Corruption

Physical gold and silver demand remains robust in many markets internationally. Demand from the Middle East remains robust as seen in the near record imports of gold and silver into Turkey. Turkey’s gold imports climbed to an eight-month high in March as prices averaged the lowest since May, according to the Istanbul Gold Exchange. Silver imports rose 31% from a month earlier according to Bloomberg. Gold imports increased to 18.26 metric tons, the most since July. That’s up from 17.34 tons in February and compared with 2.91 tons a year earlier, data on the exchange’s website show. The country shipped in 120.8 tons last year. Turkey was the fourth-biggest gold consumer in 2012, according to the London-based World Gold Council. Bullion averaged $1,593.62 an ounce last month and is trading about 17% below the record nominal high of $1,921.15 set in September 2011.

In the theory of rational expectations, human predictions are not systematically wrong. This means that in a rational expectations model, people’s subjective beliefs about the probability of future events are equal to the actual probabilities of those future events. Now, we think that rational expectations is one of the worst ideas in economic theory. It’s based on a germ of a good idea - that self-fulfilling prophesies are possible. Mainstream economic models often assume rational expectations, however. And if rational expectations holds, we could be in for a rough ride in the near future. Because an awful lot of Americans believe that a new financial crisis is coming soon - 75 percent of respondents said that it’s either very or somewhat likely that the country could have another financial crisis in the near future.

We now know that when it comes time to STEAL, the STEALING will only hit those who are not well connected with the corrupt elite. It will be the people.

• The revolving door continues: Mary Schapiro joins Promontory Financial (WSJ)
• First Peek at Health-Law Cost (WSJ)
• Abe warns over Japan inflation target: warns 2% inflation target may not be reached within two years (FT)
• BoJ's Kuroda tested by divided board (Reuters)
• Nanjing poultry butcher fourth person infected with H7N9 bird flu (SCMP)
• What time do top CEOs wake up? (Guardian)
• Cyprus Seeks More Time to Meet Targets in Talks With Troika (BBG)
• Investors Ignore Negativity at Their Peril (WSJ)
• Apple bows to Chinese pressure (FT)
• One can only laugh: North Korea to restart nuclear reactor in weapons bid (Reuters)
• Visa Demand Jumps (WSJ)
• Bloomberg's refutation of Stockman: yes, yes but... look over there, stocks are up! (BBG)

David Stockman’s New York Times Op-Ed has ruffled a lot of feathers. Paul Krugman dislikes it, saying Stockman sounds like a cranky old man, and criticising Stockman for throwing out a load of meaningless numbers that sound kind of scary, but are less scary in context. What Krugman overlooks is Stockman’s excellent criticism of crony capitalism, financialisation, systemic rot and Wall Street corruption of Washington, something Stockman has seen from the inside as part of the Reagan administration. There are plenty of other writers who have pointed to this problem of propping up casino finance, including myself. But very few of them are doing so on the pages of the New York Times. In the long run, I think it will become patently clear that throwing liquidity at the financial system won’t solve anything other than immediate liquidity concerns. The rot was too deep. The financial sector needed real reform in 2008. It still needs it today.

Our April Fool's wish: someone in the inner circle of power would finally tell the truth. In an unprecedented abandonment of his carefully scripted responses to Congressional questions, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke unleashed what appeared to be a heart-felt and spontaneous disavowal of the financial and political systems of the United States.

By manipulating the price of money through sustained and historically low interest rates, Greenspan and Bernanke created an era of asset mis-pricing that inevitably would need to correct.  And when market forces attempted to do so in 2008, Paulson et al hoodwinked the world into believing the repercussions would be so calamitous for all that the institutions responsible for the bad actions that instigated the problem needed to be rescued -- in full -- at all costs. David Stockman, former director of the OMB under President Reagan, lays out how we have devolved from a free market economy into a managed one that operates for the benefit of a privileged few.

Amidst the debacles, fiascos, and nightmares is a scrappy industry that uses ingenuity and the right amount of hops to beat Wall-Street-engineered giants.

"The world is a very risky place right now for an investor," is the cautious manner in which Grant Williams (of Things That Make You Go Hhmm infamy) begins this excellent presentation, even though he notes that "the general perception is that there is very little risk," as all markets from equities to bonds (and even risk itself) are priced as though 2007/8 never happened. It appears, Williams notes, given the market's perceptions that, "all the problems are behind us." He chides, "Nothing could be further from the truth." Williams focuses on the corruption of traditional price signals by Central Banks' ZIRP (and LSAP) policies, financial repression, and the possibility that the gold leasing market is about to fall apart - because one of these days, someone is going to ask for their gold back and be told they can't have it.

A few days ago, when news hit that Cyprus has begun investigating who the people were who had managed to pull cash out of nation's insolvent banks, both during the capital control "blackout" period and previously, we asked "how much longer will the rule of law remain in Cyprus once full blown class warfare is unleashed, and the 99% are generously handed the list of the 1% who were "informed" enough to pull their money from the flaming sovereign equivalent of Bernie Madoff, while every other uninsured depositor is facing losses of up to 80%, and soon 100%?" We may get the answer much sooner than expected, as the first iteration of this list: one naming the beneficiaries of millions of loans written off by the now insolvent Cyprus banks and therefore indirectly responsible for the "impairment" of the banks' depositors, was released yesterday by Greece's daily Ethnos newspaper. But what virtually assures substantial political fallout is that among the people listed is Cyprus' former president, George Vassiliou.

There are two types of people in this world; those who worship the ideal of centralized command authority, and those who do not.  Those who value freedom regardless of risk or pain, and those who value slavery in a desperate bid to avoid risk and pain.  When I consider the ultimate folly of man, in the end I look to the meek and unquestioning masses who strive to avoid risk, because it is they who always end up feeding the machines of war, despair, and tyranny.  The power thirsty halls of elitism surely instigate and manipulate the tides of this wretched ocean of quivering souls, but ultimately, the weak-hearted and weak minded make all terrible conquests possible. They live by the rule of fear, and their fear drives them to seek control; control of their environment, control of others, and by extension they believe, control of the future.  They attempt to mitigate their overwhelming fear by containing the world and sterilizing it of everything wild, untamed, and unknown.  They dream of a society of pure predictability, and zero responsibility.  They are willing to sacrifice almost anything to attain this position of artificial comfort. The concept of “big government” appeals to such people for many reasons...

So, relocate all manufacturing plants from Sweden to Bulgaria?

It has been a recurrent joke that in addition to Germany (see chart), the only winners out of the slow-motion trainwreck that is the Eurozone, are the Belgian caterers who in 2010, 2011 and 2012 had an absolute record profit year following what was a weekly summit after summit in which we learned, without fail, that Europe is fine, couldn't be finer, and to "believe" Draghi that he would crush and mangle anyone who dared to short the EURUSD (ironic when every other central bank is literally paying FX traders to short their currency). But while caterers were literally swimming in money in the past three years, charging European taxpayers hundreds of thousands of euros per hour for either sturgeon eggs and pâté, or boxed lunches depending on the amount of austerity imposed, so far 2013 has been rather dry. All that of course is about to change, following the epic fiasco with the Cyprus "bail-in", which courtesy of Diesel-BOOM's subsequent clarification, is a unique template that will never be repeated... until the next PIIG finds itself in the same trough, which now that the dominoes are dropping once more, shouldn't be too long. Which is why the best levered derivative trade on the European "positive contagion" mutating back into its "negative" wilde-type is to go long European caterers. However, to offset as much non-catering risk as possible, it would be ideal to have a pair trade opportunity, whereby to go short an offsetting catering exposure. Luckily, we have found just that. Luckily we have just the trade.

Reclaiming the Founding Fathers' Vision of Prosperity

Today, the very orders that make HFT a beneficial trading strategy and one worth the massive capex, are controlled by the exchanges.  That's the difference between this form of "technological advancement" and those of the past, the direct ownership of the critical intersection between information processing and order execution.