Ben Bernanke

JPMorgan, Pimco, and now BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, all join the bubble warning chorus. From Bloomberg:

• FINK SAYS IT'S "IMPERATIVE" THAT THE FED BEGIN TO TAPER
• FINK CALLS MARKET `OVER-ZEALOUS' 
• FINK SAYS THERE ARE "REAL BUBBLE-LIKE MARKETS AGAIN"

So... when the three largest banks/asset managers in the US say that Ben Bernanke has blown the largest asset bubble in history and that the time to taper has come, will Janet Yellen once again turn a blind ear to warnings that come not just from the "tinfoil" blogosphere but the "respected" legacy financial institutions made up of serious people, and after the cataclysm admit that, just like last time, she "never saw it coming?"

Usually what goes up normally ends up coming back down to Earth with a damn great thud. Well, that was long ago with good old Isaac Newton and the apple story.

The kabuki theater that passes for governance in Washington D.C. reveals the profound level of ignorance shrouding this Empire of Debt in its prolonged death throes. Ignorance of facts; ignorance of math; ignorance of history; ignorance of reality; and ignorance of how ignorant we’ve become as a nation, have set us up for an epic fall. It’s almost as if we relish wallowing in our ignorance like a fat lazy sow in a mud hole. The lords of the manor are able to retain their power, control and huge ill-gotten riches because the government educated serfs are too ignorant to recognize the self-evident contradictions in the propaganda they are inundated with by state controlled media on a daily basis.

March 18, 1996. It was the height of the dot-com boom years. And gracing the cover of Fortune magazine was a photo of a rather smug looking Alan Greenspan, then Chairman of the US Federal Reserve.  The headline across the top-- "It's HIS economy, stupid". The inside story was entitled "In Greenspan We Trust".  And the article went on to suggest that, no matter WHO won the presidential election that year between Bill Clinton and Bob Dole, Greenspan would still be running the economy. And handily.  This is a major testament to the state of our financial system. We award a tiny banking elite nearly totalitarian control over our money supply... and by extension, the economy.  We're just supposed to trust that they're good guys. Competent guys. That they know what they're doing.  Fast forward almost two decades. Long Term Capital Management. The NASDAQ bubble. The real estate bubble. The credit crunch. The mortgage crisis. The banking crisis. The sovereign debt crisis.

This artificial prosperity plan for Wall Street has the added benefit of allowing the captured politicians in Washington D.C. to continue their $1 trillion per year deficit spending with no consequences for their squandering of future generations’ wealth. Bernanke and Yellen will never taper, because they can’t. The Fed balance sheet will continue to grow by at least $1 trillion per year until they crash the financial system again. Except this time, there will be no money printing solution. We are all trapped like rats in this monetary experiment being conducted by evil mad scientists. No one will get out alive. Welcome to the new normal. Now eat your cheese.

"We see upside surprise risks on gold and silver in the years ahead," is how UBS commodity strategy team begins a deep dive into a multi-factor valuation perspective of the precious metals. The key to their expectation, intriguingly, that new regulation will put substantial pressure on banks to deleverage – raising the onus on the Fed to reflate much harder in 2014 than markets are pricing in. In this view UBS commodity team is also more cautious on US macro...

Back on August 1, 2010, Alan Greenspan - who is once again making the media rounds in a desperate attempt to peddle his ridiculous book about forecasting (in which he explains it wasn't the Fed's models that were wrong; it was reality, and all those who inhabit it, that had a glitch) and is arguably the man who created the single biggest credit expansion in the Pre-New Normal era who no longer has access to the money printer so needs to sell books, and soon enough he may devolve to pitching newsletters - issued one of his most memorable post-Lehman bloopers. To wit: "if the stock market continues higher it will do more to stimulate the economy than any other measure we have discussed here." We decided to investigate his claim...

We can only imagine to what depths of misogynistic hell Larry Summers' ego must have tumbled after women ended up overtaking him as heads of not one but the two central banks he was slated to head within a month.

The Fed has painted itself into an almighty corner with QE, and it looks as though we are finally getting to the point in the process where that fact begins to (a) occur to people and (b) matter. Bill Fleckenstein has often spoken about the Fed's reaching the point where it "loses control of the bond market", and it is quite possible that we are rapidly approaching that point (the signs have certainly been strong in Japan). We may be there already. But, as Grant Williams notes in his most recent note, we won't know until we can look in the rearview mirror; but the nonvirtuous circle the Fed has created is extremely clear...

While Ben Bernanke would prefer not to discuss the barbarous relic, having noted in the past that "nobody really understands gold prices," it would seem his European brother-in-arms has a different opinion. When asked this week, by the ironically named Tekoa Da Silva, his thoughts on precious metals as reserve assets (and central banks around the world increasing their allocations), none other than the ECB head himself Mario Draghi explained "I never thought it wise to sell [gold], because for Central Banks this is a reserve of safety." But Draghi did not stop there, and perhaps enlightened by the farce in Washington this week, the unusually truthful central banker explained, "in the case of non-USD countries, it gives you good protection against fluctuations of the USD." Perhaps that is why China continues to import gold at a record pace? Oh, and don't fight the ECB...

The future of the US economy with Chairman Yellen at the helm is grim indeed, which provides all the more reason to end our system of central economic planning by getting rid of the Federal Reserve entirely. Ripping off the bandage may hurt some in the short run, but in the long term everyone will be better off. Anyway, most of this pain will be borne by the politicians, big banks, and other special interests who profit from the current system. Ending this current system of crony capitalism and moving to sound money and free markets is the only way to return to economic prosperity and a vibrant middle class.

With two days to go to until dreaded October 17 D-Day (on which incidentally, very little of note will happen, because as Goldman explained earlier today, that is simply the date past which the Treasury can no longer borrow, but still has some $30 billion in cash which could last to fund the Treasury's needs as long as the end of the month if not longer) Washington is now openly playing with fire. Because for all the hopeful talk of an imminent deal on Thursday, then on Friday, then today, not only is there nothing substantive on the table, but Obama will not even meet with the Senate, let alone the House, until tomorrow morning. At that point there will be about 36 hours until October 17. But what is worse for all the end is nigh-ers, who are absolutely certain the world will end if Congress crosses the D-Day deadline (which, again, as Goldman said earlier "going slightly past the October 17 deadline is entirely possible") is that as The Hill explains, Senate could still miss the debt deadline, assuming there is a debt deal in the first place. Which is a big if.

Stunning Facts that Your History, Economics and Business Teachers Never Learned ...

Time is nearly up for Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve who supposedly applied his scholarly knowledge of the Great Depression to steer the U.S. to safety after the financial crisis. In truth, Bernanke navigated a monetarist course that favored intensive intervention, following in the footsteps of many mainstream economists who grossly misunderstood the lessons of the Crash of 1929 and the ensuing malaise. That lesson is that when corrective crashes occur, intervention is far from the cure — it is the cause.

Hong Kong's richest are busy offloading local assets which institutions are happy to buy. It's exhibit A why institutional money often represents dumb money.