is a freely traded market and not subject to rigging or price manipulation by banks or government. Physical Gold, either in your possession or in allocated accounts, remains a far safer alternative both to bitcoin, to digital gold platforms and to paper and electronic currencies in what is still a vulnerable banking system. 

Tonight at 7 pm Ben Bernanke will be speaking at the National Economists Club Annual Members Dinner. As Credit Suisse's Carl Lantz notes, nobody knows the topic or the title of the speech: we can only assume it is some variation of the now trite and generic "BTFATH" coming from the Fed endlessly for the past 5 years. However, we do know one thing: the menu of the dinner that will accompany Bernanke's remarks. We are certain that in a world in which a tweet by a 70 year old billionaire moves markets as much as a statement by a current or future uber CTRL-Peers, it is the details of what the glorious chairman eats that is the most marking-moving event du jour, and as such the menu will be today's most important "fundamental" news. Jon Hilsenrath will follow up with his detailed analysis shortly.

Moments ago, the following news broke across various news feeds:

BREAKING: Princeton U. to distribute meningitis vaccine not approved in the US to halt campus outbreak.

— NBCWashington (@nbcwashington) November 18, 2013

This is great news. But we wonder: considering the list of such prominent Econ department graduates as Ben Bernanke and Paul Krugman, couldn't the vaccine have been distributed some years earlier?

The Senate Banking Committee’s confirmation hearing for current Vice-Chair of the Federal Reserve began with Janet Yellen delivering prepared remarks.  Most observers likely tuned out well before the completion of the 2 ½ hours meeting to decide whether Yellen was worthy to succeed outgoing Chair Ben Bernanke and ascend to the top spot at the Fed. With the ongoing debacle of the Affordable Health Care website handcuffing Democrats, tough questions about QE, ZIRP, the oft talked about Taper and the possibility of reducing the Fed’s gargantuan $4 trillion balance sheet were verboten.  That left Republicans to address the elephant(s) in the room.  Predictably, it took nearly the entire hearing until a Senator from Nebraska offered his views about the damage being done by the various fiscal and monetary machinations undertaken to combat the Great Recession.  What happened, beginning just after the 2 hour point of the meeting, was both remarkable and revealing...

As Silk Road emerged from the "dark-web", other sites have appeared offering services that are frowned upon by most. As Forbes reports, perhaps the most-disturbing is "The Assassination Market" run by a pseudnymous Kuwabatake Sanjuro. The site, remarkably, a crowdfunding service that lets anyone anonymously contribute bitcoins towards a bounty on the head of any government official–a kind of Kickstarter for political assassinations. As Forbes reports, NSA Director Alexander and President Obama have a BTC40 bounty (~$24,000) but the highest bounty - perhaps not entirely surprising - is BTC 124.14 (~$75,000) for none other than Ben Bernanke. Sanjuro's raison d'etre is chilling, "as a few politicians gets offed and they realize they’ve lost the war on privacy, the killings can stop and we can transition to a phase of peace, privacy and laissez-faire."

One of the biggest lies in finance is this perpetual deception that inflation is good. Ben Bernanke, the current high priest of US monetary policy, recently remarked that it’s “important to prevent US inflation from falling too low.” Well of course, we wouldn’t want that, would we? Just imagine the chaos and devastation that would ensue if the cost of living actually remained… you know… the same. One shudders at the mere thought of price stability.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that we are seeing the disconnect between financial markets and the real economy grow. It is also increasingly obvious (to Citi's FX Technicals team) that not only is QE not helping this dynamic, it is making things worse. It encourages misallocation of capital out of the real economy, it encourages poor risk management, it increases the danger of financial asset inflation/bubbles, and it emboldens fiscal irresponsibility etc.etc. If the Fed was prepared to draw a line under this experiment now rather than continuing to "kick the can down the road" it would not be painless but it would likely be less painful than what we might see later. Failure to do so will likely see us at the "end of the road" at some time in the future and the 'can' being "kicked over the edge of a cliff." Enough is enough.

It would appear that much of the rally yesterday (and early overnight) was driven by hope (and confirmed relief) that Fed chair nominee Yellen is not about to take on a substantially less-dovish tone in today’s testimony in an effort to garner the support of the more hawkish elements of the Senate Banking Committee. There was a great deal of confirmation bias in the market's move and interpretation but, as BofAML notes below, this may be misplaced. The more important part of today’s testimony is yet to come in the Q&A session - where we will hear likely more unscripted thoughts from the QEeen at her Senate confirmation this morning.

A timely tiding for Santa's 2013 ZH wishlist...

With Ben Bernanke's tenure closing, many financial TV pundits delight in touting the stellar performance of Ben Bernanke as Federal Reserve Chairman with just a couple months left in his term. Before the re-writers of history begin spinning performance, we thought why not compare Mr. Bernanke against all the other Federal Reserve Chairman to determine which Chairman deserves recognition. Bernanke's overall score across all factors was the lowest (let the spin begin counterfactualists). The data suggests that Mr. Bernanke ranks last in performance between the two mandates since 1948. Quite an accomplishment considering what events transpired during the last 60+ years; Korea & Vietnam, Oil Shock, high interest rates, etc...

Anyone who says that he or she is prepared to “do whatever it takes”, whether it’s Mario Draghi and Angela Merkel talking about support of the euro, Ben Bernanke talking about preventing deflation, George W. Bush talking about pursuit of terrorism, or Barack Obama talking about growing the economy … is making a preventive war argument just like Curtis LeMay. Not a preventive war against a particular nation, but a preventive war against some conceptual social ill. Of course, you can’t defeat a conceptual social ill like you can defeat a nation. You can’t accept the surrender of General Deflation. These social ills will always be with us in one form or another, which means that a preventive war in the modern context is a permanent and constant war. It may not seem like we are on a war footing when it comes to NSA eavesdropping or QE, because the trappings of war … mobilizations, set battles, etc. … may not be present. But the language associated with a war footing is definitely present, and this is what creates the social space that allows these policies to exist and thrive. I am struck almost every day by how the language of extremism and war pervades our domestic political and social institutions, on both the left and the right.

"I can only say: I'm sorry, America. As a former Federal Reserve official, I was responsible for executing the centerpiece program of the Fed's first plunge into the bond-buying experiment known as quantitative easing.... We were working feverishly to preserve the impression that the Fed knew what it was doing...  The central bank continues to spin QE as a tool for helping Main Street. But I've come to recognize the program for what it really is: the greatest backdoor Wall Street bailout of all time....  Having racked up hundreds of billions of dollars in opaque Fed subsidies, U.S. banks have seen their collective stock price triple since March 2009. The biggest ones have only become more of a cartel: 0.2% of them now control more than 70% of the U.S. bank assets.  As for the rest of America, good luck..... The implication is that the Fed is dutifully compensating for the rest of Washington's dysfunction. But the Fed is at the center of that dysfunction. Case in point: It has allowed QE to become Wall Street's new "too big to fail" policy."

In his parting act, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has decided to continue printing some $85 billion per month (6% of GDP per year) and spend those dollars on government bonds and, in the process, keep interest rates low, stimulate investment, and reduce unemployment. Trouble is, interest rates have generally been rising, investment remains very low, and unemployment remains very high. As Lawrence Kotlikoff points out, echoing our perhaps more vociferous discussions, Bernanke’s dangerous policy hasn’t worked and should be ended. Since 2007 the Fed has increased the economy's basic supply of money (the monetary base) by a factor of four! That's enough to sustain, over a relatively short period of time, a four-fold increase in prices. Having prices rise that much over even three years would spell hyperinflation.