BIS

All banks and the Greek stock exchange are closed today. Greek citizens cued in long lines at ATMs or cash machines over the weekend and a run on the banks left most ATMs empty. There is a €60 limit on withdrawals from cash machines under strict capital controls. 

Spot the glaring "oversight" it in the BIS map below which is a snapshot of the original BIS release. Hint: Dollar zone in Green... Euro zone in blue...

"The growing size of the asset management industry may have increased the risk of liquidity illusion: market liquidity seems to be ample in normal times, but vanishes quickly during market stress. This liquidity may be artificial and less robust in the event of market turbulence." So what's the solution? Unfortunately there isn't one. Instead, fund managers are simply resorting to emergency liquidity lines with banks which is just another manifestation of using cheap cash to delay the Schumpeterian endgame scenario which, if ever allowed to play out, will finally purge capital markets, reset the system, and free the world from the nefarious clutches of central bankers gone mad with delusions of Keynesian grandeur.

We cannot forget that crisis is in itself a distraction as well. Whatever pain we do feel tomorrow, or the next day, or the next decade, remember who it was that caused it all: the international banks and their globalist political counterparts. No matter what happens, never be willing to accept a centralized system. No matter how reasonable or rational it might sound amid the terror of fiscal uncertainty, never give the beast what it wants. Refuse to conform to the dialectic. This is the only chance we have left to get back to true prosperity. Once we cross the line into the realm of worldwide institutionalized interdependency, we will never know prosperity or freedom again.

Nobody can deny that the chances of war are increasing in the world.

"If no agreement is reached on Monday, then the ECB will have little reason to show further flexibility and it will likely freeze its ELA limit on Greek banks. As a result capital controls will become almost inevitable after Monday."

We decided to do a little research to find out the size of different investable asset classes globally, to try to get some color on the money flows in this extraordinary period. The data is from various dates from 2013 to 2014, but the differences don’t matter much.

The troika is tightening the screws on Greece and its ailing banks. With deposit flight running above €1 billion per day, the ECB may look to tie future ELA cap increases to austerity concessions in a move that would appear to support Yanis Varoufakis' implicit suggestion that the troika is colluding to exploit deposit outflows to force political change in Athens.

The key events on tap for next week.    

As we enter Sunday and what may well be the last possibility to get deal done before the "accidental" Grexit scenario is put in play, we thought our Greek readers would be interested to learn that while Lagarde's "apolitical" IMF is digging in tooth and nail against giving Greece even the smallest amount of breathing room, the equivalent of half an our of a typical daily Fed POMO notional amount, yesterday the same Lagarde said that the IMF "could lend to Ukraine even if Ukraine determines it cannot service its debt."

"Central bank distortions have forced investors into positions they would not have held otherwise, and forced them to be the ‘same way round’ to a much greater extent than previously... unless fundamentals move so as to justify current valuations, when central banks move towards the exit, investors will too.... The way out may not prove so easy; indeed, we are not sure there is any way out at all."

The European Commission has ordered 11 EU countries to enact the Bank Recovery and Resolution Directive (BRRD) within two months or be hauled before the EU Court of Justice, according to a report from Reuters on Friday.

Central banks took over everything and thus changed everything; they cannot simply declare themselves successful and just give it all back. That might (stress might) have been possible had it actually worked, a true and robust economic recovery to smooth the shift, but the majority part of that November 2013 recoil was the growing acceptance, throughout 2014 and into 2015, that it was never coming in the first place.

Overnight Xinhua also reported that a gold sector fund involving countries along the ancient Silk Road has been set up in northwest China's Xi'an City during an ongoing forum on investment and trade this weekend. (read more about the "New Silk Road" which could change global economics forever here). The fund, led by Shanghai Gold Exchange (SGE), is expected to raise an estimated 100 billion yuan (16.1 billion U.S. Dollars) in three phases. The amount of capital allocated to nothing but physical gold purchases (without plans for financial paper intermediation a la western ETFs) will be the largest in the world.

The financial world today is now an island on its own – separated from the real economy, as can be seen by the paradox of record high valuation in the stock market coinciding with record low inflation, employment , productivity and no hope. There is asset inflation, but deflation in the real economy. When the world has been this long at the zero-bound, the misallocation, the inability to reform, and a toolbox without new tools creates a mandate for change. "I expect stocks to trade sideways for the balance of 2015 and have now sold all my fixed income, increased my gold exposure, and I’m looking to buy mining companies and overall to increase my exposure to commodities beyond the normal allocation."